A Commonplace Prosperity

Hawthorne, in the Preface to The Marble Faun:

No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.

As Hawthorne assuredly knew well, the narrative deficit at home, the plotlessness of "commonplace prosperity" is only ever an index of a surplus of narrative elsewhere, off stage, geographically or perceptually. He wrote the Preface in 1859... So many shadows and stories minding the fields...

France knew the story of storylessness back at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Flaubert chronicled Emma Bovary's empty hours. Britain knew it in the later half of the century, until, as always happens, the barbarians are at the gate, the hermetic platitude of the prosperous everyday crumbles into alienation, cancerous self-awareness, and collapse.

Conrad's Heart of Darkness is an inversion of the storyless status-quo, where the void afflicts the jungle, and the romance (the romance of the bills due for love and what we do to pay them) comes home to roost. The exact inversion of Austen, where entre les lignes we find Jamaica. In the Congo, it's romance at home that seeps up through the cracks...

I had heard that her engagement with Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He wasn’t rich enough or something. And indeed I don’t know whether he had not been a pauper all his life. He had given me some reason to infer that it was his impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out there.

I've been watching the new series Rome on HBO. ("Nineteen hundred years ago -- the other day...") After initial disappointment, the show is getting a little bit better each week. But one central aspect I wish was angled differently: rather than the perspective of the soldiers returning home from JC's campaigns in Gaul - we see the home that is about to be altered irrevocably from the perspective of the bearers of change - I wish wish wish they had started with the stuffy affluence of the home, the slaves tending the gardens, the children with their greek tutor (also a slave), and the eddying of time in general just before the levee comes down...

As Hawthorne concludes the paragraph cited above:

Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wallflowers, need ruin to make them grow.

Comments

[Matt]

Oh God, we're getting sucked up into The Valve again CR.

Somebody pull us out.

[CR]

Tell me about it. I gave myself an eight-hour time out today, stayed away on purpose...

We generate all the action over there, don't we? Not very pragmatic about this, no we're not...

[Matt]

{Reflexively patting himself on the back}

Well it's nice of you to post again, by the way.

[CR]

There's something about the semester, it's pressures and tediums (tedia? good question...) that puts me in a somewhat bloggier mood...

[CR]

Plus I quit quitting smoking. Praise be to Jesus. My wife made me do it. Seems that without the dopamine manipulation, I'm not all that fun to share a house with.

sigh.

It was the wrong time to quit. I've been. a. little. busy. Noble to try, but at least I can write again...

[Matt]

Lamest. Excuse. Ever. (Says the smoking man without any of those official things.)

Really it's conversations like these that convince me blog-books are underrated.

Glad you're writing.

[CR]

We're working on it, ain't we? The job part? And they often give housing... Wife I dunno.

[Matt]

Stay away from my wife, CR.

[CR]

hey you just changed your comment! You shouldn't do that to a drinking man. Might lead me to quit... And we see how that goes...

[Matt]

"Conrad's Heart of Darkness is an inversion of the storyless status-quo..."

Could you say more about this? It's an interesting thought, but I'm not sure I see the inversion you are talking about. Don't they amount to the same thing, generally, whether it's the 'jungle' or the 'romance' that's seeping up through the cracks? Are you suggesting the 'romance' is something of an 'other' that haunts (or rather grounds) the Heart of Darkness? What about the idea that Kurtz is a 'hollow man'...

[Matt]

own goal.

[CR]

The idea is that there's a recision (sp?) of the story during times of "commonplace prosperity" per Hawthorne. The British 1890s are one of those times. Wells's Time Machine and Wilde's Dorian Gray mark this out as well.

The colonial adventure would seem to give things a kick start... Render the story available again. AND it's no coincidence that the colonial adventure is literally what gets (would have gotten) Kurtz's love affair back on track. But the colonial adventure "catches" the storylessness of the center... Nothing happens in Heart of Darkness...

What I'm trying to set up is a closed economy of the story. Zero-sum. When it's absent here (per Hawthorne) it must be taking place somewhere else. Only by shifting the emptiness abroad can we restart it here. Or something like that.

Make any sense?

[Matt]

But doesn't the emptiness, like terror, always only come from within?

The colonial adventure she is "dead!" No, not dying fast enough! Quick let's kill her with a thousand swords. But first we'll have to hunt.

Yes

[CR]

Not within. It's money, as usual.

And nothing is more outside, right? Is the definition and wellspring of outside...

The existential two-step performed upon poor Conrad in a million-zillion high school English classrooms plunges directly into Baghad, today.

I don't understand the second line. Please explain.

[Matt]

Honestly I have no idea what any of that just meant. You're saying there's an annulment or cancellation of 'the story' (narrative?) in times of "commonplace prosperity" that maybe betrays an emptiness at the heart of the commonplace itself?

Or a 'somewhere else' that resides 'within' some might say?

There's a kind of pulse to the HOD as well, language relaying a form of death drive while, as you say, nothing happens. But nobody of any consequence ever cared about that stuff, come on.

The goal is to do something big to good effect.

[Matt]

Oh but you lost me with the money comment.

Where's Alphonse? I'm off to bed.

[Matt]

I maintain there is an 'outside' more 'outside' than money. Either that or there is no 'outside the money.' Either that or there is only always already alienation (AAA), and Marx's concept of reification was itself a reification.