Joyce Jameson

            On Monday morning I worked out most of the chords for “Classée X" (Rated X) by Serge Gainsbourg. I'll probably have them all in place on Tuesday. 

            I took a siesta from 11:30 to 13:00. 

            I guacamole with plantain chips for lunch.

            I took a bike ride in the early afternoon. It was only -2 outside but there was a very strong wind from the northwest that made it feel a lot colder. It kept blowing my hood off when I was going up Brock and when I was heading home along Queen. The street lights were shaking vigorously. All that was left of the snow were some dirty grey piles by the side of the street. 

            I got a notice that they will probably be dropping the second short writing assignment from the Brit Lit 2 syllabus. They’ll only drop it if the students approve of it in a vote, so I voted yes. I’d rather write one essay than some little assignment full of instructions plus an essay. Besides they cut it too close to give us the instructions for the short assignment when it would have been due next week. 

            I read “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti another time. Lizzie does not allow herself to be penetrated but only collects the men’s fruit juices in her body’s crevices, such as in her dimples.

            I logged onto Quercus at 16:20 and this week’s Brit Lit 2 lecture was up. 

            He seemed to start lecturing before he started recording. One could first hear him in mid sentence with “realism” in mid sentence. But then I restarted it a couple of times and it came in at the beginning. 

            Today’s video was on the Victorian novel, realism and George Eliot, Matthew Arnold’ and Toru Dutt’s poems. 

             Arnold and Dutt writing in a world of Charles Darwin’s theories. His theories degrade a sense of confidence in divine truth and providence. Darwin jumps through hoops to put a positive spin on this and says ennobling perfection without god is still grand. Not that people stopped belief but the sense that the world is controlled authoritatively by divinity took a hammering. People were not as sure of their beliefs as they had been forty years before. This troubled their sense of morality and their sense of punishment. Right and wrong had been rooted in divinity and the rightness of god. Confidence in divine authority became questionable. People wondered how an irreligious society was going to control criminal behaviour and how it would reward the good. 

            Dostoyesvsky a little later than this wrote The Brothers Karamazov. Ivon wonders if there is no god all is permitted. This leads to worry about how society is run without confidence in god’s rules. Darwin says god may have not created the world in way we thought but it is still noble. Dutt and Arnold are reacting to this new world. Both poems, though different in tone (One is elegiac about siblings dying while the other is about love on Dover beach) are situated in a world of loss of certainty and loss of moral and cultural certainty. Both poems use the sea as a representation of vast connectedness (often associated by faith): “Well known to the eye of faith” and “The sea of faith”. There is a shared evocation of the sea as connecting a shared wail of grief , of melancholy that is not local but present in all bays. The extensiveness of life in a world bigger than us. This is the way we used to connect to faith but with added doubt here. Arnold’s Sea of Faith is in withdrawal. There is disconnection and a loss of truth and relations. Both poets turn to love as a response to sadness and fear and withdrawal. But what are the differences in the situation the poets are responding to, as well as the power or lack of power they attribute to love and poetry? The poems articulate different values to love. Love has role in both but differently. 

            On George Eliot’s The Natural History of German Life and Adam Bede. What should art do in a world in which belief and traditional sources of moral certitude are in flux, and in which the structures of work, family, society, and culture are changing rapidly? The question about how this world should be represented is an urgent and pressing one. The world is losing its easy ways of working. How to represent a world that is not divinely ordered? Another way of asking is should literature entertain or instruct? Should it be fun? The question is not new but has new urgency, especially as Eliot shows us in Adam Bede. Should literature bring beauty or entertainment,, escape, or tell us about the world? Northanger Abbey is obsessed with the question of the tension of the way art entertains or teaches or both. This goes back to the Greeks but there is a new urgency. 

            The Natural History of German Life is ostensibly about painting but it is about the value, difficulties and function of realism for the novelist. Realism is understood as art representing everyday lives. Not magicians and knights but the average Jack and Jill. Clara Reeve in arguing why realism matters says the novel is a picture of real life and manners. The romance in lofty, elevated language describes what never happened nor ever will happen. How does the novel represent and not describe what won’t happen. There are demands of realism. In opera there is no demand for realism. But if you undertake to paint the life of the people you are responsible for concrete knowledge and direct observation. You are responsible to be real. 

            Art is nearest to life. It is the mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. We have to be faithful to the truth about people. She says this difficult because of the abstract quality of imagination versus knowledge. To talk about people in the abstract is like the way the non-railroad man treats railways. The non railroad man has no experience so knows nothing about railroads. Realism is practical and needs knowledge. The novel is showing the practical. Eliot says when we go outside direct observation in art or imagination we end up repeating what we think we know. We replicate stereotypes, clichés, and traditions, rather than being alert to the surprise of what is. We see the world as we think it is. 

            “The Hireling Shepherd” painting verisimilitudinously depicts joyous peasants, buxom cottage women and their rosy cheeked merry children. More like ornaments than people. These images are hard to get out of the artistic imagination which looks for its subjects in literature instead of life. When we look to literature for peasants we go further away. We need to look to the world and then be responsible to what we see without matching literature’s stereotypes. Pay attention to what you see in the world.

            Realism for Eliot is a moral duty. The novel is about everyday people. This means it has a different moral relation to truth. The problem she points out is that clichés and abstraction misrepresent dangerously because they turn away sympathy. If we use representation of stereotypes it turns us towards a false object of them when we encounter real peasants and we find our sympathies betrayed. We may treat the people badly because we were not connected properly. A more mundane version of this when we meet someone who is a friend of friend that we’ve heard talked about in such a way that we have a false idea and may be disappointed when we meet them. The novel is supposed tell of the world. 

            The controversial part is when she says misrepresentation is not just bad art but it makes the author a bad person and a moral failure. For our social novels to say they are representative but not being so is evil. When we appeal to the poor today we use generalized moral sympathy, weak, unconnected, and not about what the poor suffer. Art must give direct concrete material that surprises us and breaks our stereotypes. A good realist novel gives us a deeper connection and shows what we don’t know. We think we understand but are shown that we don’t. We see the gap. 

            This is not easy. Falsification is not okay even when done towards a moral end. She’s strict. The novelist’s duty is not to the ought but to the do. It is not about what ought to be but what is. One should not try to create pathos. She says if a novel is not presenting reality it is a moral failure. The end doesn’t justify the means even if it helps the poor. If we encourage sympathy we must be real and not ideal. 

            The television show “The Wire” shows Baltimore not idealized. Children are not ideal. They are bad kids making bad decisions and they are not innocent. This show is the most George Eliot art created in this century. 

            Eliot writes Adam Bede and is trying to practice what she preaches. Chapter 17 is about her responsibility to realism. She has to break out of descriptive mode. The excerpt reveals the complexity of what it means to do realism. She has to break into a metadiscursive mode to explain why she portrays Irwine realistically. Fiction is not real and so there is tension between reality as a goal and fiction as a mode of description in entertainment. We see this in Northanger Abbey when the narrator steps in to talk about novels. Eliot says the reader is breaking fourth wall. She is listening to an imaginary reader challenging her and answering those questions. Eliot again says novelists need to hold a mirror to life. She describes what realism in a novel should be. She is talking about avoiding the arbitrary picture. Not everyone is beautiful. The goal is to attempt to mirror. as if giving testimony under oath. 

            The novelist can’t perfectly narrate what happened. There is always some defect in representation. But one should still try to be truthful. Falsehood is easy but truth is difficult. If anything most important thing to learn from this class. People like what they already know. No one likes to be challenged, to think a new thought, to change our minds. It is hard, difficult and ugly. It makes us feel vulnerable, silly and that we’ve wasted our time to an embarrassing degree. We prefer the unreality of the world as we want it to be rather than how it is. 

            This is a psychological phenomenon we see in the world of Covid. People prefer fantasy. The world is absurd and unfair. In Zadie Smith’s On Beauty she says “The world won’t reward you for caring”. The novelist representing the world must not fall into the trap. This is the most important thing one can learn in university. Facts don’t match our opinions. She’s ventriloquizing how people want the world to be the way they imagine. Faulty characters are not always on the bad side. Virtuous characters are not always right. Novelists should not confirm their own desires but disturb prepossessions and to remind people that the world is not what we want. This is a moral duty. 

            But if the novel is supposed to be morally responsible how do we measure truth in fiction, which is already false by definition? She compares the old rector and the new. What does this show? The measure of truth in fiction has to do with falsifiability. Use your judgment. Test the world against your desires. When you see inconsistency test it. What is right? Adam’s account seems plausible to Assistant Professor Dancer. Eliot thinks she’s objective and using direct observation. But it’s not independent of our judgment. We decide through our experience instead of our desires. I want no one to worry about Covid in four months but that’s not going to happen. Consult experience and confess what we don’t know. 

            I think there’s something off about this whole assessment. In her intention of presenting the reality or true life of the peasants she is already othering them. The purpose of depicting the life of the peasants in her novel is for the middle and upper classes. I think that she is right that the classes that take advantage of the peasants should experience their reality but that doesn’t necessarily serve the purpose of art. Peasants that can read probably would not be that interested personally in a realistic portrayal of themselves or their communities. Nobody needs to read about what they experience every day. But Adam Bede is already unrealistic since the chance of there being a love triangle between a carpenter, a lord and a farm girl is pretty slim. 

            Next week Tennyson and Browning’s dramatic monologues. 

            I was done editing my lecture notes before dinner. 

            I had the last of my potatoes with gravy while watching Andy Griffith. 

            This story begins with Andy going to pick up Peggy for a date but the door is opened by an attractive young man. Don is an old friend of Peggy’s from college whom she hasn’t seen for three years. He showed up at her place for a visit and she doesn’t feel she can just ask him to leave. Andy is upset with her and leaves. His plan is to pick up a magazine from work, to take it home, read it and go to bed. But when Andy mentions to the situation at Peggy’s place Barney thinks Andy and Peggy have broken up and that Andy is broken hearted. He is determined to find Andy another girl that night to help him get over Peggy. While Andy is trying to relax with his magazine Barney and Thelma Lou bring over Lydia Crosswaithe. Lydia is an emotionless person who lives in her head. She speaks in a robotic voice things like, “I hate the outdoors. When I go out into the sun I get the herpes.” She also says she hates guitar music. Andy gets everyone to leave but Barney is still determined. After he takes Thelma Lou and Lydia home he calls up a woman in Mt Pilot named Skippy and arranges for him and Andy to meet her and her friend Daphne at the Tip Top in Mt Pilot. But Barney has to lie to get Andy to go. He tells Andy that the Tip Top is serving liquor. First of all the sheriff of one town has no jurisdiction in another town so he couldn’t do anything about it if the Tip Top was a booze can. Andy is surprised when he and Barney are sitting in a booth and Skippy and Daphne show up. This is the first appearance of “the fun girls” on the Andy Griffith Show. Then one of Daphne’s boyfriends shows up and is mad because she’d told him she wasn’t going out. Andy stands up to him. The next day we see Andy with a black eye telling Barney to mind his own business from now on. Peggy walks in and sees the black eye. She and Andy make up. 

            Skippy is played by Joyce Jameson, who was already a professional performer in musical revues when she started doing film and television. She was a regular on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show doing impressions and a ventriloquist’s act with an invisible dummy. In addition to playing half of the fun girls on Andy Griffith she co-starred in two Roger Corman Gothic Horror films “The Black Cat” and “The Comedy of Terrors”. 

            The other fun girl, Daphne is played by Jean Carson, who started out on Broadway and then made guest appearances on television throughout the 50s and 60s.