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Miss MacIntosh, My Darling
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Discussion - Week One - Miss MacIntosh, My Darling - Ch. 1 - 6, p. 1 - 141
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Unfortunately, my copy was misplaced during my move. Looking frantically so I can join in as well!
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My copy is apparently taking the overland route from Chicago to France via the Bering Strait... plenty of time for you to find it amongst all those boxes from your move.
I'm looking-I've unpacked 27 boxes of books but 23 more to look through. :(
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Strangely, I already received Volume 2 of Miss Mac (The Dalkey Archive 2-vol edition) but not Volume 1. Skipping through the chapters, I've already found plenty of quotable quotes, so I'm excited about this book!
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I'm imagining that this detailed zooming-in is part of how women perceive each other. Is this a common occurrence among women?
Well, I can't speak to "common" but it's certainly something I do, even though I don't actually take that much care with my own appearance. It's just something I naturally notice. In fact, in my reading, that was the first time I really understood what Young was writing about. Interesting.
By the way, I found my copy-copies actually, part 1 plus a complete set of both books.
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there's probably another part 2 hiding in another box...
In general, men tend to focus in on a woman's overall attractiveness, and if they do notice clothing, it's usually related to how it enhances or detracts from the woman's allure. It's that kind of predatory gaze that is hardwired into male behavior.
I am curious about the different ways women and men look at women.
My question is, do men look at other men as closely as women look at other women? Certainly in my discussions with other women, how a woman looks comes up immediately.I'm not sure it's only men that are hardwired. The first thing that comes up with men is not their clothes but how "hot" they are.
Maybe for some women, as I have friends like that, but not me as I have the observation skills of a gnat. ;) I am still to start the book as mine also hasn't arrived, looking forward to getting going though when it does.
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I'm not sure it's only men t..."
Male instinct is to size up potential threat and/or competition. Men are more primitive than they like to admit.
@Laura - Well, I suppose gnats are good at observing other gnats, otherwise there would be no baby-gnats - LOL!
True, very true. I now have a great picture in my head of girl gnats on a dance floor giggling as they try and get the attention of a boy gnat who is standing drinking a pint at the bar. Sorry there is always one who lowers the tone isn't there. ;)
Just got vol. 1 from the library...you guys already have me intrigued! Getting started today...
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Finished the first chapter just before dinner. So far, there's a pre-WW2 kind of expansiveness versus microcosm tension, à la Thomas Woolf and a little Faulkner, but also postwar sensibility (and form) like Flannery O'Connor, maybe a little melancholy Kerouac.
I'm very curious to see where she goes for the next 1188 pages. I know nothing about her work, so this is a big adventure for me.
Ellie wrote: "My question is, do men look at other men as closely as women look at other women? Certainly in my discussions with other women, how a woman looks comes up immediately.I'm not sure it's only men t..."
No (at least not heterosexual men). or as Van Morrison put it 'The girls go by dressed for each other." That might be a paraphrase.
Jim wrote: "Finished the first chapter just before dinner. So far, there's a pre-WW2 kind of expansiveness versus microcosm tension, à la Thomas Woolf and a little Faulkner, but also postwar sensibility (and form) like Flannery O'Connor, maybe a little melancholy Kerouac."Okay, that's interesting. I read that it took her eighteen years to finish the book, so if it was published in 1965, she started in 1947. Though '47 isn't pre-war, I imagine that eighteen year spread could accommodate some intra-author exploration of style and sensibility. Or maybe she'd craftily planned it so from the start.
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I was thinking along the lines of who would have been likely early influences - like Wolfe and Faulkner - that would have made up her early imprinting. Kerouac, for example, wanted to write like Wolfe, and his first book The Town and the City is his attempt to model Wolfe's work. But then, post-war, everything changed, and during 1947-64, all kinds of shiite hit the faane. She would have been exposed to Beats, Gaddis, Tennesee Williams, and so on, before she finished.
Anyway, I get a whiff of prewar American lit mixed in with post-war psychosis - and that's after just two chapters!
I definitely feel the pre-war stuff. The emotional beat of Wolfe and the luscious sentences of Faulkner (not to mention the drugs & decadence). But at the same time, & this is where I get incoherent, there is something that still speaks to me from these pages in a more current way even than Faulkner. Maybe it has to do with the daughter's quest.
My this book demands that you savour every word, loving it. I struggled with the sentence structures for the first few pages but now happy to get lost in them. Each sentence for me is like its own poetic story, they draw you in while encouraging you to give in to the madness of the mind. Can't wait to see how it develops so I best get back to reading especially since I am soooo far behind. ;)
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Chapter 2 is especially dense. I was thinking I'd like to compare it to other opium-based literature sometime.
With readings of The Ice Shirt and Doktor Faustus in which I want to participate coming up soon, I really should not get started on another monumental reading project right now - but this just looked so interesting I couldn't help but myself...I am only one chapter in so far, but I can already see that the reading schedule here is very optimistic, as this is a book that demands to be read very slowly. I probably should be underlining a lot and make copious notes, too, but I'm just too lazy for that.
As for the pregnant woman, I'm not sure whether that is a female thing (although one can't help but notice that her male companion is described in an entirely different manner) - to me, it seemed as if she was not described as much as dissolved, or broken down into her constituent parts - the novel turned her into a painting by Arcimboldo, made up out of all kinds of other stuff.
And while I'm only a couple of pages into the novel I am already getting suspicious about the opposition between reality and dreams the first chapter seems to organised around - can anyone who writes such a lush, phantasmagorical prose really be rejecting imagination in favour of the real?
I finally couldn't restrain myself-I started underlining. So many fabulous phrases & images.
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I know. On every page, I'm wanting to add quotes to GR.
@Larou - For this book, the schedule is unreasonable. I'm going to keep opening new threads each week, and whoever gets to them (and whenever) can post the first comments. We may be reading this through the summer.
BTW, Rachel - and anyone else reading Proust - are you sensing any similarities with ISOLT in terms of density and repetition? I particularly was sensing Proust when reading chapter 3.
Larou wrote: "And while I'm only a couple of pages into the novel I am already getting suspicious about the opposition between reality and dreams the first chapter seems to organised around - can anyone who writes such a lush, phantasmagorical prose really be rejecting imagination in favour of the real? "Really interesting observation.
The whole first chapter struck me as being an unusually direct approach to themes and even the meaning of the title. We hear who darling Miss MacIntosh is and why she's being sought. The opposition between dreams and reality is set up quite clearly: the mother, lost in her opium world, and Nanny MacIntosh, who counsels, "Common sense is the finest sense...the soul should not dream of those things far distant and not to be realized, for the way was very plain, quite direct."
This kind of direct reveal usually comes so much later in a novel; I was surprised to see it right on page 7 with 1100ish pages still to come.
Given the tension between what she's saying and how she is saying it that Larou noted, I don't think the Young is going to keep us in the tidy supremacy of the dreamless. So curious to know where she will be taking us!
Jim wrote: "BTW, Rachel - and anyone else reading Proust - are you sensing any similarities with ISOLT in terms of density and repetition? I particularly was sensing Proust when reading chapter 3."
So I haven't exactly gotten to chapter three yet, but in the first two chapters I was definitely feeling ISOLT affinity. Both authors circle back to examine different facets of the same idea, plus the dream/reality contrast is central for both, and both seem to use "illness" and its psychology as a lens through which to explore the contrast.
I'm actually not so sure about any resemblance of Miss MacIntosh to the Recherche - Proust is always extremely lucid, even (if not in particular) where he is at his most poetic, and lucidity is not quite the first thing that would come to my mind regarding Marguerite Young's novel. Where the Recherche is a cathedral where everything is well ordered and serves a clear purpose, Miss MacIntosh to me seems like a family mansion that has been added to over generations, a jumble of styles, filled with labyrinthine corridors that end in locked doors, secret attics where dust lies thick and nobody has entered for decades, where floorboards creak at under steps of an unseen person and the shutters rattle at night when there's a strong wind coming from the nearby lake.If there is any writer Miss MacIntosh reminds me of, it would be German Romantic novelist Jean Paul - I find myself having some difficulties to pin down why exactly, but there seems to be certain expansiveness of language that they both share, an exuberance in their writing that strays beyond any formal boundaries as well as a certain quirkiness even quaintness.
No, crystalline lucidity and the integrality of every word in its place are not impressions I'm getting from Young either. Love the cathedral vs. rambling family mansion metaphor.I didn't so much sense an affinity between Proust and Young in prose style, just some in themes and approaches. But I'm making all these statements from the perspective of page 31. So.
I'm not familiar with Jean Paul. Intrigued, though.
Well, I think I was on p. 28 when I wrote my last comment, so you're clearly the authority here. :PI'm liking the mansion metaphor even more the farther I move into the novel - it seems not so much a book to read as a book to live in, something you stroll through at leisure, peeking at a bookshelf here, picking up some interesting object there, while letting your attention skim over other places, maybe to return to them later.
Jean Paul is very much worth delving into, not exactly the most accessible of authors, though - in fact, one of his novels (maybe Siebenkäs?) might make excellent reading for this group, I might add him to the suggestion for 2014 or (seeing as that thread is already very long) 2015.
I'm approaching page 100 & finding myself enjoying the experience more and more. I even can follow the "story" such as it is a bit. But the true path lies, I think, in the digression, in the prose itself which is rich, dense, almost opiate-like. Certainly hallucinatory. I love it, even though I'm moving at a snail's pace & can only manage a few pages at a time. I think I'd have to be willing to let go of my grasp on reality to read more.
I'm on page 67 now and still can't help but chortle a bit every time I see the reading schedule for this group. But I'm having much the same experience - for all the slow going, reading Miss MacIntosh is an immensely enjoyable experience, one that is quite unlike anything else I have encountered.
I'm a hundred pages in now, and still struggling with the way the novel claims to favour the real over the imaginary which seems to jar heavily with the wildly fantastic narrative style.There's obviously a thematic inversion at work here - in many coming of age stories you have a child that is oppressed by a strict and utilitarian authority figures and then overcomes that oppression by way of the imagination. In Miss MacIntosh, we have the opposite, the child Vera is being oppressed by her mother's fantasy and is looking to Miss MacIntosh's realism for salvation.
Based on that, one might think that the novel would advocate a firm focus on the real, the writing attempting to reach for things as they are, as opposed to self-absorbed fantasies that run empty as the separate from reality. Except, of course, that's quite obviously not what Miss MacIntosh does - instead it's probably the most exuberantly imaginative work of fiction I have ever read (at least this side of Jean Paul, who this still reminds me of), taking off on wild flights of fancy over pages and pages at the slightest pretense; the novel is so overgrown with a teeming jungle of the fantastic that one can barely perceive the tiny patch of real ground it is sprouting from.
I'm wondering if I'm missing something, or if maybe my difficulties to reconcile those two levels might not be intentional, even what drives it forward (althoug at a snail's pace) - if in the absence of anything even faintly resembling a plot or any kind of character development, this might not the central conflict of the novel whose hoped-for resolution keeps the reader turning the pages (except for the utterly delicious luscious prose, of course).
Also, I am finding that so far, I rather dislike Miss MacIntosh. If my daughter fell under the influence of someone like that, I'd definitely take that as a cause for concern...
How are people doing with this? I can't find Week II but I'm stuck on page 144. Help!
Still at it, and still enjoying it a lot (although Chapter 6 has me more than a bit confused). I'm at page 112 now, and guess I'll make it to Week II in another week. Or two. :P
Turns out it took me one week - I finished Chapter 6 during the weekend. And I have to say, I think this one dragged a bit, as the novel does not really give us enough reasons to be interested in the love triangle between Madge (the pregnant girl on the bus), Homer and Jacqueline. Having said that, I loved how the reader is kept in the dark for most of the chapter as to whether the girl Homer loves and did not marry is a past version of Madge or a different girl - and there generally is a lot of blurring of identities going on in this chapter (including a nice self-referential comment by Homer), enough to make one suspect that this might turn to out to be another main theme of the novel, definitely something one should keep an eye on.I suspect we'll be returning to Madge eventually, as this chapter leaves quite a few open questions - is Madge's child really by her father? is Homer really dying, and if so, of what? and how does Madge's story relate to the narrator's childhood? does it at all?
Thus, after two months, I finally arrive at Week 2 of your reading schedule - onwards to Chapter 7!
I, Vera Cartwheel, rushes through the nighttime mist of the middle West in a bus peopled only by herself, the driver, and a young pregnant couple. Searching through shadows in harbor cities for her darling, Miss MacIntosh, the red-haired nursemaid. Taken to her bed for reasons obscured by time, Vera’s mother navigates the terrain of her opium dreams, respecting no boundaries between the living and the dead. Gentleman caller, Mr. Spitzer, likewise pays his pointless punctual visits and participates in Catherine’s waking dreams. Miss MacIntosh shares life-lessons and lunch with Vera on the beach. The bus-driver will never cut a hair on his head as long as the democrats rule the roost. The tiny dancer laments her marriage and mourns her death.