{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2484",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
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  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 2484,
    "subject": "PEACE and THE GOOD SOLDIER",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2000-12-04T12:43:42+00:00",
    "last": "2000-12-04T12:43:42+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0030-0151@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Michael Andre-Driussi",
        "address": "mantis at sirius.com"
      },
      "date": "2000-12-04T12:43:42+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) PEACE and THE GOOD SOLDIER",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Synchronicity moment, friends!\n\n\"THE GOOD SOLDIER is, Eugene Goodheart claims, `one of the most puzzling\nworks of modern fiction.' It is notoriously hard to make sense of Ford's\ncharacters, their backgrounds, and their actions. There is critical\ndissension on such issues as whether the title (in so far as it refers to\nCaptain Edward Ashburnham's `goodness') is ironic or not. The narrative is\nspeckled with what look like factual contradictions (about such crucial\ndata as when and where the Dowells first met the Ashburnhams). Close\ninspection reveals that the chronology is awry at almost every point. `Is\nthis,' Martin Stannard asks, `Fordian irony or simply carelessness about\ndetails?' Should we lay the inconsistencies at the door of an artfully\nunreliable narrator (John Dowell), or at the door of a slipshod writer\n(Ford Madox Ford)? Some critics, Vincent Cheng for instance (who has\nassembled a convincing chronology of THE GOOD SOLDIER), believe that Ford\nis writing in `the French mode of _vraisemblance_,' and that it is\nlegitimate to ask `what actually happens?' with a reasonable expectation of\ngetting `right' answers. Other commentators, such as Frank Kermode, see THE\nGOOD SOLDIER as the _locus classicus_ of modernist indeterminacy. `We are\nin a world of which it needs to be said not that plural readings are\npossible (for this is true of all narrative) but that the _illusion of the\nsingle right reading is possible no longer_.'\"\n\nThat's a long quote, but the article gets even better: the title of the\npiece is \"Whose daughter is Nancy?\" and it becomes something rather like\nour Doris enigma.  It is in a neat little paperback book (Dan'l and hello\nthere Henry Kaiser, they have 'em at Half Price Books [which is a used\nbookstore chain based in Texas, Roy]) titled CAN JANE EYRE BE HAPPY? which\nis a sequel to IS HEATHCLIFF A MURDERER? GREAT PUZZLES IN 19TH-CENTURY\nFICTION.\n\nHeads-up Jonathan Laidlow, since there's an article on Tristam Shandy\ncalled \"Slop Slip.\" (I can give more details if you need.)\n\nHey, wish I could give everybody here copies of these books for Christmas,\nso go out and get them.  The author is John Sutherland.  Published by\nOxford University Press as part of their World's Classics series.\n\n=mantis="
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}