confessions of the fox
Dec. 17th, 2018 04:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sea_changedFinally got around to reading Confessions of the Fox, by Jordy Rosenberg; it's only been out a few months, but the moment I heard about it I knew I needed to read it, and only the vicissitudes of grad school prevented me until now. I fully expected to love it; as it turns out, I'm not even sure I liked it.
The concept of the book is incredible: an academic, R. Voth, discovers a lost manuscript that retells the story of Jack Sheppard (legendary thief whose story is chronicled in John Gay's Beggar's Opera and later as Mack the Knife in Brecht's Threepenny Opera; he also shows up in Fielding's Jonathan Wild and a multitude of other miscellaneous eighteenth-century writings), who is revealed to be a trans man. The novel itself consists of the text of this manuscript, along with Voth's footnotes, which slowly reveal a story of their own. Voth is also a trans man; Bess, Sheppard's companion and love interest, is revealed to be South Asian.
Everything about this seems calibrated to appeal to me: queer people in the eighteenth century, people of color in the eighteenth century, meta on academia and the archive and truth and falsehood in historic narrative, metanarrative in general. I still maintain that it's a genius, extraordinarily ambitious, extremely laudable concept, but in the end--actually, by about ten pages in--the execution was too bafflingly shoddy for me to enjoy it.
According to the back-cover bio, Rosenberg is a professor of eighteenth-century literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, so I can be assured that he knows what he's talking about when it comes to literature of the period. (Indeed, Voth's footnotes are peppered liberally with references to real academic works of history and theory, and there is a six or so page bibliography at the end of the novel, which I will admit might have been my favorite part of the whole book.) Which comes back to the baffling part of the whole thing, because the faux-eighteenth century manuscript part of the book just isn't very good, in a way that would suggest to me, sans background knowledge, that the author wasn't familiar with actual eighteenth-century writing. Capitalization for emphasis abounds, as does the -'d instead of -ed ending for the past tense (watch'd, paus'd, etc.), and Rosenberg makes liberal use of cant, which he then defines in the footnotes. (I would assume this is a Fielding reference, and it's an amusing one.) However, not only does he not utilize a lot of other great eighteenth-century text stylizations (phrenzy! connexion!), but the style of the prose itself is unconvincingly eighteenth-century, making the stylizations seem more like a gimmick than anything more. (Usually this would be a nitpick, but Rosenberg is clearly so interested in language throughout the novel, and bothered to use certain stylizations and obsessively footnote the slang terms, so this neglect of other stylizations as well as overall style seems odd--at some point you've got to go big or go home, because you've already lost the audience that's going to be bothered by it.)
And while Rosenberg lampshades his own modern-sounding prose towards the end of the book, his explanation is unclear in its extent, and is disappointing no matter how it’s interpreted: either it doesn't extend far enough to explain the foibles of the prose, or, if it does, the explanation undermines the authenticity and historicity of the text (within the world of the novel) so as to render it, not meaningless, but without the meaning Voth had been vigorously attempting to give it throughout the rest of the book.
Which brings us to Voth's section of the novel, which is largely carried out in footnotes. Unfortunately, the footnotes don't work for me at all, for two reasons. The first is that I had expected (and wanted) academic-style footnotes that began convincingly and then unraveled, or the editor's personality emerging slowly through the footnotes, which is not at all what they are: instead, Voth uses the footnotes in a way that feels like scribbled notes in a margin, or else goes off on long and unwieldy tangents about his own personal life. I think I could've adjusted to this, as long as I thought of them as marginal notes rather than footnotes, except that, second reason, Voth's voice is extraordinarily annoying. That Guy In Your MFA annoying. (The footnotes also contain a B-plot which is clearly supposed to be a satire on modern academia, but contains all the subtlety and interest of a blow to the head.)
I think this sums up my main objection to the book: while I think there are many things that could've been improved, for the most part I can explain them away to myself--the plot is disjointed and not particularly engaging, but hey, it's an eighteenth-century pastiche, call it a picaresque; the characters and their relationships aren't drawn in much depth (somewhat excepting Jack, but very much including Bess, who I was fascinated by and wanted more about than the brief chapter she's given) but again, that's sticking to a very eighteenth-century style; the feel of a writing style is extremely subjective, and just because it feels weirdly modern to me doesn't mean Rosenberg couldn't back up all his choices with examples from actual eighteenth-century lit; when it comes to the footnotes, as I mentioned above, I just have to let go of my preconceived idea of what I wanted them to be--but the writing itself isn't good enough for me to just handwave and enjoy; there really isn't much left to enjoy, once you've done the requisite handwaving.
Which isn't to say there is nothing salvageable from the book: in the manuscript portion there are moments of lovely writing, especially when it comes to Jack's experience of his trans-ness. For example, this passage on page 52, when Bess first asks his name:
His mouth formed a P--then he paus'd--brought his lips back against his teeth--his tongue to the roof of his mouth. He'd said the name so many times to himself. In bed throughout the workday, walking the streets, swinging his market-bag of Lady Kneebone's off-meats and mouse-bitten grains. It sooth'd and excited him.
For the first time, though, he heard himself say it to another person, "Jack."
He'd imagined this would be easy--this saying himself into being--but now it didn't feel entirely right or True. He became loosed from his Body, floating up to the splintered-beamed ceiling of the pub. He look'd down quizzically at himself saying "Jack," and it seemed to ridiculous to have thought he could ever be Jack--and now she looked at him quizzically too--and he wanted to slip through the ceiling-planks and fly out of the pub in Shame.
Then Bess said, "I told you my surname. And what--you don't have one?"
"Oh," he breathed out. "Shepp--epp--ard."
"Jack Sheppard," she said.
And when he heard his name in her mouth something happened.
The apparition-Jack zoomed down from his watching-spot on the ceiling and sank firmly--and with a heretofore unknown warm Pleasure--into his body.
I thought the manuscript portion was saved, at least in part, by moments like this. (The footnotes are, I think, unsalvageable.) But overall, I had extremely high expectations for this book, and it managed to disappoint all of them; it's hugely ambitious and brilliantly conceived, but in the end Rosenberg didn't having the writing or structuring ability to pull it off, and it ends up seeming hastily put together and largely tedious.
The concept of the book is incredible: an academic, R. Voth, discovers a lost manuscript that retells the story of Jack Sheppard (legendary thief whose story is chronicled in John Gay's Beggar's Opera and later as Mack the Knife in Brecht's Threepenny Opera; he also shows up in Fielding's Jonathan Wild and a multitude of other miscellaneous eighteenth-century writings), who is revealed to be a trans man. The novel itself consists of the text of this manuscript, along with Voth's footnotes, which slowly reveal a story of their own. Voth is also a trans man; Bess, Sheppard's companion and love interest, is revealed to be South Asian.
Everything about this seems calibrated to appeal to me: queer people in the eighteenth century, people of color in the eighteenth century, meta on academia and the archive and truth and falsehood in historic narrative, metanarrative in general. I still maintain that it's a genius, extraordinarily ambitious, extremely laudable concept, but in the end--actually, by about ten pages in--the execution was too bafflingly shoddy for me to enjoy it.
According to the back-cover bio, Rosenberg is a professor of eighteenth-century literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, so I can be assured that he knows what he's talking about when it comes to literature of the period. (Indeed, Voth's footnotes are peppered liberally with references to real academic works of history and theory, and there is a six or so page bibliography at the end of the novel, which I will admit might have been my favorite part of the whole book.) Which comes back to the baffling part of the whole thing, because the faux-eighteenth century manuscript part of the book just isn't very good, in a way that would suggest to me, sans background knowledge, that the author wasn't familiar with actual eighteenth-century writing. Capitalization for emphasis abounds, as does the -'d instead of -ed ending for the past tense (watch'd, paus'd, etc.), and Rosenberg makes liberal use of cant, which he then defines in the footnotes. (I would assume this is a Fielding reference, and it's an amusing one.) However, not only does he not utilize a lot of other great eighteenth-century text stylizations (phrenzy! connexion!), but the style of the prose itself is unconvincingly eighteenth-century, making the stylizations seem more like a gimmick than anything more. (Usually this would be a nitpick, but Rosenberg is clearly so interested in language throughout the novel, and bothered to use certain stylizations and obsessively footnote the slang terms, so this neglect of other stylizations as well as overall style seems odd--at some point you've got to go big or go home, because you've already lost the audience that's going to be bothered by it.)
And while Rosenberg lampshades his own modern-sounding prose towards the end of the book, his explanation is unclear in its extent, and is disappointing no matter how it’s interpreted: either it doesn't extend far enough to explain the foibles of the prose, or, if it does, the explanation undermines the authenticity and historicity of the text (within the world of the novel) so as to render it, not meaningless, but without the meaning Voth had been vigorously attempting to give it throughout the rest of the book.
Which brings us to Voth's section of the novel, which is largely carried out in footnotes. Unfortunately, the footnotes don't work for me at all, for two reasons. The first is that I had expected (and wanted) academic-style footnotes that began convincingly and then unraveled, or the editor's personality emerging slowly through the footnotes, which is not at all what they are: instead, Voth uses the footnotes in a way that feels like scribbled notes in a margin, or else goes off on long and unwieldy tangents about his own personal life. I think I could've adjusted to this, as long as I thought of them as marginal notes rather than footnotes, except that, second reason, Voth's voice is extraordinarily annoying. That Guy In Your MFA annoying. (The footnotes also contain a B-plot which is clearly supposed to be a satire on modern academia, but contains all the subtlety and interest of a blow to the head.)
I think this sums up my main objection to the book: while I think there are many things that could've been improved, for the most part I can explain them away to myself--the plot is disjointed and not particularly engaging, but hey, it's an eighteenth-century pastiche, call it a picaresque; the characters and their relationships aren't drawn in much depth (somewhat excepting Jack, but very much including Bess, who I was fascinated by and wanted more about than the brief chapter she's given) but again, that's sticking to a very eighteenth-century style; the feel of a writing style is extremely subjective, and just because it feels weirdly modern to me doesn't mean Rosenberg couldn't back up all his choices with examples from actual eighteenth-century lit; when it comes to the footnotes, as I mentioned above, I just have to let go of my preconceived idea of what I wanted them to be--but the writing itself isn't good enough for me to just handwave and enjoy; there really isn't much left to enjoy, once you've done the requisite handwaving.
Which isn't to say there is nothing salvageable from the book: in the manuscript portion there are moments of lovely writing, especially when it comes to Jack's experience of his trans-ness. For example, this passage on page 52, when Bess first asks his name:
His mouth formed a P--then he paus'd--brought his lips back against his teeth--his tongue to the roof of his mouth. He'd said the name so many times to himself. In bed throughout the workday, walking the streets, swinging his market-bag of Lady Kneebone's off-meats and mouse-bitten grains. It sooth'd and excited him.
For the first time, though, he heard himself say it to another person, "Jack."
He'd imagined this would be easy--this saying himself into being--but now it didn't feel entirely right or True. He became loosed from his Body, floating up to the splintered-beamed ceiling of the pub. He look'd down quizzically at himself saying "Jack," and it seemed to ridiculous to have thought he could ever be Jack--and now she looked at him quizzically too--and he wanted to slip through the ceiling-planks and fly out of the pub in Shame.
Then Bess said, "I told you my surname. And what--you don't have one?"
"Oh," he breathed out. "Shepp--epp--ard."
"Jack Sheppard," she said.
And when he heard his name in her mouth something happened.
The apparition-Jack zoomed down from his watching-spot on the ceiling and sank firmly--and with a heretofore unknown warm Pleasure--into his body.
I thought the manuscript portion was saved, at least in part, by moments like this. (The footnotes are, I think, unsalvageable.) But overall, I had extremely high expectations for this book, and it managed to disappoint all of them; it's hugely ambitious and brilliantly conceived, but in the end Rosenberg didn't having the writing or structuring ability to pull it off, and it ends up seeming hastily put together and largely tedious.
