i don't - *cautiously* - exactly - like whitman, i think. and there is something - discomforting - in all that professed genuineness and all-encompassing-arms-wide-openess. the seeming-roughhewn but neat deliberateness, that energy and colourful language, those i like, you find yourself enjoying his rhetoric but - i don't feel i can persuaded, i don't feel i can believe in his expansiveness. it makes me - squirmy - too, as if there was something manipulative about it. oh i know people complain about tennyson making parade of pain and cashing in on grief and isn't that artificiality of emotions etc etc but honestly i don't feel that artificiality about tennyson. and anyway in memoriam isn't meant to be a biography - remember winterson saying that if she loves peggy she doesn't have a paint a portrait of peggy - she can celebrate that in lines and colours? or the frank o'hara poem about - writing pages and pages and when his poems are written he hasn't mentioned the word orange. and anyway why should the genuineness of the poet be accounted more important than the genuineness of the poem, which is its own justification afterall.
winterson dislikes the victorians, so maybe it's funny i'm using her to defend tennyson. anyway winterson is rather inconsistent in her essays. and she said something that drove me nuts: it was to the effect that plot is meaningless, her interest in narrative is only incidental. this is on her website too, i think, her saying that for plot we must go to tv and film, that the function of novels has changed, in the same way that poetry has lost its narrative function when the novel came into being, and the novelist must rise above plot. but that seems to me to be a very foolish thing to say. and "plot" is precisely what i demand of literature now, to give plot back to it. i don't mean a realist novel, but something that cared about the shape of stories. i don't go as far as to say they are more important than language, but that they are equally so - oh, i do know what winterson is trying to say, and i agree, to an extent - look at how chinese novels never moved out of that - which is why gao xingjian's lingshan (soul mountain) was so new for the chinese, when this sort of thing has been going on in the west for a long time! i thought that too and i went for a whileb to essays to find something different, but the kind of novel that winterson favours - endlessly self-reflexive - playing with language and fragmentation and unsustained plot - seeking truth through the perfection of language alone - that becomes meaningless too - all surfaces. do you not fear the vacuity of beautiful language then? or do we mean to say that no, that's not possible, because the ideas take care of themselves if we take care of the language? i think yen said something or was quoting someone about how, if we are able to find the right words they must be also the only words that can convey emotional truth, if we could dare to be that truthful, to delve to that level of emotional honesty. and that's a perfectly wintersonian way to think. and oh do i not believe in that really? i do too, i do too. the only thing to fear from that, is confusing the language of passion with that of art, which winterson warns against and i paid attention to. but maybe macneice is right, that even when we eavesdrop on the great presences we can never but appropriate a phrase entirely, that there is no "right" entirely to get. so winterson's project of developing perfect pitch is fraught with failure? and winterson's books don't achieve perfect pitch incidentally! if you want to know who has perfect pitch, byatt does. yes possession. perfect example. su-lin talked about how possession moves her to tears and breathlessness everytime she reads it, and how powerful the experience is. can you say it isn't plotted, plot-driven. but dare you say that because of that the language - that swift-rushing but precise-footed joy of her language doesn't sweep your thoughts up and send them into a whirling storm after which - you've found your own bared heart? winterson's rhapsodic language lights you (do you remember in art and lies, the woman looking at the tree filled with fruit glowing red and says "eat this and you eat the light it that gives, a lantern in the gut of man to read himself thereby"? ooh lovely) but only up to a point, at least after art and lies i've not liked her books as much, and after the powerbook i decided i wasn't going to read anymore winterson. not that i've sworn off her, you understand, not that i don't love many of her books - but it's gone stale. bloodyhell it's almost 9 i haven't had dinner nor done work. i go!
i was quite tickled when i found this note to dickens' christmas carol yesterday, appending a passage in manuscript that had been edited out in publication:
perhaps youu think that hamlet's intellects were strong. i doubt it. if you could have such a son tomorrow, depend upon it you will find him a poser. he would be a most impracticable fellow to deal with, and however creditable he might be to his family, after his decease, he would prove a special incumbrance in his lifetime, trust me.
i'm surprised i'm enjoying tacitus's annals, which i read at breakfast this morning and which i was afraid would be dry. everyone tells me the latin is fiercely difficult, and that made me think the translation would be awful, but i read quite happily through breakfast and 5 cups of tea. that's frequently the case with the classics isn't it? you feel mild dread picking up middlemarch, or paradise lost, thinking, i hope i'll make some headway with this? and then by gosh you are loving it and more than you imagined! last wednesday my ta told us that she was surprised to find herself enjoying tennyson's in memoriam, "everyone likes whitman, but tennyson is so solemn". i on the otherhand have always loved tennyson (nohrnberg frowning: "oh, a sucker for tennyson!") and coming to american lit so late i didn't think i could like whitman - oh, you know, 1850s and no knowledge of american history and man with boots and gigantic beards (i went to the whitman archives and looked at his changing face over the decades. that enormous biblical beard is deliberate! oh and the beards! has anyone noticed that most of the big white beards in the english department belong to americanists? by the way people you should check out the institute for advance studies in the humanities at uva. if i get back in here next year i want to work with them!) i dreaded starting on whitman, and yet i am finding that i am enjoying song of myself more than i thought i would.