Roxana

There’s an accounting in this book that reflects a lot about Defoe’s background as a fact-gatherer. I’d illustrate it with charts and accounts. (I think he did this already in A Journal of the Plague Year). It’s not what we’d expect in a novel. It’s not apparently a page-turner strategy, yet it is… I’m turning the pages. I find it absurdly fascinating. At times the story seems to stand still and only tension is created. I can feel the wear-marks on the floor from all the pacing that the character must do in going over the same ground seemingly endlessly. It creates tension in the reader too. There’s a sense of ‘stop talking and just get on with it’. This is especially true in the conversations between Roxana (who hasn’t yet been named so) and her maid Amy around the issue of whether and when R. will end up sleeping with the gentleman (her former landlord) who has been so generous to her since her husband left her, she had to farm her kids out to relatives and fell into abject poverty. Whether she sleeps with him or not in some ways seems the least of her worries but I understand why she worries and why Amy worries along with her and why the talking takes so long. Roxana’s also acutely aware of what we’d call ‘the slippery slope’. She knows she’s on the edge of it. When things seem to be working out, she knows that her debts will be called in. There will be a day of reckoning. It’s religious of course and we might analyze it from that perspective or from a perspective in which we recognize Roxana’s compromised position as a woman in her time and place but what Defoe really recognizes and (more importantly) gets down on paper is Roxana’s intelligence and self-awareness. As readers we really get a sense of how she lives in her own body and in her own world. But in a book supremely about manipulation, is she also working on us? What does she want from us? I’m thinking about that…

Stimulating the Palate

Jackpot (wow)
Bacteria (I feel negative about this one)
alongside (is that all one word or alloneword?)
trundle (buggy)
embryonic (I've heard a couple of birth stories recently so, yes, this, but this whole year of reading can be described using this word too)

Ration (ways in which we stand in our own way:( )
Kinship ( I read three chapters of Georgio Agamben's The Open today and suggest that his question "But what becomes of the animality of man in posthistory?" is apt here)
chase (verb or noun?)
caster (please check spelling or OED - wow, it's a variant spelling of 'castor' which is a wheel on a chair or table or a container with small holes in the top of it - like a salt shaker or a sugar shaker, thus, 'castor/caster sugar')
willpower (some have a hard time with the 'castor/caster sugar')

incubator (all of the babies I know born recently have been big and healthy - no need for this - but my ideas are, on the other, in need of one right now... perhaps)
greediness (wanting too much)
water (wow - I think I can brainstorm on that one quite considerably)
tetralogy (4?- 'who does that?' and 'why not'?)
bigot (remember: the open)

macinnongati

or an 'undeviating heart'.

I got up in the night last night panicked by the number of things I have to navigate for the next six weeks. It's a ridiculous state really - not sleeping when you have a lot to do because you really need the sleep in order to do the doing (or something like that). 'Macinnongati' may be what gets me through. I am reading quite fiendishly in preparation for some of these tasks and I'm tasking as I read. One of the things I have to do is prepare an index. It's disturbing me. I am not a methodical person and it seems that this is a task that requires that kind of habit. It's not my way. I'm reading a chapter in the Chicago Manual of Style about how to write an index. It's skilled work. I'm afraid to begin. 'Macinnongati'. I know I want to reach the destination beyond the index. I know it's important to embrace the indexing practice as part of the journey. My heart sinks. I keep moving.

Taking a detour

Well, since I haven't had a chance to get back to the library to get Seven Types out again...I grabbed Roxana by Daniel Defoe out of a box and started reading it right after I reached the glorious conclusion of Ivanhoe. What does this mean? Perhaps I prefer fiction at hand. I don't want to have to go looking for it. Perhaps I like novels that have the name of the main character in the title. Come to think of it, I do. I like King Lear and Hamlet and Tom Jones and Moll Flanders and Tristram Shandy and David Copperfield and Ulysses...and DQ... I'll let you know what happens.

And a footnote

A few pages after 'the twist, the surprise', there's a footnote in my edition that comments on an apparent critical controversy around Scott's insertion of 'the twist, the surprise'. If I had time, I'd read more about this...it would be interesting. It would be especially interesting to find out when these critical comments were made. Literary fashions change and maybe critics aren’t always honourable in how they understand the times in which the book was actually engendered and written. The footnote briefly suggests that readers (whoever that refers to) found the turn of events contrived and far-fetched. Personally, I loved it. I thought it was classic gothic and very comical (to my mind - these are two things that naturally go together). It also functioned narratively as a way of bringing all of the characters together effectively to share some information and revelations and as a transition to the next episode – the battle for Rebecca – which turned out to be an incredibly short section – I would write a footnote on that – though I loved Brian de Bois Guilbert’s final moments – very interesting character altogether. He’s driven by passion and this makes him human despite being a bad guy. Yet his ‘unbalance’ is not madness in the stereotypical sense. He doesn't loll around with his head in his hands talking nonsense - though he does become uncontrollable. Indeed, in the end, his madness manifests itself through the body. Scott talks about his face a lot…and it is the last part of him that we see – Malvoisin has to see his face and read it. It’s one of those extreme close-up pov to zoom out to crane shot scenes. But too short.

A Twist, A Surprise

And just when I thought Ivanhoe was winding down, Scott throws in a twist, a surprise. Now I've stopped thinking about what I'm going to read next (I know, I've pledged to read Seven Types of Ambiguity but I have to go back and get it out of the library and who knows what book might jump out in front of me before then or is that just an avoidance strategy?). I'm completely in/with Ivanhoe. How could this have happened? What effect will it have on the ultimate clash of foes which we knew was coming? Clearly, no matter how much experience you have as a reader, it's not good to become complacent about the book you're reading. Maybe if I read faster and more intensely, it would be easier but I leave books to sit for so long. I have about 20 library books in my office. Now I have to move offices (again) and I'm wondering if I should just take the books back to the library or if I should pack them? Or if I should read them. Or if I will read them...