A review by joe_olipo
Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke

2.0

Mother, might we have Lord Giles?
We have Lord Jim at home.
Lord Jim at Home:

On the "Anti-Psychological" Novel

The novel that repudiates the so-called "psychological" novel's play of pellucid characters, traceable motivations, and tractable metaphysics; and which is instead outfitted with automata, absent inner lives, whose actions don't appear to follow from psychic etiologies, might be called the "anti-psychological novel." Mechanical characters have long been the mainstay of satire, from Aristophanes to Oscar Wilde, but Brooke is taking the next step in which the so-called "psychological reading" is also being satirized; such readings are dubious because they are always providing explanations that function as post hoc justification of Tragedy. Of the many editorializations of Jim's behavior in the text, the reading of an "Oedipal" crime is mentioned once, and fits as sloppily as the explanations fabricated by the prosecution. We recall Jim's old schoolmaster, who can't punish him for chewing holes in his urine-soaked sheets — there's no precedent on the books for something like that — but is happy to spank him for lying about it. (Foreshadowing the judiciary that later functions in the same capacity.) The anti-psychological character is not developing quite how we would otherwise expect. i.e. The abused, orally-retentive child doesn't develop "aberrant" relations with women. (He does do one rape, but in a way that's socially acceptable.) Against expectations, Giles is admirably applying a leaded pipe equally to mother and father (and the Oracle of Delphi). It can't even be said that this event is the culmination of a lifetime of problematic family relations; rather, the proximate cause appears to be impressionable Jim's happenstance perusal a provocative novel in which an obstructing parental figure is removed in a similar manner. Jim here, in all his atypia, displaying a resistance to unifying narrative with much more fidelity to reality than the so-called "psychological" novel that wraps it up so nicely.


On the "Psychological" Novel

Bad reading is always threatening to turn the "anti-psychological" novel back into a "psychological" novel. Those who are reading Lord Jim without awareness of the legacy of the Victorian novel that it's playing off of (especially now in its most recent re-printing), are reading Jim as if he's the psychological product of his upbringing rather than an alien element introduced into the plot for the purpose of satire. As an element of pure receptivity, alien Jim exposes his relations when they stretch out their necks at him. Because he never learns to respond to incentive structures, he elevates the satire of his compatriots who are doing only this. (The old judge and his nurse are perhaps the most mordant pair of examples.) The psychological reading of Lord Jim is cutting across this interpretation in an effort to assign blame, yet quickly becomes quite messy. We are disturbed to read the details of the wetnurse's abuse of young Giles. If these events produced his lethal character, one might hold the lower class nurse, who is "more Catholic than the Pope," to be responsible for it. The secret of British class satires is that one can always read them as pro-Tory. One can delineate everything bad in Jim along class lines, or instead use that master-slave (dialectical) approach with the recognition that this outsider is the only one with the guts to put upper class principle into practice. How much do we blame the mother for her timidity and comically aberrant value system, or the father with his own millennium of daddy issues. Luxury (karma) dissolves into the atmosphere like a perfume. (This is prophetic!) Surely decadence is sometimes worth protecting for its own sake (if we follow Huysmans or Adorno). Yet, even a bit disgusted by the machinations of these wealthy automata, we also recall those encounters with lower-class, cat-food-eating journalists who are producing a most insalubrious psychological influence on unlucky Giles — proles not any better than the devil we know. The psychological class critique has been reversed; the circle makes a complete revolution, and we want at least a little douceur — Coming to appreciate the decadence of grand-pater Judge who wants petite (grande?) mort in a horsehair wig. Oh, how hard it is to write the anti-Tory novel!


Aside: on the Novel as Torture Device

Ottessa Moshfegh states, in the introduction to the 2023 edition, that this book is a kind of torture device for novelists: Dinah Brooke is doing it — writing babyhood without sentiment — so much better than you that it makes you want to die. I can think of another sense in which this book is a torture device for writers: moments in which you recall how Brooke's books have remained in abeyance for decades despite such talents, such that you, who aren't writing anything even a fraction as good, are commended to die to death.

Some sentences (which I believe Brooke has originated):
"She is built on a grand scale” (legs)
“Plain English cooking is good enough for her.” (wrt phallingus)
“She is famous throughout the town” (fabulous girlfriend)