Sin of the Month • Abby Bardi
	Literature

I was planning to write an incisive, hard-hitting column this month about the state of America today. However, the only thing I can think about is the state of Great Britain from 1830 to 1930.

I am studying for my Ph.D. exam.

You may wonder why I am working on a doctorate in English literature. The answer is that I am insane; too much Dickens has addled my brain, and at some point I seem to have decided that it would be fun to take the study of literature, which I love, to the next level.

However, right now it is not all that much fun. I lie awake half the night pondering the nature of Gothic novel, and after a while I just give up, turn on the light, and read thirty pages of Aylwin, a terrible 1896 novel about a guy with gypsy blood who falls from a cliff and is "lame" for a while, then is inexplicably cured. . . . I fall asleep at that point and invariably dream that I am reading an interminable paragraph by an inscrutable French critic.

I wake up sweating with fear.

Indeed, lately, all my dreams have been constructed like articles by Jacques Derrida. The night before last, I dreamed that a woman on the street stole my money, then handed it back, interspersed with her own money as well as some photographs. I can well imagine that Derrida would have something profound to say about this, but I, who am so much dumber than he, could only wake up going, "Huh?"

This wasn't as bad as the dream I had last week, in which I was literally drowning in a sea of text: I was reading, and as I read, the page got wider, and deeper, until suddenly I was falling into it as it swirled around me like water, and as I plummeted downward, I tried to breathe, and couldn't.

This is a fairly apt description of what my every waking moment will be like for the next month.

But while I complain about it, I realize that there is something truly wonderful about being this absorbed in something. It's like Lamaze–I'm so busy trying to cram all these facts and theories into my head, not to mention the assortment of strange characters who populate Victorian fiction, that I hardly have time any more to notice what the Bush administration is up to, what ridiculous spin they have put on the bad news from Iraq (can you say "Viet Nam"?), how many false economic upturns they have tried to take credit for, how many children they have left behind, etc.

All I can think about is the British Empire of the nineteenth century, its arrogance, xenophobia, and hubris, its confidence that it was the greatest civilization in the history of the world and as such, deserved to colonize all the continents it deemed inferior; its inability to sustain itself as a dominant world power, its ultimate bankruptcy because of wars and the difficulty of its own hegemonic project....

Anyway, it's kind of a relief to reside in another century for a while. The trouble is, the more I read, the less I seem to know, as if my brain had sprung a leak somewhere and was now leaving pools of ideas, like oil stains from cars, on the ground everywhere I go. I imagine that, like oil stains, these ideas are streaked with rainbow colors when the light hits them, right before the rains come and wash them away.

In any case, the ideas are rarely in my head when I want them to be. Last night at dinner, I was trying to talk to my husband about the Gothic novel. "What does the word ‘Gothic' actually mean in that context?" he asked. I had to admit that I had no idea–I had just continually used the word as if its meaning were clear.

So, in the middle of the night, unable to sleep again, I read about the Goths, who were, as everyone knows, warring Germanic tribes of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries, but was still unable to ascertain why and at what point the term "Gothic" had ceased to mean "Germanic" and had begun to mean "Romantic" and "Medieval" instead. I'm hoping that no one asks me this during the exam, which is oral and lasts two hours. I envision it as a police interrogation, where the questioners figure out which books I haven't read carefully enough, which scenes I can't recall, which critics I don't understand, and then probe me with detailed questions until I scream that in fact I am not capable of serious literary study, or even of coherent speech, and then I go home and watch General Hospital, the only artistic activity for which I am truly suited.

In short, I expect a Spanish Inquisition.

And, even though that's irrational and my examiners are kind, reasonable scholars whom I selected for their noble qualities, I'm still scared. Although last week, I had a dream that the exam was almost over, with only five more minutes to go, and I thought, "Wow, that really went well!" Let's hope it was a premonition.

But you never know. Meanwhile, as I hang out with my friends, Al Tennyson, Bob Browning, Chrissy Rossetti, and Chuck Dickens, the twenty-first century goes on without me. And as my pal Matt Arnold said in "Dover Beach" (1851):

"[W]e are here as on a darkling plain,
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night."