March 2009 Archives

Our discussion of THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE by fifteen attendees at the Central Market Book Club last night, Monday March 9th, 2009 in the Houston Central Market Community Room was enlightening as usual. And we definitely had disagreements which always adds interest in my opinion.

I lead the discussion, starting out with a brief introduction of the author Muriel Spark and her background starting with Edinburgh Scotland (which was the setting of the book by the way) and also with some background information about her education, strong affiliation with Roman Catholicism and her literary awards. She died in 2006.

I then read from the first paragraph of Chapter 3: " It is not to be supposed that Miss Brodie was unique....; or that...she was in any way off her head.... There were legions of her kind during the nineteen-thirties...[but] The progressive spinsters of Edinburgh did not teach in schools, especially in schools of traditional character like Marcia Blaine's School for Girls."

One of my first questions was why did Jean Brodie make considerable effort to teach at and stay employed at such a traditional school if she was such an untraditional teacher. She definitely had her enemies, a subject covered in the story. Answers to my question were basically that because she was different, it allowed her to stand out and allowed her to take pride in what she considered one of her most important personality traits, that of rebellion and disagreement with the norm.

Next we discussed generally what our opinions were about Brodie, i.e. was she inspiring, was she silly, was she petty? feminist? Four of the attendees were male and it seemed to me that all four initially at least thought fairly highly of Brodie. They respected her attempts to break from the norm and teach the girls about the real world and not just raise them to stay at home. The remaining attendees either were quiet about their opinions or were very outspoken about how they felt Brodie was inappropriate in condoning and vicariously planning an affair between one of her previous students, Rose, and one of the male teachers at the school, Mr. Lloyd who was married.

We briefly discussed Miss McKay, the school administrator who tried for most of the book to find evidence that would allow her to dismiss Brodie. It seems that both Miss McKay who was quite victorian in her values and Miss Brodie who was not, did not have problems exploiting the young girls in their strategy and using them in saving their positions.

In answer to whether Jean Brodie had an impact on the girls lives, most agreed that mainly Sandy seemed affected out of the six girls in the "Brodie set" (which was how they were known as a group as they advanced through school even after they were no longer taught by Brodie - but still socialized with her on weekends").

The Brodie set girls' feelings about Brodie seemed to change in a fairly normal manner (except for one) considering that they became teenagers in the course of the story and we all know what happens then. But one of the participants in our discussion tried to keep us on focus with Sandy (and rightly so) because she felt we needed to understand better why the story focused on Sandy in the second half as well as why Sandy betrayed Brodie as well as why Sandy seemed to forgo a normal life by becoming a cloistered nun.

Several thought that Sandy was the most like Jean Brodie, that she was manipulative and seemed to have a strong ego that made her bitter towards Brodie. Perhaps Sandy, more than most realized was offended by how Brodie had manipulated the girls. Becoming a nun might have been her way of opposing Brodie and becoming the opposite of what Brodie wanted.

We discussed the significance of the title "transfiguration of the commonplace" of Sandy's thesis in psychology and I will report here that I believed it basically was pointing to the fact that Brodie was actually fairly mediocre and commonplace, nothing special, something that someone in the group pointed out must be true since she really wasn't very successful at impacting most of the Brodie set to any great degree. Had she been smarter or more competent, she might not have been betrayed and might not have been requested to eventually leave the school.

In my efforts to keep my entries in this blog short (or at least shorter than they have been), I will only mention the other topics we discussed such as:

1. what did Brodie mean by being "in her prime"?
2. were the girls really "creme de la creme" as Brodie liked to constantly call them?
3. what is the author's opinion of Roman Catholicism?
4. how did men react to Miss Brodie? and she to them?
5. what did Sandy mean by calling Brodie a "born fascist"?
6. what should we think of Brodie regarding her relationship with Joyce Emily, a girl who was excluded from the Brodie Set?

And I forgot to ask how many in the group agreed with Jean Brodie that "goodness, truth and beauty are more important than Safety". I bet that we would not all have agreed, one of the reasons these discussions are so interesting, in my opinion.

Looking forward to our next discussion of UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry at Central Market on April 13, 2009.

We had a rousing Montrose Great Books discussion by twenty-five attendees of WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS by J.M. Coetzee on Thursday, March 5th at Freed-Montrose Library.  As was revealed at the end of the discussion when we go around the room and ask for subjective comments from everyone, most did like the book.  

I led the discussion and started with a question about the central character and narrator who had no name but was called "the magistrate" and who governed a seeming frontier town on the outskirts of a fictitious large geographical entity called "the Empire".  I asked what was thought about the magistrate, was he likable? was he flawed? was he all good?

The first commenter indicated they didn't like the magistrate, one reason being that his poor decisions kept getting him into more and more trouble.  Everyone agreed that the magistrate was a flawed character but some thought he was the better for it, that he represented "everyman" and he illustrated how we often make decisions seeking the easier way out hoping for pleasure or comfort but that he still was a sympathetic and humanistic character.  

When I asked why the author chose to include so much about the sex life of the magistrate in the story, one of the female attendees said the passages about sex were a welcome change from the ones about torture which were quite painful to read for most of us.  Another attendee indicated that the magistrate's way of dealing with his sexual relationships analyzing them from a distance seemed to show particularly how he was unable to deal with connecting with the women on a intimate basis. It was also pointed out that he used the skills learned in his hobby of being an amateur archeologist in his relationship with the blind girl when he repeatedly attempted to decipher the details about how she was tortured as if she was an archeological ruin.  His examination of her was motivated by his lack of knowledge and experience with her culture referred to as "barbarian"  and representative of nomadic tribesman who lived nearby in the dessert in the winter and moved to the mountains in the summer.

Now that the discussion is over and this is the next day, I realize we didn't talk much about Colonel Joll, another main central character who was responsible for torturing the apparently innocent barbarians. Though only 150 pages (or so) in length, this book was very dense with events and symbols and philosophical thoughts making it impossible for me to cover most of these in my little attempt here to encapsulate our discussion.  Also, since I'm trying to start a new leaf and shorten my entries here hoping that this new strategy will encourage me to submit reviews of our discussions on a more regular basis (once again), I  will leave out further details about

-- the expedition planned by the magistrate to return the blind barbarian girl to her people.
-- the terrible hardships encountered on the expedition
-- the imprisonment and torture of the magistrate shortly after he returns from the expedition and after he is accused of colluding with the barbarians
-- the survival of the magistrate and his return to authority of the town
-- the preparations made by the town as they are "waiting for the barbarians"
-- the devastation of Colonel Joll's army when they return from their expedition after having tried to do battle with the barbarians   

This review would not be complete without a mention of a very important statement by the magistrate regarding Colonel Joll on page 133 (of my book published by Penguin) and one that I believe reveals the most important theme of the book:  "For I was not, as I liked to think, the indulgent pleasure-loving opposite of the cold rigid Colonel.  I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow.  Two sides of imperial rule."

Looking forward to our next discussion at 6pm at the Freed-Montrose Library on April 2nd of a play titled ROCK 'N ROLL written by Tom Stoppard, the same play that will be performed live by the Alley Theatre during the first part of May of this same year.