I have always loved reading. It's been many things to me throughout my life. Sometimes I feel stuck in my own habits. I read and metabolize the text, but I feel like such a passive reader. I'm here to try some new things, but maybe I really don't want to change.
Something that keeps me engaged and questioning a text is thinking about the author. What world did they live in? I think about the larger world and their personal worlds. How does that come out through the writing?
This is also my first time reading Middlemarch and I never studied literature. I have to want to be invested in a book both to start reading it and to continue reading it. This is one of the joys non-assigned or graded reading. Who is this author? Why did they think this section was important to include? That got me through Moby Dick twice!
I think I'm searching for the meaning of life and books that raise questions about that. I love when something gets me excited. I will always be searching. How to make it through the dark times? The alone times?
So much to love here: "Thinking that makes and unmakes us, as readers and partakers in the conversation." And this: "That’s what I’m after when I read a book and when I seek to talk about that book with others. I want that kind of conversation: the lightning of impossible storms that spark us alive and remind us that the world is so much stranger and curious and unknown than we want to believe." Me too.
Haley, I'm requesting a copy of the Foucault interview through ILL as soon as I finish writing this comment. I love your piece! It reminds me of my first reading of Le Guin's novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. The first half is so hard to read because the first-person narrator establishes himself as an uncreative, anxious, and judgmental man who is not aware that he sees the alien world through his cultural prejudices. And then, suddenly, his narration changes as he's opening himself up to another human on this alien world. But that first half of the novel totally does what you're describing here; it challenges the reader to remain open to details that seem mundane and boring. They turn out to be the places where this narrator will change the most! As others have said, your essay is truly thought-provoking.
I need to read that Le Guin novel—it’s been on my list for years! I didn’t know about how it unfolds, and I really love that. A similar thing happens in one of my favorite novels, Jeff Vandermeer’s “Borne,” where you realize halfway through that the narrator has *really* been keeping things from you (and herself). It makes you go back and realize even the most offhand comments from her were deeply telling. Shirley Jackson, I think, does this so well, too.
Your close read joins with my love of Eliot and Foucault and reminds of this quote from Milan Kindera in _Testaments Betrayed_: “Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding.”
Thank you for joining us here with this terrific essay that got me rereading Eliot and thinking about all you've said here.
Thanks for contributing! I'm intrigued, but also puzzled by this distinction: "I have no interest in judgment, these days. Judgment is easy and often finite. It’s what Amanda Montell, in her book Cultish would call a “thought terminator.” After all, that’s what judgment is for: to make it unnecessary for there to be any further questions or ponderings on a given matter. Judging settles things. It puts ideas to rest.
But what of wakefulness? Of being eyes wide open inside a story? What of paying attention?"
I'm of two minds about judgment as it comes to reading. My literary hero is Willa Cather, and she loved the art she loved fiercely and despised the art she disliked just as passionately. Thea Kronborg, of The Song of the Lark, even describes "creative hate," which is a kind of detestation for mediocrity.
For me, there is no distinction between paying attention as a reader and making critical judgments about craft, ideas, aesthetics. When Steinbeck's narrator starts to make sweeping generalizations and drifts into moral hectoring in "East of Eden," I chafe at it. When his characters come alive, I thrill to them.
What do you see as the fundamental difference between judgment (or discernment) and wakefulness?
Thanks Joshua!! I’m so happy to have had the chance to contribute.
I think you and Foucault (and me?) may be defining “judgment” in different ways. What you’re describing—that kind of self-aware discernment—seems crucially different from the kind of numb dismissal at the core of the kinds of judgment that would reduce and simplify, rather than expand and wonder about.
That level of discernment, tinged with self awareness, is a critical part of paying attention that would, I think, allow a reader to have moments of recognition: oh, I’m chafing at this (why? To what end?) and to continue to read.
To judge, though, as I see Foucault saying, is to say “I am chafing at this and therefore it is bad and there is nothing more to say. I am passing a universalizing judgment upon this thing that it is X and Y and Z, and couldn’t possibly be anything else.”
Haley, I’m so intrigued by your reference to Eliot’s anxious narrator in Middlemarch. I’m not sure I’d put it that way, but it makes me think through my own appreciation of what Eliot crafted. I think her narrator both wants to control the social “experiment” of her novel and seems aware that she can’t (or that in life, things have a way of being unpredictable). I think Eliot is working through this material as a personal essayist and creative critic in our own time might.
Which makes your reference to Foucault (and HD!) so apt. Can’t say I’m a huge fan of French philosophy or literary theory, but I do love that quote of his you pulled from that long ago interview about what he dreams for criticism - sparks and questions, yes!
I’d like to dig into why you think the narrator is so jarring (so, maybe I’ll join the Middlemarch chat on your stack). Meanwhile, a question: how does Eliot’s narrative desire to control and explain differ from Dickens in Bleak House or Flaubert in Madame Bovary, or other male authors of the same era? I think there are some provocative differences but also that omniscient storytellers tend to over-explain for contemporary readers. I don’t mind it, because my own writing focus is on personal essays and nonfiction, and the narrative “I” of such prose works through ideas on the page so that readers are encouraged to do the same. That’s one take on Eliot’s narrative goals; ditto for Tolstoy in War and Peace 😉
Thank you, Martha!! Our Middlemarch narrator is so jarring to me—I can never quite “read” her despite having so much from her to read closely. She’s right there, and yet feels so incredibly guarded. I’ve been wondering if that is a result of guarding against something or protecting something. Why do I get the feeling there are “walls up” around her?? I’m excited to keep reading and puzzling it out.
I enjoyed this Haley. A long time ago, I wrote a master’s thesis on Middlemarch and Foucault. I agree about the tension in Eliot’s writing and also love your thoughts about what Foucault brings to it and to reading in general. Thanks again!
Ha! I used Discipline and Punish, Madness and Civilization, and The History of Sexuality, I think. I may also have used Birth of the Clinic. I read all of his books to prepare, but I can't remember the ones I actually used in the writing. It has been nearly 30 years (oh dear)!
I have always loved reading. It's been many things to me throughout my life. Sometimes I feel stuck in my own habits. I read and metabolize the text, but I feel like such a passive reader. I'm here to try some new things, but maybe I really don't want to change.
Something that keeps me engaged and questioning a text is thinking about the author. What world did they live in? I think about the larger world and their personal worlds. How does that come out through the writing?
This is also my first time reading Middlemarch and I never studied literature. I have to want to be invested in a book both to start reading it and to continue reading it. This is one of the joys non-assigned or graded reading. Who is this author? Why did they think this section was important to include? That got me through Moby Dick twice!
I think I'm searching for the meaning of life and books that raise questions about that. I love when something gets me excited. I will always be searching. How to make it through the dark times? The alone times?
Thank you for everything that you share!
So much to love here: "Thinking that makes and unmakes us, as readers and partakers in the conversation." And this: "That’s what I’m after when I read a book and when I seek to talk about that book with others. I want that kind of conversation: the lightning of impossible storms that spark us alive and remind us that the world is so much stranger and curious and unknown than we want to believe." Me too.
Haley, I'm requesting a copy of the Foucault interview through ILL as soon as I finish writing this comment. I love your piece! It reminds me of my first reading of Le Guin's novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. The first half is so hard to read because the first-person narrator establishes himself as an uncreative, anxious, and judgmental man who is not aware that he sees the alien world through his cultural prejudices. And then, suddenly, his narration changes as he's opening himself up to another human on this alien world. But that first half of the novel totally does what you're describing here; it challenges the reader to remain open to details that seem mundane and boring. They turn out to be the places where this narrator will change the most! As others have said, your essay is truly thought-provoking.
Thanks Christa!!
I need to read that Le Guin novel—it’s been on my list for years! I didn’t know about how it unfolds, and I really love that. A similar thing happens in one of my favorite novels, Jeff Vandermeer’s “Borne,” where you realize halfway through that the narrator has *really* been keeping things from you (and herself). It makes you go back and realize even the most offhand comments from her were deeply telling. Shirley Jackson, I think, does this so well, too.
Your close read joins with my love of Eliot and Foucault and reminds of this quote from Milan Kindera in _Testaments Betrayed_: “Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding.”
Thank you for joining us here with this terrific essay that got me rereading Eliot and thinking about all you've said here.
Oh wow. That quote is so beautiful!! Thanks for sharing, Mary!
Thanks for contributing! I'm intrigued, but also puzzled by this distinction: "I have no interest in judgment, these days. Judgment is easy and often finite. It’s what Amanda Montell, in her book Cultish would call a “thought terminator.” After all, that’s what judgment is for: to make it unnecessary for there to be any further questions or ponderings on a given matter. Judging settles things. It puts ideas to rest.
But what of wakefulness? Of being eyes wide open inside a story? What of paying attention?"
I'm of two minds about judgment as it comes to reading. My literary hero is Willa Cather, and she loved the art she loved fiercely and despised the art she disliked just as passionately. Thea Kronborg, of The Song of the Lark, even describes "creative hate," which is a kind of detestation for mediocrity.
For me, there is no distinction between paying attention as a reader and making critical judgments about craft, ideas, aesthetics. When Steinbeck's narrator starts to make sweeping generalizations and drifts into moral hectoring in "East of Eden," I chafe at it. When his characters come alive, I thrill to them.
What do you see as the fundamental difference between judgment (or discernment) and wakefulness?
Thanks Joshua!! I’m so happy to have had the chance to contribute.
I think you and Foucault (and me?) may be defining “judgment” in different ways. What you’re describing—that kind of self-aware discernment—seems crucially different from the kind of numb dismissal at the core of the kinds of judgment that would reduce and simplify, rather than expand and wonder about.
That level of discernment, tinged with self awareness, is a critical part of paying attention that would, I think, allow a reader to have moments of recognition: oh, I’m chafing at this (why? To what end?) and to continue to read.
To judge, though, as I see Foucault saying, is to say “I am chafing at this and therefore it is bad and there is nothing more to say. I am passing a universalizing judgment upon this thing that it is X and Y and Z, and couldn’t possibly be anything else.”
Haley, I’m so intrigued by your reference to Eliot’s anxious narrator in Middlemarch. I’m not sure I’d put it that way, but it makes me think through my own appreciation of what Eliot crafted. I think her narrator both wants to control the social “experiment” of her novel and seems aware that she can’t (or that in life, things have a way of being unpredictable). I think Eliot is working through this material as a personal essayist and creative critic in our own time might.
Which makes your reference to Foucault (and HD!) so apt. Can’t say I’m a huge fan of French philosophy or literary theory, but I do love that quote of his you pulled from that long ago interview about what he dreams for criticism - sparks and questions, yes!
I’d like to dig into why you think the narrator is so jarring (so, maybe I’ll join the Middlemarch chat on your stack). Meanwhile, a question: how does Eliot’s narrative desire to control and explain differ from Dickens in Bleak House or Flaubert in Madame Bovary, or other male authors of the same era? I think there are some provocative differences but also that omniscient storytellers tend to over-explain for contemporary readers. I don’t mind it, because my own writing focus is on personal essays and nonfiction, and the narrative “I” of such prose works through ideas on the page so that readers are encouraged to do the same. That’s one take on Eliot’s narrative goals; ditto for Tolstoy in War and Peace 😉
Thank you, Martha!! Our Middlemarch narrator is so jarring to me—I can never quite “read” her despite having so much from her to read closely. She’s right there, and yet feels so incredibly guarded. I’ve been wondering if that is a result of guarding against something or protecting something. Why do I get the feeling there are “walls up” around her?? I’m excited to keep reading and puzzling it out.
I enjoyed this Haley. A long time ago, I wrote a master’s thesis on Middlemarch and Foucault. I agree about the tension in Eliot’s writing and also love your thoughts about what Foucault brings to it and to reading in general. Thanks again!
Oh wow! A thesis on *Middlemarch* and Foucault: I'd read that! Which Foucault texts did you use to analyze *Middlemarch*??
Ha! I used Discipline and Punish, Madness and Civilization, and The History of Sexuality, I think. I may also have used Birth of the Clinic. I read all of his books to prepare, but I can't remember the ones I actually used in the writing. It has been nearly 30 years (oh dear)!