Am I afraid of the (anti-)epic journey ahead of us?

Here it is, a week after we committed to (re-)reading the first half of Middlemarch in three weeks.  And all I have read is the Prelude. What’s that about?

(What’s the Prelude about?  Well, you’ve just read it:  It makes it clear that the hero of our piece is a heroine, and in that sense the novel comes across as a feminist project; and –at least for someone such as myself, obsessed in a small way with genre theory– it stakes its claim for the importance of the Novel as the chronicle of the failure of the Epic.  Eliot read more German aesthetics than I have, and is very comfortable with the idea that not just the age of Greek mythology but also the Age of Faith, that of St. Teresa of Avila, could produce epic heroic action, even for a woman (those of you whom I pushed through Lukacs might remember how his Hegelian narrative made room for Dante as the epic in an Age of Faith); and we sad middle-class Victorians no longer live in that age.  There are other things layered into that first anecdote, of course:  it’s partly a comic anecdote (St. Teresa tells it as a comic anecdote about her own childish naiveté, even though it also foretells a life of heroic action for her); and (again, St. Teresa is in some sense aware of this too) little Teresa’s interest in setting out to be a martyr heroicizes the kind of expectations of female self-sacrifice which are still around in Eliot’s day.  Most people who have finished the novel would argue that the prologue somewhat misrepresents the novel in a way that the title does not:  this is a novel primarily about a world and secondarily the impossibility of being a female epic hero, it is not a novel primarily about a failed female epic hero and secondarily the world she lives in.  So that’s what the Prelude is about.)

Why is taking me so long to actually start (re-)reading the book?  Yes, yes, I’m in New York on vacation, but my days are not chock-full of events.  Yes, yes, I’m a chronic procrastinator, I haven’t done my laundry since I got here two weeks ago and my to-do list for the coming semester is a horror.  But I feel something more than generic reluctance to start reading a big book.

I don’t want it to, but I feel as if Middlemarch has the capacity to judge me.  Not all Great Books have that capacity, either because it’s not part of that particular book’s DNA or because they don’t know who I am and where I live.  Tristram Shandy not only doesn’t want to judge me, it’s kind of an enabler of my digressiveness and my hobby-horses; Moby-Dick would be very happy to judge me but the novel is not about me.  But Middlemarch, if I recall it correctly, is full of people who have some trait of mine that Eliot holds up to kind but severe scrutiny:  Pat, she says, insofar as you are like Lydgate, Casaubon, Bulstrode, Dorothea herself when she makes some terrible mistakes, Pat, I’m not mad, but I’m so disappointed in you.

I’m sure that’s due in part to reading this book as a middle-aged person.  I don’t at all remember feeling that way about the book when I was an undergraduate (conversely, I certainly don’t remember thinking that I had the privilege of judging it; there were only a handful of books in my youth that I developed that kind of attitude towards:  Naked Lunch, maybe; maybe The Sun Also Rises).  One of my teacher’s class lectures –did you take any courses from Dorothy Mermin, Andreas?– about the book placed it in the tradition of the “Victorian sage” along with Carlyle, Ruskin, in his own way Pater:  nudging or exhorting the reader to be his best self, to acknowledge that although God is dead, Duty is more alive than ever.  I was exhilarated to rise to that challenge (while analyzing the rhetorical strategies that maintained that voice) when I was nineteen; I’m not sure I will feel the same way about it when I’m sixty-three. 

Okay, 2 pages read this week, 480 pages to read for next week–