Sedatives and Irony Come

I’d assumed I might rise early on Sunday morning.  I’d headed to bed reasonably early.  I didn’t check the clock on my phone but the sun told me it was well passed “early.”  I tried to read another chapter of my: “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”  Finally Connie and Hilda were off in Venice.  There were some fresh observations of the City of Fortune, but mostly she was pining.  And then the bad news starting coming in about how Oliver’s wife had returned and begun making a fuss.

I know one is supposed to be struck by the unvarnished sex in the novel, though in this day an age it is, of course, rather genteel and proper.  More powerfully noted was just how prevalent and awful the pressures of class were for the English. I finished off thinking about a British friend or two with whom I might want pursue this line.  Just how prevalent is class as a marker in today’s Britain?  In this work there are the clothes and the manners and education, but largely what distinguishes otherwise phenotypically identical people are their accents.  And accents are in the end, mutable.

This must be an entire line of ironic humor in the U.K. for people who fake posh accents and who are discovered to be rather common at the end of it all.  One thinks of Graham Chapman sitting around savoring the word “gorn” and being revolted by the word “tinny.”

The scene between Connie’s father and Oliver the “lover” is an especially notable class confrontation.  Beforehand we’re lead to believe it will simply be a train wreck.  But sedatives and irony come to the rescue.  The father, rather than rejecting the encounter outright lubricates himself to a point of complete inebriation so that he is sufficiently detached to navigate the discomfort he is feeling.  Drunk he’s able to pun about poaching with the gamekeeper, over and over so that they both laugh and as best as possible, bond across the gulf of British nobility.

Sunday, 03/26/17