Review: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings by George Eliot

Trade paperback, 505 pages
Published 1990 (contents: 1846-79)
Acquired August 2015
Read May 2017

Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings by George Eliot
edited by A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren

Wit, acumen, imagination, feeling as distinguished from sensation, reason as a subjective faculty, – all these so-called powers of the soul, are powers of humanity, not of man as an individual; they are products of culture, products of human society. [...] To ask a question and to answer, are the first acts of thought. Thought originally demands two. It is not until man has reached an advanced stage of culture that he can double himself, so as to play the part of another within himself. (462)

This volume collects a variety of writing by George Eliot, from across four decades: her journals, reviews of a diverse range of books, letters, poems, and translations. The editors, A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren, seem to have a particular interest in areas where Eliot expresses her opinions on the importance/function of art, and on the role of women. Eliot was a smart, witty woman, and so of course, her essays make for smart, witty reading. Some of what's collected here, the most famous stuff, I'd already read in Nathan Sheppard's The Essays of "George Eliot", so I skipped over that material, but that still left a lot of good stuff.

Parts of particular interest include her 1866-70 correspondence with Frederic Harrison, which may have inspired Middlemarch (1871-72); he asked her to write about a utopian village run by scientist to demonstrate the power of Positivism, and she replied that "æsthetic teaching is the highest of all teaching because it deals with life in its highest complexity. But if it ceases to be purely æsthetic – if it lapses anywhere from the picture to the diagram – it becomes the most offensive of all teaching" (248). If Middlemarch is anything, it is anti-utopian, but it definitely deals with "life in its highest complexity," as indeed do all of her works-- yet they still all engage in "æsthetic teaching" too.

Review-wise, I particularly got something out of those of R. W. Mackay's The Progress of Intellect (1851),* where she sifts out some of what there is to like about Positivism; of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (1855), where she argues under what circumstances a book depicting immorality can still promote morality, concluding that in overtly moral novels, "The emotion of satisfaction which a reader feels when the villain of the book dies of some hideous disease, or is crushed by a railway train, is no more essentially moral than the satisfaction which used to be felt in whipping culprits at the cart-tail" (308); of Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho! (1855), where she decries how Kinglsey lets his fiction be taken over by his shoddy moralizing; and of John Ruskin's Modern Painters (1856), where you can see some of her own theory of art emerge, being developed (one presumes) on its way to its fullest statement in Adam Bede (1859).

The translations (I've quoted from her 1854 translation of Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity above) are also worthy inclusions; they come from early in her career, and you can see how they would influence both her theories of art and knowledge and her fiction, especially (as always) Middlemarch.

* All dates given are those of her review, not the reviewed book's publication.

Review: Possession: A Romance by A. S. Byatt

Trade paperback, 555 pages
Published 1991 (originally 1990)

Acquired March 2010

Read June 2015

Possession: A Romance
by A. S. Byatt

Never has literary research been so exciting. That sounds flip, but I mean it. Obviously Byatt has a bit of advantage in depicting a group of people doing archival work-- close readings would maybe be a little less dramatic!-- but this book really captures that drive to understand written text that underlies literary criticism, a drive that I myself share.

I was enjoying it all along, but at the end it totally clicked for me-- became almost like a heist tale, maybe? It's just a really uplifting ending, the way everything and everyone comes together and unites to do what's right. Made me tingle a little bit. This is a really good book, and my words are inadequate to express why, if I'm honest. (But then, aren't they all? And don't we try anyway?)

Pages 510-12 are just the most amazing description of what it means to read that I have ever read. If I felt like I could get away with it and if I had the patience, I'd quote the whole two pages here, but I'll just leave you with this: "the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other. True, the writer may have been alone also with Spenser's golden apples in The Faerie Queen.... He was alone when he wrote and he was not alone then, all those voices sang, the same words, golden apples, different words in different places..." I want to quote more, but I want you to read it for yourself, and see the joy of reading expressed, to make that connection between minds, the isolation that is always building bridges. This is a book about the joys of reading, about making connections when we are at our most lonely, about never being alone. Read it alone for yourself.

Possession (2002 film): Not Much of a Romance

A few months ago, I read A. S. Byatt's excellent novel Possession, and so I watched the film this past week. My review of the book will go up on Monday, making this a little back-asswards, but right now it's the only idea I've got for a blog entry, so here you go.

Byatt's novel is about reading, and the pleasures of reading, and the investigation of reading. What does it mean to encounter a text, and what does it mean to perform research on a text. You might be surprised, then, that someone would decide to turn it into a film, but in 2002, Neil LaBute directed an adaptation starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart. But it's not just possible for the film to be about what the book was about: the scene at the beginning where we see Aaron Eckhart in a montage of book-reading is almost comic in its attempt to depict visually a very non-visual experience, and wisely, the film never attempts such a thing again. Part of the title refers to, I think, how you can be "possessed" by what you read, and the film just doesn't communicate that.

Which might be okay: films do different things than books, and part of the process of viewing an adaptation is coming to accept that. But man, if LaBute just totally fails to come up with something interesting to replace it. The novel is about a pair of literary critics investigating an historical romance between two Victorian poets, and the film unspools their investigation in parallel with the romance of the poets. The stuff from the past is quite nice, even if the shorter nature of film means it doesn't quite have the complexity of the relationship in the book. But the film turns the present day story into a romance, too, which it might get away with it if it wasn't incredibly dumb. Seriously, there are some less convincing romances in the history of film (I'm looking at you, Attack of the Clones), but probably not a lot.

First off, Gwyneth Paltrow's character:

Uptight ladies... has anyone ever told you that you would look better with your hair down? Seriously, what is your deal and why do you wear your hair in buns? Also: loosen up! What's the point of being a female if you don't look nice for the men?

Seriously, this is the most cliched and uninteresting angle on romance I can think of at present.

Secondly, Aaron Eckhart's character:

The third time that, completely unprompted, this guy told someone that he just didn't do relationships, my wife and I started to laugh. Like seriously, dude, no one even asked. He spends the whole film  finagling the topic of relationships into conversation so that he can explain that he doesn't do them. "They're just not for me," he says ruefully, staring off dramatically into the distance.

This could almost kinda work, I think, if there was some attempt to explain it, but nope, halfway through he just decided he likes Gwyneth Paltrow and his supposed hatred of relationships is never mentioned again. While Paltrow's half of this plot is completely cliche, it is impossible for me to even imagine what this half of the story was even going for. Like, what was his deal? Why was he surprised that Paltrow didn't want to date him given he spent the whole movie pointedly dropping into conversation the fact that he didn't want to date anyone. Who knows! He's too busy brooding his manly feelings.

Unfortunately, this film makes the present-day romance most of its point (seriously, the climax is almost perfunctory, while in the novel it's a brilliant, exhilarating feel-good moment).

Um, well the Victorian stuff was nice, though. Has Jeremy Northam ever been in anything good? He's one of those people who looks like he was born to act in a period drama.

I couldn't find a picture of him in his hat on Google Images, but he had an awesome hat, too.

Archival Review: Angels & Insects by A. S. Byatt

Trade paperback, 304 pages
Published 1993 (originally 1992)
Acquired January 2007
Read December 2007

Angels & Insects
by A. S. Byatt

This is another of my catchup reads from my last semester of school.  This book is actually two novellas, tenuously linked by the fact that they both occur in the Victorian era.   We read the first, Morpho Eugenia, in class, but not the second, The Conjugial Angel, so I added the book to my list.  The Conjugial Angel is a story about grief and how people move on; Alfred, Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H. plays a heavy role in the proceedings.  I'm not sure if I could explain what happened, but I love Byatt's way of writing-- she has a playful tone that jumps all over the place and (gently) mocks her characters, but becomes suitable somber when events warrant it.  Ideas are her forte, though, and Byatt explores those of grief, mourning, and judgment quite well.  I look forward to reading more by her.