Thursday, September 27, 2012

but, as night deepened, it took a new tone



"The wind was wailing at the windows," says Lucy Snowe, the representation of a young woman who is narrating Charlotte Brontë's Vilette, "it had wailed all day; but, as night deepened, it took a new tone -- an accent keen, piercing, almost articulate to the ear; a plaint, piteous and disconsolate to the nerves, trilled in every gust" -- but this is not enough for the author, she is impassioned, this wind should not be ignored, and so she makes a paragraph around it; this wind will not be an absence, this air needs to be noticed: "Three times in the course of my life, events had taught me that these strange accents in the storm -- this restless, hopeless cry -- denote a coming state of the atmosphere unpropitious to life" -- and now if the reader is asking O Ms Brontë, what kind of unpropitiousness do you mean? she tells them, she answers the unasked question, she makes the damage specific and not vague -- she fills a crack with epidemic diseases -- "Epidemic diseases, I believed, were often heralded by a gasping, sobbing, tormented, long-lamenting east wind" -- and if "I believed" seems too solitary, then she will attach this wind to other people's beliefs not only hers, it will be a legend that flies everywhere nebulously and it will have a mythical dimension. "Hence, I inferred, arose the legend of the Banshee."

Then she will enlarge the effect by attaching the wind to concrete things, hard, huge things, deadly fires, massive destruction, identifiable and romantic, scientific horrors, and inescapable global terrors: "I fancied, too, I had noticed -- but was not philosopher enough to know whether there was any connection between the circumstances -- that we often at the same time hear of disturbed volcanic action in distant parts of the world; of rivers suddenly rushing above their banks; and of strange high tides flowing furiously in on low sea-coasts." The character does not usually talk to herself in print but now she does, she breaks briefly into a new style, she is punctuating the end of this idea. ""Our globe," I had said to myself, "seems at such periods torn and disordered; the feeble amongst us wither in her distempered breath, rushing hot from steaming volcanoes.""

Yet the wind is not necessary: a woman named Miss Marchmont was already frail and sick, and then this wind blows and the next night she finally dies of a stroke that does not seem to have been caused in any medical way by the blowing of any wind anywhere.

We were prepared for that death pages ago but the wind is a moody poison running into the atmosphere and killing her; the reader sees this description of doom and they probably decide, since this woman's death is the most obviously bad thing that is likely to happen -- they believe, "That's it, she's going to die," or at least, "Something terrible is going to happen, she'll probably die although something else might happen too." But the woman's death will probably feature in their reasoning somewhere.

This emphasis on the wind has turned the wind into a clue.

A post at Languagehat quoted this from Herbert Fiegl: "The attempt to know, to grasp an order, to adjust ourselves to the world in which we are embedded, is just as genuine as, indeed, is identical with, the attempt to live. Confronted with a totally different universe, we would nonetheless try again and again to generalize from the known to the unknown. Only if extended and strenuous efforts led invariably to complete failure, would we abandon the hope of finding order. And even that would be an induction." A book is a ghost of that totally different universe; it's not the one where the reader lives, yet the rules of the known universe are the base rules by which the other one is judged: each book is the judgement of a mystery.


10 comments:

  1. Yet, to win readers, a book must reflect the reader's experience of the universe where they live somehow surely? I've always remembered a tutor saying that we read books - I think he meant novels - to find out about ourselves. That's not right, I don't think - I don't believe the process is purely self-referential - but don't readers prefer not to be alienated? I'm not sure I'm grasping quite what you're getting at so set me right.

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    1. I'm starting with the idea that people comprehend the world by putting together clues (if I get up in the morning and see strong light coming through the slits in the blinds then I assume that today will be hot, I adjust for that -- and so on) -- this is how they negotiate the mystery around them. They see signs, they interpret the signs, they extrapolate this into a coherent structure of laws and objects; this is a compulsive activity, it's the way we survive. I think we bring the same behaviour to books. I see Lucy describe the wind, I notice her emphasis, and I automatically decide that I'm supposed to be deducing more than just, "Air is moving quickly in this fictional universe." This thing is important, pay attention, think around it -- all right, it's a clue. Now I'm bringing in tactics I've learnt from my lifetime in the world: righto, portents, I've heard of portents and this looks like a portent so I'm comfortable with that, let's go with it, right then, volcanoes, huge and threatening things -- Pompeii, killing people -- uncontrollable lava -- dangerous Banshees, I've read about those -- I'm nailing ideas together -- I'm looking for order. The world of the book is not the world of the world around me but I can treat it as though it's a similar phenomenon. I regard this book like a question and try to work out the solution.

      I don't mean that I regard it as a question the way you do when you've been asked to write an essay on the thing, I mean that this is just the way books are approached: page one is always the introduction to a mystery. Because every object around me is a mystery, every chair asks a question (what am I, what do I do, what am I going to do?); any old shoe is a mystery, but a book is not only an object in the physical world, it's also an object in literature, which is another dimension that we can intuit but can't see. You can see a page and a cover; you can't see literature. You have to feel your way in. So here is Vilette this alien thing that says, "Here I am, what do you make of me?" and I apply my tactics, which is another way of saying that I read.

      Does that make sense? I've got Roy and H.G. on the radio shouting, "He's kicked it to a bloke! It's a bloke with a beard!" so my mind has been in two places.

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  2. Speaking for myself - very much only for myself - I read novels to learn about novels. I already know plenty about myself, if anything too much.

    I see that I have not sufficiently incorporated the passages you, Pykk, reference here into my crackpot theories about this novel - I am particularly amazed by how Lucy Snowe is on the verge of turning into Sir Thomas Browne in that dissertation on the aspects of the wind - but I know you are right about the clue. In writing about this death, Lucy is actually writing about another.

    Your Fiegl quote is uncannily appropriate. The narrator deliberately and repeatedly violates "our" universe - in, for example, the novel's title. What mystery is she trying to solve?

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    1. I agree novel reading is not to learn about oneself, but I quite like its way of providing other perspectives on and new insights into existence and the world I inhabit. I am missing something here and am also too dense to understand how the name Villette violates our universe (I can see it could be a play on the word 'violate')? Essentially I am completely out of my depth and will bow out of this conversation from now on.

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    2. Browne is the word, Browne is what she's doing; that's the thing she's going: Browneish. She suddenly goes Browne and plants an extravagant load in that strange spot, this weird lump of weight that doesn't explain itself until the "another" comes along, as if extravagance is taking the place of a quality that, in human life, would be volume, and she's trying to project her voice over several hundred pages, like an actor in a theatre, but with different tools and a different space to cross, and a longer wait for the audience.

      Her biography makes all of the books look like a reaction to the damage she received in Brussels, but she "violates " -- why violate? -- why a "puzzle book?" -- she renames places, she disguises them like that (or makes a gesture of describing them; who's fooled? -- but it's a signpost reading "This is fiction, this is mine, I've built this door"), she renames the man she was attached to, she removes his wife, she takes facts and re-embeds them, and then touches them. I wonder if damage itself was the mystery: why was I hurt, how was I hurt, what happened -- not even reasoning that out, necessarily, but kicking against it. What happened, why these questions? (Q. Why does anyone solve a mystery? A. So that they can stop asking questions.)

      (Vilette as a puzzle book is a blog post I'd read.)

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  3. Ah, "Villette" is the narrator's contemptuous name for Brussels. She also renames Belgium, calling it Turkey-yard (but in French).

    It is possible that she is living in a world where there is no Belgium or Brussels, but in their place a country named Turkey-yard with a capital city called Little Town. But another possibility is that the narrator has imposed these names herself, that she is the one deliberately violating her universe, in however small a way, which is entirely consistent with her character and some other aspects of the book.

    And this becomes one more clue to lead the reader in all sorts of fascinating and fanciful directions.

    Villette is, or at least I treat it as, a puzzle book. The narrator is extra-tricky.

    My experience with book blogs suggests that a majority of readers do read mostly to learn about, or at least gaze upon, themselves. If I were more interesting, I might do the same. I like the other perspectives and insights, too.

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    1. I don't know if I read mostly to gaze at myself, but as I read I remember that books do parasitise the reader, they use you to construct themselves, and so there's a back-and-forth motion (which seems worth looking at, or trying to look at, or thinking about, in the way you'd want to know what a drug had done after you'd taken it) and they gaze back as per Nietzschean abysses, until by logical extension the reader is old and blind and hunchbacked and mad like a medieval scholar and dies screaming quotations from Tacitus.

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  4. Oops, I mangled the French. It's "Poultry-yard"; the Duke of Turkey is a barely glimpsed character.

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  5. Thanks, Pykk, I think a faint dull glimmering of your meaning is now attempting to penetrate. I shall get there in the end, possibly

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    1. No matter what, I'm glad you asked. Completely different subject: did you see that the Telegraph is running an interview with Patrick Leigh Fermor's biographer? I know you've done at least one post about him. She liked his energy: http://tinyurl.com/cutsw6s

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