Book Review: Nutshell (a novel)

By Moristotle

With a whoop and a slap of my thigh, I finished Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Nutshell, its final act an ingenious, but inevitable turn of plot. What a read! I highly recommend Nutshell, for all those who like their fiction with a flair for invention – in language as well as in setting and narrative voice – and for informed comment on culture, politics, psychology…and, in this case, forensic investigation. For Nutshell involves a murder.

Thor's Day: Couples who stay together

Benjamin Whitrow as Mr. Bennett in the 1995 BBC TV series

The true philosopher, Mr. Bennet

By Morris Dean

It is said that couples who pray together...stay together. In the case of the parents of the five Bennet daughters in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, their staying together derives from another source:

Thor's Day: A perk of clerical office

Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet,
Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy

From Chapter 18 of Pride & Prejudice

By Jane Austen

[The Reverend Mr. Collins came up to Elizabeth at Mr. Bingley's ball at Netherfield]

and told her with great exultation that he had just been so fortunate as to make a most important discovery.

Sunday Review: Martin Amis reviewing Jane Austen

Two for one

By Morris Dean

Today it's two for one¹, or one within another. Martin Amis's 2001 collection, The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000² is itself a two-for-one: writing that's just fun to read, plus a few dozen reviews of books that you might be glad to have read about and decide to read one or two, or a few.

Interpretation

Non interludus

The action in David Lodge's novel Small World: An Academic Romance takes up ten years after that in its prequel, Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses. At a conference hosted at Rummidge University by English Department Chairman Philip Swallow, Euphoric State University professor Morris Zapp delivers a paper:

"You see before you," he began, "a man who once believed in the possibility of intepretation. That is, I thought that the goal of reading was to establish the meaning of texts. I used to be a Jane Austen man. I think I can say in all modesty that I was the Jane Austen man. I wrote five books on Jane Austen, the aim of which was trying to establish what her novels meant—and, naturally, to prove that no one had properly understood what they meant before. Then I began a commentary on the works of Jane Austen, the aim of which was to be utterly exhaustive, to examine the novels from every conceivable angle—historical, biographical, rhetorical, mythical, structural, Freudian, Jungian, Marxist, existentialist, Christian, allegorical, ethical, phenomenological, archetypal, you name it. So that when each commentary was written, there would be nothing further to say about the novel in question.

"Of course, I never finished it. The project was not so much Utopian as self-defeating. By that I don't just mean that if successful it would have eventually put us all out of business. I mean that it couldn't succeed because it isn't possible, and it isn't possible because of the nature of language itself, in which meaning is constantly being transferred from one signifier to another and can never be absolutely possessed.

"To understand a message is to decode it. Language is a code. But every decoding is another encoding, If you say something to me I check that I have understood your message by saying it back to you in my own words, that is, different words from the ones you used, for if I repeat your own words exactly you will doubt whether I have really understood you. But if I use my words it follows that I have changed your meaning, however slightly; and even if I were, deviantly, to indicate my comprehension by repeating back to you your own unaltered words, that is no guarantee that I have duplicated your meaning in my head, because I bring a different experience of language, literature, and non-verbal reality to those words, therefore they mean something different to me from what they mean to you. And if you think I have not understood the meaning of your message, you do not simply repeat it in the same words, you try to explain it in different words, different from the ones you used originally; but then the it is no longer the it that you started with...." [pp. 24-25]

I wrote in my post "Definitive Stop" on May 24, after quoting the corresponding passage in Changing Places: "Wouldn't it be nice if someone would write such a definitive series on religion?"

But ten years later, alas, Professor Zapp is saying that no one could possibly write such a series. While this might reassure those who hope to earn a living perpetually by writing works on religion, it could deeply trouble those who put great stock in the "Word of God" as revealed in their favorite "Holy Book"....

Jane Austen again

Non interludus

I said the other day that I was finding David Lodge's Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses "replete with eminently quotable passages." True enough, but the passages I'd like to share with you tend to be little bits here, little bits there that, together, provide exhilarating twists and turns of plot. It's hard to share those without quoting more than is tolerable or providing, perhaps equally intolerably, summaries of intervening material.

So I'll content myself (and I hope you) by quoting the novel's concluding lines:

PHILIP: You remember that passage in Northanger Abbey where Jane Austen says she's afraid that her readers will have guessed that a happy ending is coming up at any moment.

MORRIS: (nods) Quote, "Seeing in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity." Unquote.

PHILIP: That's it. Well, that's something the novelist can't help giving away, isn't it, that his book is shortly coming to an end? It may not be a happy ending, nowadays, but he can't disguise the tell-tale compression of the pages.
(HILARY and DÉSIRÉE begin to listen to what PHILIP is saying, and he becomes the focal point of attention.)
I mean, mentally you brace yourself for the ending of a novel. As you're reading, you're aware of the fact that there's only a page or two left in the book, and you get ready to close it. But with a film there's no way of telling, especially nowadays, when films are much more loosely structured, much more ambivalent, than they used to be. There's no way of telling which frame is going to be the last. The film is going along, just as life goes along, people are behaving, doing things, drinking, talking, and we're watching them, and at any point the director chooses, without warning, without anything being resolved, or explained, or wound up, it can just...end.
(PHILIP SHRUGS. The camera stops, freezing him in midgesture.)

THE END

That's from page 251, so you can see that it wouldn't be a big investment of your time to pick up this delightful comic novel to enjoy yourself in its entirety. For me, it's on now to its sequel, Small World: An Academic Romance.

Definitive stop

Non interludus

I'm listening to David Lodge's comic novel Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses on tape, but having found it replete with eminently quotable passages, I borrowed a copy of the book from a library. Imagine my astonishment to find in it a single tiny scrap of paper marking the very page containing my first quotation!

The two campuses of the subtitle are Rummidge University, a fictional campus in England, and Euphoria State University, a perhaps equally fictional American campus except that it is obviously modeled on the University of California at Berkeley. (If I were more familiar with English universities, Rummidge U might not seem so fictional to me either.) The State of Euphoria lies between Northern and Southern California, and Euphoria State University is situated across the bay from the city of Esseph (S.F. for San Francisco). You get the idea.

The setup is that the two campuses have an exchange program, and the professors (of English) changing places for the six-month period (of the late 1960's) described in the novel are Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp. Their appointments have come about unexpectedly for both men, Morris's as a result of his wife Désirée's having demanded a divorce but agreeing to a six-month's delay if he'll just get out of the house.

In this passage, Euphorian^* Morris Zapp, who at age 40 could "think of nothing he wanted to achieve that he hadn't already achieved," has just been asked by the Dean of Faculty why on earth he wants to go to Europe. He has to stop and think about it:

There was always his research, of course, but some of the zest had gone out of that since it ceased to be a means to an end. He couldn't enhance his reputation, he could only damage it, by adding further items to his bibliography, and the realization slowed him down, made him cautious. Some years ago he had embarked with great enthusiasm on an ambitious critical project: a series of commentaries on Jane Austen which would work through the whole canon, one novel at a time, saying absolutely everything that could possibly be said about them. The idea was to be utterly exhaustive, to examine the novels from every conceivable angle, historical, biographical, rhetorical, mythical, Freudian, Jungian, existentialist, Marxist, structuralist, Christian-allegorical, ethical, exponential, linguistic, phenomenological, archetypal, you name it; so that when each commentary was written there would be simply nothing further to say about the novel in question. The object of the exercise, as he had often to explain with as much patience as he could muster, was not to enhance others' enjoyment and understanding of Jane Austen, still less to honour the novelist herself, but to put a definitive stop to the production of any further garbage on the subject. [p. 44]

Wouldn't it be nice if someone would write such a definitive series on religion?
_______________
* Moristotle is a "Euphorian" also; I was born in Berkeley and might have taken UC Berkeley up on its offer of admission if I hadn't chosen to attend Yale instead.