The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

I just finished reading last night this book I came upon quite by accident, as I was looking for something else online. In other words, because of Amazon’s snooping and spying on my browsing habits, I read this really wonderful book that I’m now going to recommend very strongly to anyone interested in the Victorian period, whether you're interested in crime writing or not.

I guess you could call it “true crime”: it’s certainly true and does detail a shocking crime. But it’s not a typical true crime book, written before the blood is barely dry. It’s a soundly and deeply researched discussion of a Victorian crime--the murder of a child in a middle-class home--the investigation of the crime by different kinds of police including a Scotland Yard detective and the local police and constables, and the final word on the crime after more than 20 years, when someone comes forth to confess. The title is The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale. It’s really not just about the crime itself but about the mid-Victorian period, attitudes toward police and the newfangled thing called a detective, attitudes about the sanctity and privacy of the middle-class Victorian home, attitudes toward women in the period, etc. And Lady Audley’s Secret, my favorite Victorian sensation novel comes up again and again. Summerscale has quite a bit to say about the interest in sensation fiction and what it reveals about the times. Anyway, I read it in about three long nights (up until 2 last night!) and I think you’ll enjoy it, plus learn a lot from it. I certainly did both.

I was reading it for pleasure but finally had to get out my highlighter because I couldn’t help it!

In the beginning is the end

I think JCO has a lot in common with Hawthorne AND the ability to be a lot more explicit about the stuff of life than he was.

I think that she's very interested in "coming of age" stories about young women because that is a defining moment where, you might say, women discover the connection between sex (Eros) and death. A young woman both begins life at that moment (at least the part of life that has an awareness of the larger world and a role for her in it) and senses that this is where the slide toward death begins. It's the moment in which identity or a certain kind of identity is found, discovered, granted, and the moment when the slide toward death lends a sense of melancholy, desperation, or....something, to life. As soon as life is affirmed, we become aware that life will inevitably end.

Where does the question of identity play into this? My first thoughts...that moment that I am talking about is the moment when the woman is, for herself, identified with her sexual role. That is not the only identity that she will have but it is in many ways the most defining one. Even rejecting or not having sex implies an awareness of the sexual role and reaction to it.

I see this in all three young women in our stories ("Where Are You Going..." and "Why Don't You Come Live With Me It's Time"), though I still feel that "How I Contemplated the World.." is somehow more attached to the world than the other stories, which are much more dreamlike and much more readily, at least for me, seen as allegories. BUT, here's the weird thing, everything I know about allegory requires that allegory to have some kind of transcendent meaning to refer to. I will have to think about this. Obviously, for JCO, that's not the case.

A semester's worth of Joyce Carol Oates

I've begun an independent study project with a student this term and we're reading numerous novels, short stories and essays by Oates. A more detailed discussion is taking place in her blog and in a course discussion board, but I'm going to be posting some of my ongoing thoughts and responses here. Anyone who's interested should feel free to ask questions or make comments. We are first discussing two of Oates' early and much-anthologized stories, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" (1966) and "How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again" (1969)
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I came across an article a student gave me in 1998 in which JCO (basically) answers the question "Why do you write?"

She says a lot of things here about her obsession with imagination and dreams and says that writing is a sign of hope in a world without meaning. "Writing is not an escape from reality...it is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system" (partially paraphrasing Flannery O'Connor, to whom she gives credit, though for O'Connor the world was, in fact, filled with meaning).

"The world has no meaning; I am sadly resigned to this fact. But the world has meanings, many individual and alarming and graspable meanings, and the adventure of being human consists in seeking out these meanings."

What she is getting at, I think, is that while there is no one, single, overarching meaning in the universe, there are many individual "meanings" that can be explored. She believes, again, I think, that because we are human, we seek meaning and want meaning, and that the job of the artist is investigate and expose "meanings," not a single unifying "meaning of life."

There is an example that she gives that I think will help us as we grapple with our wish or expectation that there is some "meaning" we are to grasp from her stories. Are you familiar with any Chekhov stories? Well, there is a story called "The Lady with the Pet Dog," a great story. Oates wrote her own updated version of this story giving it the identical title. Here is what she says about the Chekhov story in this article as she gives a very brief plot summary: "They meet, they fall in love, they continue to meet...she weeps, he is helpless, they cannot marry because of their families, their social obligations, etc. That is all the story 'means.' Chekhov gives us a sense of their dilemma, an unforgettable sense of their anguish, and the story need have no meaning beyond that. Surely they are not being punished for adultery!--nor are they being punished for not being daring enough to run away together."

I put that part in bold just in case we start looking for transcendent meaning in her stories!

I can imagine, for instance, that she might have seen something about an arrest in a newspaper or maybe just a brief notice about a minor being arrested for shoplifting and she began to wonder what was going on in the mind of a young person who might seem to have a lot of advantages but got herself into this situation. I can see that happening.

The Establishing Shot in Tarantino's Jackie Brown

The scene I'm going to examine in detail is the establishing shot that introduces Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown (1997). (See it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BWA1T78WpI). The "establishing shot" (definition from James Monaco's How to Read a Film, rev. ed.) is "generally a LONG SHOT that shows the audience the general location of the scene that follows, often providing essential information, and orienting the viewer."

If the purpose is "orienting the viewer," the remarkable thing about this shot is that it resists orienting us; it withholds information about exactly who and what we are looking at and where we are. It's a 2 ½ minute shot in which the camera never leaves the woman we're watching, but it's only when the shot has ended and we move on to the next three shots that we realize where we are and who she is. The beginning of the movie is anxiety-producing, which is a good introduction to the entire movie, a crime story of suspense and violence.

The credits are superimposed on the shot, so the first question that came to my mind was "Is the movie starting?" Two and ½ minutes later, the answer is "yes." Then, there is the odd framing and staging of the shot. We are watching a woman in profile and she is wearing what looks like a uniform; it's a bright blue uniform and she's wearing what seems to be an i.d. of some kind around her neck and she has a patch on the shoulder of her uniform . What kind of uniform is it? Is she a security officer of some kind? She is standing still, not walking, not looking about. She has a calm expression on her face, stands erect and with dignity, and gives us no clues. But, and this is a major disorienting factor, though she is not walking, she is moving at a steady pace. This is not a "long shot," which "includes at least the full figures of the subjects, usually more" (Monaco) but a truncated shot: We see the woman only from the waist up. We know she's moving because she is passing by the wall behind her. That wall is tiled in geometrical patterns and has a wide range of colors, all fairly subdued. She stands out vividly from the ever-changing background. Is she moving or is the wall moving? How is the movement happening?

This movie, from the beginning, has a very evocative soundtrack, mostly of disco and blues-inflected music from the 70s. The whole time we are watching this woman a song is playing that seems to be the antithesis of what she represents. It's a song that repeatedly talks about "crossing 110^th Street" and invokes the "ghetto," a "brother""trying to survive," and a "woman trying to catch a trick on the street." The contrast between this calm, well put-together, light-skinned black woman we're looking at and the music we're listening to raises even more questions.

At nearly three minutes in, the credits finish and suddenly the woman moves—or is moved—forward much faster. Will she fall? Be thrown forward? And…cut! In the next instant, we see the x-rayed contents of bags moving right to left and the movement is almost nauseatingly different from what we have been watching, but at least we now have a clue: We are probably in an airport. Next, a crotch being wanded, and we know we're in an airport. Within another minute or so, our woman is walking more quickly, then nearly jogging through the airport. She reaches her destination and—voila!—she is a flight attendant.

The principal purpose of this establishing shot is to create anxiety and discomfort in the viewer using all of the techniques described above. We are not allowed to rest and everything is done to disorient us and disappoint our expectations. All of these features prepare us for the movie to come in which we will be continually disoriented about who is doing what to whom and in which this calm woman will not be quite what she seems, there will be double and triple-crosses, as well as a star-crossed romance, and crime, finally, will pay.

More on Kosofsky Sedgwick's influence

From the NY Times Week in Review section (04-19-09):
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/weekinreview/19cohen.html?emc=eta1

The Times 04-15-09 obit: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/arts/15sedgwick.html?emc=eta1


A 01-17-98 interview in the Times: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/17/books/queer-theory-is-entering-the-literary-mainstream.html?scp=11&sq=eve%20kosofsky%20sedgwick&st=cse&emc=eta1

Death of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Sedgwick's work has been a profound influence on my own development as a scholar. Her book, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, was first a puzzlement and then an inspiration to me. Through the years, her work continued to excite, inform and inspire. Sedgwick was always at home out on the edge and never afraid of falling. She will be missed in so many ways. RMartin

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1950-2009
One of the most influential cultural theorists of her generation, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, died on Sunday following "a long and very public battle with cancer," in the words of David Manning, director of media relations for the CUNY Graduate Center, where Sedgwick was a distinguished professor of English. The author and editor of numerous books, Sedgwick is perhaps best remembered for Epistemology of the Closet (University of California Press, 1990), regarded as one of the founding works of what became known as "queer theory." A volume of her poetry, Fat Art, Thin Art, was published by Duke University Press in 1994. She mixed poetry, memoir, and psychoanalysis in A Dialogue on Love (Beacon, 1999), based on her struggle with breast cancer and depression. Sedgwick received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1975. Before joining the Graduate Center in 1998, she was a professor of English at Duke University, and also taught at Hamilton College, Boston University, and Amherst College. In 2005, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, then to the American Philosophical Society in 2006. --Scott McLemee
See also: http://dukeupress.typepad.com/dukeupresslog/2009/04/eve-kosofsky-sedgwick-19502009.html

Jhumpa Lahiri in NYC

If you scroll down to the bottom of my blog to see blogs I'm following, you'll see Sepia Mutiny. The latest post there is about an interview with Jhumpa Lahiri (Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth), an author many of you may have read. While the event at the New School is sold out this Friday, Sepia Mutiny is interviewing her and will be posting that later in the week AND they are asking for any questions you may be interested in asking Lahiri. Ok, it's not fame and fortune, but it's a chance you might find worth taking if you have read any of her books or seen the movie, The Namesake.