Kelroy/Kristeva/Crary/TheFollowing

Today I read the next fifty pages of Kelroy. This section of the novel mixes sentiment with melodrama. Despite Mrs. Hammond’s opposition to a match between Emily and Kelroy, she is practically forced to give her consent to the relationship through a combination of her financial precariousness and Walsingham’s knowledge of the same. As much as being forced into this approval enrages Mrs. Hammond, worse is to come: her house burns downs in a fire and she is rendered absolutely penniless. And then, in another reversal of fortune just as sudden and unexpected, she wins $50,000 in a lottery and is more financially comfortable than ever! While all this is going on, Kelroy leaves on a trip to Calcutta that should be to his financial advantage (although the exact nature of his business is never revealed) and Emily acquires another admirer, an American by the name of Dunleavy. Under other circumstances, Emily would be interested in him, but she considers herself (happily) pledged to Kelroy. This part of the narrative is characterized, more than any other thus far, by a peculiar combination of mind-numbingly mundane everyday events and extraordinary disasters and triumphs. This combination, along with a knowledge of the sentimental genre, encourages us to expect more of the same in the final part of the novel.

I also finished Julia Kristeva’s This Incredible Need to Believe. For a non-believer, Kristeva’s reading of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular is so generous that she is practically an apologist. In an interesting discussion of the relationship between Christianity and suffering, for example, Kristeva argues that “the genius of Christianity promoted a formidable counterweight to suffering…that is none other than its sublimation or its working through by psychic and verbal activity “ (italics in original). But nowhere in her discussion does Kristeva even acknowledge the amount of suffering caused by Christianity—this aspect of the relationship between religion and suffering is apparently not up for discussion. The last two pieces in the book are even more extreme, being virtual love letters to Pope John Paul II. While Kristeva acknowledges his “scorn for the pill, for the condom, and for blended or homoparental families,” she also says that ‘we’ “could hardly hold his ignorance against him.” Oh, really? Kristeva must in paroxysms of delight about Pope Francis. Even though she distances herself from Freud’s views on religion, I’m still more persuaded by the following words from Freud than anything Kristeva says here: “Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.”

I also began Jonathan Crary’s 2013 book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. http://www.versobooks.com/books/1429-24-7. The first part of the book discusses the various attempts being made by the military-scientific complex to reduce or even eliminate completely the need for sleep on the part of military personnel. Although this hostility toward sleep may seem aberrational and exceptional, Crary goes on to trace this antipathy toward slumber in various aspects of capitalist culture , an antipathy that is deep-rooted because “The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated needs, subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism. Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism.” Crary then shows how this disparagement of sleep even extends to the work of philosophers, with the honorable exception of Schopenhauer, who “proposed that only in sleep could we locate ‘the true kernel’ of human existence.” Crary indicates the larger stakes of his attention to the scarcity of sleep in the neoliberal world order that he will presumably explore in the remainder of the book when he argues that “The injuring of sleep is inseparable from the ongoing dismantling of social protections in other spheres.” Ironically, I stayed up late into the night reading this riveting book!

In the first two episodes of The Following, prolific serial killer Joseph Carroll escapes from prison and kills his only surviving victim with the help of his followers, all of whom share a fanatical devotion to both Carroll and Carroll’s hero, Edgar Allan Poe. After the murder, Carroll allows himself to be recaptured and then reveals that this latest murder was just the first step of an elaborate scheme of punishment and revenge that centers around Ryan Hardy, the alcoholic and traumatized FBI agent who captured Carroll and subsequently had an affair with his wife. The nanny of Carroll’s son turns out to be another of his followers, and when she kidnaps the son, it seems that Carroll’s wife is also to be punished. Where to begin with this hot mess of a plot? One thing that jumps out straight away is the breakneck pace at which these events are presented, as if this is a drama designed for viewers with attention deficit disorder. In this way, presumably, we are encouraged not to notice plot holes, giant lapses in plausibility, and so on. The other thing that strikes me is the utter woodenness of Kevin Bacon’s acting and the squirm-inducing embarrassment I feel whenever they show scenes of Carroll teaching as evidence of his brilliantly charismatic nature. The level of literary analysis in these scenes is teeth-achingly banal. What has poor Edgar Allan Poe done to deserve this?