Clarissa Part 4

Hopefully this will be the last Clarissa post.

I wrote at one point, evidently in a momentary lapse of despair, that what had been done to Clarissa was similar to what had been done to my writing. This was a statement of emotion rather than reason, of course. One`s writing, at the low amateur level, is not really capable of being ruined by outside agency.

Quotation p.1114. "Oh my dear, how many things happen in this life to give us displeasure! how few to give us joy!"

p.1194 Richardson's subconscious confession (through the agency of Clarissa) of his own feelings about the book?: "I am very much tired and fatigued--with--I don't know what--with writing, I think--but most with myself, and with a situation I cannot help aspiring to get out of and above."

Lovelace's repeated taunting and condescension of the bourgeois is effectively done. In fact, all the parts where Lovelace is being a horrible bully and daring anybody to do anything about it are the best-written in the book. Such scenes of browbeating and cruelty in all his works are Richardson`s specialty for the student and connoisseur of literary skill.

This was certainly a race of men attuned to the reality of death and the processes of the common (collective) human soul with regard to it.

No one in literature can single-mindedly draw out death like our author. There is a character in The Idiot who is hundreds of pages in dying of consumption, but the story leaves his deathbed alone for the most part and concerns itself with somewhat more vigorous actions and characters.

The scene where Clarissa, who is starving herself to death, orders her coffin, decorated with inscriptions from Job and other relevant texts, and has it delivered to her sickroom in order to save those who will survive her from the expense and trouble of arranging for it, is really hilarious, though of course it is not intended to be. The last 200 pages, in which Clarissa`s virtue and the exemplary attitude with which she approached the grave are delineated ad nauseum, are really treacly.

The latest Penguin classic edition sells for $24.95 in the U.S., which, given how long it takes to read it, comes out to a bargain of $7.20 per month book bill during the duration of the reading. The listed price for the U.K. is 25 pounds. At the current exchange rate, this is a $51 paperback novel.

Several of the characters who assisted in Clarissa's torments suffer immediate and painful deaths shortly after hers is achieved, their mode of departing this world in decided contrast to her model, the approach of hell being actively apprehended to the terror of the mind encountering it. I am too bourgeois of course to even conceive of hard or eternal punishment of any kind. The actions of men do not, in imagining such a system, seem important enough, nor for the most part their minds intelligent enough, for their souls to merit such intense usage in the afterlife. Obviously this exposes me as someone in whom the idea of any serious human grandeur has died utterly. This of course was a common attitude among the serious thinkers of the 20th century, but the fact that the strong sense of it has trickled down to the likes of me indicates that the strong mind now is the one that is either so far beyond this (i.e. in the realm of high science) as to no longer be able to perceive this loss as a serious problem, or is moving back in the opposite direction, with the ability to make sense of the noble ideas and mindset regarding the human race of those forebears whose achievements represent to the attentive mind what is generally thought of as civilization.

Whenever I come across the idea in a novel or poem that the sensual temptations some character is facing is due to the active agency of the devil I can not help but to ask why he never tries to tempt me with the same. The only answer I can come up with is that he must have found my soul easy enough to secure by cheaper and to me less pleasurable means that there was never any need to resort to throwing a lot of beautiful and willing women into my path.

I mentioned earlier that I read what I do read--long, largely dull 18th century novels, dozens of Restoration comedies, 10,000 line blank verse poems from the graveyard school of the 1740s--as a form of intellectual penance. This has become too very therapeutic to me, and I have come through dogged habit to actually enjoy becoming acquainted with all of these historic pieces, even though the literary value of many of them is dubious to say the least. I take the idea of penance seriously however. I failed to develop my intellect, personality or body adequately in youth to be able to participate fully and productively as a student and later as a twenty-something and thirty-something man when those times came, and I must never forget this while I live. How does reading Restoration comedies serve this purpose? I am too tired to answer this today. It will come up again, it is an important point, it informs almost everything I do. I just need time to compose the explanation of it.