Recent Reading
Mar. 19th, 2022 04:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
x_losAnne of Green Gables:
I'd never read this before. Though there was foreshadowing aplenty for the demise of two characters (and I'm vaguely aware, via cultural osmosis, of a risk to a third), the actual death in the penultimate chapter felt sudden and surprising (and, though this isn't necessarily connected to the shock at all, quite affecting).
Actually, it's kind of odd how little I know what to expect? The title itself is very famous, but the incidents perhaps less so. I also didn't have a clear idea, beforehand, of Anne's character.
Not since "Gormenghast" has a writer been so fucking into trees. I think I'd follow this element better if I wasn't listening to this while I work--the descriptive passages of imagery are difficult to really grapple with in this mode.
Some absolutely banger lines, like describing a hearth fire burning as the distilled sunshine of a hundred summers. I'm not always entirely sure whether I like this book. I think it's definitely evocative and well-executed, but I go back and forth in terms of how eager I am to get back to it when I'm not listening. Oddly the end pulled the text together better for me than preceding chapters, leaving me with a better overall impression.
The Great God Pan:
Not a bad book, and well-written, but kept doing the proto-Lovecraftian 'I couldn't possibly explain the horror to you!!' nebulous schtick. Women are scary because they look Italian.
GGP speaks of British primitivism and Roman conquest, but in its interest of the dark, mystic past of man, it has no interest at all in a global ‘primitivism’, where I'd expect a "Totem and Taboo" style treatment of contemporary 'civilisation' as something of a sliding scale. Spaces outside England might as well not exist, which is particularly interesting given that the writer was Welsh. What was/is the rest of the globe's relation to Pan? What is the Devil to non-Christians? Despite the scale of the threat the novel introduces, the most the text does to make this horror global is have someone write a note from Argentina (and look threateningly Italian, as aforementioned).
A key problem with the book is that it opens with an event that makes the rest of the novel's moral universe difficult to parse. A scientist/occultist decides that Mary, the child-bride he saved and raised, belongs to him, and that thus her very groomed consent morally or legally enables him to perform an operation on her that will rend the veil between her and the horrifying, numinous spirit-world. She subsequently has a daughter. It's unclear whether the child is a product of her mother's contact with the beyond (like Anakin Skywalker the midi-chlorian baby) or the offspring of her mother and the scientist, simply tainted irrevocably by this contact. Mary's mind is immediately destroyed by the operation: she has her baby and dies horribly.
Later in the book, the daughter--a sort of Typhoid Mary--will expose people who don't really understand what they're agreeing to to a horror that will destroy their minds and lead to their deaths, either as a result of nervous shock or at their own hands. The thing is, the scientist is largely morally removed from blame and consequences when he does just that. He doesn't have to be destroyed, and his actions aren't truly coded as beyond the pale. His daughter or ward essentially does exactly what the scientist did, only a few more times.
Having introduced this scale of abuse in the very first chapter--practiced on a much more vulnerable person than the daughter's victims and representing a betrayal of Mary's dependent fondness and trust on a scale that will never again be repeated in the novel--the horror vaguely unfolded at the conclusion is simply a repetition of the initial crime. The way the scientist's atrocity gets enfolded into the grammar of homosocial relationships, smoothed over and forgotten, also makes other gentlemen's aghast 'my GOD, man!!' responses to the hints of cosmic horror confusing and difficult to emotionally engage with.
And again, the lack of a global perspective makes this strange, because this sort of high-handed experimentation is a key precipitate of coloniality. In a sense, this behaviour is only remarkable at the novel's end for happening in London, to gentlemen: it is well within an understanding of what absolutely normal, socially unimpeachable gentlemen do to people. Even the earlier experiment on a poor and young woman is completely in line with real contemporary psychiatric practice.
Is GGP, in absolutely refusing to touch any hint of coloniality, actually all about it? If so, it's a stark contrast with Lovecraft (who was heavily influenced by this work), where you can FEEL the racialised anxiety.
I'd never read this before. Though there was foreshadowing aplenty for the demise of two characters (and I'm vaguely aware, via cultural osmosis, of a risk to a third), the actual death in the penultimate chapter felt sudden and surprising (and, though this isn't necessarily connected to the shock at all, quite affecting).
Actually, it's kind of odd how little I know what to expect? The title itself is very famous, but the incidents perhaps less so. I also didn't have a clear idea, beforehand, of Anne's character.
Not since "Gormenghast" has a writer been so fucking into trees. I think I'd follow this element better if I wasn't listening to this while I work--the descriptive passages of imagery are difficult to really grapple with in this mode.
Some absolutely banger lines, like describing a hearth fire burning as the distilled sunshine of a hundred summers. I'm not always entirely sure whether I like this book. I think it's definitely evocative and well-executed, but I go back and forth in terms of how eager I am to get back to it when I'm not listening. Oddly the end pulled the text together better for me than preceding chapters, leaving me with a better overall impression.
The Great God Pan:
Not a bad book, and well-written, but kept doing the proto-Lovecraftian 'I couldn't possibly explain the horror to you!!' nebulous schtick. Women are scary because they look Italian.
GGP speaks of British primitivism and Roman conquest, but in its interest of the dark, mystic past of man, it has no interest at all in a global ‘primitivism’, where I'd expect a "Totem and Taboo" style treatment of contemporary 'civilisation' as something of a sliding scale. Spaces outside England might as well not exist, which is particularly interesting given that the writer was Welsh. What was/is the rest of the globe's relation to Pan? What is the Devil to non-Christians? Despite the scale of the threat the novel introduces, the most the text does to make this horror global is have someone write a note from Argentina (and look threateningly Italian, as aforementioned).
A key problem with the book is that it opens with an event that makes the rest of the novel's moral universe difficult to parse. A scientist/occultist decides that Mary, the child-bride he saved and raised, belongs to him, and that thus her very groomed consent morally or legally enables him to perform an operation on her that will rend the veil between her and the horrifying, numinous spirit-world. She subsequently has a daughter. It's unclear whether the child is a product of her mother's contact with the beyond (like Anakin Skywalker the midi-chlorian baby) or the offspring of her mother and the scientist, simply tainted irrevocably by this contact. Mary's mind is immediately destroyed by the operation: she has her baby and dies horribly.
Later in the book, the daughter--a sort of Typhoid Mary--will expose people who don't really understand what they're agreeing to to a horror that will destroy their minds and lead to their deaths, either as a result of nervous shock or at their own hands. The thing is, the scientist is largely morally removed from blame and consequences when he does just that. He doesn't have to be destroyed, and his actions aren't truly coded as beyond the pale. His daughter or ward essentially does exactly what the scientist did, only a few more times.
Having introduced this scale of abuse in the very first chapter--practiced on a much more vulnerable person than the daughter's victims and representing a betrayal of Mary's dependent fondness and trust on a scale that will never again be repeated in the novel--the horror vaguely unfolded at the conclusion is simply a repetition of the initial crime. The way the scientist's atrocity gets enfolded into the grammar of homosocial relationships, smoothed over and forgotten, also makes other gentlemen's aghast 'my GOD, man!!' responses to the hints of cosmic horror confusing and difficult to emotionally engage with.
And again, the lack of a global perspective makes this strange, because this sort of high-handed experimentation is a key precipitate of coloniality. In a sense, this behaviour is only remarkable at the novel's end for happening in London, to gentlemen: it is well within an understanding of what absolutely normal, socially unimpeachable gentlemen do to people. Even the earlier experiment on a poor and young woman is completely in line with real contemporary psychiatric practice.
Is GGP, in absolutely refusing to touch any hint of coloniality, actually all about it? If so, it's a stark contrast with Lovecraft (who was heavily influenced by this work), where you can FEEL the racialised anxiety.
