ElliotsReading March 2021: Eca de Queiros, George Eliot, Shakespeare, Mishima

 It started off so well. I’d heard over the years about the novelist Eca de Queiros, considered by many to be the greatest Portuguese writer and among the greatest writers of the 19th century, a leader in the tradition of social realism (alongside Dickens, Balzac, maybe Zola …). His name came up recently run an NYTBR review of the final work of criticism from Harold Bloom - again, as one of the great if little-known today 19th-century novelists. Eventually, I got a copy of his more famous and ambitious work, The Maias (1888, tr. Margaret Jill Costa), 600+-page doorstop from New Directions. And I started reading with great enthusiasm. From the start, as well learn of the complex multi-generation tends of the eponymous Lisbon family - broken marriages, suicide, infant left in the care of wealthy widowed grandfather - it looked to be one of the great novels about the rise and fall of a family dynasty, mirroring perhaps the rise and fall of a social class over generations, somewhat in the vein of, say, Buddenbrooks, 100 Years of Solitude, The Makioka Sisters - the kind of book that I love to read. By the 2nd chapter, the novel began to find its focus, which is the orphaned grandson and his aspirations to become a leading medical scientist and researcher, as he comes into his inheritance. We have many long chapters about various gatherings of the young man, Carlos, and his friends, all of them of high aspiration and, so far, limited accomplishment. OK, still good - reminding me a little of Lucky Per (Pontoppidan, forgotten Nobel winner) or a Mishima novel I recently read, Spring Snow, maybe even Sentimental Education - about young men and their aspirations and their failings. But as I proceeded to slog my way through this novel - despite some beautiful passages, mostly topical description - the going became increasingly tedious, as all that these young men do is spend money, drink heavily, and talk about how someday they would be great and famous but all of their time, as far as we can see, involves attempts to seduce married women (never do they have any sort of relationship that does not involve secrecy and humiliation). There are no great ideas, no great insights, and, though Proust could get away with writing at length about largely unsympathetic characters, EdQ can’t do so, perhaps because he lacked the expansive intelligence and acuity of thought and observation, and perhaps because he’s not working through a first-person narrator who can provide unique insight into his consciousness and thereby into his culture. Abandoned reading this disappointing novel about about p. 250 - gave it my all. 

In the process of reading, over the course of several months I’m sure, George Eliot’s Middlemarch - reading this with an impromptu book group, and taking it, as least thus far, one “book” (the novel divided into I think 8 books, each of about 125 pp) at a time. A few random thoughts, then, on the first book of Middlemarch. At first glance (writing style aside) it may seem as if we’re in Jane Austen world: two sisters, one thoughtful and serious (Dorothea Brooke) and the other more flighty and superficial though perhaps prettier (Celia), recently orphaned (though most of their childhood spent in boarding schools abroad) and cared for by the uncle Brooke - a wealthy landowner somewhere in the Midlands (?), a superficial and malleable man, though good-hearted. A 40-something man (who seems about 80-something), Casaubon, a reverend who’s devoted his life to biblical/anthropological scholarship proposes to Dorothea (his letter to her asking her consent is hilarious!), and she happily accepts and her uncle approves (largely because he doesn’t want a fight and anyway C. has enough money to support a wife) - though we and everyone else in the novel knows she’s making a huge mistake. So, will she end up with a Mr. Right? (A few eligible if imperfect bachelors make cameos in this first book - plus a rival suitor, Sir James Chettam [??], who seems clearly meant for younger sister Celia.) But it’s obvious as well that this is not a novel of romance in the conventional/BBC sense. Dorothea is a young woman of high ideals who dreams of rectifying injustice and inequity in her small community - her grand scheme is to convert the laborer’s cabins into modern, well-lit cottages - a great idea, but not one that Casaubon (or Sir James) could ever possibly support. And isn’t her plan presumptive? She’s really like a benefactress bestowing welfare from afar (or above); wouldn’t it be better to give the workers better wages and let them make decisions about their lives? The social and political dynamics of this novel are omnipresent - even if some, notably the Whig politics of the era (early 19th century - though the novel was written, I think, in about 1880) are today quite obscure. Eliot is not an easy writer - some passages are almost impenetrable, at least to me - but there are some amazing quips, put-downs, and insights of surgical precision that any reader will mark and return to in review. She’s so smart she almost gets in the way of her narrative. 3/14/21

Gogol’s stories The Nose and The Overcoat are often linked and taught side by side. Understandably, they’re two of the best Russian stories of the early 19th century (ca 1830 and 1840) and the best and most accessible of his work. Each is absurdist, in a way, and each is surreal/supernatural, though with significant differences. The Nose, the earlier of the 2, is by any measure a surreal fantasy. The plot is, roughly, this: A barber wakes one morning and finds, in his breakfast roll (which his termagant wife prepared) a nose, which he recognizes as that of one of his customers! He eventually tosses the nose into the Neva River. At about the same time, a government worker of about middle rank (an assessor) wakes to find that his nose is missing. Over the course of the story he does pretty much what anyone would do having lost an item such as, say, a wallet - without the least surprise on his part or on that of others that he’s searching for his lost nose. The strangeness of the story lies in the extremity and absurdity of its premises (and it obviously antedated Kafka’s works), the sense of unease and fright as we wonder: Is this possible? Normal? At the end, nose restored, Gogol gives the story a strange twist, suggesting that these things happen all the time - at least in literature (which raises questions about what literature is, what it presupposes, what it reveals) - so the story is a “realistic” as any work of fiction. The Nose has been adapted into an opera (Shostakovich I think); not sure of the Overcoat ever has, but it would be, I think, an even better basis for a libretto. This story, until the final page or two, is a social-realism drama about a 50ish government clerk, timid and friendless, the object of scorn and derision, who saves his money over time to buy a much needed new overcoat custom made. And on his first day wearing the coat, it’s stolen by some thugs at night in a city square. His efforts to retrieve the coat lead him to various public officials who treat him with the utmost scorn. We feel deep sorrow and pity for this poor man, and almost wish we could reach into the story and restore his coat. At the end, the man dies - and returns as a ghost who steals coats in random acts of thievery around the city - eventually tormenting the government official who scorned him mercilessly. As this story veers into the realm of the supernatural, we get the sense that the “ghost”is now no different from the thugs who stole his coat - and perhaps that the thieves themselves were ghosts: So this is a realistic story that in the end kicks out the props and becomes a story of mysticism and the supernatural. So, one story is supernatural at the outset but realistic in the end; the other, the opposite. 3/18/21

Read Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure with thoughts of possible contemporary setting update for screenplay, and decided: Not a great idea. Superficially, there are some easily spotted similarities between the plot and personae of M4M and contemporary society, but how well these similarities would hold up over the course of a film is the big question. In brief, the plot involves a Duke (who rules over Vienna) who, for reasons never clearly explained, gives up his power temporarily to one of his minions, Angelo, who is one of the holier-then-thou types, a strict interpreter of the law and in particular of laws regarding sexual relationships - and of course we recognize right off that his strict judgment over others is a proxy for his self-hate and guilt. Over the course of the play, the Duke, in disguise, watches Angelo’s sleazy behavior as he suggests to a young woman, Isabella?, that he’ll pardon her brother if she has sex with him. All this is too much for the disguised Duke, who engineers a crazy scheme in which Angelo is tricked into having sex with the woman whom he’d long ago been engaged to - and in the end, when the Duke returns to power and justice has been meted out, the Duke proposes to the young Isabella (who btw was about to enter a convent a few scenes ago!). OK, so we can see the similar social forces - politicians and church leaders guilty of sexual crimes and abuses, but the plot of M4M is so weird that it would never stand up over 2 hours on screen (on stage is a different matter). Why does the Duke give up his power? (We could add many scenes of sin and vice in “Vienna,” but to what end?) Why does nobody recognize him? What are the characters drawn in such black and white? And, perhaps most of all, where’s the dramatic tension - as we all the while know that the characters are being manipulated by the all-powerful Duke (like a God? like a playwright?) so we never feel that the other characters - Isabella, her accused brother - are ever in jeopardy. On stage, many aspects work to save this unusual play, notably the comic “subplot” involving tavern owners, incompetent police officers, pimps and prostitutes, which is at times quite funny, though not nearly so much as the subplot of, say, Much Ado. Shakespeare’s straining here, trying for a dark vision but getting in his own way. You can tell that he was eager to get back to tragedies - or at least to much darker “comedies” such as Troilus. 3/23/21

Recently I read Yukio Mishima’s Spring Snow, the first book in the quartet that he wrote before his death by ritual suicide - the 4 volumes published posthumously in the late 1960s/1970s. My post on Spring Snow will show that I really admired that sometimes challenging work, as it gave a real sense of life in Japan at a time of great change in the culture ca 1910, all told through a dramatic set of relationships among close friends and a fatal romance - ending w/ the sad death of the protagonist. Moving on from Spring Snow, I began reading the 2nd volume, Runaway Horses, which takes place about 20 years later (ca 1930) and centers on the son of one of the characters in the previous volume. The young man as it turns out is a militarist right-wing fanatic, who has read a seminal book or pamphlet about an uprising against the government that failed and lead to the ritual suicides of the entire attacking force; the young protagonist in this novel, Isao, is obsessed w/ this book and its glorification of the Japanese Samurai spirit of ritual warfare (using firearms would be a Western corruption) and ritual death. He finds various sympathizers in the army and elsewhere as he tries to build a cult following and a revolution. Potentially interesting - yes, and a little creepy as well, as we know that this young man is expressing Mishima’s views and that Mishima is foretelling his own death. Actually interesting? Not really; the novel builds slowly, meanders, without much conflict or self-awareness, and the obsession of Isao and its political/militarist implications - applicable today in the U.S. to a frightening degree- is so unpleasant that, at about the halfway point - 200+ pp - I’m passing on this novel. No wonder it’s obscure today (I had to find the last beat-up copy in our state library system). 3/25/21