The Unclassed by George Gissing

 Let me first of all deal with the problem of coincidence in novels, Victorian novels in particular.. The Unclassed by George Gissing is full of them. Does not that flagrant breach of likelihood ruin verisimilitude?  Yes if you view the novel as a tranche of life, a piece of social history using the characters as lay figures.  Of course its not that, it is a story, a world enclosed in a narrative, pure fabulism. It is a restricted world and the relationships of the characters must be worked out within it.  Therefore they must all meet in whatever likely or unlikely way they do. Its a small world..

A good way to bring disparate characters together is school. Right away the enmity which is a central element is established by Ida Starr skulling Harriet Smales with a writing slate knocking her out.  The row has come about through Harriet declaring Ida’s mother to be no better than a street woman which is actually true.  Though Ida who is about 10 or so does not know what this means having been sheltered from this life by a mother who wants to rear her gently being herself from a well off background but a little wayward, seduced at age 18 and by refusing to give up the child, Ida,  is cast out by her father, Abraham Woodstock.  Maud Enderby is a friend of Ida’s and she is being reared by her Aunt who is a strict ascetic non conformist. Maud believes that her parents are dead . Harriet’s father is a compounding chemist, sickly of course as per usual in the novels of Gissing a good percentage of the characters will be ailing.  Harriet is the only child but there is a nephew Julian Casti a few years older than her.  Mother is dead.

That is one assemblage of characters. The other element is the lone figure of Osmond Waymark.who brings them all together by writing an ad in the newspaper looking for a friend of literary bent to meet for conversation and company.  This is some years later than the opening scene. . 

Now this sort of review through dramatis personae is not my usual way of dealing with a novel.  I’m doing it to remind myself that this was the work of a 26 year old man and  his second novel.  It was an extremely complex narrative retaining interest in the characters as they developed over several years.  In some ways the novel is like a therapeutic journal plotting his own internal drama.  Waymark represents the authori himself as the strong writer able by the force of his personality to turn the prostitute Ida to purity and love unsullied by lust.  At the same time he is attracted to the religious Maud Enderby.  Casti represents the side of Gissing easily imposed on by a scheming woman dragged down and neglecting his talent.  At the time of the writing of the novel he had broken with Nell the alcoholic prostitute that he had married.  The intensity of the energies released in the writing creates a like absorption in the reader.  We want the fantasy to correct the sordid aspects of his life and the visualisation to achieve reality.  The speed with which it was written and its journal aspect mitigated the usual writerly orotundity which can make the prose the analogue of lumpy porridge.

Do all the characters meet? Yes they do, of course. There are many well drawn evil characters.  Harriet is a monster of passive aggression, and vengeance, Slimey a Caliban clown, and Mrs. Sprowl an instigator of vile plot.  As in many of Gissing’s novels there are slums noisome, crooked, rotten and with defective plumbing causing night soil to be cast into the yard.  This is a good novel. 

 

'The Three Imposters' by Arthur Machen

    First of all you will have to pay attention to the prologue.  Do not regard as a long winded introduction to the main story.  It holds the key and introduces you to the imposters and their aliases.  You are  therefore primed to disbelieve everything they may say and enjoy the irony of their fabrications while seeking to discover why they go to such lengths to tell Dyson and Phillipps egregious rigmaroles.  That reason you will never discover  because it is opaque to the profane.  In this realm causality operates on another level not the normal billiard ball one which is a matter of transmission of gross force on the material plane. The imposters lie out of sheer jouissance in the activity.  To impose and rook the stranger is a goal in itself.  Its what they do and they are good at it.  But why do Dyson and Phillipps meet them to be the objects of their imposture? My intuition is that the gold Tiberius, that coin a lone survivor of coinage struck as the celebration of infamy is accursed and has brought destruction on its possessors down through the centuries, generally hidden from sight and fought for when it occasionally turns up. It has therefore become karmically magnetized and though the Three Imposters do not know that Dyson has the coin their will to evil draws them into his company and to Phillipps’s who also knows about the coin.  

The action of the energies evoked by the coin are an example of what Hindu ritualists call ‘apurva’. Why, they asked, do rituals which must fructify appear to act with a non-linear causality? Are there subtle seeds which act to  create a catenary of action or must we accept that this action is apurva or unprecedented, uncanny if you will?  Shankaracarya the great teacher demurs.  It is the will of God that makes everything happen.  

The evil will and the vile energies that surround the coin make me fear for the future of Dyson and Phillips or whoever chances to bring it into the light of day.  The novel is a masterpiece of irony and palindromic fabulism.

Phillipps is most certainly wrong:

"I certainly think," replied Phillipps, "that, if you pull out that coin and flourish it under people's noses as you are doing at the present moment, you will very probably find yourself in touch with the criminal, or a criminal. You will undoubtedly be robbed with violence. Otherwise, I see no reason why either of us should be troubled. No one saw you secure the coin, and no one knows you have it. I, for my part, shall sleep peacefully, and go about my business with a sense of security and a firm dependence on the natural order of things. The events of the evening, the adventure in the street, have been odd, I grant you, but I resolutely decline to have any more to do with the matter, and, if necessary, I shall consult the police. I will not be enslaved by a gold Tiberius, even though it swims into my ken in a manner which is somewhat melodramatic."  

What its like to be a sage

 What its like to be a sage is a riff on what its like to be a bat.  It controverts it with irony because the bat is not an idealist.  The bat if anything is a non-dualist.  If the bat had it’s own very own special bat feelings, inscrutable and mysterious to the non-bat world then the existence of an external world that was congruent with those feeling would arise.  Of course the bat is a non theoretic creature; the problem of an external world does not arise, there is simply a consciousness and action without a second thought.  Humans do take thought when not immediately pressed by the exigencies of survival and navigation around the furniture of this world.  The human being is a theoretic creature who examines his own reactions and places them within the boundary of an entity called the person.  In essence that is a naturally occurring theory which may be useful for navigational purposes, indeed essential yet as Bergson and the Advaitins hold the forked consciousness is parasitic on a non-dual plenum.  Bergson calls it ‘pure perception’  and allies it to Memory the significant element of Consciousness.  Getting to that state is for the Eastern sage a letting go and letting be, expressed by Ramana Maharshi as ‘effortless effort’.  The Master enjoins ‘Show me the face you had before you were born’ or ‘the sound of one hand clapping’.  There is consciousness in that state but it has not yet migrated per ur-theory to a person.  It is the natural state.  

Janaka in the Ashtavakra Gita explains it thus:

"Janaka said:

I became intolerant first of physical action, then of extensive speech, and then of thought. Thus therefore do I firmly abide.

Having no attachment for sound and other sense objects, and the Self not being an object of perception, my mind is freed from distraction and is one-pointed. Thus therefore do I firmly abide.

An effort has to be made for concentration when there is distraction of mind owing to superimposition etc. Seeing this to be the rule, thus do I firmly abide.

Having nothing to accept and nothing to reject, and having neither joy nor sorrow, thus, sir, do I now firmly abide.

A stage of life or no stage of life, meditation, control of mental functions - finding that these cause distraction to me, thus verily do I firmly abide.

Abstention from action is as much the outcome of ignorance as the performance of action. Knowing this truth fully well, thus do I firmly abide.

Thinking on the Unthinkable One, one only has recourse to a form of thought. Therefore giving up that thought, thus do I firmly abide.

Blessed is the man who has accomplished this. Blessed is he who is such by nature."

The House next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons (pub.1978)

 House is a weird suburban novel in which a house is a malignant force. Its not even an ancient house with a grisly history and bold boltered rooms, a corpse half in and half out on the patio where glasses are broken and a cheeky little vintage of no great authority breathes for the dead and dying.  The echo of the boy or girl next door in the title with its imputation of ordinary health lies.  This house’s  jouissance is marred by an abstract vengance though it is brand new with a brand new couple moving in expecting a new child.  Newness, brightness and hope are revived on a lot that was deemed to be impossible to build on until the young genius architect worked his Frank Lloyd Wright on it producing a dream design that everyone loves.

Colquitt the narrator thought it couldn’t be done and at first resented the noise, fuss and tree felling that was going to take away frontage and sideage and the leafiness oh the leafiness from her office room where she planned to curate a few clients in her public relations business. However when it was built its beauty made her ‘fall in love’ with it.  Husband Walter also in an advertising executive role as the co-owner of an agency that is doing quite well.  The author Anne Rivers Siddons worked for an ad agency once so the consciousness of refined, classy but understated glamour which uses wealth with taste and discernment in the manner of an upmarket glossy is well depicted.  All the elements of gracious Southern living in an enclave that runs to extreme wealth with butlers to its just us, plain folks.  Automobiles are named if they are vulgar, like Cadillac or BMW Bavaria.  

This house is mad, bad and dangerous to live in.  Siddons very skillfully gives you a sense of the growing dismay of the Kennedys as they realise that a monstrous fate befalls  the inhabitants of this jonah house.  Is it just bad luck or what or just a series of coincidence that befall first the Harralsons, then the Sheehans and finally the Greenes.  Excuse the pun; the plot really builds and even as the Kennedys visit they find themselves in the penumbra of evil.  What can they do about it?

To begin the omens are light:

"Much later I awoke and heard an owl in the woods on the lot next door. We don’t get many of them in the city; I could not remember the last time I had heard one. It was, for some reason, a truly dreadful sound. I lay listening to it, something wild and heavy uncurling in my chest. And I reached down carefully, so as not to wake Walter, and I tied a knot in the corner of the top sheet."

Might be a winding sheet yet but I’ll say no more.  This is excellent, a classic really.  It has the Stephen King imprimatur, bad housekeeping award.  I concur.

Here and There with Sankara and Bergson

Katha Upanisad: 2.i.10: What, indeed, is here is there; what is there is here likewise. He who sees as though there is difference here, goes from death to death.

 

This is the deep meaning of sadhana. You are not aimed elsewhere, you are here and now already there. What keeps us tethered to this point where we act is the nature of consciousness which is adapted to action or designed to navigate through the world. We do not have to strive which the meaning of the effortless effort that the sage discourse on. In the commentary by Sankara on this sutra he refers to the limiting adjuncts viz. the body and the senses. In Bergson’s well known depiction of the memory cone this is the point P intersecting the line of history. Living exclusively at that point is to be utterly submerged in the everyday practical reality. Being too far away from that point is to be in the grand flux of imagination and memory as a dreamer lost in reverie. All states whatever are immediately self-luminous and therefore reveal the nature of identity. Now we are practical then we are speculative and yet only the ‘mass of consciousness’ is taking on various forms of limitation. 

 

“This being so, anyone who - being deluded by ignorance, consisting in seeing differences that are natural to limiting adjuncts; sees, perceives; here, - in this Brahman, which is not a plurality; as though there is a difference; feels such differences as, “I am different from the Supreme Self, and the Supreme Brahman is different from me", he gets, death after death, he becomes subject to repeated death after death.”(commentary)

'The Whirlpool' by George Gissing

  

This is a very complex and closely plotted novel but all that doesn’t matter much because the real events are inward and moral. Again and again Harvey Rolfe the central figure, a gentleman of independent means who passes his days in scholarly pursuits mounts the heights of moral assessment; high ground which he has gained after a rackety start in life.  The exact details of that are given quite late in the novel but initially as we meet him dining at the Metropolitan Club we find that he is decent sort of chap who at age 35 is rolling towards middle age down the gentle slope of esoteric study in his rooms which are in a filthy condition arising from a charity job he has given to an indigent lady that lives by grace and favour of the landlord in a room at the top of the house. As ever in the novels of Gissing incompetent and mutinous servant pullulate. 

The smash of Bennet Frothingham’s Britannia Loan, Assurance, Investment and Banking Company is the novel’s big bang as it were. All of the characters in it are affected by the loss of their money and readjustments are required by all except for Harvey who has his money in solid and safe instruments which allow him £900 a year, a quite respectable income in 1897.   The moral core of the novel is suffering and growth. Mrs. Abbott is one of those people visited by great sorrow who  comes out on the right side of that equation.  

"In truth, Harvey did not quite like Mrs. Abbott. Her age was about seven and twenty. She came of poor folk, and had been a high-school teacher; very clever and successful, it was said, and Harvey could believe it. Her features were regular, and did not lack sweetness; yet, unless an observer were mistaken, the last year or two had emphasised a certain air of conscious superiority, perchance originating in the schoolroom. She had had one child; it struggled through a few months of sickly life, and died of convulsions during its mother's absence at a garden-party."

The children of a cousin of hers have been abandoned by their father and she takes them on and rears them with the Rolfe’s financial help.   Her husband died due to an overdose of laudanum that he was taking for his neuralgia whether that was deliberate or not is left unclear. 

Alma the daughter of Bennett Frothingham is a talented musician who marries Harvey.  She is rather spoilt and lacks the character to stick at anything and being over reliant on praise falls into a torpid state when they move into Wales and there is no one to admire her.  

The Carnabys, Hugh and Sibyl are friends of Rolfe affected by the financial smash of Britannia and have to begin to think of trade to restore their fortune.  Sibyl is a queenly figure, an aristocratic type, in contrast to Hugh who is a classic Arnoldian barbarian who ought to be putting down uprisings in a far flung corner of the Empire.

" Her opinions were uttered with calm assurance, whatever the subject. An infinite self-esteem, so placid that it never suggested the vulgarity of conceit, shone in her large eyes and dwelt upon the beautiful curve of her lips. No face could be of purer outline, of less sensual suggestiveness; it wore at times an air of cold abstraction which was all but austerity."

Part of the mystery and interest of this novel is that we never really plumb the depths of what Sibyl really is.  What is her relation to Cyrus Redgrave who attempted to seduce Alma before her marriage.  Is there an alliance between them of some sort.  Alma thinks there is.

I see now that it is impossible to even suggest the winding and threading of the plot of this novel which was written at great speed by Gissing. The overwhelming fact of social class and the genteel ignorance of ladies of where the money was coming from is realised in the minor figure of Mr. Leach:

"At the age of fifty, prematurely worn by excessive labour, he was alarmed to find his income steadily diminishing, with no corresponding diminution—but rather the opposite—in the demands made upon him by wife and daughters. In a moment of courage, prompted by desperation, he obtained the consent of Dora and Gerda to this unwelcome change of abode. It caused so much unpleasantness between himself and Mrs. Leach, that he was glad to fit up a sleeping-room at his office and go home only once a week; whereby he saved time, and had the opportunity of starving himself as well as of working himself to death."

A brilliant novel, a picture of late Victorian life amongst the rentier classes.

Henri Bergson, Louis MacNeice, and William James

 But first the poem by Louis McNeice which clearly shows the influence of Henri Bergson:

This is a republication of an earlier post with an addition and proper tags:

Louis MacNeice

August

The shutter of time darkening ceaselessly

Has whisked away the foam of may and elder

And I realise how now, as every year before,

Once again the gay months have eluded me.

For the mind by nature stagey, welds its frame

Tomb-like around each little world of a day;

We jump from picture to picture and cannot follow

The living curve that is breathlessly the same.

While the lawn-mower sings moving up and down

Spirting its little fountain of vivid green,

I, like Poussin, make a still-bound fete of us

Suspending every noise, of insect or machine.

Garlands at a set angle that do not slip,

Theatrically (and as if for ever) grace

You and me and the stone god in the garden

And Time who also is shown with a stone face

But all this is a dilettante’s lie,

Time’s face is not stone nor still his wings

Our mind, being dead, wishes to have time, die,

For we being ghosts cannot catch hold of things.

Was Louis MacNeice a Bergsonian? In Creative Evolution I find:

“Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself. Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general.”

(pg.332, Mod.Library edn.)

Poems enact duration in such a way as to bring us into the reality of what makes knowledge possible, what Aquinas called connaturality. We find our way into the being of things through such artefacts.

Addiition: The spatialization of time, its mathematization, is an example of a useful fiction that becomes taken for reality. (cf.Matter and Memory) We ‘catch hold of things’ by freezing the flow. In an interesting speculation that has mythic dimensions Bergson envisages godlike duration:

And would not the whole of history be contained in a very short time for a consciousness at a higher degree of tension than our own, which should watch the development of humanity while contracting it, so to speak, into the great phases of its evolution? In short, then, to perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few more differentiated moments of an intenser life, and in thus summing up a very long history. To perceive means to immobilize.

(from Matter and Memory)

Not only is MacNeice influenced by Bergson but the following extract from a lecture by William James has a similar catenary of images.  

But all these abstract concepts are but as flowers gathered, they are only moments dipped out from the stream of time, snap-shots taken, as by a kinetoscopic camera, at a life that in its original coming is continuous. Useful as they are as samples of the garden, or to re-enter the stream with, or to insert in our revolving lantern, they have no value but these practical values. You cannot explain by them what makes any single phenomenon be or go—you merely dot out the path of appearances which it traverses. (from lecture VI.on Bergson’s Critique of Intellectualism in  A Pluralistic Universe by William James)