(no subject)
You guys, you guys, you guys. I know this isn't a big deal at all, but my thesis is going to include an actual disproving of an argument in The Commodity Culture of Victorian England. It's a tiny little thing, but the author's flat-out wrong. Like, just wrong. He says:
"Even her [that would be Gerty MacDowell, narrator of the "Nausicaa" chapter of Ulysses] recollection of The Lamplighter [that would be a sentimental novel she's read] merges with that of Reggy Wylie [that would be her boyfriend-until-the-day-before] on his bicycle: "Reggy Wylie used to turn his freewheel like she read in that book The Lamplighter by Miss Cummins" (363). The literal implication of the syntax is that the scene with the boy on the freewheel bicycle is in The Lamplighter. Unwittingly, Gerty places contemporary technology-a 1904 invention, a bicycle equipped with a clutch that would disengage the rear wheel-in the past and almost out of time. As much a reader of billboards, throwaways, and leaflets as of novels, her tendency is to wander; she has an attention span of about thirty seconds."
Here's where my argument picks up. Because Richards is arguing that Gerty is part of a commodity culture and therefore has a cheapened sense of the "literary experience." I am begging to differ in some ways and finding his argument super-useful in other ways. But here's the thing. The freewheel thing? HANG ON A SECOND. Let's go back to the text, shall we?
"...soon the lamplighter would be going his rounds past the presbyterian church grounds and along by shady Tritonville avenue where the couples walked and lighting the lamp near her window where Reggy Wylie used to turn his freewheel like she read in that book The Lamplighter by Miss Cummins..." (13.629-633)
BULLSHIT.
Nobody's denying that it's a muddled sentence, but "her window where Reggy Wylie used to turn his freewheel" is one syntactic unit,* and it's part of the participial phrase modifying THE LAMP. Therefore, syntactically as well as semantically, "like she read in that book" goes right back to the lighting of the lamp, or the lamplighter himself, which, of course, makes eight times more sense, since the book? Is called The Lamplighter. And it is about a lamplighter. Who lights lamps.
*making it, I think, somewhat disingenuous to start quoting it in the middle
All of this actually has very little impact on my thesis, but the idea that someone who has published a rather well-known book is WRONG and I am RIGHT is kind of awesome. It also comes from someone who stresses that the "Nausicaa" chapter is easy to read (he argues it's because consumerist literature has to be easy to read), which has rankled me since I picked up his book, because there's this sense of, "nur nur nur, Gerty MacDowell is reading fashion magazines and sentimental novels, but you and I, my friend, we are reading academic tomes and Ulysses." Which of course IS, in fact, the subject of my thesis.