Legacies

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts - not to hurt others.

I'm not super far into Middlemarch, but I'm enjoying it so far, beginning with the revelation that George Eliot was actually the nom de plume of Mary Anne (later Marian) Evans.

It's interesting, because Eliot comes just before the explosion of Woolf, Joyce and Proust - the advent of literary modernism - but after the torrid romanticism of Austen and the Brontes. As such, elements of both can be found in her work, but it also seems to lack the tortured aspect that the individual and the novel would take on in the late 19th and early 20th century, thanks more to Woolf and Joyce than Proust, who has far more in common with Eliot than the other two. This is not to say that characters in Middlemarch are not or will not be unhappy (at least, I assume they'll be unhappy at some point), but the overall tone remains lighter than one might expect. It's also interesting to see the narrative tricks she employed, with multiple instances of the omniscient narrator interrupting the story to inform the reader of this or that tidbit, or to provide a bit of droll commentary. The psychological insights have been quite interesting so far; I can definitely understand why I've seen Middlemarch referred to as the great Victorian novel.

The psychological insights of Middlemarch, however, bring to mind an argument of Harold Bloom's about the development of the human psyche. Bloom's argument regarding Shakespeare is that he does not so much capture the essence of humanity as create it; that is, Hamlet is, in a sense, a more fully realized human being than the vast majority of people ever become, that in writing his plays Shakespeare was not so much commenting on and depicting the human condition as he was inventing it, building a concept of humanity which has come to dominate all of western thought. Great art changes all those who are engaged by it, so is it possible that Eliot's (and any author's) words ring true because people believe them to be true, because people make them true? It's an interesting and slightly chilling thought, because the potential for abuse is frightening. It also ties into some thoughts I've been having recently about music, but I'll save those for another post.

I'd seen Middlemarch and heard of George Eliot before, but it wasn't until I heard about this list, a compilation of 125 authors' top ten lists that I decided to go ahead and pick it up. I've only read 4 of the 10 books on the list, so by the time this year is done I hope to have gotten through the other 6.