Hello!
The weekend is here and it’s almost Halloween. I’m sorry to once again open with the weather but I wore a coat this week and it felt wonderful. The majority of my reading this week was from the nineteenth century, which always feels fitting for the colder seasons (a lot of misery and sweeping landscapes).
What I’ve been reading and what I think about it
I am approaching the 500 page mark of Dickens’ Bleak House (1852), and, somehow, new characters are still being introduced. This is a re-read for teaching; I read it about ten years ago as an undergraduate, and I’d forgotten a lot of the finer details, such as the insanely huge cast of characters. It’s undeniably a great novel, maybe one of the best, but there are, and I will reiterate this for a third time, so many people in it.
It is mostly a satire of the convoluted legal system that usually had far too many people involved in the smallest of cases, but it also satirises other social elements. The one that is done best, I personally believe, is in the case of Mrs Jellyby. She is a philanthropist who throws herself into charitable ‘causes’, her latest being poverty in Africa.These causes are at the expense of her family, both financially and emotionally, as she sinks them into bankruptcy and abandons her children and husband’s wellbeing in the process of her fundraising and advocacy. Her answer to this poverty is to relocate English families to small communities, which the reader knows is shorthand for colonialism, and so this becomes a multi-faceted criticism -- what she is abandoning her home for is an ill-advised solution to something that isn’t her business anyway. I also like this particular example of Mrs Jellyby because it throws up the difficulty with Dickens -- although what he is satirising is indeed morally bad, you just absolutely know that his preference would be a woman who has no ambitions to work (in an economic sense) and instead wants to be a meek homemaker. It’s an interesting paradox.
I also read some of Browning’s poetry, again for teaching. Overall, pretty fine -- I liked how he uses European historic settings. I was particularly taken with ‘Childe Roland To The Dark Tower Came’ (1855), an ambivalent poem about a soon-to-be-knight traversing a difficult landscape. It’s not really about anything, he’s just angry at how hard it is to travel towards this dark tower. We don’t know why he’s going, or what is in the dark tower, but as with most knight tales, the journey is the focus:
And just as far as ever from the end!
Nought in the distance but the evening, nought
To point my footstep further! At the thought,
great black bird, Apollyon's bosom-friend,
Sailed past, nor beat his wide wing dragon-penned
That brushed my cap—-perchance the guide I sought.
Maybe I’m just looking for something to help with my disappointment over Ivanhoe and am clinging on to anything that is good and about knights, but I think it’s great.
I also read/skimmed Sadeq Rahimi’s The Hauntology of Everyday Life (2021) for my PhD. Its central premise is that everyday occurrences are examples of hauntology, which I just kind of took as a given, but I realise now that that hasn’t been fully articulated by anyone. It was nice to have something new to read about Derrida and there were some useful bits in there for my thesis. (I won’t assume that everyone knows what hauntology is -- a very brief summary would be that it is a concept thought up by Derrida in response to both the first line of the Communist Manifesto (‘A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism’) and also Francis Fukuyama’s statement that the end of the USSR meant the end of history. He argues that the things we make and experience are haunted by social and cultural pasts, as well as futures that won’t come to pass or remain as possibilities. Mark Fisher also wrote about it quite extensively.) Anyway, a good read if you’re into all that.
Books on my radar
Jean Rhys: The Collected Short Stories. Obviously.
Literally anything by Robin Hobb. I’m craving something with a dragon in it.