The Story of an African Farm (1883)
From Commonplace Book
General notes
- 36-8: The overseer's silver hunting watch, the way it invokes religion fate and history for the boy. Time and apocalypse -- cf. McClintock 1995
- Time reinvoked on 137 at start of part 2
- Kaffir: black South Africans (derogatory now)
- Kraal: enclosure outbuilding for livestock
- Kopje: small hill
- 40 Waldo's sacrifice
- 45-6 as in The Mill on the Floss (1860) the opposition between education and agrarian work even in childrens' understanding
- 66 Waldo reading bible -- cf McClintock 1995 for Waldo and books
- Ch 5 strange/interesting structure
- 76 lyndall's books/bonaparte's phony teaching
- 93 Em swearing she will help the weak against the strong
- 102 Waldo's rejection of god and the mutual incomphrehensibility of experience/ feeling
- 103 Ghosts and guilt like hamlet or lady m then Macb at chapter end
- 109 Waldo reading abt property rights
- 114 Tant throws book at Waldo like John reed in jane eyre
- 119-20 deep time
- 130 a more visceral meditation on the wounds of childhood but reminiscent of Mill on the Floss
- 137 time and internal seasons - there aer 7 stages just as there are 7 in Shakespeare's Ages of Man (though they don't match)
- Also a metafictive moment indicating how the narrative is structured like in ch 5
- why recapitulating bildung that has already happened?
- 139 anticipating lacan mirror stage/self awareness: what were Victorian understandings of this part of childhood dev?
- 140-1 religious print culture: Bible, Jeremy Taylor, Wesley
- 143 book flinging again
- 150 almost a climate change metaphor
- 153 Darwinian faith
- 160 Macbeth again
- 169 art after stranger's fable
- 170 another recursion into Waldo's past, this time diegetic
- 174 Illustrated London News on Gregory's wall
- 186-7 gender (and Robbin island, later mandelams prison)
- 191 Goethe
- 216-17 books/evolution/deep time
- 252 again Waldo's experienced narrated in retrospect through vehicle of letter (though not diegetically offset like Gregory's)
- 253 clerk lighting his pipe with book paper
- 276 Book throwing again, then Shakespeare
- 290 universal unity of souls
