Kelroy/Kristeva/TheFollowing

Today I read the next fifty pages of Kelroy. Mrs. Hammond has little problem marrying off Lucy, her older daughter, to Walsingham, an English gentleman visiting the US for an extended period. This is partly because Lucy shares her mother’s mercenary spirit and partly because Walsingham is so easily taken in by Lucy’s beauty that he either doesn’t notice or doesn’t trouble himself overmuch about signs of Lucy’s selfishness and shallowness. It’s interesting to read a novel from this period in which the male is the victim of the marriage plot rather than its villainous initiator, although this book does have its fair share of male villains, too. Mrs. Hammond has a much more difficult time with her younger daughter, Emily, who is the sympathetic protagonist of the story. Unlike Lucy, Emily’s nature disinclines her to be overly influenced by her mother’s ambitions for her, and she retains too much innocence and good humor to marry for the wrong reasons. When Kelroy, a poet with precarious financial prospects, enters the narrative, Mrs. Hammond is horrified to see he and Emily falling for each other. The fact of Emily’s happiness matters not to Mrs. Hammond; she merely cares about having Emily marry ‘well’ so that her financial difficulties may be alleviated once and for all. How much of the disapproval we’re encouraged to feel for Mrs. Hammond’s actions come from the fact that she’s a woman? Would we condemn a man performing identical actions with the same motives? And can we blame Mrs. Hammond for placing pecuniary considerations before everything else? What other choice does she have?

I also read the next fifty pages of Julia Kristeva’s This Incredible Need to Believe. In this section of the book, Kristeva discusses the concept of genius in detail as another possible bulwark against nihilism. She has no interest in renovating the traditional concept of romantic genius, and yet she does not want to dismiss the concept altogether. Why not? Because she believes that nihilistic depression comes from “the programmed decline of the singularity…which slumbers within each one of us.” Acts or works of genius can therefore stimulate this singularity: “the intelligence of the extreme singularity (as manifested in exceptional works of art, for instance) that calls out to the singularity of each one of us, is the only possible therapy for this banalization” (italics in original). The other thing that struck me about this section of the book was Kristeva’s treatment of Christianity and Islam. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex argument, I would say that she tends to treat Christianity too generously and Islam too harshly by underemphasizing the problem of fundamentalism in the latter and overemphasizing it in the latter. This may be a consequence of Kristeva’s Eurocentric emphasis; American Christian fundamentalism is only mentioned briefly and deserves much more attention.

Take all the standard ingredients of the serial killer tv drama—a ‘brilliant,’ charismatic and preferably non-American killer; a haunted and traumatized FBI agent; an immense yet curiously ineffective law enforcement system; lots of female victims; lots of blood to cover up plot holes, and psychobabble of one kind or another—and put them in a blender. But—and this is important—don’t blend them until they’re smooth. Instead, blend them half-way until it’s a mess of indigestible chunks. Congratulations! You’ve just made ‘The Following.’ We have a lot of episodes to get through in this first season and so lots of time to list all my objections, but let’s start with this one: I’ve been an English professor (from England, no less!) in America who teaches Poe regularly for over 20 years and the notion that a charismatic professor influences his students to obey him blindly is, I’m sorry to say, not true. I can barely persuade my students to complete assignments, let alone form a death cult and kill at my bidding. Perhaps I’m not trying hard enough.