Wednesday, January 13, 2016
ramble safe and unregarded
Henry Fielding ends Chapter III in book XVII of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, 1749, by saying that he "can no longer bear to be absent from Sophia" but he begins the next chapter by writing two paragraphs of preamble, or two hundred and fifty-five words in which her name is not mentioned. He has said that he cannot bear to be absent from her, and by saying that -- in that moment -- he is not absent from her: she is on the book's mind all of a sudden, and she will remain there throughout his conversation. If she was absent from him then where was she? She was nowhere but he was not writing about her. Now he is writing "the bleating Ewe in Herds and Flocks, may ramble safe and unregarded through the Pastures," but the reader has been asked to understand that in writing those words he is writing repeatedly, "Sophia is coming, Sophia is here."
When he says he "can no longer bear" to be apart from her, is the reader right to say that the personage of the author is feeling genuinely upset or should they believe that this is a calm device to make the discussion of the ewes seem more carefully aimed, and to make them feel the discomfort that the personage in fact does not feel? They might as well understand both at once: he would like to see Sophia's name written down but he is also the predator that he writes about who chases the "plump Doe;" he is somewhat glad to be thinking but not saying, and he is happy to know that you are waiting and wondering: he is happy overall as he imagines the sensation in the mind of you, the reader, "some tender Maid, whose Grandmother is yet unborn" who will "under the fictitious Name of Sophia [read] the real Worth which once existed in my Charlotte," his wife, who had died five years earlier. Book XIII, Chapter I.
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other possibilities: the "bear" is actually real and is chasing the ewes; tom is too much of an airhead to remember what he just said; fielding went off for a beer and had forgotten where he was in the plot; (i'm just being silly for the most part, but also pointing out that meaning is an individual thing and the fact that sense can actually be communicated on paper is an ongoing miracle)...
ReplyDelete"Exit, pursued by can no longer bear," eh?
Deleteugh, groan... a perfect comment for wintertime...
DeleteOr he is "absent" from her because she is the author of a book in which he plays a character who is writing a story named Tom Jones, and she has not mentioned him for a while, and he needs to return to her consciousness before he fades out of existence completely, destroying her boyfriend, Tom Jones, who is the hero of his book.
DeleteThis is all, you know, kind of sweet. He's writing about farm animals and nature but he's thinking of Sophia, and when he's writing about Sophia, he's thinking of Charlotte. So sweet, unless, I guess, you're the Sophia in question, in which case you're being used as a substitute for someone with "real worth." So huh. No longer so sweet.
ReplyDeleteThough if you really were Sophia you could comfort yourself by considering your author's ideas about "real worth" in a woman -- which are, as stated by Squire Allworthy, that you will never contradict a man at all, or attempt to have an opinion if it has any danger of disagreeing with anything any man might think, even if that man is a first class fruitbowl like Mr Thwackum -- and decide that if Charlotte wants that kind of encomium then she can have it, and you will leave those two together, and go away in a corner, and, I don't know what you do there, but it is better than pretending that you agree with someone who calls himself Thwackum, for god's sake.
Deleteone of my hesitancies re fielding is that, like other 19th c. authors i've read, his characters are stereotypes; or the predecessors thereof. they were not concerned about describing people the way they really are; either that or it never occurred to them that every single person in the world is an individual and has his own reality and that not understanding that makes the work inaccurate at best and worthless at worst. if i may say so...
DeleteI know Fielding tells you from time to time that he's using some piece of a character's behaviour to show you, and every other reader, a general trait* but I'm not convinced that individual people are uninteresting to him; he separates them starkly into their own self-possessed sets of habits and makes them individual in that way. Squire Western isn't subtly himself, but he is himself. He is emancipated into his eccentricities.
Delete*"For Ingratitude never so thoroughly pierces the human Breast, as when it proceeds from those in whose Behalf we have been guilty of Transgressions," etc.
(I can also see a problem in calling a book worthless because it doesn't try to describe individual human beings. Is that what a book is supposed to do? Is that its criteria? Where does that leave Finnegans Wake?)
Delete(Additionally -- and this has nothing to do with Fielding -- but you've said you read Clark Ashton Smith, and when I saw the video for Bowie's Blackstar a few days ago I thought immediately of Smith.)
Deletenot familiar with "blackstar"; i read smith when i was young and had forgotten the sadistic parts that you pointed out. i remembered mainly the florid language and poetic descriptions which at the time entranced me. i might not like it now... and- after thinking about it some more, it's not so much that i think they only wrote stereotypical characters as that humans categorize each other into stereotypes: like when i worked in the oil field, the important figures wore cowboy boots and stetson hats and swaggered around like john wayne. certain attitudinal identifications are endemic in all societies, and they evolve, albeit slowly. for instance, in the twenties, the drunk playboy type was common(re fitzgerald) but gradually disappeared and today it's the rich jet set type. i think someone could do a thesis on these cultural evolutions that might explain a lot of interpersonal and even international behaviors.
DeleteThere's a woman, in the Blackstar video, carrying a jewelled skull, and a group of people bowing and worshipping in a mysterious desert city -- I wouldn't assume for a minute that the visual designers were thinking of Smith, but it looks like his kind of scenery, "a land remote in ulterior time, and alien space not ascertainable; the desert of a long-completed past, upon which has settled the bleak irrevocable silence of infinitude; where all is ruined save the stone of tombs and cenotaphs ..."
Deleteyes, i like that a lot; sort of like ozymandias, the same feeling...
Delete