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A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

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Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Anti-Semitism in Parade's End - Have people written about this? If not why not?

Super difficult to know exactly what's going on - again - in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, even with the advantage of having seen the HBO-BBC miniseries - but what seems to be going on - as the long chapter seen mostly from Sylvia Tietjens's POV comes to a close, with she and estranged husband, Tietjens, heading off to the hotel bedroom, chapter ends in some commotion - guns going off outside the hotel, presumably some kind of call to arms, or an alarm of some sort rather than an attack - and then we jump to a new chapter and find Tietjens walking through the camp with Col. Levin, I think en route to a confab with one of the visiting generals -Campion? the one who is suspiciously close to Sylvia? - and we learn that T. is in some kind of trouble for events in the hotel that have not been narrated. Piecing it together, I think that he was in the bedroom with S. and the door handle moved (he seems to have some obsession with this image) and the General and someone else - Perowne? the obsequious guy with whom S. once ran away for 3 weeks? - come in the room and I think T. pushed the General, and may be subject to some military discipline, We know some of this only because T., back at the camp, fell asleep at a table and was talking in his sleep - in Levin's hearing - and talked mysteriously about the moving door handle and also something about his would-be but unconsummated mistress, Miss Wannop, safely back in London, living in near squalor. Two observations: the long Sylvia chapter reminded me very much of Molly Bloom's chapter in Ulysses, and I wondered about the chain of influence; the excellent chronology included in the Everyman edition that I'm reading shows that Ford did know and publish Joyce, and that U. cameout about 4 years before Parade's End vol 1, so I'm pretty sure Ford was v. influenced by the interior narratives and the frank sexuality in U. Second observation: what's with Tietjens's obvious anti-Semitism? Have others remarked on this, or just more or less ignored this as typical either of the time or the class - repulsive in either case. T. is v. scornful of Levin, asks many nasty and probing questions about his provenance, and ultimately says that he's not really English. Is this T. being defensive because he, too, has an odd and non-English sounding name? Or is it Ford himself, born Heuffer, who adopted a v. English name - desperately trying to fit in, but let's blame it on someone else, let's call them outsiders and strivers and not really English, let's blame it all - the war, everything - on the Jews. Will continue to read carefully to understand the relationship between Tietjens (aka Ford?) and Levin, the Jewish, no make that English, officer.

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