The Washington Review of Books was commonly better known to the simple people than the New Testament, and unconsciously they acquired the outlook, because they acquired the words, of the Managing Editor.
N.B.:
This year’s first WRB Presents, featuring readings by V Efua Prince, Lisa Russ Spaar, Colette Shade, and Ryan Alexander, will take place on Wednesday, March 12 at Sudhouse D.C. at 6:30 p.m. Readings begin at 7.
March’s D.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Saturday, March 29 to discuss the topic “Is there honor without revenge?”
Links:
In Psyche,
on medieval responses to haters:Geoffrey’s entire career is on trial in The Legend of Good Women, but he has a defender. Queen Alceste argues that he’s an idiot, doesn’t think about his material, and isn’t a very good poet anyway. He can barely be held responsible for the poems he writes. Instead of death, the court decides to give him a lighter sentence: Geoffrey is to write a collection of stories about “good women” who were true in love, and of the “false men” who betrayed them.
Chaucer is clearly making fun of naïve readers who expect two-dimensional characters that will make them feel, in today’s parlance, comfortable. His Criseyde might have forsaken her lover, but she remains one of the most complex and nuanced female characters in English literature. In contrast, the stories that Geoffrey relates in the Legend are tedious and repetitive. Every woman is a saint and almost every man is a cold-hearted deceiver. Some of the women, like Cleopatra and Medea, had bad reputations in the Middle Ages, so he leaves out any details that might have stirred trouble. His audience would have known that Medea killed her own children, but he’s not going to mention it.
[Sure, but, based on the record of history, how sure are we that “being an idiot” and “not thinking about your material” are impediments to being a good poet? —Steve]
Reviews:
Two in the TLS:
Rosemary Ashton reviews a book about reading the nineteenth-century novel (Imagining Otherwise: How Readers Help to Write Nineteenth-Century Novels, by Debra Gettelman, 2024):
A fine chapter on Middlemarch looks closely at the many examples in the novel of Eliot navigating character, philosophy and plot by means of a rhetoric of negation. Austen had done this too, but Eliot takes it further—asking us not to take too obvious or lazy a view of the characters she brings to our attention. An example chosen by Gettelman is the introduction of the evangelical banker Mr. Bulstrode. “Do not imagine his sickly aspect to have been of the yellow, black-haired sort,” the narrator writes, immediately putting just that description in our heads before correcting it. Another is the moment when we are asked to imagine the workings of Rosamond Vincy’s mind when she fancies a future for herself with the handsome newcomer Dr. Lydgate. “Do you imagine that her rapid forecast and rumination concerning house-furniture . . . were ever discernible in her conversation, even with her mamma? On the contrary.” In this case Eliot persuades the reader to agree by assuming genially that agreement will necessarily follow. As Gettelman says, she is relying on the “flexibility, multiplicity, and fluidity of readers’ minds,” “exercising the reader’s ability to distinguish what is and is not realized in a novel.”
[Quick! Don’t think of a sickly aspect of a yellow, black-haired sort! —Steve]
Huw Nesbitt reviews a biography of Huysmans (J.-K. Huysmans, by Ruth Antosh, 2024):
“[W]hat bothers me in this book?” said Zola. “First . . . confusion.” But the confusion is deliberate; indeed, it is cultural. For if À rebours is about anything, it is about the transformations taking place in art and literature during the period in which it was written. Des Esseintes is an emblem for old-fashioned aristocratic cultural ideals. Where books were once circulated among learned elites, they were now available to all in mass-produced editions. Where literary value was once conferred by priests, scholars and gentlemen, it could now be assessed by the market. And where literature once promised to educate and ennoble, it now titillated with stylistic tics and thrills. Yearning for the past, the Duc tries to turn his life into art according to the old standards. But while he was on his long debauch, the world changed. Not only are he and his fellow nobles outmoded as artistic producers, but their tastes, at the dawn of mass culture, are démodé as well. “After the aristocracy of birth, it was now the turn of the aristocracy of wealth,” says the narrator, ventriloquizing the Duc as he retreats to the metropolis. “[T]he bourgeoisie borrowed their frivolous love of show and their old-world arrogance, which it cheapened through its own lack of taste.”
[I would go even further than Nesbitt does here: Des Esseintes is not merely outmoded or out of fashion. He is completely irrelevant. You could only live his life, and obtain his delicacy of sense and perception, by being free of any obligations or connections and living entirely in your own world—your own head. It’s almost “The Fall of the House of Usher” if there were something heroic about Roderick Usher. (The differences between the United States and France.)
The WRB is a bit like pressing gems into the shell of a tortoise. The difference is that the tortoise lives and is named “email.” —Steve]
[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:
I pass judgment on various claims made by a Frenchman about the English language
A(nother) plea for more books about the English Civil War
Hannah on a Poem by Sophie Jewett about the sea
If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below. And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you; I appreciate it. —Steve]
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