WRB—Dec. 18, 2024

“creative industry”

And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you managing editors of men.

N.B.:

The final D.C. Salon of the year, cohosted by the Washington Review of Books and Liberties Journal, in celebration of a full year of our monthly salon discussions, will take place in a joyous mode on New Year’s Eve, at Chris’ home, as we gather to discuss a timely question: “Can people change?” Email Chris for details.

Links:

• Two about George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss:

  • Alan Jacobs on forgiveness:

    As I have said: Tom’s cruelty is his treasure, and where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. He delights to feel himself morally strong, and from that strength to judge those he feels to be weaker than he. When he repudiates Maggie, as he often does, it is hard not to feel that those are to him the best moments of his life: the ones in which he condemns, not his enemy, as his father had condemned Wakem, but his own flesh and blood, his own sister, who loves him more than she loves anyone and has all her life craves his approval. Tom Tulliver is not a good and responsible man who is sometimes overly strict; he is an absolute monster of cold-blooded savagery. His cruelty is limited only by the scope of his power; alas for his ego, he has only poor Maggie to tyrannize over.

    Eliot says of Maggie that “she had always longed to be loved,” and that is true, but I think she longs for forgiveness even more, if indeed those two things can be divided. Perhaps she craves forgiveness as a token of love. And while from some who are dear to her she indeed receives forgiveness—that is almost the only thing that sheds light on the dark, dark road she is forced to walk—she is never forgiven by the person whose forgiveness would have meant the most to her: her brother.

  • Adam Roberts
    on tragedy:

    Maybe it’s not the novel form, or even the larger social ethos, that makes tragedy such an ill fit to Eliot’s art. Maybe it’s that the lines of force of her ethical imagination are always tugging her out of drama as such, away from the conflict, and towards something neither comic nor tragic but rather a sense of the fundamental undisclosure of life as it is lived, and the spiritual benefits of that state. Adam Mars-Jones somewhere says that “mourning is a wound that is also somehow an achievement.” He wasn’t talking about tragedy when he said so, but he might as well have been. Tragic drama stages mourning as a mode of ritualized social-religious sublimity, parsing its shattering absences and ruptures into a sort of transcendent achievement. But Eliot, however hard she tried to capture a Sophoclean grandeur and depth in The Mill on the Floss, was working against the grain of her genius. At her best she understands not that grief is not an achievement, but rather than achievement itself is a kind of chimera, that the best things we can do as human beings, things to do with kindness and connection and unobtrusiveness, are actually pointed, forceful, marvellous unachievements. When she writes novels—even when, as in this case, she writes a tragic novel—her aim is to capture the wisdom of the sort of being-in-the-world that evades the drama of tragedy and the melodramatic eventfulness of fiction.

  [If forced to identify a tragic novel I would go with Tess of the d’Urbervilles, although contra Jacobs I find the iciness of Hardy’s narrator there belied by his frequent insistence on mentioning how things could have gone differently. Take this, after Tess walks to her husband’s parents’ in hopes of learning what is going on with him, encounters his brothers on the way, and decides not to visit after overhearing them insult her:

  She went her way without knowing that the greatest misfortune of her life was this feminine loss of courage at the last and critical moment through her estimating her father-in-law by his sons. Her present condition was precisely one which would have enlisted the sympathies of old Mr. and Mrs. Clare.

  If this is unbelievably cruel to Tess on the part of Thomas Hardy, author of the novel, and if the presentation of the fact lacks much in the way of sympathy, its very inclusion speaks to something else. This is not acceptance of an almost-divine Fate but deep anger at things not written in the stars: the social mores of Victorian England, the casual cruelty of an unkind remark uttered at exactly the wrong time. The bleakness of Hardy’s world is that these things without fail happen to his characters—but they don’t have to. And Hardy makes sure his readers know that. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall: Steve on seduction in Paradise Lost, an image Ford Madox Ford lifted from Ezra Pound, and his favorite film adaptation of A Christmas Carol, Grace on the darkness of the Christmas season, as well as Lore Segal, exhausted reading, risotto, Tom Wolfe, Zora Neale Hurston, elderly rock stars, the Titanic, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected just for you, just like on Saturdays. If you like what you see, why not sign up for a paid subscription? Your support helps keep us going, and we greatly appreciate it.]