Oh my dears it has been a long time since I've written an entry for this blog! but I have been reading and reading nevertheless, but without quite as much leisure time to blog about it as I had in the summer. But this was a mistake, because now I have terrible sprawling notes consisting of passages I highlighted on my Kindle, and little notes I typed like "wha!" and "ha ha" and "good one dodo" instead of the wise synthetic readings I recorded with my angel wings in this blog.
And the truth is that I don't have much time to write about Middlemarch, which I just reread in a desperate flurry over the past two days because I have an orals meeting on Wednesday & didn't realize how little I remembered about this novel, because I also think I might have forgotten what happened in Daniel Deronda. Also, do I think anything new about Middlemarch, that I didn't think in 2004 or whenever I read it last, and that has not become commonplace in my brain? Rereading a book like this is the opposite of Spoilers Ahead: what possible freshness can I bring to this story? I still feel sympathy for Casaubon & Rosamond, although I feel less than I did before, maybe; possibly Lydgate seems more like Casaubon to me than he did before, in the expectations he has of his wife; maybe I'm curious about thinking about the structural similarities between Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda with the male & female protagonists who can be friends but not lovers? Except the role of saint has switched genders by DD, and DD seems like more of a saint than Dorothea, because Dorothea is this weird frustrated Saint Teresa who ultimately does none of the great things she aspired to do? And maybe I want to think more about structure in general: how is this sprawling novel about the interconnectedness of human lives different from Dickens's sprawling novels about the interconnectedness of human lives? There's still the same emphasis on type, and also on coincidence (Raffles!) but all of that seems muted by Eliot's more serious, scientific realism. It took the appearance of Raffles and his revelations about Ladislaw to make me realize that coincidence was an important part of the plot--there's Ladislaw & Dorothea meeting in Rome, but also all the little ties between all the characters, which makes coincidence seem less a plot device than a truth of human life that the plot enacts? because in a small town everyone is all mixed up together, whereas in London this kind of interconnectedness seems more spectacular and showy and implausible and shocking. Eliot, like Lydgate, is trying to show the connectedness of systems (discover a primitive tissue? a key to all mythologies?) because otherwise how could she show people as they really are. This will be interesting to see in Deronda too: the titles suggest that in Middlemarch Eliot really is interested in a system, a group of interconnected lives, whereas in Deronda she wants to explore the journey of one person; but are the novels actually so different? Daniel + Gwendolen vs Lydgate + Dorothea + also Fred + the Garths + Bulstrode, right? I guess Middlemarch is more ambitious, moving, as Lydgate says, from systole to diastole. Also worth thinking about: science! and animals. Everyone is described as dumb animals in different and interesting ways. I love Casaubon being described as honest as a ruminant.
