Medawar/Hobsbawm/Moretti/TopoftheLake

Today I started reading Mardi Oakley Medawar’s 1999 novel, Murder at Medicine Lodge, the third in her series of mysteries featuring Tay-bodal, a Kiowa healer. Having introduced this character in Death at Rainy Mountain (see previous blog entries), in this novel, Medawar can cut to the chase much more quickly, and in fact we begin in medias res, with Tay-bodal and his fellow Kiowas journeying through Osage country in the summer of 1867 on their way to Medicine Lodge, Kansas, for a peace conference with other Indian tribes and the ‘Blue Jackets,’ or Union soldiers. This setting gives Medawar an opportunity to do several things she was not able to do in the first novel of the series. For example, rather than focusing on intra-tribal conflict (as in Mountain), here Medawar can focus on conflicts between Native American nations, which helps to convey important messages about the internal diversity of Indian cultures. One senses, too, that much more emphasis will be placed in this novel on white-Indian interactions, something that was only a minor concern in her first novel.

I also finished Eric Hobsbawm’s Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the 20^th Century. The book ends with two pieces that both focus on mass culture, but are in other respects very different from each other. The penultimate essay tries to make sense of the role of mass culture in the current conjuncture, and especially of the way in which it has displaced high culture. Although Hobsbawm is right to say that we are still in need of a critical language to discuss mass culture productively, I don’t think he has any notion of what such a language might look like! In that sense, whether he’s aware of it or not, he’s discussing the superannuation of traditional modes of criticism as much as the superannuation of high culture. The final essay, on the meaning and influence of the figure of the American cowboy, however, shows that, in fact, Hobsbawm can discuss mass culture very thoughtfully. Although he doesn’t focus overmuch on examples of pop culture Westerns, he develops a number of insightful points about why American cowboys have a universal status quite different from that of analogous figures from other cultures. As is the case throughout this book, Hobsbawm is much better when analyzing specifics than he is when generalizing. A final point: for all the looking back he does in this book, Hobsbawm distinguishes himself by his lack of nostalgia and golden ageism—would that one could say the same of other writers.

I also started Franco Moretti’s 2013 book The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature.  This seemed an apposite book to turn to after finishing Hobsbawm’s examination of the fate of bourgeois culture but also because of Rick Santorum’s recent comments on how the term ‘middle class’ is now verboten because it’s an example of 'Marxism talk.'  Leaving aside Santorum’s idiocy, Moretti’s discussion of why the term ‘middle class’ came to be preferred over the term ‘bourgeois’ is one of the best things about this opening section of the book, which Moretti describes as a “partisan essay” whose focus is “the bourgeois, refracted through the prism of literature.” Moretti goes on to ask the crucial question of what kind of evidence literature represents and concludes that literary works “belong to a parallel historical series—a sort of cultural double helix, where the spasms of capitalist modernization are matched and re-shaped by literary form-giving.” Literature, in other words, can give us (necessarily indirect) access to “a dimension of the past that would otherwise remain hidden.”

I also watched episode 5 of Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake. At the point where Robin and Johnno are having sex in the middle of the forest, one can’t help but feel that the series has gone in the wrong direction, but has it? Answering that question depends on the answer to another question: what is the relationship between Robin’s personal life and the pregnancy and disappearance of Tui? If one interprets Top of the Lake too narrowly as a police procedural, then the moment Tui disappears and the focus shifts to Robin’s attempt to work through the traumatic events of her past is the moment when the series loses its direction and purpose. But clearly Campion is doing something much more than a standard (or even a reinvented) police procedural. For one thing, the police are seen as corrupt and ineffective, and Robin’s association with them is more a matter of convenience than a reflection of a shared belief structure. In this sense, Robin’s temporary dismissal from the police serves to accentuate how distant she is from this institution. With this said, although one can see the importance of her relationship with Johnno in terms of Robin’s healing, there’s no denying the fact that by the time we get to that scene in the woods, we are a very long way from the original mystery indeed. I still can’t shake the feeling that Campion is trying to do too much in too short a time and the evidence for this is not only the lack of fit between the various threads of the plot but also the fact that some characters (for example, Robin’s mother and GJ) are seriously underdeveloped. With two episodes left, it will be interesting to see to what extent, if at all, Campion is interested in resolving the various plots.