Medawar/Moretti/TheLegoMovie

Today I read the next fifty pages of Mardi Oakley Medawar’s Murder at Medicine Lodge. As one might have anticipated by her inclusion of black soldiers in her story, this section of the novel brings in both slavery and the Civil War as Tay-bodal’s investigation proceeds. The murder victim, Buug-lah, becomes a more and more unsympathetic character as his unscrupulous control over and exploitation of other people is revealed and the focus of the book thus becomes less on solving his murder and more on making sure that the innocent are not impacted by the death of a cruel and worthless individual. Medawar also allows her reader to see the value system that produced both slavery and, even more fundamentally, money from a Native American perspective, providing another example of estranging the familiar, giving the book a very distinctive pedagogical edge. Strikingly, except for Tay-bodal, Native Americans are more or less completely absent from this section of the novel. Indeed, Native American culture takes something of a back seat in this novel as a whole, in sharp contrast to the first novel in the series.

I also finished Franco Moretti’s The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature. In my previous post on this book, I commented on the fact that prose fiction was Moretti’s preferred way of illustrating the points he makes. Happily, Moretti both confirms and extends my observation when he comments “readers of this book know that prose is its only true hero. It wasn’t meant to be; it just happened, in trying to do justice to the achievements of bourgeois culture. Prose as the bourgeois style, in the broadest sense; a way of being in the world, not just of representing it.” This passage neatly summarizes Moretti’s method throughout his intriguing book. To give a final example among many others: in the context of discussing the way in which adjectives are “inconspicuous vehicles of Victorian values,” Moretti summarizes the “semantic miracle” performed by the word “earnest”: “preserving the fundamental tonality of bourgeois existence…while endowing it with a sentimental-ethical significance.” Attention to detail combined with the ability to generalize: the hallmark of Moretti’s own prose style. He closes the book with a section on Ibsen because “He is the only writer who looks the bourgeois in the face, and asks: So, finally, what have you brought into the world?” The question remains worth asking today.

I also watched The Lego Movie, a film that renders product placement superfluous, with my younger daughter. I read a lot about the so-called pointed satire of this film before seeing it, but it turned out not to amount to much. Yes, the evil Lord Business gives up his maniacal desire to control and regiment everything, just as the everyman hero Emmet learns not to follow instructions slavishly, liberating everyone into spontaneous acts of creativity, but the fact that this freedom is learned within the confines of a corporate technocracy is too obvious a fact to need belaboring. I thought the most bizarre and interesting part of the movie was the eleventh-hour introduction of human actors into the story. I understand that they were there to embody the sentimentalism of the film’s conclusion in human form, but I still don’t quite understand why it was thought necessary or desirable to do this. Was it an intentional or a mistaken suggestion that the world-making capacity of an animated film needs to be supplemented by a physical stand-in for the audience members? There’s no way to tell for sure, but it was the most thought-provoking moment in an otherwise utterly predictable film.