Sunday Salon: Middlemarch Review and early childhood traumas
Excellent short review of Middlemarch by Keith Oatley in yesterday’s Toronto Globe and Mail (better go there fast though, they only leave stuff up for a week, if that). And I quote: "Eliot aspired to write about the ordinary. She searched beneath its surface to make it comprehensible, and succeeded in a way that is profoundly moving." "Eliot explores what really holds us humans together: the quality and breadth of our emotion. " Middlemarch is a generous book. It is one of the world’s great books because, between the three streams of writing (traditional 19th century, early stream of consciousness, narrator’s astute commentary), George Eliot enables space to grow: a space for the reader’s emotions and thoughts. You feel things you have not felt, think things you have not thought. It’s a book [as Virginia Woolf says] for adults."
In recent email exchange with Keith over his antipathy toward The Brothers Karamazov, my second favourite novel, we mused about likes and dislikes…I mentioned that although War and Peace is my favourite novel, I’ve never been able to forge past about 100 pages of Anna Karenina…and I’m stuck at page 300 of Middlemarch…even as we speak…
"I am shocked," he responded "that you don’t like Anna Karenina, which I think is my favourite novel, closely followed by Middlemarch … But what is it, I wonder, that allows one mind—that of a reader—to resonate with another—that of a writer—in some works rather than others? Because I do think Crime and Punishment is brilliant. A puzzle."
No doubt it has to do with early childhood traumas, loves and hatreds, unconscious demons and black holes. Unresolved fixations, infatuations, obsessions. Anyone have any other ideas?
March 30th, 2008 at 1:33 PM
It took me a long time to get into Middlemarch as well. I felt like I started to REALLY like it during the last 100 pages. Before that, I was struggling to finish. I think that your ability to sync. with another on written works depends on where you are at the time and what you are consciously or unconsciouly looking for when you read.
March 30th, 2008 at 1:53 PM
I loved Middlemarch, but I know many many folks who got stuck in that novel. Would it be too simple to say that tastes differ?
March 31st, 2008 at 10:23 AM
Yes, tastes differ, but the "why" and "how" of it are still interesting questions.
May 8th, 2008 at 6:01 PM
I think there may be several processes involved in responding deeply to a favourite novel. One is that, as Nigel Beale suggests, scenes in a novel may resonate with memories of an autobiographical kind, but not necessarily ones we remember explicitly, and not necessarily at a level we ordinarily think about. So if we find ourselves in tears at a story of lovers parting, it may resonate with experiences of loss we have not resolved. Second is the idea that what literary reading allows is to take a novelist’s words and make them our own, as ways of verbally expressing something meaningful to us. But I don’t want to make every novelist’s words my own. I still don’t understand, however, why I find Crime and Punishment gripping but The Brothers Karamazov difficult to get through.