Medawar/Moretti/TopoftheLake

Today I read the next fifty pages of Mardi Oakley Medawar’s Murder at Medicine Lodge. In this section of the novel, Medawar introduces her victim into the story. Buug-lah, as Tay-bodal calls him, is a Bugler in the Union army, and Tay-bodal’s chief, White Bear, is suspected of his murder when he finds and picks up his bugle on the Plains. A mixed white-Indian search party is sent out to search for Buug-lah, and when they find his dead body, the Kiowa immediately capture and tie up the American soldiers because they know things look very bad for White Bear. Tay-bodal has to figure out who killed Buug-lah in order to both clear White Bear’s name and defuse a potentially explosive situation, a situation that could easily go from the negotiation of a peace treaty to all-out war. Medawar selects the characters in her search party carefully in the sense that the American soldiers include not only whites, but also ‘Buffalo Soldiers,’ or African Americans. The addition of Billy, a mixed blood who occupies a liminal position between the white and Native American communities, completes the complex picture Medawar is constructing of the communication problems created by the coming together of these different, and in many ways, polar opposite cultures.

I also read the next fifty pages of Franco Moretti’s The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature. This section focuses mostly on a text that Moretti describes as “the great classic of bourgeois literature,” namely, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Moretti explains at length what gives Crusoe this status, including fascinating discussions of exactly why Crusoe works so hard during his time on the island, as well as examining the importance of concepts such as ‘useful,’ ‘efficiency,’ and ‘comfort’ to both Defoe and the bourgeois mindset as a whole in a manner reminiscent of Raymond Williams’ Keywords. But Moretti’s analysis also goes beyond the analysis of keywords when he develops a model of what could be described as bourgeois stylistics: “It’s a first glimpse of bourgeois ‘mentality,’ and of Defoe’s great contribution to it: prose, as the style of the useful.” This aspect of Moretti’s work reminds me bizarrely of a re-tooled and newly politicized Leavisite close reading, as when he compares the different uses that Defoe and John Bunyan make of the word ‘things’ in their work. One may not always agree with Moretti, and one may feel in particular that he tends to be too aphoristic in the sense of not always developing his observations in enough detail, but one cannot deny that his work is always brimming over with ideas.

I also watched episode 6 of Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake. Now that we know for sure that Tui is still alive and is being helped by not only Jamie but also a larger group of friends, the show feels back on track, not just in the sense that the mystery that began the series comes back into focus, but also in the sense that this mystery’s impact on the relationship between Robin and Johnno is coming under scrutiny. For example, even though Johnno and his father Matt Mitcham are estranged from each other, Johnno still disagrees with Robin’s decision to bring a case against Matt, not because he feels any loyalty to him, but because he knows what the consequences of Robin’s decision will be. Interestingly, Johnno’s disagreement with Robin’s targeting of Matt is endorsed, at least some extent, by other parts of the show. The fact that Matt’s drugs lab provides a livelihood for many of the local people is not an insignificant fact; indeed, Robin’s decision to try and shut down this operation is seen as not only naïve but also, in a way, unjust, in that it’s putting an abstract notion of the law above the lived realities of people with no other alternative but to work for Matt. In this respect, Top of the Lake consistently defines justice as something that happens outside of the law. To the extent that Robin still identifies with and is part of a corrupt law enforcement organization, her decisions and priorities are going to be questioned by the show.