Miss MacIntosh, My Darling discussion
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Miss MacIntosh, My Darling
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Very generous. Looking forward to this
It's no problem. I would make them free all the time if I could. :-) Also no one has to read them, it's entirely optional!
I’ve got to finish reading Tristram Shandy, which I’ve been entirely too slow with. Coral are you consolidating the discussion to one site sbustack, Facebook or Good-reads, or doing all simultaneously?
I'm posting on Substack and sharing the post on the other sites and checking comments on all. I look forward to reading them!https://open.substack.com/pub/coralru...
Week 1 Hegel dialectic? https://open.substack.com/pub/coralru...I have some pics for illustration of some dialectic things but can't post them here. sorry!
Shaviro’s notes - Prof. Shaviro has graciously allowed me to share links to his notes on MMMD from his Facebook group which read the novel in 2019. You will need a Dropbox account (free) to access the epub and text files.
EPUB - https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/mel299...
TEXT - https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/cxawcq...
things have worlds and worlds inside (the whole philosophical system as a circle of circles - Hegel) Young in an interview described the structure of MMMD as spokes of a wheel with Miss MacIntosh in the middle.
Phenomenology is a philosophical study and movement largely associated with the early 20th century that seeks to objectively investigate the nature of subjective, conscious experience. It attempts to describe the universal features of consciousness while avoiding assumptions about the external world, aiming to describe phenomena as they appear to the subject, and to explore the meaning and significance of the lived experiences.[1]
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the study of deductively valid inferences or logical truths. It examines how conclusions follow from premises based on the structure of arguments alone, independent of their topic and content. Informal logic is associated with informal fallacies, critical thinking, and argumentation theory. Informal logic examines arguments expressed in natural language whereas formal logic uses formal language. When used as a countable noun, the term "a logic" refers to a specific logical formal system that articulates a proof system. Logic plays a central role in many fields, such as philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics.
Other Philosophical Subject Matters - in Volume 3 of To All My Darlings I have included a chapter on all the philosophy that I think is included in MMMD.
the soul is “inexactitude” pg 202-208
the individual is the one illusion
rhetorical questions pg 167-196 and pg 268
Dialectic
the art of investigating or discussing the truth of opinions
inquiry into metaphysical contradictions and their solutions
Hegel’s Dialectics - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/he...
Hegel’s Dialectical Method - https://www.literatureandcriticism.co...
What the heck is dialectics? https://bayareadbtcc.com/38-what-the-...
I liked these two graphics about dialectics as well -
And we also get our first taste of intertextuality with a mention of the white lady which can be taken from The Woman in White.
Fate - the development of events beyond a person’s control, regarded as determined by a supernatural power. Among early Christians fate was approached in different ways. One approach is “divine omnicausality” where the assumption would be that God causes every creaturely event that occurs and in this way exercises comprehensive control over the minutest aspects of his creatures’ activities.
I just tried to post on SubStack but my post failed. I’m not really sure how to use it, as I just signed up for this read. In any case, I’m looking forward to the discussion. Has a reading schedule been determined yet?
Without having made a comment on SubStack (I just signed up for this reading group). My account is banned? Anyhow. I hope there is some conversation here on goodreads
Andrew wrote: "Without having made a comment on SubStack (I just signed up for this reading group). My account is banned? Anyhow. I hope there is some conversation here on goodreads"Seriously? I have halfa$$ed my way through substack and still allowed to post. lol
All my discussion is in the posts so I hope you can add your insights here and I'll be happy to talk about it with you!
Week 2 MMMD https://open.substack.com/pub/coralru...I posted it just a little bit ago. I started with just a putting in a personal email and it allowed me to read posts at least.
I can post my written stuff here as well if you want:
Egyptian Sailor may be based on Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor
Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor on Wikipedia
“the narrative is shown to have complexity and depth: a shipwrecked traveller engages upon a spiritual endeavour (or quest), journeying through the cosmos, to meet a primordial god, providing to the traveller a gift of moral vision with which to return to Egypt.[19] Further, Richard Mathews writes that this "oldest fantasy text contains archetypal narrative of the genre: an uninitiated hero on a sea journey is thrown off course by a storm, encounters an enchanted island, confronts a monster, and survives, wiser for the experience…”
“The tale itself begins with a framing device in which an attendant or "follower" (conventionally—although not in the papyrus—referred to as "the sailor") tries to comfort his master ("Mayor", although it has been suggested that they might be of equal status[21]), who is returning from an apparently failed expedition and is anxious about how the king will receive him.”
A reference to King Solomon in ‘Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor’ the land of Punt - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...
“The tale begins with a follower (sailor) announcing or stating his return from a voyage at sea.[8][9] He is returning from an apparently failed expedition and is anxious about how the king will receive him. An attendant reassures him,[10] advising him on how to behave before the king, and repeating the proverb, “The mouth of a man saves him.”[11] To encourage his master, he tells a tale of a previous voyage of his in which he overcame disaster, including meeting with a god and the king.”
“The tale ends with the master telling the narrator, “Do not make the excellent (that is, do not act arrogantly) my friend; why give water to a goose (literally, bird) at dawn before its slaughtering in the morning?”[14]”
“THEN A STAR FELL:” FOLK-MEMORY OF A CELESTIAL IMPACT EVENT IN THE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN TALE OF THE SHIPWRECKED SAILOR?
“In truth, however, the sailor’s voyage appears to be a type of Otherworld Journey – a dangerous crossing-over to a divine or magical realm beyond the edge of the known world.”
“William K. Simpson observes (Simpson 2003: 45-46) that the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor is ...one of the most interesting, straightforward, and yet puzzling compositions of ancient Egyptian literature. [...] A curious emphasis is placed on numbers, the height of the wave, the dimensions of the ship, the number of sailors, the length of the serpent’s hood, the number of months of the sailor’s stay, and so on. It is almost as if the tale is an allegory involving the movement of stars.”
“The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor is considered to contain esoteric knowledge, much of it related to the serpent’s story (Baines, 1990: 58, 67). Whatever its meaning, this tragedy is enshrined as the central motif of the narrative: it is element X in a structure A-B-C-X-C'-B'-A' (Baines, 1990: 67). Unlike all of the other motifs, its form is mythic rather than folkloric; it seems to be a religious allegory. As a mythic island (X) set in the dead centre of a sea of folktale elements (A-C and A'-C'; Baines, 1990: 65), it may even be the “payload” of the whole story.”
Shaviro compares Young to “Proust on Quaaludes (opium)”
William Kennedy compares Miss MacIntosh to Mary Poppins
Dean Lockwood - Miss MacIntosh is the “ur-form of all practicality” and clichés
“The puppeteer they dreamed of did not exist although he moved the strings” This image of a pupeteer moving the strings despite not existing seems central to the metaphysics of the novel - Shaviro’s notes
After watching the 3 Body Problem and how an aliens could influence the society of the earth without ever actually being on earth is pretty profound. What if God didn’t exist (or not able to prove his existence) but the beliefs in him control everything.
Circle of Circles - If we go back to this as Young’s description of the novel - spokes of a wheel with Miss MacIntosh as the center (aka reality). We have added Catherine as illusion and Mr. Spitzer as self-determination/fate. Vera is also on a quest to find the truth to life, love and meaning. We have Thales as the background of the wheel is water. We’ll see where this framework takes us…
Week 3 MMMD https://coralrussell.substack.com/p/m...Any thoughts about the Australian headhunter are welcome! Here's the written part of the post in case you can't access Substack.
I had to add a few pages in order to get through Chapter 3. Week 4 will start with Chapter 4. There are 82 chapters in MMMD.
Shaviro’s notes - “sometimes the baptized drowned” which made him exclaim “WTF?” Vera blames herself for causing Miss MacIntosh’s death.
Baptism - For especially early Christians, baptism was like being buried so that a person could rise to a new life. According to Paul in the Bible full immersion under water represents our death and burial in a watery grave becoming one with the dead Christ. The rising out of the water represents our resurrection from the dead and becoming one with Christ.
There is some history of drowning during baptism with a couple of recent examples but in the 1600s it was used against the Anabaptist movement who martyred Anabaptist leaders by drowning.
Anabaptist groups are established in Iowa - Amish, Mennonites, Old Order River Brethren.
Miss MacIntosh says human sinning is greater than a sin of omission - which is a mistake that occurs when something that should be included is not, or when something that should be done is not. She seems to reference God in that he is a forgetful deity who forgot or didn’t know what he forgot to do.
Miss MacIntosh encounters an Australian headhunter, bushman but also refers to Easter Island and Borneo. She could also be referencing Ned Kelly from 1877 in Australia who some thought personified the plight of workers set against large landowners in an economically depressed period.
She does not like that the headhunter has embraced Catholicism. The Catholic Church had an assimilation policy (as in many other colonized countries) which was used to break the spiritual and cultural identity of Aborigines but removing tens of thousands of children from their parents. They apologized to Aborigines for this “stolen generation”. Recently Canada and the United States have also apologized for this practice.
Headhunting may have been practiced in Australia (Torres Strait, Badu people). It was used in ceremonial practices to honor the dead.
More notes I wrote in the book and will discuss on the audio. Input is suggested since this is for me at least a hard character to decipher.
This chapter is for me one for spiritual development of the book. Who is the headhunter? I take it at how it’s written. Whereas earlier in the book we had some character development over top of some scene descriptions, or texture, now we have a sense of textual obuscation or mystery building - the meaning of which may or may not be revealed later on. How will this add to the value of the book? Again, to be seen. I’m not sure if it’s always meant to be understood all the time. Or it’s accepted that different readers will have different experiences. In which case we get to come together and talk about it, and our lives are all the richer for it.
Andrew wrote: "This chapter is for me one for spiritual development of the book. Who is the headhunter? I take it at how it’s written. Whereas earlier in the book we had some character development over top of som..."Obvious point that I take into full consideration but I'm a nutter as much as the next person so... XD
The couple of things I can see in the headhunter is foreshadowing about MacIntosh on what is to come, her railing against religion converting pagans (that they shouldn't be converted or accept conversion), and how she has learned to reject men and their advances because they are not to be trusted. This pulls into her very sad backstory once you get it and there are many pages to go until that happens.
Thanks! So is it working to post here from Substack for you? I'm so sorry the site isn't working for you I really am enjoying it.
Week 4 is just the audio so no post. Feel free to share thoughts. Be back week 5!
Week 5 Shaviro’s notes are extensive about this chapter which he considers a masterpiece. I believe we see the first glimpse of the repetition of the motif for the theme of the book. “like something spontaneous as in a dream of apparent disrelations which were secretly related” (this is sort of how the book itself works)
“for everything was self-contradictory, it seemed, as she was…” (is this the metaphysics of the novel?…)
“So they were united by disunion, she and he, the poor shadows of themselves in earthly life, their marriage being such perfection as death itself could never break. For what was death? It was the falling of the snow. It was the opening of a flower. It was the singing of a bird.” (I (Shaviro) feel as if one could write twenty pages of explication/expansion of just this short paragraph, which folds over on itself so many times. and it is followed by a few more paragraphs on the paradoxical nature of marriage, which is never itself, which never succeeds. “It was the other couple always, the other life, the other death.” I (Shaviro) feel like I could quote every line of this novel, and spend pages explicating each line, and yet there is nothing to say about hese words aside from just quoting and repeating them, for they repel any sort of hermeneutics. (philosophical study of interpretation)
She must remind him “that though love could never die, the object of his love might die, might change, might alter her looks? And was that love which did not die, change, alter, grow old with time? Indeed, he was like all other men, indifferent to the facts of life or to the passage of time unless somebody reminded him, for he thought time had never passed. He thought he was young. He was the king of heaven, but woman was the queen of hell.” This seems to me to be quite philosophically profound. A kind of inversion of Plato, with its revelation of the horror of the timeless?
I (Russell) would add the concreteness of this experience. Men can impregnate women all the way up to very old age, we’ve seen it and the questioning of its appropriateness to do so. Men as long as they can continuously have children, marry, date, impregnate younger women, do have access to this timelessness.
And just a few lines later: “The great things were those which happened without any way of knowing them or knowing when or where or how or why or to whom they had happened, just as if they had happened to no one or were happening now.” another philosophically profound passage (it reminds me of Deleuze’s theory of the event, expect this is better).
There is much more so please see his notes. At the end of the chapter which we’re going to cover over several weeks he says:
This chapter is stupendous. The longest one so far, and the most intensely packed and deliriously excessive so far. It nearly killed me. My notes here feel incomplete, because there is so much else I would like to have quoted and reflected on, not to mention the overall structure of the chapter…
Maternal mortality runs around 30-40% around the time Young is writing this. It could be as high as 48% since that’s how much the mortality rate changed after abortion became legal and women could be saved from life threatening situations during pregnancy and birth. Young does go into the deaths of the fathers in this chapter for Madge and Homer.
Madge also wears a mask of makeup or after we learn of her multiple traumas it could also be an example of masking - a defensive behavior in which an individual conceals their natural personality or behavior in response to social pressure, abuse, or harassment. Masking can be strongly influenced by environmental factors such as authoritarian parents, social rejection, and emotional, physical, or sexual abuse. Masking can be a behavior individuals adopt subconsciously as coping mechanisms or a trauma response, or it can be a conscious behavior an individual adopts to fit in within perceived societal norms. Masking is interconnected with maintaining performative behavior within social structures and cultures.
Week 6 - https://open.substack.com/pub/coralru...I think these pages cover a central motif of the book and Schopenhauer makes an appearance.
Cora to your last post on the other platform. I’m a Canadian. Having a difficult time focussing on reading lately, not a good headspace for relaxing with a book
No problem, and I hope you feel better. It's frankly rough with everything going on but reading Young is a coping mechanism for me. Take care!
Also I was wondering why pursuing this in light of Nazis actively among us only to keep finding Young using the entire narrative of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling as a subtle history to exactly what the foundations of America was built on. It has become even more fascinating and reassuring to me that documenting this book is the right thing to do even during this time.
I apologize but I am going to have to put the read along on hold and work on it as I can. A health issue has come up that I have to take care of first and it will take a while to recover. Thanks for joining and wish everyone the best with this brilliant book!
Chapters 1-44 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B2T9PWDQ
Chapters 45-82 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BKX67PSD
Exploring the Masterpiece https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BQCS5HCN
I will make them FREE every three months from now and through 2025 so anyone who would like a Kindle copy of these books can download them for free for the upcoming read a long starting January 1, 2025
September 12-16, 2024 FREE for five days