Anyone in my Neo-Victorian Novel class can see, if surveying my location while we’re all on Zoom, that I’m in my basement. One could also notice, on basic inspection, that our basement isn’t finished; it’s also not entirely unfinished, I suppose. It’s framed with two-by-fours, prepared for drywall to be put up, primed for whatever type of flooring we want to install - but not quite. I would like to do some more electrical work first, and I would like to better plan out the plumbing for the bathroom we’ve imagined down there. The basement has existed in its current state for two years.
I have imagined more than just that bathroom. I see an office space for me: there’s my desk, some bookshelves built into the wall, an old record player equipped with new speakers, one of those globes that is brownish-tan for some reason. The imagined basement also has a playroom for the kids, a room with exercise equipment that is solely dedicated to working out, a family room with bar, a mud room for re-entry after working in the yard, and of course, an art studio for my wife. Oh yeah, and more storage space. I would love that basement to exist. Somehow, I envision this working without building a second basement where I can fit it all. For now, it’s the perfect place to discuss Julian Barnes’ Arthur & George, a fictional work about the true story of George Edalji, a man who is Parsee and British but mostly imagines himself as a middle-class solicitor. He is convicted of a crime but released before his sentence has elapsed. He is exonerated after a review by the Home Office, but not found deserving of compensation for his improper imprisonment. Some imagine circumstances in which he was guilty all along; some imagine the reasons he may have been persecuted; some imagine who is the true perpetrator of the crime for which George went to trial. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle imagines the last two circumstances in that list, and his efforts are what lead to the Home Office review. At the time George’s case piques his interest, he is a grieving widower who is also planning to marry a woman he has loved in a state of chaste infidelity for nearly a decade. He does not imagine himself as an adulterer. As he investigates Edalji’s case retroactively, some imagine him in the place of his indelible Sherlock Holmes, and he certainly thinks of himself as a masterful investigator, even when he makes basic legal mistakes. He is pleased that George regains his ability to practice law but incensed that George receives no remuneration and that no one is arrested in the case of the livestock maiming for which George once served three years in prison. Arthur and George are each what they claim to be. Doyle is in fact a British gentleman, and Edalji is in fact a solicitor. Each is also what he claims not to be. George is suspected in his small, rural town because he was different from the typical inhabitant – no matter how adamantly he insists that his arrest is not due to race prejudice, none of his misfortunate would have been catalyzed without prejudicial attitudes. And Arthur might not think of himself as bumbling amateur sleuth who discovers no new hard evidence but whose celebrity brings the attention of the nation to the problems with George’s case. That’s who he is, in this case. George and Arthur simultaneously are and are not what they and what others think of them, just as Jacques Derrida once claimed that his concept of “differance” both is and is not. I’m not going to get into much depth of discussion of “differance” in a blog post. It’s just too much for a blog. But if we think of it in terms of word definitions – a common example used to explain the concept – it is the undefined “space,” or “thought,” for lack of a more accurate terms (because the term is “differance,” I suppose), that makes one word not another word. Like, what is the difference between jogging and running – what is the thing that separates the two of them? When does one become the other? There is something there that separates them. It’s the same thing that brings them together; they wouldn’t be closely related to each other without that distinction, and they wouldn’t be separate from each other, either. That negative space, that indefinable thought, might be the most important thing about jogging and running. It’s what makes one not the other. And the fact that jogging is not running is what makes it jogging. I’m going to imagine, now, that you (patient reader) and I both understand that. Key to understanding the concept of “differance” is imagining it, as we cannot define it, and we cannot perceive it with our senses. Imagination may be the most important faculty a human being possesses because of the importance of the indefinable. Imagination is what allows us to understand the mysterious “something” that links people’s experience of life. Imagination is what helps us define, too, how we are individuals separate from others. We take it upon ourselves to imagine what is reality. Arthur imagines he’s faithful to two wives at once, that he solves mysteries as decisively as his fictional detective (who solves crimes that Arthur imagined in the first place), and that he has found the metaphysical solution to the irrationalities of religion in “Spiritism.” George simply imagines himself as a nondescript British solicitor. Some people believe one thing about each man while the men themselves believe another. Their own imaginations, though, are the tools they use to shape the way they live their lives. What they imagine into being might not be exactly what they want, but the shapes of their lives would be nothing if not for what they imagine. George, regarded as “half-caste,” imagines a simple British life. Though he never marries and is at the center of a legal debacle, a simple life is essentially what he gets. And Arthur imagines the nobility embodied by chivalric knights in old romances. He never slays any dragons, but he is knighted, he does fight in a far-off land, he excels at his chosen focus (writing), and he does participate in a pure and chaste love. It’s a “different” version of what he imagined as a child. Yes, these are the characters I’ve discussed for the last two weeks with my classmates while I sit in my unfinished basement on an office chair, watching and listening to everyone on my laptop, which is on top of a space heater designed to look like a fireplace. There’s no heat in our unfinished basement. I’ve imagined taking out a section of the wall down there to create a chimney and a fireplace, probably where I’m imagining that family room. Or maybe in my office. Either option seems delightful, but for now, it's all a fantasy. Retrofitting a chimney and fireplace on a house is a major project, and I have a lot on my agenda this year. It certainly is comforting to imagine that fire, though.
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There are several movies made before 1990 that Mrs. Avery has never seen. Often, according to her, she’s “seen the ending” on tv, and not only does that not count, but it ruins good stories. I always give her great film recommendations, and she promptly doesn’t watch them. Around the same time our class began reading Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, I was teasing Mrs. Avery about never seeing the movie Back to the Future. She informed me that I was incorrect, and she told me the plot of Back to the Future in impressive detail for someone who was watching it only to humor her husband. She told me when and where we watched it, and I conceded that she was correct, even recalling a memory of watching it with her: a memory as indefinably ghostly as Marty McFly’s hand when he hasn’t yet convinced his mother and father to kiss in 1955: This led to a great idea. She said, “What if a person traveled back in time, saw a ghost, and then traveled farther back in time and saw the same ghost?” I thought that would make a brilliant story. In fact, I have some notes about how and why it would happen. You’ll read them in my forthcoming novel or see them in the production of my forthcoming screenplay as soon as I decide to actually write either one of those and someone wants to publish or produce them. Until that day comes, you’ll have to be satisfied with a blog post about hauntings, the past, and how we create our identities. All were on my mind when I read Alias Grace. I first read Alias Grace in a freshman English class at Miami University two decades ago. I remembered it was about a “celebrated murderess” in the 1800s who was either misleading everyone, was mentally ill, was some combination of the two, or maybe none of those. And I thought it was excellent. That was all I remembered. Alias Grace was both familiar to me, part of my past I had comfortably integrated into my life, and a story foreign to my experience because when I read it at age 19, I was reading it for the intrigue only and had less experience in analyzing narrative. I wouldn’t say reading it the second time was uncanny, or unheimlisch, as Freud describes the concept, but a second reading was helpful to my thinking, particularly about the way people use narrative. In his essay on “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud examines the two definitions of the German word heimlisch (these are my definitions of the paraphrasing): 1. essentially, something appropriate to the home or made familiar enough to be at the home; 2. something secretive. These aren’t so different, not in my opinion. That which belongs at home does not belong in the public unless we invite the public into our homes. Freud complicates the reader’s thinking by explaining that unheimlisch (or uncanny, in English translation), the opposite of heimlisch (canny?), can mean the same as uncanny: that which is unfamiliar. If it’s uncanny, it’s unfamiliar to me. Here’s the thing: the fact that my wife, Q, could tell me about the time we watched Back to the Future was uncanny to me. But, supposedly, I was there when it happened. Grace Marks, in Alias Grace, claims to forget what happened during the murders of Nancy Montgomery and Mr. Kinnear. Uncanny! The fact that she can describe to Dr. Simon Jordan what happened, mostly, is also uncanny. I cannot believe that someone could forget, remember, and misremember all at once. But I should. I remember watching a movie with Q, but I misremember it – which is to say, really, I forget it. I’m telling myself the story of what I remember about it, and I’m sure later, when I let her read this, she’ll tell me how I’ve misremembered the Back to the Future story. For the purposes of this blog, though, I’ve told the story in a way that makes me seem like a guy who loves and finds importance in good storytelling like one would find in Alias Grace or Back to the Future, a guy who takes storytelling very seriously, but a guy who doesn’t take his own perspective too seriously. Which am I: the serious guy, or the not-serious guy? I’m giving you both stories at once so you can focus on whichever convinces you of my point. On my end of this writing: I’m familiar with both of me, so no dopplegangers will appear in this blog. The stakes aren’t high enough for a doppleganger. I’m not a murderess, so my storytelling doesn’t determine whether I’m incarcerated or not. Grace’s storytelling does serve this purpose, of course. Several times, she expresses the desire to give Dr. Jordan what he wants, which is a story that satisfies his desire to evoke her lost, murderous memories and to diagnose any possible “madness” by which she may be afflicted. She is an expert storyteller by the time readers meet her, in 1859, after 16 years of imprisonment, and she has been practicing the art of what to include and what to omit since she arrived in Canada. By the time she is employed, she knows what not to tell her father so she does not feel obligated to give him her entire pay. The first two sections of the novel are comprised of second-hand accounts of her trial and her comportment; even Grace, in the portions she narrates before “Puss in the Corner,” considers how to define herself by the way others define her. At the end of the novel, when she is married to Jamie Walsh, she presents herself to her husband as she must have learned to present herself to Jordan: a suffering damsel to whom a man must atone. We know Jordan’s predilection for women who owe him something, and because Jordan never ending up owing her anything, the atoning character in her story has to be Walsh. She never would have created enough doubt in her conviction to be granted amnesty without the assistance of Jeremiah the peddler, who called her “one of us,” and who appeared in three other guises during the part of Grace’s life that she narrates for us. Jeremiah knows how to convince a customer to buy goods from his pack; he knows how to convince an audience and a subject, perhaps, of a hypnotic trance; and Grace may pick up on some subtle suggestive skills from him. In the climactic scene of the book, Grace convinces those at the scene of her hypnotism that she has been possessed by or has unwittingly adopted as a second consciousness her old friend Mary Whitney. Mary, a servant both more plainspoken and more wise to the ways of Toronto society than Grace, serves as a coarse, diabolical doppelganger. She’s the “naughty” Grace, the Grace who could have been rebellious, infiltrating the upper classes through a clandestine affair, aborting a child, and murdering Nancy Montgomery through daemonic possession. Nancy Montgomery, interestingly enough, could be seen as Grace’s “trippelganger.” Nancy infiltrated the world of the upper class through a nearly public relationship with Mr. Kinnear: no one in his social class approves, but they behave as man and wife at home, and she is pregnant at the time of her murder. Perhaps Nancy is the “good” version of what Grace could have aspired to (pre-murder, certainly) in the social realities of 1840s Canada – it was the most fortuitous station to which a servant woman could have aspired. If so, Freud’s tripartite concept of the id, the ego, and the superego could be analogous to Mary, Grace, and Nancy, with Grace as the ego: the one does what helps her get along in society. Perhaps that is why, as the novel ends, Grace is knitting a Tree of Paradise quilt just for herself, and she hopes that its pattern will symbolically reunite the three servant class women upon whose loom this novel is woven. The Tree of Life quilt is representative of a true amalgamation of the parts of her personality that she sees in her fellow women. During the novel, Grace is a woman of her Victorian time. When it is appropriate, she tells the story of becoming a “fallen woman” in need to atonement. When it serves her, she is the domestic angel. That’s the one we get, the domestic angel: we see her as a servant at the Governor’s, the storyteller enchanting Jordan, and the wife both pleasing and shaping Jamie Walsh. The great mystery of the novel remains: is she more than the angel? Has the devilish part of her personality been left out of the novel? The fact that, by her own admission, she leaves out parts of her story, declares no devilish intent inherently. It’s human nature to leave out parts of stories. We don’t even do it on purpose much of the time. It’s possible that our stories don’t belong solely to us, so we don’t know which parts to tell. Mary and Nancy’s stories closely mirror each other, and the only parts that matter to readers are the parts relevant to Grace. After hearing them, Jordan’s life begins to parallel theirs despite the fact that he belongs to a more privileged class and is a man. He begins an affair with his landlady, and he is presented with a plot to murder her husband if he is to return to their home. He escapes to the United States, as Grace planned to do after Nancy and Kinnear’s murders, and he suffers from amnesia, forgetting all that happened in Kingston (according to his mother, who could be lying to his former lover). These are all motifs from Grace’s life. Her past is analogous to his present and was somewhat predictive of his future.
Along with the uncanny and the doppelganger, Freud discusses the recognition of repetition in “The Uncanny.” He attributes this to neuroticism – we see what we pay attention to, but we don’t want to pay attention to it because it is repressed. We find it uncanny, as in unfamiliar to the point of being unreal, because we don’t want to recognize that what we’re seeing is something that we should, for our own mental health, want to address. It’s too frightening for us. Each time we analyze our reading, we might be seeing what we need to see in it at the times in our lives when we do the reading. Maybe when I was 19, I was trying to find some new intrigue in life as I entered adulthood. Maybe now that I’m 40, I’m trying to figure out how I define myself to others by the way I tell my story. And so we return back to the future, wherein I’ve read Alias Grace a second time and am trying to decide whether or not I should present myself as a guy who would reference that movie again in pun form. |
AuthorIan Avery. Archives
April 2021
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