Today I read the
next fifty pages of Mardi Oakley Medawar’s Murder
at Medicine Lodge. Tay-bodal’s investigation temporarily gets easier when a
piece of evidence is found that seemingly directs attention away from White
Bear as a suspect in Buug-lah’s murder and toward an American soldier. However,
when the American army is prepared to execute Little Jonas, a black soldier,
for the murder, even though they still believe White Bear is guilty, simply in
order to preserve the peace, the Kiowa object and Tay-bodal is left alone at
the army camp to try and discover the identity of the real murderer. The stakes
of the investigation are now even higher. Not only does Tay-bodal have the
responsibility of maintaining the peace between the Americans and the Kiowa,
but if his investigation fails, the Kiowa may be ejected from the Confederacy
of Nations, which would mean the Kiowa would be at war not only with the
whites, but also with other tribes. One technique Medawar uses very effectively
in this novel emerges when Tay-bodal is left alone among whites; the
anthropological gaze that often structures fictional narratives about Native
Americans is now turned upon white culture, so that the dominant culture is now
defamiliarized and seen as strange and a-typical.
I also read the
next fifty pages of Franco Moretti’s The
Bourgeois: Between History and Literature. In his continuing effort to
outline the defining features of a bourgeois stylistics, Moretti turns to the ‘filler,’
namely, information and episodes in novels that seemingly do nothing or when
nothing happens. Moretti concludes that there are so many fillers in the
nineteenth century because they “offer the kind of narrative pleasure
compatible with the new regularity of bourgeois life.” Moretti perceives,
however, that this regularity was not the only game in town during the
ninteenth century; bourgeois existence existed alongside what Moretti calls
persistent “conservative beliefs.” In fact, Moretti goes on to argue, the job
of the novel was to forge “compromises between different ideological systems.”
At this point of the book, after having concentrated almost exclusively on the
novel, Moretti shifts to a brief discussion of Victorian pictorial
representations of the nude in the context of a punning discussion of the
bourgeois’ tendency to embody “naked self-interest.” It’s a striking shift
because it suggests the portability of Moretti’s method in a double sense: it
is able to discuss different historical periods and different genres. In a
telling moment, however, when Moretti attempts to answer the question “Why was
Victorianism?” he concludes that “the English nude is too petty a feat for such
a large question.” Literature (more specifically, prose fiction) remains not
only Moretti’s preferred example, but also the one that seemingly best suits
his method. Why might this be?
I also watched the
final episode of Jane Campion’s Top of
the Lake. Many resolutions, but few surprises. The identity of the father
of Tui’s baby was fairly predictable from the start, as was the resolution of
this situation, with Tui killing the father. Incest, as the most fundamental
violation of the law, had to figure in this series somewhere. The revelation
that Matt was Robin’s father was balanced by the sentimental revelation that
Matt was not Johnno’s father, thus
allowing the relationship between Robin and Johnno to continue, although
thankfully Campion did not pursue this happy ending scenario in any detail. And
as for the revelation about Al, which I gather angered some viewers because
they saw it as an out of left field twist ending, I can honestly say it seemed
logical rather than surprising to me. As the series progressed, Campion made it
increasingly obvious that Al was disturbed and violent. Even the victimization
of children was logical within the context of the series, as pedophilia, rather
than sexual violence against adult women was, for whatever reasons, Campion’s
focus. For me, the major underdeveloped or unresolved aspect of the series was
GJ and the women’s commune. Right from the start, I felt that once Campion had
set this aspect of the story up, she didn’t seem to know what to do with it. I
honestly can’t decide whether Campion intended GJ to be a charlatan or a seer,
but if it’s the latter, I must say that she comes dangerously close to being
the former, as most of her pronouncements are a mixture of psychobabble and
half-baked spirituality. And as for her final advice to Tui, that her child is
now her teacher, and she should listen to him?! The rest is silence…
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