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May. 21st, 2021 10:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseI want to take some time to talk about my recent reading!
This recent memoir from Ruth Coker Burks tells the story of her work in the 80s and 90s as a young divorced white single mom helping late-stage AIDS patients in Arkansas. Burks is a stubborn, scrappy woman hanging on at the edges of society, and she uses every scrap of hedge-knowledge she possesses as she gets drawn deeper into the tragedy of the AIDS pandemic and these young queer male victims.
I was moved by the portrait of solidarity between marginals, the way she understood the condition of marginalized people different from but similar to herself, and was flexible, but still helped so much. Also tickled, from a narrative standpoint, by the way Bill Clinton peeks over the edge of the memoir, going from a former neighbor to a correspondent as he ascends the political ladder off-stage.
I do still mean to do up a post on the Frederica quartet, which I'm now reading over for a second time (!), but let me talk now about this two-novella duology, which I read directly after, and I'll get to the big guns later.
The first novella in the book, "Morpho Eugenia," is a very Crimson Peak-y Victorian naturalism gothic with a great house, butterflies, ants, a stranger come to stay, and some brother/sister incest. I guessed its secret early in, and then was pleased by the regular unspooling of the unspeakable-yet-known.
There is a characteristic of Byatt's writing that I find perturbing but also compelling, a deep but interesting squickiness, around descriptions of soft and sexual female bodies. It's very much on display here in the portrayal of Eugenia, and I found it more than usually distressing, as it did seem to totally preclude any sympathy with her as a victim, rather than a perpetrator, of incest, although she is unavoidably more the former than the latter. No Lucille she. But, in depicting her as having a sort of power, the narration seemingly closes off any but the hardest and most disgusted reactions to her experiences.
The second novella was a delight to read unspoiled. I'd settled in nicely after the first few chapters, comfortable in the Victorian spiritualist milieu of seances and automatic writing. And then the whole thing turned on a pivot and became Tennyson RPF/In Memoriam fanfiction. Well!
I did a good chunk of work on In Memoriam in school, and lent it to my grandma B when my grandpa died. The repetitive grieving stanza form that can't ever move on, the homoerotic relationship between the poet and the lost beloved triangulated through the engagement to the sister ... I couldn't have set myself up better for this story, which takes on the problem of the disrupted life of Emily Tennyson, frozen in time in the poetry of her brother as a maiden fiancee, a perpetual mourner who wants to get on with living the many years remaining to her.
Considered as a work of derivative fiction, it's got great structure. You don't realize who Emily is right away, although if you're familiar with the "canon" you start to suspect it a good bit before the reveal. There's an electric sequence at the end, when the point of view wanders, through the trance of a young Spiritualist woman, into an extended narration of Tennyson's own stream of consciousness, looking at himself in a mirror and flashing through rhymes, memories, impressions, regret. If the In Memoriam verse form circles, this novella spirals, rising in the intensity of its engagement with its literary and cultural matter.
The two novellas in the volume are strung together loosely but charmingly. The young ship captain who takes the disgusted bridegroom away from Eugenia appears to be the same individual, years later, who is being mourned by a grieving wife, a social friend of the former Emily Tennyson, herself now remarried to a seafaring gentleman. There's no great import in it, but it left me smiling as a way to slip from one story into the other.
This recent memoir from Ruth Coker Burks tells the story of her work in the 80s and 90s as a young divorced white single mom helping late-stage AIDS patients in Arkansas. Burks is a stubborn, scrappy woman hanging on at the edges of society, and she uses every scrap of hedge-knowledge she possesses as she gets drawn deeper into the tragedy of the AIDS pandemic and these young queer male victims.
I was moved by the portrait of solidarity between marginals, the way she understood the condition of marginalized people different from but similar to herself, and was flexible, but still helped so much. Also tickled, from a narrative standpoint, by the way Bill Clinton peeks over the edge of the memoir, going from a former neighbor to a correspondent as he ascends the political ladder off-stage.
I do still mean to do up a post on the Frederica quartet, which I'm now reading over for a second time (!), but let me talk now about this two-novella duology, which I read directly after, and I'll get to the big guns later.
The first novella in the book, "Morpho Eugenia," is a very Crimson Peak-y Victorian naturalism gothic with a great house, butterflies, ants, a stranger come to stay, and some brother/sister incest. I guessed its secret early in, and then was pleased by the regular unspooling of the unspeakable-yet-known.
There is a characteristic of Byatt's writing that I find perturbing but also compelling, a deep but interesting squickiness, around descriptions of soft and sexual female bodies. It's very much on display here in the portrayal of Eugenia, and I found it more than usually distressing, as it did seem to totally preclude any sympathy with her as a victim, rather than a perpetrator, of incest, although she is unavoidably more the former than the latter. No Lucille she. But, in depicting her as having a sort of power, the narration seemingly closes off any but the hardest and most disgusted reactions to her experiences.
The second novella was a delight to read unspoiled. I'd settled in nicely after the first few chapters, comfortable in the Victorian spiritualist milieu of seances and automatic writing. And then the whole thing turned on a pivot and became Tennyson RPF/In Memoriam fanfiction. Well!
I did a good chunk of work on In Memoriam in school, and lent it to my grandma B when my grandpa died. The repetitive grieving stanza form that can't ever move on, the homoerotic relationship between the poet and the lost beloved triangulated through the engagement to the sister ... I couldn't have set myself up better for this story, which takes on the problem of the disrupted life of Emily Tennyson, frozen in time in the poetry of her brother as a maiden fiancee, a perpetual mourner who wants to get on with living the many years remaining to her.
Considered as a work of derivative fiction, it's got great structure. You don't realize who Emily is right away, although if you're familiar with the "canon" you start to suspect it a good bit before the reveal. There's an electric sequence at the end, when the point of view wanders, through the trance of a young Spiritualist woman, into an extended narration of Tennyson's own stream of consciousness, looking at himself in a mirror and flashing through rhymes, memories, impressions, regret. If the In Memoriam verse form circles, this novella spirals, rising in the intensity of its engagement with its literary and cultural matter.
The two novellas in the volume are strung together loosely but charmingly. The young ship captain who takes the disgusted bridegroom away from Eugenia appears to be the same individual, years later, who is being mourned by a grieving wife, a social friend of the former Emily Tennyson, herself now remarried to a seafaring gentleman. There's no great import in it, but it left me smiling as a way to slip from one story into the other.
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Date: 2021-05-22 02:27 am (UTC)