Reading, Writing, Thinking

There aren't a lot of Victorian novels (at least among the ones I've read, not an extensive sampling) that treat working-class people as real. Dickens's workingmen are sympathetic, but I never quite believe them. They are standing in for principles more than they behave as real people. (I find that his upper-class people have the same failing.) Trollope's people are human to me, if slightly alien, but they are rarely working-class. There are a few clerks, and a risen workman in Dr. Thorne, but no one who works a farm other than the occasional farmer-earl. Eliot has Silas Marner, an artisan, but I've read only the one novel. And Becky Sharp can be considered a working girl of a sort, but her ancestry is genteel.

Thomas Hardy, on the other hand, isn't so interested in the gentry. The mayor of Casterbridge has ascended from, and returns to, manual labor. There are gentry in Tess of the D'urbervilles, but Tess is not really one of them. The "upper classes" in Far from the Madding Crowd, the book at hand, are tenant farmers. Gabriel Oak may be somewhat stylized by modern standards, but he has authentic human feelings and motives. His love for Bathsheba Everdene is a literary conceit, but so is most literary love. What is more important is that we never doubt that he is the kind of man who can see a woman, decide to marry her, and stand by that decision forever.

Of course, this being a Victorian novel, we know from about the second chapter how it is going to end. In sensation novels or gothics, there might be surprises, but not in Hardy. (There are some minor surprises here and there, as in The Mayor of Casterbridge when we find out about the daughter, but in general we know how things are going to work out from pretty early on. Trollope, in I forget which of his novels, apologizes for bringing in something that some readers might not have anticipated. We are there for the pleasure of the journey, not to find out what is at its end.) So we know that, somewhere in the last chapter or two, Gabriel will marry Bathsheba. The question is not whether her first husband will disappear, but how, and how permanently.

I suspect that for women readers the main character is Bathsheba, in fact. For me, and possibly for most men, it is Gabriel. Much of the story really does focus on her, but Gabriel's constant backgkround presence keeps us up to date on his story as well. Each has obstacles that must be dealt with before they can get together, but the challenges are very different (even though they are, in a sense, the same: Gabriel must overcome Bathsheba's romantic inclinations and entanglements through perseverance, and is on the verge more than once to give up and move out of the county). His presence, then, is mostly passive, on the fringes of her story. He is active in small ways while she makes the grand gestures: she gives up all for a grand passion, sacrifices herself for duty, and eventually grows into a recognition of the value of mature love (that is, love that is based on merits and something beyond physical attraction; the book is unusual among Victorian novels -- granted it is late Victorian -- in acknowledging the sometimes destructive role of physical passion in forming alliances in a world that lacks ready access to divorce). All right; I guess that means Bathsheba really is the main character. She grows and changes, and Gabriel works hard and perseveres. Not the same thing at all. Still, he's rather endearing.

dmh

What is it with Walker Percy? I get so much pleasure from reading his books -- I've just finished Lancelot and have read Love in the Ruins and The Second Coming -- but I come away from them vaguely dissatisfied.

Part of the problem, of course, is the strong theistic, even Christian, tenor of much of his concerns. As time goes on, I have less and less sympathy for these themes in fiction. Even Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory galled me somewhat, and a lot of people consider that a masterpiece.

But there's a lot more going on in Percy's fiction than people dealing with faith. In Lancelot it's a minor theme at most, at least on a surface reading. (Of course the novel is about redemption, but not in conventional religious terms, even though the book takes the form of a confession to a priest. And there's a sense in which he isn't redeemed, because he gets away with murder at the end.) I wouldn't go so far as to say that his people are real, but they are believable without being realistic. His main characters are exaggerated for comic and dramatic effect, yet they are still sensibly human. Even when I lose sympathy with them for their religiosity, I enjoy their company.

Living in the South may have something to do with this. As a transplanted Yankee, I appreciate the way Percy plays with Southern stereotypes (although I suppose native Southerners appreciate it, too), exploring their truths and falsehoods, strengths and weaknesses. He examines the relationships between various stereotypes as they play out between humans, without forgetting that they are humans, and that real human characteristics have contributed to the construction of the stereotypes. And if the characters' problems are not strictly realistic, Percy has earned our indulgence by giving us living stereotypes.

So there is, as I said, great pleasure in the reading. It's the endings that leave me cold. The Second Coming managed all right, resolving questions of faith and love and survival with gentle humor and the promise of a new start. Love in the Ruins, on the other hand, plays with science fictional tropes and builds up to what is supposed to be an apocalypse, but the disaster fizzles out. This works within the definitions of the main character and his story, but it leaves the reader with unfulfilled expectations. The world is changed at the end, and the hero is transformed through love, but none of the transformations have come about through the cataclysm that the whole book leads to. That proves to have been more or less an afterthought.

Likewise, in Lancelot, we expect some consequence when Lancelot finally gets around to describing how he murdered his wife, but there isn't any. He is released from the institution where he has been confined, apparently sane enough to function in the world. Yet from what he describes, he is guilty of murder and sane enough to stand trial. Yes, he is rejected by the other patient, with whom he has been having a fantasized romance, but otherwise he is a monster set loose on the world, preaching a repellent social doctrine (I don't know if Percy expected it to be sympathetic, but it certainly wasn't to me) and unrepentant over killing human beings.

I just hoped for more after all that charm.

dmh

For years, I've been using the Gettysburg Address as part of my unit on the persuasive essay. It's hard to top, and it works nicely with some of the other texts I use: the Declaration of Independence, "Self-Reliance," "Resistance to Civil Authority," and "Letter From Birmingham Jail." It's even short enough that I can read it to the class, removing all those problems about the students not having read the text.

It's a wonderful bit of writing, and I long ago stopped believing that nonsense about Lincoln having scribbled it out on the train on his way to the ceremony. This is a polished text by a master, not an improvised (or divinely inspired) first draft. I did, however, accept the myth that the newspapers, the next day, considered Lincoln's remarks as just an unmemorable footnote to Edward Everett's oration. I even mentioned it in class, along with a very brief precis of Gary Wills's argument, drawn from dimly remembered reviews of his Lincoln at Gettysburg.

But now I've read that book, and I'm going to have to change my approach. For one thing, a lot of newspapers got the text (or a text; there's some dispute over exactly what Lincoln said that day) from the Associated Press. For another, many of those newspapers recognized it immediately as a significant statement.

My basic premise, that Lincoln used the occasion to redefine both the war and the nature of the republic, still holds, although now I've got a better idea of what was really involved. I also now have a better idea of how the idea of the occasion came about (there was no previous national cemetery, after all). I also have a sense of the relationship between the two major speeches of the day, Everett's and Lincoln's, and what happened to our memory of Everett as an orator.

In fact, that style of oration was a way of recreating the historical moment. Everett specialized in battle stories, telling them on the spot (as at Gettysburg) as a way of making sense of the action and explaining their importance. (The record doesn't seem to show whether he really understood Gettysburg as the turning point in the war; he may have.) Lincoln explained the importance of the war (changing the importance of it; what does he say in the speech about slavery?) and of America. It was a masterful performance by both men, even if we only remember one of them.

The book is also a masterful performance by Wills. It isn't easy to write a book about less than a page, without overwhelming the original text. But Wills recognizes his job and does it well. He provides context as well as analysis, knowing that most of us don't really have the history at the tips of our fingers.

dmh

I wrote a longish post yesterday about The Deptford Trilogy, very interesting and thoughtful, and then lost it before it saved. I won't bother trying to reconstruct it. The gist was that the concerns of faith and redefinition -- through the major characters in the trilogy, all of whom redefine themselves in some major way including new names -- mesh here, as both are ways of making a connection between the self and the general world; a connection, that is, that makes sense and that makes continued thinking existence possible. But since the point of these entries is to reach the conclusions, now that I've reached it, I have no interest in working out again how I got to it.

You'll just have to take my word that it was interesting. If you've read Davies, you won't have to take my word that the books were first-rate. If you haven't, you're missing something wonderful.

dmh