The Road through the Wall
| A novel that reminds me of what I’ve always known, that American suburbs are deeply rotten states. Shirley Jackson earned her fame by writing about small towns, but this novel published around the same time of the The Lottery story collection is a reminder, along with most of those stories, that all parts of the US have a deep cultural rot to them that is not housed in specific places. Those places just have their own flavors.
The novel takes place in a neighborhood where everyone is in everyone else’s business. This is a novel told mostly through the interactions of the women and girls and boys in the neighborhood. The men leave in the morning, come home at night, and whatever they’re doing at their jobs has almost no impact on the real living. In a way, this seems right anyway, as most of the jobs of the 20th century white collar class produces nothing and the actual lives of people are lived at home. |
(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/131190.The_Road_Through_the_Wall)
Selected Prose of TS Eliot
For me, my vast experience of reading TS Eliot comes from his drama, from Four Quartets, from selected poetry, from The Wasteland, and then reading Tradition and the Individual Talent in several classes. I was interested in this collection because sometimes writers end up being more exciting readers of literature than critics do, and the type of criticism that happens is more spirited. I can’t say that that’s true of Eliot really. Coming from a New Critical approach in general, and from not being particularly interested in any kind of historicism or biographical criticism, much of the criticism focused very heavily on the text itself. I am also not grealy well-read in English poetry so while I know a handful of the work presented here, as soon as we’re in the weeds a little, I am lost.
In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell describes how the use of the Book of English verse in British public schools had a great influence on the poetic output of the British war poets. As both an American and someone who went to college exclusively in the 21st century, my experience with literature in general is a little scattershot in classes and then self-driven otherwise. So when I read someone like Eliot, I have to remember how different the structure of education was, and how much more literature came out after these essays.
The Burden of Southern History
This collection of essays is a kind of follow up to Woodward’s book The Strange Career of Jim Crow. This is much less successful as a book, but’s more of an issue of the scattershot approach here than anything particularly bad about a given article. As much as anything, this book is a fascinating look at what historical questions were being asked about the South at this time, from someone not writing hagiography or polemic. My biggest issue with the whole book is that the writing here is less clear and good than in the other book, so the essays take some time to warm up. In addition to this I am not a huge fan of historians weighing in on literary questions because the results are usually pretty middling.
I did enjoy Woodward’s take on “Irony of American History”, the Reinhold Neibuhr book about Americans myths we tell about ourselves. Something that occurs to me here, that after this book, we have what amounts to the Southernization of the whole country. The South has already predominated American politics, where its worse desires and impulses control the national questions. This has not actually stopped, but has shifted to the ways in which Conservative has done the same thing. This book is situated in the midst of that process happening, but not actually yet happening, so it has a foot in more than one camp.