Adam Bede, Chapters VI through X

I am continuing here from where I left off in a previous post, talking about my endeavor of reading through Adam Bede, about five chapters at a time, while participating in an online group critique of it. At the time of writing this post, I have already read past the eleventh chapter, and that has somewhat dulled the degree of surprise I had experienced after the first ten chapters of how free the novel was of being overwrought and sappy. But nonetheless, I am still enjoying the combination of sheer joy and acerbic disdain that I feel Eliot must have experienced in creating the characters in this novel.

Naturally, Hetty Sorrel is the focal point of these five chapters, and the only reason the character of Mrs. Poyser comes in second, albeit by the breadth of the smallest concession that she might give in a battle for getting her due out of those that associate with her, is because Eliot has taken care to sound the most ominous notes when talking of Hetty before this. We have ample reason to suppose that Hetty is what I term the “broken disciplining paddle” of a good nineteenth century novel — the cause of many a sorry end, including itself. If I were Mel Brooks satirizing this novel, I would, in the first few scenes, have the kettle drums and minor chords playing ostentatiously whenever someone said Hetty’s name, until one of the other characters, perhaps Adam, would be forced to walk “off camera,” revealing the drum band to the right, who he then proceeds to warn off any future scene.

Before I return to Hetty, let me briefly spend time with Mrs. Poyser. Who can represent better the true face of England’s future than this endlessly harrying woman, attempting with every breath to negotiate a materially more satisfying, cleaner and safer world for herself and her brood? Clearly, Eliot’s sympathies lie with Mrs. Poyser and her kind more than any one else in this novel — not with the dying breed of aristocrats, country squires and Anglican clergy that the Donnithornes and Irwines are, nor with the pretentiousness of the religious novelties that Dinah and her Methodists (which would make such a good band name!) nor even with her hero, the man who lays claim to the title of the novel, if not the title of any land, for after all we already know that Hetty is his fatal flaw. The only character that will survive and do so intelligently, instead of because of a last minute Dickensian intervention, is Mrs. Poyser.

What I remember from these chapters more than anything else is the continuation of Eliot’s sarcastic sense of humor. Our introduction to Hetty’s beauty is through a series of metaphors that subvert themselves through Eliot’s insistence that none of them could possibly do Hetty justice, only because the truest justice to such beauty as Hetty’s is done by actually gazing upon it. Her lack of interest in the senior Bede’s death is the expected response; her lack in Totty’s cherubic charms is a surer indictment, coming as it does after the first scene we see Totty in, with her mother, where we’re primed to expect that every one who comes within a few feet of her lisping presence will immediately dissolve into paroxysms of indulgence. That Hetty fails to do so, especially in the presence of a gentleman who is already smitten by the little child and could only gain a favorable impression of Hetty were she to share in the coddling, more clearly marks her as a massive failure than any other past or future insensitivities could.

The discussion of these chapters on The Valve, which motivated me to start reading Adam Bede, has much to say about Eliot’s description of Totty, of her beauty being so intense that lack of understanding it forces one to extinguish it. It’s a chilling thought, and one that I believe conceals a strikingly deep, if cynical, understanding of power. Something as beautiful as a child threatens traditional power because it is seductive. The child itself is not threatening but Eliot uses the tiny Totty effectively as a metaphor, for how we can be overwhelmed by beauty until we become obsessive about it. In retaliation, we find ourselves developing a Fight response to this seductive force, and we want to crush it.

Moving on from Hetty to Dinah, I found Dinah’s role in the bereaved Bede household surprising in how mean she is made out to be, which is of course a very relative thing to say given that Dinah is clearly on her way to beatification within the normal course of things. Her desire to bring the word of God on every lip seems so strong that we begin to suspect her motives in comforting Ma Bede. She’s itching to make the old woman kneel before the Lord’s omnipotence and is barely able to contain herself — perhaps held back eventually only by the attraction she will begin to betray for the “hunky hero,” Mr. Adam Bede himself. The discussion on The Valve also touches on Dinah’s lack of “interiority,” which I don’t find to be a flaw in Eliot’s style, but rather the truth of who Dinah is. We can forgive Dinah for her almost overbearing and single-minded behavior when it comes to religious responsibility only because we know she’s compelled by forces she doesn’t understand, a fact that becomes even more abundantly clear in later chapters.

Seen in this respect, the novel is beginning to shape up, rather nicely, I might add, around the question of human desires, secular and transcendental, and how we act under circumstances beyond our control — Hetty’s seduction is almost a red herring in this regard, the obvious story that is itself a microcosm representing the larger story it is a part of. It is almost as if Eliot is setting us up, lulling us, through both Hetty’s story and the calm and idyllic setting of the English Midlands, to not see the larger picture, so that the true drama, when it unfolds, is that much more frightening.

Adam Bede, Chapters I through V

I tried reading Middlemarch a few months ago, on the recommendation of a resolutely misogynistic friend who proclaimed that reading it had convinced him that George Eliot was not only the only woman novelist worth reading (ever!) but that she was an exceptional novelist in the first place. This was praise of a special kind, coming as it did from someone who was rarely moved to any kind of positive opinion of things. So I proceeded to read the novel, even though I had an initial twinge of despair when I saw how large it was.

I did not finish the book — too quickly I found the plot slow and the situation of the characters rather tepid, on the whole. I wasn’t expecting a Michael Crichton blockbuster or a James Cameron screenplay, but once it dawned on me that all the action of the novel would not stray far from a small part of nineteenth century England, that indeed I should have considered myself forewarned by the bloody title itself, this grain of realization quickly became a desert of insight in which my stream of early motivations sputtered to a dry and sorry death.

I mention this at length because it is an important part of the context which I have brought with me to the reading of Adam Bede as part of this Summer Reading Project. I anticipated that the format of discussion would provide a better motivation than the one that drove me to try and read Middlemarch, because it would be more ongoing. I hope also that there will be a community engaged in the same task as I, whereas with Middlemarch I had only the implicit approval of my friend and perhaps the added benefit that we could add a discussion of the book to our existing topics of conversation.

I also bring to the analysis of this book no literary context other than

A Thought on the Poor State of Software Technology

I just realized that computer operating systems haven’t gotten to the point, where I can type in, “Run the program that reads PDF files,” and the computer runs the version of Adobe Acrobat/Reader that is installed on it.

In the next stage of evolution, even if no such reader is installed, the computer will automatically say something like, “You need to install a program called Adobe Acrobat/Reader,” and then tell me how to do it.

When this happens, I will consider operating systems to have reached version 1.0, from the point of view of usability.

Requiem to the Fantastic Imagination

There is nothing left to write fantasies about, except witches and imaginary gods. There was a time, an era in which Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle or even earlier when Rabelais and Swift imagined fantastical things, when the Universe was still mysterious. The workings of the world around us were unknown to us, and there was drama in imagining where the limits of our knowledge would lie and what would happen when we pioneered human consciousness to those limits.

Those days are now gone, not because Science has uncovered everything there is to know, but because it has at least exposed the essential aspects of everything. We know how big things can become, and what will happen when they become that big — distances, sizes or amounts of energy. More importantly, we know the limits of human perception. Technology will not allow us to see a quark, even if it allows us to conceive of such a thing in our minds and mathematical models.

Even William Gibson admits of the impossibility of predicting the future, in a recent interview with Silicon.com. The implication of this which Gibson doesn’t touch upon is that, bereft of this once-fertile fount of story-telling, we are forced to move on to realms that simply cannot exist, rather than those that only don’t exist in the present but might come to fruition some day. The popularity of Harry Potter is partially explained by our thirst for worlds far away from ours, but close enough that the sentiments and conflicts still sound human. Earlier, this shift was achieved by injecting a dose of technological advances, but today, it has to be done via a wave of a magic wand, or the arrival in our world of not just alien, but completely imaginary beings. The strangers in our fantasies are not aliens who we have to fear, strike a camaraderie with, or at least anthromorphize mildly so that they fit in our stories; they have been laid off and replaced with interchangeable characters from our hoary myths, legends and sacraments.

Where will we go from here? The answer is obvious — our mind and its inner mechanics. This final frontier, already being explored for over six decades, still largely remains a mystery. The cartography of our consciousness is as exciting to imagine, report on and travel through as the unexplored wildernesses were to pre-Information Age travelers of uninhabited geographies. Everything we know today about our neural pathways is largely conjecture, even though it is admittedly conjecture that is deeply informed and that serves admirably well in explaining the ways in which humans behave and react to their surroundings.

The gaps left behind by our fuzzy understanding of our minds are fallow grounds to plant our exotic imaginings, like patches of alleyways between concrete blocks of city buildings. What is unknown is both the framework and the potential of the mind. It’s not just a question of how it functions, but how much more it can do, that will become the subject of our fantasies for ourselves. Whether we can learn to love and rage and aspire and hate with a greater range than we have shown already; whether we can acquire new emotions even that we haven’t even named; whether we will interact with each other in vaster numbers of ways — all this remains to be written about and, of course, to be shaped and fulfilled in reality.