Reading Portrait of a Lady in Berkeley

Oh dear, I completely forgot to check the blog! Here is one I wrote a month ago exactly!

June 14, 2009

Dear Irene,

Your little letter was a splash of sunshine here in cloudy Berkeley. We seem to need quite a bit of coaxing before the heat manages to dissolve the grey and let the afternoon sun shine through. I like to imagine you speaking French in your light, lissome voice, in an open roof car (what are those called?), full of people gesticulating loudly, the stereo blasting some high-stepping accordion music, the conversation rollicking through English and French and Korean and Italian. How was the lunch party in the burbs?

Despite the quaint m’lonesome’s and m’love’s in your letter, I highly doubt that you play the old maid very well. You are too sweet; I think everyone will fall in love with you, I think everyone has fallen in love with you already. I feel a bit like Henrietta in The Portrait of a Lady, which I just read, who is fortitudinously vigilant over Isabel Archer’s propensity to go off in zigzags. I don’t mean that you suffer the “sin of self-esteem” and regard for one’s own opinions that Isabel does, only that I wouldn’t be surprised if you received a proposal here and there that forces you into “a thousand ridiculous zigzags." I am thinking of when we shared our mutually embarrassing stories of obliviously going on dates. Don’t forget to come back to the Bay Area—it will truly be gloomy if you don’t!

Have you done much reading and writing and espresso-ing at the picturesque little cafes of rue des Tessiers? I thought it funny (and notable) that Isabel can never keep her attention on a novel when we as readers do keep our attention on her, or rather, it seems to recall us from our wandering attention (as The Portrait is so long and plodding at times, my attention did wander). Yet other times, and this is so at the end of the novel, our attention is so fixed upon Isabel, so stridently hoping for her happiness that when she departs to her despair, we’re left clutching at her shadow in the most unhandsome way (Emerson wrote, “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition,” in “Experience”).

More often, we find Isabel “motionless and empty-handed, her eyes bent on the cool green turf of the lawn," a novel forgotten on her lap or neglected on a desk. If it is true, as James writes, that a “well-chosen volume” can help “to transfer the seat of consciousness to the organ of pure reason”; then it is also true that the moulds of reason have their limitations. James’ novels are not philosophical treatises, and so the practice of reading a novel is not quite inhabiting this “organ.” But it is inhabiting another point-of-view, even if only parenthetically, as in the remarkable feat of readerly perception Ralph performs: “He bethought himself that persons, in her view, were simple and homogenous organism…." And so this is the kind of inhabiting that we do as we traipse and trespass through the consciousnesses of James’ characters. But like Ralph, we find that our view is not, after all, from within Isabel’s shelter of mind, but locked out from it and peering as through a microscope or listening with a stethoscope into it. And I find this limit (and modesty for his characters’ privacy—who would have thought that eavesdropping is more courteous?) most striking in the curious turns of phrases from the narrator: “We know how much she like Lord Warburton…” or “I have already had reason to say that Isabel knew her husband to be displeased…," and most pointedly, “The working of this young lady’s spirit was strange, and I can only give it to you as I see it…." These foreground the deductive logic of the narrator’s position; it reminds us that we are always ever on the outside of someone else’s house.

In The Portrait, I do not think it is just Ralph and Osmond who think of “life as a matter of connoissership." All the characters desperately collect and clutch at things and peoples. What is most frightening, and perhaps even more relevant to us in our so-called digital age, is that they collect not just objects, and everything that can be turned into an object, but also minds. We like to think of the mind as infinite, volatile, and uncontainable; freedom of speech is only as good as freedom of the mind. Yet description fails even to capture what the mind is. We liken it to the soul, the heart, the brain, an aura, a fragrance—“a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring boughs, of shady bowers and lengthening vistas."

I thought that since you thought about “things” in Jane Eyre, you might find this thing-like quality of the mind as perfume and gardens interesting, too. And even this mind may be annexed the way Osmond wishes to appropriate Isabel’s, “attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park." That is the sadness of The Portrait; the overwhelming sense that Isabel’s mind must retreat further and further into the shade; that her mind may be caught in the vise of another’s will. But is it ever? When we step away from the doorsteps of Isabel’s house, can we believe, as she says, that “We see our lives from our own point of view; that is the privilege of the weakest and humblest of us…."

Have I bored you yet in this rather long-winded and impersonal treatise? If I have, then I have succeeded in convincing you that my mind is, quite unfortunately and unexceptionally, my own and no one else’s. If I haven’t, then we’ve temporarily achieved a laudable cohabitation. I watched, yesterday, the new Pixar/Disney movie Up, which takes this theme of house to a most delightful and poignant (at least as poignant as cartoon animation can get) incarnation. I found none of the characters wholly loveable, and I think that is their charm. If you go to see it, tell me what you think.

These Pixar movies represent to me the revival of a classic art form—if we can call statues classic, then we can call cartoons classic. In Rome, Isabel sits for long meditations in the company of Greek sculptures, “under the charm of their motionless grace, wondering to what, of their experience, their absent eyes were open, and how, to our ears, their alien lips would sound." Cartoons display this same alien subjectivity, and this is most apparent in the episodes that go entirely without human dialogue. The by-now famous amuse-bouche of Pixar movies are the animated film shorts, which have been (at least all the ones I’ve seen) inventive pure storytelling in the form of nonhuman shape and sound without dialogue except in caws, grumbles, and chirps. Hemming and hawing at its best.

I hate to end on a sad note especially when I have no reason to do so, except that the old man in Up also reminds me of this sadness, but I love this passage so much I want to share it with you here. And as we are among Greek statues, why not continue with Roman ruins? “She had long before this taken old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective, so that as she sad in a sun-warmed angle on a winter’s day, or stood in a mouldy church to which no one came, she could almost smile at it and think of its smallness."

Like Isabel, I take great comfort in my own smallness, but I think it is too easy to bewilder ourselves with our surroundings and convince ourselves of our insignificance. It is more difficult to believe in our significance, at least it is for me. I spend most of my day reading and writing; I go outside to play tennis with Shu Ping at Willard Park, to bike to the AMC in Emeryville, to go grocery shopping at the new Berkeley Bowl down by my dance class on Heinz. The busy little circles I’ve made for myself are not unnatural and I have little real desire to widen the circles except in restless imagination. Yet I am aware that to believe in the significance of that smallness as some mode of welfare is also paradoxically immodest and egotistic and too apparently impotent. I don’t know if this letter suffices as an answer to Isabel who “often checked herself with the thought of the thousands of people who were less happy than herself—a thought which for the moment made her fine, full consciousness appear a kind of immodesty. What should one do with the misery of the world in a scheme of the agreeable for oneself?"

Much love,
Jules