Wuthering Expectations

Was it worth the effort? - closing with Pessoa's Message

2012-01-27T09:00:00.000-06:00

Readers curious about Fernando Pessoa, those who plan to read The Book of Disquiet in the near future, for example, but who have been impatient with all of his poetry or my prose will find Carmela Ciararu’s 4,770 words worthwhile. That appears to be a chapter from her recent book on pseudonyms.

I think I’ll end this run at Pessoa with a stumper, the only book of Portuguese poems from Pessoa’s lifetime, the 1934 Message. Edwin Honig and Susan Brown include the entire thing, which only covers 23 pages, in the City Lights Poems of Fernando Pessoa. Plus six pages of notes. It is the only work of Pessoa’s I have seen that, for a non-Portuguese reader, absolutely demands notes, as Pessoa works his way, stanza by stanza, through the succession of Portuguese kings and explorers.

Although, as I leaf through the poem, it looks less obscure. Are young’uns in American schools still taught about the Portuguese explorers? We were back in the old days. And then all of the stuff about King Sebastian – that’s the Battle of the Three Kings! And the sea monster is from The Lusiads. The entire poem is a cryptic Modernist compression of The Lusiads. Still, some obscurity:

First Part: Coat of Arms
II. The Castles
Seventh (II): Philippa of Lancaster

What enigma was borne in your womb
Which bore only geniuses?
What archangel came on a day
To guard your maternal dreams?

Turn your somber visage toward us,
Princess of the Holy Grail,
Mortal womb of Empire,
Godmother of Portugal!

To the notes: 1359-1415, English wife of King João I (ruled 1385-1433, author of The Book of Hunting), six surviving children “were named The Illustrious Generation by Camões.” I guess this is helpful.

King Sebastian, mentioned above, was killed in battle in Morocco but subsequently became a Portuguese King Arthur figure, a hero who would come to Portugal’s aid in dark times. A cult or myth of Sebastianism recurs during difficult periods of Portuguese history, sometimes as political metaphor, and sometimes as something more mystical, which is what gets Pessoa’s attention. Pessoa, who had a longtime interest in esoterica, climaxes the poem with a mishmash of messianic Sebastianism and Rosicrucian symbols (“On the dead and fateful Cross, \ The Rose of the Hidden One”) and the visions of the Portuguese mystic António Vieira. Some of Vieira has only recently been brought into English, in a book tantalizingly entitled Saint Anthony’s Sermon to the Fish and Other Texts.

In summary, no, I do not know what I am talking about.

In the middle of all of this sidewise patriotism and mystification is something else entirely:

Portuguese Sea

O sea of salt, how much of all your salt
Contains the tears of Portugal?
So we might sail, how many mothers wept,
How many sons have prayed in vain!
How many girls betrothed remained unwed
That we might possess you, Sea!

Was it worth the effort? Anything’s worth it
If the soul’s not petty.
If you’d sail beyond the Cape
Sail you must past cares, past grief.
God gave perils to the sea and sheer depth,
But mirrored heaven there.

I am tempted by an allegorical reading of the poem, one more personal to Pessoa than Portuguese seafaring, but I will instead abandon my own navigation of Pessoa here. Until the end of March at least – The Book of Disquiet!

Thank God I cannot know What inside me is going on! - Pessoa the poet

2012-01-26T11:25:00.000-06:00

If I’m then told that it’s absurd to speak of someone who never existed, I reply that neither do I have proof that Lisbon ever existed or that I who write exist, or that anything does, whatever it is.

Just to remind myself what I am up against with Fernando Pessoa. This line is from one of a number of introductions to his Collected Works or Selected Poems that Pessoa wrote, books that never existed during Pessoa’s life, not that I have proof either way. Always Astonished: Selected Prose, tr. Edwin Honig, p. 14, that’s where I found that bit of epistemological skepticism.

The imaginary Pessoa is impossible to separate from the actual Pessoa. The only reason I know that there such a creature should be considered is that Campos and Reis discuss Pessoa, and mention that he, like them, changed poetic directions when he by chance met the shepherd poet Alberto Caeiro and heard him recite his poems. Caeiro, Campos, and Reis are imaginary, so I am taking the Pessoa who lives in their world as similarly situated. But of course the poems of Caeiro and his disciples exist in my world (I have read them, or I believe I have), so the fact that poems attributed to Fernando Pessoa also exist tells me nothing about which Pessoa, the real one or the otherly real one, wrote them.

Half the fun of messing around with Pessoa is writing nonsense like this.

The other half is reading his poems. I think this one, from November 1914, should be taken as a product of Pessoa’s encounter with Caeiro, but it could just as well be the “real” Pessoa writing about his creation of the other poets:

The wind is blowing too hard
For me to be able to rest.
I sense there’s something in me
That’s coming to an end.

Perhaps this thing in my soul
That thinks life is real…
Perhaps this thing that’s calm
And makes my soul feel…

A hard wind is blowing.
I’m afraid of thinking.
If I let my mind go,
I’ll heighten my mystery.

Wind that passes and forgets,
Dust that rises and falls…
Thank God I cannot know
What inside me is going on! (Zenith)

The ellipses are Pessoa's. Feeling against thinking, internal versus external – these are common Pessoan concerns. Campos feels, Reis thinks, Caeiro is, or so he says. The wind that blows through this poem is some expression of psychological unease, one that the poet himself does not understand.

The last lines suggest that he prefers not to understand, which suggests to me that he knows more than he is revealing in the poem. And that is what the heteronyms are for, to allow Pessoa to externalize his internal mysteries, to give him some distance from himself. I guess.

The wind is never stilled. It returns in later Pessoa poems. It is more frightening in this one from 1932, a sign of something dangerous:

The wind in the darkness howls,
Its sound reaching even farther.
The substance of my thought
Is that it cannot cease.

It seems the soul has a darkness
In which blows ever harder
A madness that derives
From wanting to understand.

The wind in the darkness rages,
Unable to free itself.
I’m a prisoner to my thought
As the wind is a prisoner to air. (Zenith)

I overemphasize the playfulness of Pessoa, but his self-fragmentation has a bleaker side. The heteronyms can look like a defense against – I do not know what.

I tell with my thought - sad, cold Ricardo Reis

2012-01-25T10:49:00.000-06:00

Ricardo Reis is the narrowest, most theoretical of Pessoa’s heteronyms. His thinking is pinched; his poems are repetitive. Not only does he only have a few themes or ideas to work with, he could go on at length about why he should be as narrow as he is. “The colder the poetry, the truer it is,” he told Álvaro de Campos (H&B, Poems, p. 126). Roughly speaking, Reis is a gloomy intellectual pagan, Epicurean and neoclassicist who in most of his poems imitates Horace’s odes. He is the kind of guy who talks a lot about hedonism and freedom but never seems to have any fun himself.

I find Reis minor compared to the expansive Campos or the narrow but deeper Caeiro. My judgment is conventional. All three Pessoa collections I have read give the least space to Reis. Two caveats, though. First, perhaps because of his thinness, because he is so easy to define along certain dimensions but otherwise shadowy, later writers have made all kinds of curious uses of him. I should read José Saramago’s 1986 novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, shouldn’t I? And at least one major Portuguese poet, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, has clearly gotten far more out of Reis than I can see. I have just begun to read her – perhaps she will help me read Reis differently.

The second caveat is that minor poets write good poems. Pessoa, as Reis, wrote many.

Lips red from wine,
White foreheads under roses,
Naked white forearms
Lying on the table:

May this be the picture
Wherein speechless, Lydia,
We’ll forever be inscribed
In the minds of the gods.

Rather than this life
As earthly men live it,
Full of the black dust
They raise from the roads.

The gods, by their example,
Help only those
Who seek to go nowhere
But in the river of things. (Zenith)

The last few lines of this 1915 poem reveal the influence of Alberto Caeiro, who helped Reis channel his paganism into poetry. The first verse summarizes the paradox of Reis. The scene at first sounds sensual, even lush, but is revealed to be frozen, lifeless. Campos, an “earthly man,” would not be bothered by some black dust on his forehead. Reis always uses his poems for abstract, ideal purposes.

Some of them are little more than statements of purpose or verse manifestos, like this early one, presumably used by Pessoa to clarify his concept of Reis:

Others narrate with lyres or harps
I tell with my thought.
For he finds nothing, who through music
Finds only what he feels.
Words weigh more which, carefully measured,
Say that the world exists. (Zenith)

Many people would see this as an argument against poetry, however much Reis insists on the importance of form. I am more curious about the early use of “nothing,” a favorite concept (“nowhere” in the first poem) of Reis:

Nothing comes of nothing. We are nothing.
Briefly in sun, in air, we postpone
The unbreathable darkness that weighs us down
And humble earth imposes,
Delayed corpses that breed.
[snip]
We’re stories telling stories, nothing. (Honig and Brown)

“Delayed corpses that breed” is the sort of line that makes me laugh, not cry or sigh or whatever I am supposed to feel, or since this is Reis, think. I laugh with the vivacious Campos.

The Zenith book has minimal overlap with Honig and Brown. Credit to the translators – in both books, Reis sounds like Reis.

Real and metaphysical gibberish in the age of the rubber stamp - Pessoa's great "Maritime Ode"

2012-01-24T10:18:00.001-06:00

“Tobacco Shop,” from 1928, is an example of mature Campos, or mature Pessoa. Post-Boom Pessoa. The Boom was the invention, in 1914, of Alberto Caeiro and the writing of the poems The Keeper of Sheep, and the creation of the Campos and Reis heteronyms and the accompanying poems, especially two long Whitman-inspired poems by Campos, “Maritime Ode” and “Salutation to Walt Whitman.”

Along with the Caeiro poems, Pessoa’s blending of Whitman into his own thought is his most impressive achievement. By impressive, I mean ambitious, or of large scope. Pessoa wrote plenty of interesting short poems, and another impressive long one before he died. I have barely brushed against “Maritime Ode,” and do not plan to interpret it today, so much as to poke at it.

Campos is “Alone, on the deserted dock,” looking “out toward Indefinitude” (?), watching a little steamer approach. “Maritime Ode” is explicitly a descendant of Whitman’s great seashore poems. Pessoa has made Campos a naval engineer by trade, perhaps only because he wanted the writer of this poem to have a direct connection with seafaring. He asks “all you seafaring things” to

Give me metaphors, images, literature,
Because in actual fact, seriously, literally,
My sensations are a ship with its keel in the wind,
My imagination a half-sunken anchor,
My anxiety a broken oar,
And the weave of my nerves a net to dry on the beach.

“[I]n me a flywheel starts spinning lightly,” and the poet launches into an elaborate nautical visionary fantasy, much of which involves pirates (“The Pirate Chief! King of the pirates! \ I pillage, I kill, I tear, I cut everything up!”). Some of this is pretty ridiculous, but the violence and crime becomes more cruel and less cartoonish, until the poet makes a surprising masochistic flip and becomes the willing victim of the violence of the pirates. “Subdue me like a dog you kick to death!” etc. etc. It goes on for a while. I cannot remember a Whitman poem that works itself into such a frenzy, that shrieks like “Maritime Ode.”

The intensity and pain are, fortunately, unsustainable; the flywheel slows, and Campos drops out of the vision:

Ah, how could I have thought and dreamt of such things?
How removed I am now from what I was a few minutes ago!
The hysteria of one’s sensations – first one thing, then the opposite!

The poem continues placidly, even gently, with a visit to a childhood aunt, some marveling at naval machinery and shipping. This is “the age of the rubber stamp,” which does not sound so poetic, but Campos insists, with Whitman’s example behind him, that “Poetry hasn’t lost out a bit!” The poet ends the poem still open to all sensations: “God knows what emotion” might be inspired by a “slow-moving crane” or the glitter of sunlight on the Lisbon buildings.

I have not even gotten to the “real and metaphysical gibberish” – now this is the poet for me! – of “Salutation to Walt Whitman,” which is punchier line for line – “Maritime Ode” is 34 pages in the Honig and Brown collection, “Salutation” nine pages, “Tobacco Shop” six. Richard Zenith’s book omits both “Maritime Ode” and “Salutation to Walt Whitman,” possibly because they are ably translated elsewhere. The two collections work well together. Taking a run at Pessoa without sampling “Maritime Ode” would be a shame.

Look, there’s no metaphysics on earth but chocolates (but not for nonmetaphysical Stevens) - "Tobacco Shop" by Álvaro de Campos

2012-01-23T11:25:00.001-06:00

I’m going to wander through a long Pessoa poem, “Tobacco Shop” (1928), written under the guise of Álvaro de Campos. The translation is Honig and Brown’s, from the City Lights Poems of Fernando Pessoa. Richard Zenith’s version is just as good.

“Tobacco Shop” begins with a typical paradox of Pessoan identity:

I’m nothing.
I’ll always be nothing.
I can’t even wish to be something.
Aside from that, I’ve got all the world’s dreams inside me.

Campos is sitting across the street from a tobacco shop, which is symbolically serving as “reality,” or an anchor to the real, while the poet has some sort of epistemological crisis. Campos was a naval engineer by profession, so I should artfully scatter metaphors like “anchor” throughout my post.

Today I’m mixed up, like someone who thought something and grasped it, then lost it.
Today I’m torn between the allegiance I owe
Something real outside me – the Tobacco Shop across the street,
And something real inside me – the feeling that it’s all a dream.

If the long, prosy lines remind you of Walt Whitman: yes, correct.

The poet has lost confidence in himself, in his art. “I’ve secretly thought up more philosophies than Kant ever wrote down,” but to what purpose? “[W]e wake and the world is opaque.”

I take the poem as a train of thought (cross out “train,” insert, um, “steamboat”) which is intermittently interrupted by an ordinary event on the street, like a girl eating a chocolate: “Look, there’s no metaphysics on earth but chocolates.” For some reason, though, Campos finds even the philosophy of chocolates unsatisfying, failing to provide reassurance. He will die, as will his poems, and even his language, and so on to, in an adolescent touch, the entropic heat death of the universe.

At this point:

a man’s gone into the Tobacco Shop (to buy tobacco?)
And the plausible reality of it all suddenly hits me.
I’m getting up, full of energy, convinced, human,
And about to try writing these lines, which say the opposite.

Campos, of all the Pessoan poets, is the funniest, or at least the one most evidently amused by his own contradictions.

The poet has not quite left his reverie, narcotized by his own cigarettes (“As long as fate permits, I’ll go on smoking”). But he is almost ready to return to ordinary concerns. The man he saw before leaves the shop:

Ah, I know him; it’s nonmetaphysical Stevens.
(The Tobacco Shop Owner comes back to the door.)
As if by divine instinct, Stevens turns around and sees me.
He waves me a hello, I shout back Hello Stevens! and the universe
Reorganizes itself for me, without hopes or ideals, and the Tobacco Shop Owner smiles.

And that’s the end of “Tobacco Shop.”

I find Campos to be the “biggest” of Pessoa’s personae, the one with the most energy, the one who, like Whitman, is unafraid of contradiction. He is a true follower of Alberto Caeiro (“I went off to the country with great plans \ But found only grass and trees there”), allowing things to be themselves, but also a dreamer, imaging things to be other than what they are, at least until nonmetaphysical Stevens brings him back to earth (strike that – drags him back to shore).

I believe in their infinite number - or Pessoa's fun with heteronyms

2012-01-20T11:21:00.001-06:00

The two Pessoa collections I have been thumbing through (Zenith, Honing & Brown) both divide Pessoa’s poems by heteronym; the old and excellent Peter Rickard translation does the same thing. Alberto Caeiro’s poems always comes first. Álvaro de Campos always gets the most pages; Ricardo Reis the least. A highly recommended exception is the Honig and Brown book that assembles Caeiro’s The Keeper of Sheep into a single, separate book.

Even with the Caeiro-only book – no, moreso – the emphasis of the editors is on the character, on the imagined poet. Pessoa-himself fades. Caeiro brightens. This is why I like the Caeiro-only book: Pessoa’s fiction is so convincing. These are just the poems the semi-naïve non-shepherd genius poet would have written. No wonder Reis and Pessoa and Campos were so impressed.

Both Zenith and Honig & Brown preface each heteronym’s section with explanatory material about the poet. Zenith writes his own summary, while Honig & Brown go to the author himself (authors themselves). Pessoa says Ricardo Reis “was born inside my soul on January 29, 1914, around 11 o’clock at night.” An invented brother describes Reis’s philosophy as “sad Epicureanism.” Then Reis describes his own aesthetic and spiritual beliefs: “The colder the poetry, the truer it is”; “I believe in the existence of the gods; I believe in their infinite number, in the possibility of man to ascend to divinity.” All of this is from Poems of Fernando Pessoa, Honig and Brown, pp. 125-6. Edwin Honig’s selection of Pessoa’s prose, Always Astonished (1988), has more more more of this stuff.

All of this phony biography and positioning and commentary comes before the poems themselves. The editors seem to think it is important to know beforehand. This is an amusing challenge to readers who dismiss any interest in the biography of the author, and a different challenge, also amusing, to readers who demand a biographical capsule before starting any new author. Here is the biography and more, but all invented. Or ignore the biography, and miss much of the intent and inventiveness of the actual author.

Well, in reality, we can read in multiple ways, yes? The imagined author, the real author hidden by the imagined, the text as such. Pessoa gives the reader more to play with, not less.

The great question is what creative problem the heteronyms solved for Pessoa. The primary problem must have been idiosyncratic, a search for a means of expression that could contain his ideas. But I think there was another purpose. Pessoa was, like many of his conceptual peers, obsessed with artistic “movements,” Symbolism and Futurism and Cubism, that sort of thing. All of these were imports into Portugal.

The cluster of fictional poets allowed Pessoa to immediately create his own Modernist Portuguese movement. One poet becomes four; the surviving poets (Caeiro unfortunately died in 1915, soon after writing the Keeper of Sheep poems) could then behave like members of a movement, promoting or arguing with each other. I do not believe that Pessoa ever expelled any of his creations from the movement which would have been a good joke, especially if the poet he expelled had been Fernando Pessoa.

The movement, as such, is Sensationism, which I will summarize with these lines of Caeiro’s:

To think a flower is to see it and smell it
And to eat a fruit is to taste its meaning. (IX, H&B, 17)

and then with any luck I will never mention Sensationism again. I am not so interested in “movements” or schools, but I am not a conceptual artist.

Next week, poems, just poems.

Conceptual Pessoa - no need to read him; just read about him

2012-01-19T11:37:00.003-06:00

Everyone who writes about Fernando Pessoa spends too much time describing the heteronyms, his stable of invented poets who wrote real poems. Critics and translators have trouble moving from the concept of Pessoa’s poetry to the poems themselves. The English-language collections I have been reading include substantial supplementary prose, often by Pessoa (or Reis, or Campos), explaining or mystifying the different characters. I include myself – see today, see yesterday, see, I would guess, tomorrow. When, last spring, I spent several days writing about the poems of Alberto Caeiro while pretending that I did not know that he was an invention of Pessoa’s, I was in part trying to move away from the heteronyms and spend some time with the poems as poetry.

Alternately, writers spend, if anything, too little time on the nature of Campos and Reis and the dozens of other Pessoa names. Readers skeptical of conceptual innovations might ask if there is any need to read any of the actual poems. The concept of the poet-turned-dramatist, who creates a little universe of poets who know and write about each other, and who writes poems in their voices or from their aesthetic stance – is this idea not entirely graspable from its description? Does it matter at all, for the concept to be useful, if the poems are any good, or if they exist at all?

By which I mean: a budding conceptual poet (or painter, or composer) could very well read about what Pessoa did and extend the idea into his own work without knowing a thing about what Pessoa wrote. Why not attribute paintings in different styles to different imaginary painters, each with their own biography and aesthetic stance, why not invent critics to misunderstand the paintings?

Creating the artworks, the real poems by imaginary poets, is actually a different idea than simply positing their existence. If nothing else, it makes the joke funnier. I am thinking of a conceptual artist like Tom Friedman – imagining a self-portrait carved out of a single aspirin is funny, but creating such an object is even funnier (search for “bust”).

Although the writing of the poems was important for Pessoa, it is not at all clear how much their publication mattered. It is unfortunately even less clear for me as I read the English collections of his work, since the translators are often vague about the wheres and whens of publication. Am I reading something that Pessoa published in one of the literary magazines he helped found himself, or in someone else’s magazine, or is this one of the texts from the huge volume of unpublished manuscripts Pessoa left behind?

The Book of Disquiet, I remind myself, was not published until 45 years after Pessoa’s death. Pessoa did publish a substantial amount of magazine writing, criticism and essays and poems, but he only finished four books, all of them more like chapbooks: two little collections of English poems – Pessoa had written poetry in English since he was a child, Antinous and 35 Sonnets, both appearing in 1917, another English-language collection in 1920, and a peculiar nationalistic mini-epic, Message, from 1934, which was “awarded a prize by the Ministry of national Propaganda, under very special circumstances” (Honig & Brown quoting Pessoa, p. 222). Pessoa planned to publish a larger collection of his poems, but died in 1935, age 47. His bibliography now resembles that of his contemporary Franz Kafka, a mix of the published and unpublished, the complete and incomplete, the public and private.

At some point I should try to get to the poems, and ignore or at least suppress the cloud of text that surrounds them.

The poet is a faker \ Who’s so good at his act - a start on Pessoa

2012-01-18T11:44:00.001-06:00

I have been reading Pessoa, and thinking, if that is not too strong a claim, about his poems and his project. The examples I wrote about Monday and yesterday have certain Pessoan qualities to them.

Fernando Pessoa had been interested and had written in pseudonyms from an early age, but in 1914 he made or had a conceptual breakthrough, quickly writing a series of poems as if they were written by a fictional poet, a poet with his own biography and distinct philosophical and aesthetic ideas. That poet was Alberto Caeiro, the naïve shepherd poet, the poems the bulk of The Keeper of Sheep.

At this point, Pessoa was not doing anything much different than writing in character, like Robert Browning writing dramatic monologues or a playwright creating a character. The result was impressive – I think the poems that resulted are themselves extraordinary, certainly much more interesting than what I have read of Pessoa’s earlier poetry.

The next step, though, is the wild one. Having summoned one poet, he quickly conjured a couple more, both of whom, in their fictional (but also real) writings claimed their Caeiro as life-changing, inspirational forebear. The classicizing neo-pagan doctor Ricardo Reis was one poet; the ecstatic naval engineer Álvaro de Campos was another. Pessoa wrote – and published – essays by each poet, discussing the influence of Caeiro on their work, and arguing with each other’s interpretation of their master. At one point they even interview each other. They both agree that Fernando Pessoa is a peculiar fellow who completely misunderstands Caeiro.

Autopsychography

The poet is a faker
Who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.

And those who read his words
Will feel in what he wrote
Neither of the pains he has
But just the one they don’t.

And so around its track
This thing called the heart winds,
A little clockwork train
To entertain our minds.

This is a Fernando Pessoa poem written in 1931, after Pessoa had been working on his heteronyms for fifteen years. I like this Richard Zenith translation, and its forthright emphasis of the poem’s central paradox, better than its competition.*

“Fernando Pessoa” has at this point become another heteronym, another mask. Attaching the name of Pessoa to a text simply means that the actual Pessoa is working with that particular character. The real Pessoa, for example, actually wrote the poems of Alberto Caeiro. The character Pessoa did not, and in fact is a disciple of Caeiro, just like Reis and Campos. All three had their (fictional) lives changed by a lucky encounter with (fictional) Caeiro and his (real) unpublished poems, inspiring their own new and superior (real) poems.

If the poems were no good, none of this would matter much. The most amazing feature of the conceit is that it resulted in great poems, and allowed the real Pessoa to be a great poet. The second most amazing thing, to me, is that Pessoa was able to successfully create two quite different fictional great poets (Campos and Caeiro), one promising but self-limiting minor poet (Reis), and another messy, irritating, but occasionally brilliant one (Pessoa).

My plan is to keep writing about Pessoa until he exhausts me.

* Zenith’s version is on p. 247 of Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems (1998); an alternative on p. 167 of Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown’s Poems of Fernando Pessoa (1986 & 1998). These are the two books of poems I will use as I mess around with Pessoa.

Eça de Queiros and his doubles - cluck-cluck-cluck, cluck-cluck-cluck!

2012-01-17T09:00:00.000-06:00

Here’s another example:

Eça de Queiros and some of his prankster pals published, in 1869, a set of poems under the name of Fradique Mendes, Portuguese knockoffs of Baudelaire and other French avant-gardists. Decades later, Eça resurrected the poet, making him the ideal post-Romantic type of the Great Man, brilliant and elegant, like the protagonist of The Maias but with more energy and talent. The eventual result was a short novel-like object, The Correspondence of Fradique Mendes (1888/1901), which pretends to be a collection of the letters of this exemplar, preceded by the author’s, Eça’s, own encounters with and biography of him.

The first joke is that “Eça” discovers Fradique Mendes through his only published works, those poems, “a revelation in art, a dawn of poetry coming into birth to bathe young souls in the light and special warmth to which they aspired” (5). The second joke is thus Eça turning himself into the absurd devotee of poems he wrote as a gag.

The letters themselves, full of anecdotes, sketches, jokes with punchlines, witty asides, overheated rhetoric, and nothing resembling a story. Some of the letters are addressed to real people. Eça de Queiros can express outrageous views while hidden behind Fradique Mendes:

A man should only speak with impeccable assurance and purity the language of his own country; all the others he should speak poorly, poorly but proudly, with the flat and false accent that immediately marks him as a foreigner… His patriotism disappears, diluted by foreignness. (73-4)

But of course, the witty and ironic Fradique may not mean a word he writes; the letter ends with conclusive evidence of his “admirable aunt who spoke only Portuguese (or rather, the Minho dialect).” Wherever she traveled:

[she] would call over the waiter, fix her sharp and meaningful eyes on him, and squat gravely on the carper and imitate, with a slow puffing up of her ample skirts, a hen in the act of laying as she shouted cluck-cluck-cluck, cluck-cluck-cluck! (75)

And she always got her eggs.

The example I want to keep is that of the novelist coming up with a fictional mouthpiece, a common enough practice, but then pairing him up with a parodic version of himself, perhaps still common, but then making both character and narrator so inscrutably ironic that the author is not only free to express his most deeply-held views, but also their opposite, and, why not, some other ideas that no one believes, but are amusing.

Gregory Rabassa gave this novel its English debut. I wrote at some point that I was not so concerned with where to start with a writer like Eça, but I would like to amend that opinion: do not start with Correspondence of Fradique Mendes. The jokes are of the inside variety – I guess an outside joke is merely a joke. The way to join the jokes on the inside of this novel is to read a lot of 19th century French poetry and a stack of Eça de Queiros novels, two good ideas.

It is easy to fill up the space when you get to make everything up. - Stone Arabia's rock star

2012-01-16T09:00:00.000-06:00

Here’s an example:

Nik Worth was a Los Angeles rock musician who almost made it big with his New Wave band The Fakes, circa 1980. When the Fakes split up, so does Nik, into the “real” Nik, who tends bar, and the Nik who became a famous rock star. Stone Arabia (2011), the Dana Spiotta novel starring Nik, is a fantasy novel of the non- magical variety. Nik had always kept elaborate scrapbooks documenting his life and work (the Chronicles). So he does not stop; that is all there is to it:

Nik’s Chronicles adhered to the facts and then didn’t. When Nik’s dog died in real life, his dog died in the Chronicles. But in the Chronicles he got a big funeral and a tribute album. Fans sent in thousands of condolence cards. But it wasn’t always clear what was conjured. The music for the tribute album actually exists, as does the cover art for it… But the fan letters didn’t exist. In this way Nik chronicled his years in minute but twisted detail. The volumes were all there, a version of nearly every day of the past thirty years. (37)

The material evidence, the music and album art and press materials, of the existence of Nik’s alternative life is central to the concept:

After he left, I put on Nik’s fake illicit record. He has made a gorgeous little cardboard digipak for the CD. It was deliberately sort of rough, so it would look like a bootleg. He had several fake “unauthorized” labels; this was a Mountebank Industries release, which meant it was acoustic demos, not a live concert bootleg… Nik said he had to tolerate these little sub-rosa products – after all, the fans demanded more than the bands could officially release. (129)

The novel actually begins with the ten-year-old Nik’s cartoon journal, with “elaborate ink drawings of dogs and cats behaving like far-out hipsters” (1). He might have become an artist if his part-time father had not given him a guitar. Nik develops a real talent for songwriting, which leads to bands, and LPs, and an agent, and a crash. But something about Nik’s creativity does not really require any of the external signs of success that he has not created himself. He can record music, draw posters, write reviews, and be interviewed (by himself). See pp. 42-43, where his frustrated sister comments “It is easy to fill up the space when you get to make everything up.” I am not sure that she is right about that.

The novel is set in 2004, twenty-five years after Nik’s bold creative move, or breakdown, or whatever it is. He is turning fifty. It is time to wrap up the persona; that’s the plot of the novel, or Nik’s plot.

Stone Arabia is narrated, or “written,” by Nik’s perplexed and forgiving sister. She has her own problems – fear of aging, misplaced sympathetic energy, information anxiety – none of which I found half as interesting as Spiotta’s exploration of Nik Worth’s uncompromising private creativity, although the novel clearly needed a more ordinary point of view to tell Nik’s story. I wish the narrator were a better writer (she’s OK – see above, that’s all her), although that might violate the concept. She is Nik’s audience, almost the only person who hears his music and reads his Chronicles. I mean the “real” Nik’s audience. I mean the other Nik. I mean both, I guess.

Regardless: I want to keep Nik’s example in reserve this week.

A Dorrit miscellaney, with rambling, backtracking, and a well-marked and necessary spoiler alert

2012-01-13T09:00:00.000-06:00

1. I have been coming at Little Dorrit from a funny angle, worrying about characters and gentlemen, when the great thing about this novel, I mean aside from the usual virtues of Dickens, is the language, the intense and complex pattern of imagery that he creates and sustains. The first chapter is titled “Sun and Shadow;” it is set, once we wander past a bird’s-eye view of Marseilles, in the cell of a “villainous prison.” Sun, shadow, prison – these three basic concepts, in the right hands, turn out to be almost sufficient to carry an 800 page novel. The combinations of the idea are complex, more than the ideas themselves.

2. A couple of years ago I was startled by the number of prisons and prisoners I was encountering in French literature, and I wondered about their absence from English literature. Absence outside of Dickens, that is, and, curiously, the poetry of Emily Brontë. Little Dorrit is full of prisons: literal prisons, for crimes and debts, a parrot cage, prison-like non-prisons (a Swiss monastery), and figurative prisons: poverty, or senility, or being an invalid, confined in bed, for example. Innumerable creative variations on the theme.

Bleak House is constructed like this, too (with a different pack of images and rhetoric), in its omnisciently narrated sections at least, and I expect Our Mutual Friend to be built of similar stuff. These novels are superb handmade objects.

3. So why do I dwell, in what I write, on the weaknesses of Dickens, or of the problems he is trying to solve? Because I simply assume that he is the world’s greatest novelist. I am creating a vague mental weighted index of social reach, human insight, complexity of pattern, linguistic daring, humor, and so on – breadth, depth, scope, reach. All the good stuff fiction writers do. Balzac’s social acuity is comparable, and any number of novelists are sharper thinkers than Dickens. He has few rivals in rhetorical range – just Victor Hugo, perhaps – or in the ability to define characters (the minor characters) so quickly and permanently. A reader who gives far more weight than I do to, for example, depth of thought will calculate the index rather differently.

4. Lionel Trilling, in his 1952 introduction to the Oxford Illustrated Dickens edition of Little Dorrit, wonders why “of the three [big late novels] it is perhaps the least established with modern readers” (v). I like that neutral word: not least “liked” but least “established.” Perhaps that is the other reason I have been poked at the deceptively gray central characters. Why does nobody care about Little Dorrit? Or care enough, or care about it relative to Bleak House or Great Expectations.

Now that I have read the book, I care a lot about how it was put together, why certain passages work so well, and even how Dickens uses the characters and rhetoric to achieve emotional effects that still work, even with all of my distance. I do not think there is as uplifting a moment in Dickens, no, in all of English literature, as when, on the last page of the book, (spoiler alert!) our heroine takes the initial steps of her new life as the first and greatest of all Victorian lady travelers, Dorrit the Explorrit.

It's my intent to be a gentleman. It's my game. - Dickens solves another problem

2012-01-12T09:00:00.000-06:00

Where is that thing I wrote about Dickens and gentlemen? No, it was Trollope, wasn’t it? Let me check the archives – Margaret Oliphant, of course. I had a point back then that comes up in Little Dorrit.

My point is: Charles Dickens, for all of his sympathy for the deserving poor, had trouble imagining his way past the idea of the status of the gentleman. Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9) is the example I always revert to, where a central problem for Nicholas and his sister is that they have to work below their station; similarly, although David Copperfield may believe that no boy should work in a factory, he seems to believe in particular that no boy of his upbringing should do so.

Possibly the problem for Dickens was not one of politics but of art – how to move past received ideas of gentlemanly status not in life, but in fiction. Regardless, Little Dorrit contained a surprise for me: a direct assault on the idea of the gentleman, or at least a newly complicated understanding of the concept.

See the villain of Little Dorrit, Rigaud, for example:

'Haha! You are right! A gentleman I am! And a gentleman I'll live, and a gentleman I'll die! It's my intent to be a gentleman. It's my game. Death of my soul, I play it out wherever I go!' (Ch. I.1)

This declaration is on page 9 of the edition I am reading. Rigaud is, at that moment, in a French jail cell, awaiting trial for murder. The prison theme and the gentleman theme are chained together right at the beginning of the book.

The more complex and pathetic player of the “game” of gentlemanliness is Little Dorrit’s father, the longtime inhabitant of the debtors’ prison, who maintains a fiction of gentility at the expense, primarily, of his daughter. Everyone participates in the farce – here the prison turnkey describes Mr. Dorrit, jailhouse celebrity:

'Brought up as a gentleman, he was, if ever a man was. Ed'cated at no end of expense. Went into the Marshal's house once to try a new piano for him. Played it, I understand, like one o'clock – beautiful! As to languages – speaks anything. We've had a Frenchman here in his time, and it's my opinion he knowed more French than the Frenchman did. We've had an Italian here in his time, and he shut him up in about half a minute.’ (I.6)

The business about French and Italian turns out to be foreshadowing. In Rome, hundreds of pages later, we finally see the destructive toll of Mr. Dorrit’s desperate attempt to convince himself that his birth and ed’cation mattered more than anything he actually did with his life.

His daughter, Little Dorrit, embodies a transcendence of class status. She is a believer in works, not faith. Dickens has been moving towards this ending over the course of several novels. As Little Dorrit ends, not every piece is in its place, not every problem has been resolved. Amy Dorrit ends the novel as (spoiler alert!) Agent Dorrit, crisscrossing the globe in pursuit of the most dangerous enemies of the Crown. Or if not that, with “a modest life of usefulness and happiness” (last paragraph).

On to the next character in Little Dorrit - failed benevolence

2012-01-11T11:35:00.000-06:00

How does plot affect character? The events of a story can change a character, or reveal character. Or do nothing, I suppose, as is all too common. I suggested yesterday that Dickens used the plot of Little Dorrit to reveal the complexities of the title character. Amy Dorrit becomes more interesting as I see her from new angles.

The host of ombhurbhuva, in a comment on that post, suggested that Amy was particularly interesting “because of her lapses in serenity and her opposition to the fatuity of the rest of the Dorrit clan.” As the story progresses, Amy’s circumstances change, wildly, but she always has lapses in serenity – but new kinds of lapses; she always stands opposed – but in new ways – to the fatuity of her family. She looks different in light than in shadow, to follow one of the themes of Little Dorrit, but is recognizably the same person.

Well, it is clear enough how I read. I am trying to get a good look at the patterns the author is creating. In big, mature Dickens novels like Bleak House and Little Dorrit, the variety and intricacy of the patterns are amazing.

The hero of the novel, Arthur Clennam, also looks more interesting as the plot moves, but the pattern is the inverse of the heroine’s. Little Dorrit turns out to be bigger than she first appears, more full than the old type of Dickens heroine. Arthur turns out to be smaller than he first appears.

A great flaw of many of the earlier Dickens novels is the clumsy use of jolly, benevolent, independently wealthy, charitable men, practitioners of the Philosophy of Christmas*, who can end a novel by cleaning up the mess, rewarding the good and improving the less good. Sometimes the device leads to a great character (Mr. Pickwick), but sometimes it is not only dramatically flat but vaguely creepy (the Cheerybles in Nicholas Nickleby). In Bleak House, Dickens successfully complicated the device, and I think he is doing something similar in Little Dorrit. Arthur aspires to be a benevolent Dickens character, but fails.

His story presents him with a series of attempts to improve the lives of others; he proceeds to botch each one, usually even misunderstanding the problem. For example, back in England from China after twenty years, Arthur becomes convinced that his parents did something long ago to injure William Dorrit, trapping him in the debtors’ prison. Mrs. Clennam is employing Little Dorrit as a seamstress – ah ha! – presumably to assuage her guilt. Arthur will right the wrong! But his efforts go nowhere (although he coincidentally causes others to act), in part because he misinterpreted every available clue.

Arthur is not a lot of fun to spend time with. He is resentful, depressive, and fails at every significant attempt at benevolence. He is eventually crushed and redeemed through suffering, giving him just enough strength to (spoiler alert!) survive the climactic, house-shattering battle with Little Dorrit’s malevolent twin, Anti-Dorrit. But for me, seeing how Dickens creates the pattern of Arthur’s repeated well-meaning failures, and how it is the pattern that reveals Arthur’s character more than any individual scene, was interesting enough.

* Borrowed from Chapter II, “Benevolence,” p. 52, of The Dickens World (1941) by Humphrey House. The great Dickens idea is “all-the-year-round Christmas.” Aimed at almost any other writer, this would be a devastating criticism.

I care about Little Dorrit - many light shapes did the strong iron weave itself into

2012-01-10T10:36:00.001-06:00

Most Dickens novels have memorable but otherwise useless titles. I mean, Nicholas Nickleby is a name that sticks, but gives no hint about what it is the book. I have a tag for each novel that helped me keep them straight before I read them. Still helps, actually. NN has abusive Yorkshire schools, Martin Chuzzlewit goes to America, Little Dorrit is the debtors’ prison novel.

Little Amy Dorrit was born in the Marshalsea Prison, where her typically useless Dickens father has been imprisoned for twenty-three years.* So Amy is an adult, twenty-two when the novel begins, although people often mistake her for a child. It is the father, not the daughter, who is the debtor, so although Amy lives in the prison she can leave it to earn money which she uses to support, at various times, her frivolous but spirited sister, her useless brother, and, always, her parasitical father. Little Dorrit is little, symbolically, because of her self-sacrifice and the exploitation by her family, physiologically, because of malnutrition during childhood.

How does Dickens make the virtuous Amy Dorrit interesting or “real,” to the extent that she is (frankly, she fades in and out a bit)? He has a couple of tools. First, and more interesting to me, but perversely what I do not want to write about, is the symbolic world that Amy creates for herself. We do not cling to her thoughts like we would in a Woolf novel, but we do see what she sees:

Then she would flit along the yard, climb the scores of stairs that led to her room, and take her seat at the window. Many combinations did those spikes upon the wall assume, many light shapes did the strong iron weave itself into, many golden touches fell upon the rust, while Little Dorrit sat there musing. (I. 24).

Dickens rings a dozen changes on this passage, Amy’s view of those spikes, but I picked this one because it is followed by Amy’s Parable of the Princess and the Shadow, a story she tells, and another way Dickens defines Amy’s character by describing the symbolic world she creates herself (and shares with the symbolic world of the novel).

The other trick Dickens has, one that I now see is characteristic of his late novels, is to complicate her virtue. Amy is too self-sacrificing, too good, and the novel is ethically complex enough to recognize that this is a problem, that Amy, to use current lingo, enables some of the worst behavior of her father and other relatives. Readers looking for Strong Female Characters will find her frustrating: no one is stronger, but her strength is misapplied, and she has no interest in independence. Little Dorrit has a caring temperament, and would have been, for example, an outstanding nurse – she is akin to a number of characters in the Elizabeth Gaskell stories that Dickens was editing and publishing at the time. But she has allowed her family, her father especially, to manipulate her sense of duty.

For the first half of the novel, Amy is martyr to her family, which, for all of her strength, damages her. About halfway through, Amy is relieved of her labors, but is also no longer able to be a caregiver, which turns out to be even worse for her, psychologically (I am simplifying a little – e.g., the love plot, her homesickness). This is now an interesting character, yes? And all done with plot, plot used to test or highlight character. The heroine grows in complexity as the plot unfold.

A disadvantage: she is thus not all that interesting early on, and I am not sure the balance Amy achieves at the end of the novel is as satisfying as it could be, although I am pretty sure that Dickens is deliberately maintaining some of the complications rather than brushing them all away as he would in one of his early novels – “the noisy and the eager, the arrogant and the forward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar” (last line).

Still, it is enormously satisfying when, at the end of the book, Little Dorrit, finally escaping from the draining leeches who have always surrounded her rapidly becomes (spoiler alert) Giant Dorrit. The final chapter, when Amy wades into the estuary of the Thames and single-handedly demolishes the invading Russian fleet, and final scene, when the Queen awards Amy the Victoria Cross (a forgivable anachronism), are triumphs.

* I was saddened to learn that, despite the closure of the Marshalsea in 1842, obooki is currently imprisoned there.

Nobody cares about Little Dorrit

2012-01-09T11:52:00.000-06:00

The nobly suffering character, not the novel, Little Dorrit (1855-7). My title is the only distinct line I remember from the teacher of a long-ago undergraduate English class, Modern British Novels (Dubliners, Mrs. Dalloway, The Good Soldier, and several more). For the proper effect, read with an exaggerated comic sneer, emphasis on “nobody” and “Little Dorrit.”

Now, my professor did not exactly mean it. We were working on the question of interiority and roundedness, how the techniques of Woolf and Joyce, with the voice of the author as such suppressed as much as possible, could make their characters, not such obviously interesting people on the surface, seem to alive and “real.” The professor was presumably also cheating by subtly playing up our preference for serious-minded Modernist stringency as opposed to soft-minded Dickensian sentimentality. Imagine Conrad or Joyce naming a character “Little” as anything but parody! Little Nell, Little Jo, Little Dorrit – Dickens means something by it.

I wonder, now, how many of my fellow students even knew what the prof was talking about, how many knew who or what Little Dorrit was? But a good teacher not only cultivates knowledge but scatters seeds by the fistful.

Ironically, Little Dorrit is, for a Charles Dickens heroine, not so bad. The books hero is also not so bad. If the two central characters are still less interesting (round, alive, “real”) than those of the typical Thackeray, Eliot, Trollope, Gaskell, or Brontë novel, or, more to the point, of the earlier Bleak House or the later Great Expectations, progress is at least visible. The protagonists are now Dickens characters, not plagiarisms of Walter Scott. Actually, this had been true for a decade of Dickens novels, since Dombey and Son (1847), but Dickens is still improving.

I am only worrying here about the protagonists, of course. A dozen of the so-called minor characters are typically brilliant – Flora Finching and Mrs. F’s Aunt (“Bring him for’ard , and I’ll chuck him out o’ winder!”), for example. As if to remind us his previous insipid heroines, Dickens even includes one in the background, the hideous Pet Meagles, “a fair, fresh, pretty girl.” Not one of those, ugh!

The technical challenge in this novel was to give the less eccentric characters, Little Dorrit and Arthur Clennam, some kind of novelistic life without the advantages of the first-person narration of David Copperfield and Bleak House, and with a couple of serious handicaps: the hero is well-meaning but useless, the heroine useful to the point of martyrdom. And Dickens only has limited facility with the “free indirect” tool, the one that Joyce and Woolf use to do such extraordinary things, that Gustave Flaubert is at this exact moment perfecting with Madame Bovary (1856-7). How does Dickens do it?

I guess I will write about Little Dorrit for a while longer. I do not care a lot, but I care. How I wept when, on the last page of the novel (spoiler alert!), the ever-shrinking Little Dorrit finally vanished with a barely audible “pop.”

They had no choice: it was, after all, that or nothing - Juan José Saer’s The Witness, a novel found on many lists

2012-01-06T13:39:00.001-06:00

I am tempted to write more about book lists, but will restrain myself, by which I mean, save it for later, and try to write something about an actual book I recently read, Juan José Saer’s The Witness (1983), one more example of the Argentinean Literature of Doom. The novel is, it turns out, one of the 1,001 Books I Must Read before I Die, and I am thus almost 0.1% more reconciled to my death. I will bet you that I picked the book off of a different list, a critics’ poll of The 100 Best Novels in Spanish Language, 1981-2006, in which The Witness is #12.

A 16th century Spanish cabin boy is captured by Amazonian cannibals. He lives with them for ten years. The novel is his account, written many decades later, of his time with these people. So on the surface it appears to be a historical novel that nods at Robinson Crusoe, or is perhaps a revisionist history of the conquest of the Americas. It is not, not really.

Saer’s book is a full-fledged novel of ideas, sub-category: linguistic and anthropological. The author makes no attempt to mimic the language or mindset of an early modern writer. The historical details are minimal, and not the result of hours in the library. Or not in the history section – I would guess that Saer ground through a shelf or two of ethnography and linguistics, plus an additional stack of Claude Lévi-Strauss. If I knew what was in The Raw and the Cooked (1964), I could say that I found it in The Witness, but in fact I am just guessing.

What Saer needed from the 16th century Amazon was cannibals, so he set the story where he could find them. He needed a society that was recognizably alien, so he could give it a special problem:

Their principal problem was the outer world. They could not, as they might have wished, see themselves from outside. (128)

One way the narrator serves as the witness of the title* is that he helps the Indians see themselves from outside. He helps them confirm their own existence:

There is no equivalent in their language for ‘to be’. The closest equivalent they have means ‘to seem’… [‘Seems’] implies an objection rather than a comparison. (130)

Saer uses this novel to explore a people and society with a epistemological problem: a radical uncertainty about their own existence, and the constant threat, with one mistake, of non-existence:

Even if it was unrewarding, they constantly worked at making that one known world real. They had no choice: it was, after all, that or nothing. (132)

My quotations have all been from the end of the short book. Near the beginning is a single long scene, about a fifth of the novel, of a wild orgy that moves from roasted human flesh to alcohol to sex, all in large, life-threatening quantities, a society-wide Rimbaud-like derangement of the senses. This strange and horrifying event is the narrator’s introduction to these people; the rest of the book is his attempt to make sense of it, to understand the problem the Indians are trying to solve.

If all of this sounds interesting, it is; if it sounds tedious, yes, a bit; if Saer’s fictional anthropological case study sounds like something other than what fiction does best, I have my doubts, as well. But I did find the ideas and the path Saer took through them to be quite interesting.

Richard (Caravans de reuerdos) wrote some interesting things about another Saer novel, La Glosa (1986, #75 in the poll, so not as good as The Witness), and here's a Spanish literature student working on The Witness in some productive ways.

Margaret Jull Costa was, inevitably, the translator.

* The English title, I mean. Doesn’t El Entenado actually mean The Stepson?

Read The Book of Disquiet - before you DIE!

2012-01-05T11:51:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, after putting up my invitation to read The Book of Disquiet along with whatever group of sharp characters plans to join in with me, I discovered that the novel-like non-novel has been included in the last couple of editions of the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. So I used this as a marketing hook in my Twitter promotional effort, under the untested assumption that some readers out there somewhere are neurotically working off of (surely not through) this list.

I think this was my favorite joke (de-Twittered just a bit):

Imagine the poor reader, trapped in his deathbed, who has read all 1,001 books except #PessoaDisquiet. He feebly turns the pages of the Richard Zenith translation, but his eyesight and concentration are insufficient for the difficult concepts and miniscule type of Pessoa’s text. His strength wanes; the book slips from his fingers; he feels the icy shadow of Death approach, knowing that he ends his life unloved, and badly read. Just one book short of being well-read, actually.

Do not be that reader.

Perhaps others are not so amused by the title of that book as I am. The official position of Wuthering Expectations is that there is no book that a generalized “you” must read before “you” die. Specific “you”s will want to consult a religious authority within “your” faith for some important exceptions. Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet will not be among them. I can come up with a long list of shoulds, but no musts, and even the shoulds need to be preceded by ifs. E.g.: If you are at all interested in literature, you should get to know some of Shakespeare’s plays.

Not that I am knocking the Must Read book as such. It is a list among many lists, but a pretty good one. The accompanying website has a nifty gadget to search the list by date, language, nationality, and so on. I find sixteen books in Portuguese, the oldest being The Lusiads, The Crime of Father Amaro, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, and Dom Casmurro, outstanding choices. Then a standard cluster of Portuguese and Brazilian Modernists: Amado, Lispector, Guimăres Rosa, Saramago, and Lobo Antunes (plus Pessoa). And then two novels by Paulo Coelho, about whom I will admit suspicion but plead ignorance. I doubt that the typical purchaser of Before You Die is quite so fond of avant garde fragmentation and alienation and extremely long paragraphs as this list of authors would suggest, but this is a great list for me.

The Must… Die list also includes a number of oddities I never see anywhere else, which I wish someone else would read and tell me about. Who is up for Emilio Salgari’s The Tigers of Mompracem (1900), the second of an eleven-volume series about the adventures of a Malaysian pirate? See left, and do not miss this amazing page of Salgari’s Italian book covers, provided by his current English-language publisher. I would also like to hear, from a reliable book blogger, something about Ivan Vazov’s 1888 Under the Yoke, the classic Bulgarian epic.

Why did I write this? Oh yes, to encourage morbid neurotics who read in order to make checkmarks in spreadsheets to read The Book of Disquiet with me. To encourage other people, too.

It is more difficult to be someone else in prose - the Book of Disquiet readalong.

2012-01-04T10:05:00.003-06:00

I am thinking March, aiming at the last week of March, as a good time to write about The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa’s semi-fictional non-novel un-diary. Whatever it is. I invite anyone interested to join in however they like.

The Book of Disquiet is only a novel in the sense that we now stretch the word “novel” to cover unclassifiable fictional objects. The book has no obvious story, no plot, or characters aside from the narrator, but is instead a series of observations, sketches, and aphorisms, the diary of a Lisbon bookkeeper, Bernardo Soares. Pessoa wrote that Soares has Pessoa’s style, but was “distinct from me in ideas, feelings, modes of perception, and understanding.”* So the book is a fictional exercise of some sort.

I am in large measure the very prose I write. I punctuate myself, and, in the unchained distribution of images, I wear newspaper hats, the way children do when they play at being king; by making rhythm out of a series of words, I crown myself, the way mad people do, with dried flowers that remain alive in my dreams. And above all, I am tranquil, like a sawdust-stuffed doll, which, having acquired awareness of itself, shakes its head from time to time so that the bell on its pointed hat plays something, life rung by the dead, a minimal warning by Destiny. (152-3, Alfred Mac Adam translation)

Please see this essay at Vapour Trails for more Disquiet.

The What-is-it problem is worse than it seems. The Book of Disquiet is unfinished, perhaps never meant to be finished, and was unpublished until 1982, forty-seven years after Pessoa’s death. The order of the elements of the book cannot be established with certainty. The text is not stable.

The book’s English history is odd, too. Four versions exist (Richard Zenith, Alfred Mac Adam, Margaret Jull Costa, Iain Watson) all of which were published in 1991. That must have been handy for book reviewers. The Zenith version is the longest and most complete, including fragments and appendices and so on. I will be reading Alfred Mac Adam. The thing I want to emphasize is that these are not just different translations, but translations of different texts, different orderings and excerpts of the mass of material.

I see this as an opportunity for a group read, not an obstacle. With many readers, it might be possible to see more than I can by myself. The Book of Disquiet is a perfect candidate for many readings, and many kinds of reading. Seraillon recently finished it, over the course, he says, of two months (about four chapters a day). Another reader may want to guzzle Pessoa, or just read fragments, such as the samples of The Book of Disquiet found in Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown’s Poems of Fernando Pessoa (1986) or Honig’s Always Astonished: Selected Prose (1988).

Pessoa wrote and even published one more ordinarily fictional piece of fiction, the 1922 story “The Anarchist Banker,” a thirty page short story of ideas that has characters and dialogue and even a story, the story of how the anarchist became a banker, and why the banker is still an anarchist. Read that instead. Or, like me, also.

OK, March. The end of March.

A couple of other readalong opportunities will intersect with Wuthering Expectations: Bolaño's The Savage Detectives (see Caravana de recuerdos and in lieu of a field guide) and Our Mutual Friend (see The Argumentative Old Git). The former has more of a schedule, while the latter does not. When I finish Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend, I will have read every Dickens novel. How many pages into Little Dorrit was I, by the way, before I realized that “Dorrit” only had one “t”? (Answer: 200). What kind of an English name is that?

* This quotation, and the post’s title, are from the fragment of Pessoa’s “Concerning the Work of Bernardo Soares” found on p. 209 of the Honig and Brown Poems of Fernando Pessoa.

A year of good .... reading AHEAD - revisiting my New Year's resolutions

2012-01-03T09:00:00.000-06:00

Happy 2012! Blogging vacations stave in my writing. Last year, to cooper the writing barrel,* I uncharacteristically resorted to New Year’s resolutions. What would happen if I revisited them?

1. “I vow not to write bad prose this year.” What was I thinking. See two resolutions down for the grisly results. I remind myself that resolutions are aspirational. I did what I could. This resolution is promoted to 2012.

2. “I’ll read Middlemarch.” And I did. Tess of the d’Urbervilles advances to the #1 pre-20th century British literature most-famous-book-I-ain’t-read slot. For some reason, this does not irritate me as much as not knowing Middlemarch; nor does my lack of significant Zola, or the Henry James perplex. The resolution served its purpose and is retired.

3. “Finish fewer books.” Meaning not what I wrote but: abandon more books without finishing them. Accomplished, although a disadvantage of the practice is that I have trouble remembering exactly which books I abandoned. My memory palace is built for completed books, it seems. Promote this one, too. Abandon even more books. Abandon even better books.

4. “Write about music more.” Jane Austen’s songbook. A passion based on Hans Christian Andersen. Massenet’s Thaïs. I actually wrote, and deleted, an entire additional piece about Thaïs, tracing the musical motifs, which was valuable to write and deadly to read.

I wonder why more people do not write posts like these. The key, for someone like me with only basic technical knowledge, is to write about music that has a text. The connections between opera and literature are particularly rich. Opera is just theater.

So more of this, more, more! Something about Richard Wagner, maybe, or Charles Ives, The Concord Sonata, say. What else would be fun?

5. “Write shorter posts.” Another triumph! This is turning into one of those humblebrags. I have been aiming at 500 words and staying under 600 when I want. Going over when I want, too, but that has been rare.

The great advantage of writing a serial is that I can advance the beginning of an idea and receive feedback, spurs, corrections, and taunts, often from comments, always from myself, which may well improve the next day’s writing. One decent idea at a time, that’s enough writing for a sitting.

Last year’s resolutions post was exactly 500 words long (that is just a regular old brag).

Tomorrow: plans.

The Federal Art Project poster atop the post is borrowed from the Library of Congress. It depicts, with uncanny precision, the way I bring books home from my own library during the long winter.

* This metaphor is terrible. The attempt to use a more original, vivid verb in place of “hurt” is not by itself so bad, but once I had used it I felt the need to continue the conceit, because I had now conjured the smashed barrel, and, well, the wreckage you can see for yourself. And thus, I demonstrate what vacations do to my writing.

The Wuthering Expectations Lifetime Writing Plan

2011-12-22T11:20:00.000-06:00

Writing, blog writing, my own writing, is a difficult subject, almost a book blog taboo. You tread lightly just to say you dislike a book I like; how much more difficult to politely suggest that my argument is trivial and my writing is bad, which it often is. We cannot all be Anecdotal Evidence or Pykk.

So I continue the slow work of identifying and stripping out the fluff, filler, and gibberish that I see, retrospectively, everywhere in the writing at Wuthering Expectations, while at the same time pursuing ideas to something closer to an end point, rather than abandoning ideas as soon as I identify them. Blog writing lends itself to – probably should be – loose, but a writer should still be able to follow a thought.

With a mix of planning and luck, last winter I pointed myself in a direction that felt like “forward.” The key text was Flaubert’s blood-soaked Salammbô, not one of the year’s best books, perhaps even a bad book, but one that was enormously fun to write about. I loathe the word “read” as a noun, the ill-defined “good read” cliché, but I assume that people who use the term are trying to get at some aspect of the experience of reading a book that is independent of the qualities of the book itself. If I include writing about Salammbô as part of the experience of reading it, the book was a blast. A good write. Oh, ugh, ouch!

Flaubert was surrounded by a cluster of French books – Maupassant’s stories, Hugo’s Les Misérables and William Shakespeare, Gide’s Immoralist, Charles Péguy and Anatole France, culminating in the madness of Alfred Jarry. A side trip led to A Tale of Two Cities and early British science fiction - H. G. Wells, Richard Jefferies and Samuel Butler. Most of the books I mentioned are second tier, at best, but they made satisfyingly impressive noises when smashed together.

However well written these pieces might have been, I had a good time writing them. Les Misérables was an interesting case. Because of its bulk, I had worried that it would be difficult to write about coherently, but in fact Hugo’s wealth of stuff made the writing all too easy. I just planted some flags as I read, picking out especially rich spots to which I could return. Sewers and barricades; short, punchy sentences; long, twisty sentences. What more do I need from an author for a week of posts than one great sentence? Hugo gave me thousands of them. And then, generous soul that he was, he gave me thousands more not-so-great sentences, and to add to the piquancy of existence, a handful of stinkers.

What more am I trying to do but write one great sentence? It is like a dang grail quest: perilous, endless, ridiculous.

My title is a parody of the post I wrote this time last year, like this post written just before my vacation. I’ll be back on January 3, maybe. Merry Christmas! Thanks for all of the help this year.

The Wuthering Expectations Best of 2011, if I remember correctly

2011-12-21T09:00:00.000-06:00

I have an irritating mental block in which it feels like everything I read before I went to France this summer was read not this year but last year, as if years are now six months long. A Wuthering Expectations Best of 2011 is thus helpful to me – oh yeah, Les Misérables, that was good!

1. In early January, I re-read Aeschylus. The best book I read all year was The Oresteia. Why pretend otherwise. I just barely wrote about Aeschylus.

2. Occasional bookish collaborations are the way to go. They focus my mind and define my audience. It helps to know that at least one clearly identified person will be carefully reading my ravings about Alfred Jarry. To my delight, many people joined in the Anything Ubu Readalong Opportunity, to the extent that the best excuse to root around in my Ubu posts is to find the links to other, better pieces, of which there were many. The Ubu plays themselves represent, of course, the death of literature – after this, the Savage God, as Yeats put it. And yet here they are on my Best of list. Someday when I have recovered my strength and I will read them again.

3. The same collaborative principle applies to much of my reading in Portuguese literature, but this has been recent and I am hardly done, so I will just thank everyone who has joined in so far and remind potential readers that the novels of Eça de Queirós and Machado de Assis have been winning fans wherever they have been opened. I rank The Maias most highly among the Eça de Queirós novels, and Dom Casmurro among the Machado, but in both cases on such narrow technical grounds that I am not sure there is any point in pursuing the issue. They have both been outstanding authors to read in depth.

4. Les Misérables, now that was a good novel.

5. I cannot describe how much I have been getting from the John Ruskin I have been reading. I mean that literally – I cannot, and I have not. This year I read the second and third volumes of The Stones of Venice and the third volume of Modern Painters and feel that I am overwhelmed by Ruskin’s ideas, good and bad. Perhaps these ideas are being skillfully and subtly woven into the very fabric of Wuthering Expectations. Yes, that must be it.

6. In January, I wrote a little piece about Vladimir Nabokov’s novels, and about bibliographing nicole’s chronological attempt on them. I read the first five this year, but I do not believe I wrote a word about them here. I would now single out Nabokov’s third novel, The Defense, about a mentally troubled chess genius, as his first masterpiece, a complex overlay of patterns that had no precedent. Whether or not it is enormously meaningful, I am less sure, but it is an utterly extraordinary artistic object.

7. While I am on the subject of books I did not write about here, Interpolations Kevin spurred me to read J. M. Coetzee’s Foe, his deconstruction of Daniel Defoe’s novels. I wrote about it, but only at his place. Why not.

8. Those early, Flaubertish stories of Maupassant’s, those were really good. Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and Brand. The third edition of Leaves of Grass. That scene in Le Grand Meaulnes where the puppeteer knocks the stuffing out of a doll, fills it with porridge ("with doleful little cries"), and hurls it into the audience. That bit of The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc where Joan becomes a saint through sheer force of will. The artfully detailed disgust of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.

Now I am just wandering. Not so bad, not so bad.

The Best Books of 1861 - Yet if ye will but stay, whom I accost, And listen to my words a little space

2011-12-20T09:00:00.000-06:00

What an amazing run the Victorian novel had from 1859 to 1861, or, really, from 1847 ( the annus Brontëus) through the 1870s. Amazing in the quantity and quality of books of books that are still read, and not that the French and Russian and even, finally, American literatures of the period are insufficiently bulky.

This is only partly due to the irritatingly productive Anthony Trollope, who finished Framley Parsonage in 1861 and began serializing Orley Farm. I am not sure how often the latter is read, but the former has survived pretty well. Charles Dickens finished Great Expectations. George Eliot published Silas Marner. Margaret Oliphant wrote her first Carlingford stories. This is a good haul, I would say, without having to resort to – I am on Wikipedia, 1861 in Literature – Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne or Thackeray’s Adventures of Philip.

One more wonderful piece of English, or semi-English, literature dates from 1861, the first version of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Early Italian Poets, a book of translations of 13th and 14th century poems. The centerpiece of the book is a complete translation of La Vita Nuova, Dante’s – the other Dante, the Dante-Dante – peculiar blend of prose and poetry celebrating his love for and mourning his loss of Beatrice:

Yet if ye will but stay, whom I accost,
And listen to my words a little space,
At going ye shall mourn with a loud voice.
It is her Beatrice that she hath lost;
Of whom the least word spoken holds such grace
That men weep hearing it, and have no choice.

NYRB has kept Rossetti’s version of The New Life in print. Much of it, I would guess, is unsurpassable.

Let’s see. Emily Dickinson was writing energetically, to the knowledge of no one. Incidents of the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs, now one of the most-read slave narratives, is from this year. Frankly, the Civil War seems to have done in American literature for a few years.

I have no idea what was good in the French literature of 1861. That Wiki page includes George Sand’s wacky Consuelo, but that is wrong by almost 20 years. Come back next year for 1862. Good, good French stuff in 1862.

Dostoevsky’s The Insulted and the Injured in Russia (I have not read this one). The symbolic patriotism of Gottfried Keller’s The Banner of the Upright Seven in Switzerland (I have read it, and recommend it to the most dedicated readers of Keller). Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald’s Kalevipoeg, the Estonian national epic. Sorry, the what? Now I am itching, ridiculously, to read the thing.

I expect most of these books to still be on this list when I repeat this exercise 50 years from now. In the face of books as strong as Great Expectations and Silas Marner, 50 years does not sound so long.

The 1861 painting up top is John Morgan’s “Gentlemen of the Jury,” borrowed from Wiki.

The Best Books of the Year - 1811 - I shall not cease from Mental Fight

2011-12-19T09:00:00.000-06:00

I love Best of the Year lists, and believe that they are valuable, even if they do not quite do what they think they are doing. For example: let us look back 200 years and catalog the Best Books of 1811.

As usual for the first couple of decades of the 19th century, the bulk of the Top 10 action is in German literature, where three major, long-lasting books were produced:

1. The second volume of Heinrich von Kleist’s short stories, which included his longest piece of fiction, the novella Michael Kohlhaas. Kleist ended the year by shooting himself in the chest.

2. The novella Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. Aside from the difficulty of the author’s preposterous name, I do not know why this story, among the greatest fantasies of the century, is so little known in English. Fantasy stories are still popular, I believe. This one, about a water spirit who falls in love and becomes more or less human for a while, is light and fluid and not burdened with allegories of Kant or Masonic flimflam like some fairy stories I could mention. George MacDonald called it the ideal fairy tale, which it is.

3. The first volume of Goethe’s autobiography, Poetry and Truth. I do not remember how far he gets in the first part. The childhood section is a marvel, even delightful. Much of the recent movie Young Goethe in Love is presumably drawn from this memoir. Goethe was 62 or so when this book was published.

German “Top 10 of 1811” lists, if there had been such things, would have regularly included these three books. Kleist would be more common on the lists of young firebrands, who might well omit Goethe to declare their independence from orthodoxy. The omission of Undine by the avant or rear-garde would simply have been a failure of judgment.

What else was going on in 1811? Napoleonic France was for some reason bad for literature, so I do not know of anything there. American literature, by which I mean lasting literature, had not quite been born yet, although I am sure a number of highly praised poems about Niagara Falls were published.

I wonder what the English Top 10 lists would have looked like? Novels were not quite respectable yet, and crackpot visionary poets much less so, so the two greatest works of the year would have been omitted.

The image atop the post is the title page of William Blake’s Milton: a Poem. One might note the 1804 in the lower left and wonder why I place the poem here. My understanding is that Blake had been working on the poem since 1804, and that complete versions of these extraordinary handmade objects did not exist until 1810 or 1811. And then I am arbitrarily picking the latter. This is as good a place as any to remind myself that although I do double-check dates and so on, these year-end wrap-ups likely include some pretty grim errors.

Milton: A Poem is among the less complex of Blake’s mythological poems, which does not mean that I remember it well , or that the summaries I have used to jog my memory have been much help. The spirit of Milton enters Blake’s foot and is united with his Female Principle? ???* Even if the entire poem is rarely read, the preface is the source of a genuinely famous poem, “Jerusalem” (see left):

I shall not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

As famous now, more famous, is the only English novel of the year whose title or author mean a thing to me. Sense and Sensibility, by “A Lady,” was published in 1811, and I amuse myself thinking of how baffled all but a few readers of the time would be at the book’s life, that it is not only read 200 years later, which is rare enough, but hugely popular, both beloved and esteemed, while so many books that got so much more attention have been forgotten.

Which 2011 Top 10 list includes our contemporary Sense and Sensibility?

The Blake images are borrowed from the Milton page of the William Blake Archive.

* ?????

If we can just get through this, maybe everything will be all right - my Russell Hoban appreciation, featuring windup mice and Samuel Beckett

2011-12-16T10:30:00.001-06:00

Russell Hoban passed away earlier this week. He wrote some picture books about a badger, and the funny and dazzling Riddley Walker (1980), a post-apocalyptic novel written in an imaginary English dialect. I want to say something about a different book, one of my favorite books. This one:

The Mouse and His Child (1968) is a story about windup toys, rats, tramping, frogs, and infinity. The title characters are a single windup toy (see map, lower right) who have a series of adventures on their way to enlightenment, by which they mean self-winding. For example, they join a traveling theater company that is performing Samuel Beckett’s The Last Visible Dog:

“The bottom of a pond,” squawked Euterpe: “mud, ooze, rubbish, and water plants. Two tin cans, standing upright, half buried in the mud at center stage. At stage left, a rock. A head rises from one of the tin cans. It is the head of Furza. The head of Wurza rises from the other tin can. Gretch enters stage right and crosses to the rock.”

“Some play,” said the rabbit, who was Gretch. “I don’t get any lines until the third act. All I do is stand on that rock.” (Ch. IV)

The Mouse and His Child is the only children’s book I know that features a Beckett parody. The novel is in fact philosophical and allusive, although subtly so. It is full of little gifts for children that they will perhaps not unwrap until decades later.

In Chapter VI, the mice find themselves underwater (see map, upper right corner), in the company of a dog food can, a snapping turtle, and a larva of some sort, Miss Mudd. The turtle is a practitioner of Zen (“That’s it,” said Serpentina. “Nothing is the ultimate truth.”), although he seems to have been corrupted by self-interest, or years in the muck, while Miss Mudd is a sort of practical Romantic who eventually moves to a higher stage of existence.

A great treat of this book about anthropomorphized animal characters is how much they behave like the animals they are. I am still in the pond in Chapter VI, where Miss Mudd has eaten the last scrap of paper on the shiny tin:

“Ah,” [the child] said, “there’s nothing on the other side of nothing but us.” Miss Mudd looked at herself in the tin, then covered her face and turned away.

The mouse child felt himself fanned by a current of water as a large-mouth bass swam past him and glowered at the tin can. “Move along, buddy,” the fish said to his own reflection. “I’m nesting here.”

“You’re talking to yourself,” said Miss Mudd, stepping aside as the bass struck at her.

Animals kill and are killed in the novel, so adults with weak nerves should be careful. Children will be fine:

Two passing tadpoles swam between him and the BONZO can, where they encountered a water snake. “This way, please,” said the snake, and swallowed them.

“It looks bad,” said one of the tadpoles as they disappeared down the snake’s throat.

“You never know,” said the other. “If we can just get through this, maybe everything will be all right.”

A 2001 edition replaced Lillian Hoban’s illustrations, the ones I feature here, which should be a desecration, but in fact David Small’s new pictures are wonderful. I failed to mention that The Mouse and His Child begins and ends at Christmas. The newer edition, or a ragged old one, like mine, would be a nice gift for a readin’ kind of kid or grown-up.

The glassy glitter of the cheap metaphors I loved - how The Land at the End of the World is written and why

2011-12-15T14:49:00.001-06:00

When I described Lobo Antunes’s The Land at the End of the World as a war novel yesterday, I was employing shorthand, just as when I called Cardoso Pires’s Ballad of Dogs’ Beach anti-mystery a mystery. Both novels are about the thing they appear to be about, but also distance themselves from their subject by means of literary style.

The method of Lobo Antunes is particularly wild. Not only does he create distance by putting the narrator in Lisbon in 1979 while describing Angola in 1971, an old tactic, but he smothers his stories, both the one about wartime boredom and horror and the other about the meaninglessness of the narrator’s post-war life, in what he calls “the glassy glitter of the cheap metaphors I loved” (68).

The fourth page of the novel, for example, about how the young chap used to live near the Lisbon zoo:

Ticket-takers have “blinking myopic owl eyes.”

When tigers roar wax hands “shudder in arthritic terror” and clay statuettes of priests rattle “as if they were struggling to digest one too many cookies.”

Camels’ “expression of profound boredom lacked only a managerial cigar to complete the look.”

“Seated on the toilet, where the final remnant of a river in its death agony uttered intestinal gurglings, you could hear the laments of the seals, whose excessive girth prevented them from swimming down the pipes and out through the taps, grunting like impatient math examiners.”

That last one shows the commitment Lobo Antunes has to his metaphors. To the imaginative reader, the world of the novel now includes cigar-smoking camels and seals popping out of water faucets – seals who sound like math teachers! Whatever grim grittiness I might expect from a war novel is hidden under all of this other stuff, of which there is a massively disorienting quantity – four out of five sentences. Or nine out of ten.

… the bathroom is an aquarium of tiles… my arms wave spasmodically like the boneless farewells of octopuses… my eyes resemble the sad, bulging eyes of the sea bream on the kitchen table… I am dissolving [in the tub] as I imagine fish do when they die in rivers… (162)

The character is at this point sitting on his toilet looking at himself in the mirror. The layered metaphor – the transformation of tentacles into “boneless farewells” – is again evidence that the narrator is really imaging the octopus, that the metaphor is not just thrown away. He needs the second metaphor to properly describe the first metaphor, which he needs to tell us how his arms look in the mirror.

Why he needs any of it is another question. The novel is the story of a terrible wartime experience, but it is also simultaneously the story of the invention and deployment of two hundred pages of original, often absurd, metaphors (“I feel like a horse with my snout in the nosebag of my vodka, munching the sour hay of my lemon slice,” 55), a dozen or two on every page.

It is unbelievable. I can barely follow it. Lobo Antunes slips from the “real” to the imagined and back so frequently and with such enthusiasm that I sometimes lost track of which plane I was on. In fact I was on both, simultaneously, just as I was in Lisbon and Angola, and in the narrator’s thoughts and on his date. The broken detective novel of Cardoso Pires circled around its central ideas without looking at them directly, creating a source of negative space for them, while the author of The Land at the End of the World seemingly spoke freely, while seeming to want to escape from his own story by creating an independent imaginary world.

Fascinating books, both of them. A round of reading of post-Salazar Portuguese novels would be hugely rewarding, that is clear enough, although I suppose I will now retreat again to the jolly, comfortable 19th century.

You'll be amazed how fat I've gotten - The Land at the End of the World by António Lobo Antunes, a Portuguese war novel

2011-12-14T10:17:00.001-06:00

Bad critical practice here. I am going to write about a book I have not finished. I want to follow a thematic connection with Ballad of Dogs’ Beach.

The narrator of The Land at the End of the World by António Lobo Antunes (1979) spent two years in Angola as an army doctor at the tail end of the Angolan War of Independence (1961-1975). The novel, the narrator’s monologue, is a blend of his war experiences, which range from stultifying to nightmarish, and his life in Lisbon, also dull and horrific, although horrible in a different, self-inflicted way:

Life lived against the current does, however, have its disadvantages: my friends gradually distanced themselves from me, annoyed by what they considered to be an emotional frivolity bordering on dissolute vagrancy. My family recoiled from my kisses as if from a bad case of contagious acne. My professional colleagues gleefully put out the word that I was a dangerous incompetent… (143)

I need those ellipses as Lobo Antunes is one of many Modernist long sentence fiends. His primary method is the abuse of commas. See pp.117-23 for a particularly effective and dramatic example, where multiple planes of action (surgery on the victim of a mine; a cheery letter to his wife) are hammered into what pretends to be a single sentence (the reader is free to pencil in ordinary punctuation) in the most expertly Faulknerian manner, best to just plunge in:

… one day I’ll take a photograph of myself and you’ll be amazed how fat I’ve gotten, two Coramine tablets and three Sympatol in the hope that I won’t lose the pulse as rapid and tenuous beneath my fingers as a bird’s heart, Slow march and at ease panted the second lieutenant on the Ericeira Road, a line of exhausted cadets on either side of the tarmac beneath the icy March rain… (123)

And all of this is supposedly being directly spoken to a woman in a bar the narrator is trying to pick up! And he succeeds, and takes her home, and sleeps with her, and sees her out, and never stops talking. The unremitting and allusive flow of talk, combined with the narrator’s loathing for Portugal, or perhaps for everything, often reminded me of Thomas Bernhard, but I have a hard time imagining one of Bernhard’s characters using his ranting as a tool of seduction.

I find it ridiculous here, too, but I actually interpret the river of memory and images and bile as something going on in the narrator’s head. Fragments of the bar and bedroom leak into his thoughts; fragments of his thought leak back into his drunken conversation with the woman. No need to be too literal.

Perhaps in the part of the novel that remains for me, all of this will be undone, or the narrator will tell us about the super-horrible atrocity he witnessed, which would destroy part of the effectiveness of the novel, so I doubt it. The narrator’s personality is shattered by a series of ordinary atrocities and military absurdities. He now numbs himself with booze and anonymous women. The author, who the narrator closely resembles in biographical detail, also began writing novels. The Land at the End of the World, his second, made his reputation.

Portugal, Europe's Best Kept Secret - a first try at Ballad of Dogs' Beach by José Cardoso Pires

2011-12-13T15:51:00.000-06:00

The books at hand is Ballad of Dogs’ Beach: Dossier of a Crime by José Cardoso Pires, published in Portugal in 1982 to acclaim and prizes, translated by Mary Fitton and published in English in 1986 to somewhat more muted acclaim. I vaguely remember this book getting some attention long ago. It is a good one, but a tough nut.

The novel begins with a body – it is, in some sense, a murder mystery. We are reading a police document, apparently, “BODY OF UNKNOWN MAN \ found, Praia do Mastro, 3^rd April, 1960,” followed by fifteen numbered descriptive details (“10 perforation of oesophagus”) and then a note on the surroundings: “Shreds of clothing at no great distance, torn by dogs.”

But then the document ends, followed by white space. A distant third person narrator takes up the description, looking at the stray dogs and rubbish and an out-of-place travel poster “in English: PORTUGAL, EUROPE’S BEST-KEPT SECRET.” Now there is an example of what we call foreshadowing. The Portugal of Salazar’s rigid dictatorship is full of secrets, although many of them turn out to be badly-kept.

A detective novel needs a detective. There he is, on page 5, Inspector Elias Santana, nicknamed Graveyard. Pale, near-sighted, digestive troubles, and one weirdly long and polished pinky fingernail, which creeps out the main female suspect for the entire book. He is who we spend the book with, when we are not leafing through the dossier:

‘Today’s the day we receive a kick in the pants from the corpse, my friend. How’s that for a novelty?’

In the cage, listening, was a lizard. Either listening or feigning sleep, you couldn’t tell. He was a big lizard, the colour of sand, and Elias called him Reptile. He lay as if permanently poised for flight, head motionless, neck extended, long black claws spread and gripping strongly.

‘And you, with your reptile thoughts,’ Elias told this one and only confidante, ‘you could not care less.’ (7)

The kick in the pants is that the corpse turns out to be an army officer who had been arrested for his part in an attempted military coup but had recently escaped. The case is political, the secret police will take it over, and it is unclear why Graveyard should bother making an effort to solve the case.

He does solve it, though, almost immediately, because of the lucky capture of one of the conspirators, the victim’s stunning mistress. Not that the reader learns the answer. Every piece of information is delivered obliquely, in the wrong place, wrong in an ordinary detective novel, which, to my joy, Dogs’ Beach is not. The mystery of this mystery is the motive of the detective. His questions are his own. He does not blow the lid off of a conspiracy or take down a corrupt general. He explores his folder of documents, and the crime scene, and Lisbon (Dogs’ Beach is an outstanding Lisbon novel) looking for something only incidentally related to the case.

As a detective novel, the whole thing is likely a failure. As a political novel, a novel about life under a stagnant and oppressive regime, it is a great success; I have never read a book quite like it.

Animals were so clearly just themselves - wandering in the woods with Jim Harrison's Farmer

2011-12-12T11:46:00.000-06:00

Kevin, at Interpolations, suggested folks read Jim Harrison’s Farmer (1976), so I did. I’d never read him before. The short novel makes a nice companion piece to Jean Thompson’s Iowa novel The Year We Left Home – Harrison’s Michigan novel could be re-titled The Year I Stayed Home. Actually, in the first chapter, we see that our hero Joseph has, in fact, left home, or at least gone on vacation for the first time in his life, so never mind. The Year I Left Home works for this novel, too. Joseph just has to work out a few minor issues before he can leave home. Death, love, vocation, that sort of thing.

Joseph spends a lot of time wandering in the woods, hunting and fishing and looking around. I would have been happy if the novel had been nothing but, like a book-length version of Hemingway’s “Big Two-Fisted River.” Just one of these after another:

One afternoon he had been lucky enough to see a Cooper’s hawk swoop down through the trees and kill a blue-winged teal. The other ducks escaped in a wild flock circling the pond twice while the Cooper’s hawk stood shrouding its prey with its wings. Joseph watched it feed on the teal’s breast then fly off to a large dead oak to preen. It was far too spectacular to be disturbing. (15)

A water snake swam past the boat; the doctor poked at it with the tip of his flyrod and the startled snake turned and hissed. Then it continued on its way, leaving an S-shaped miniature wake in the water. (102)

Man in nature – the “man” part is what makes it literature. Harrison’s novel is about Robert Louis Stevenson’s “ennobled lemurs,” a more humanistic investigation of human animalism than Zola’s Thérèse Raquin:

Animals were so clearly just themselves, much more so than humans. He liked the idea that man was the only mammal that thought of himself as part of a species. (42)

The best ideas in the novel are about Joseph, or Harrison, investigating the relationship between his animal self and his “ennobled” self, how a sexual affair with a student* relates to his love of Keats and Whitman, or why he will hunt grouse (“splendid dinners wandering around in the forest waiting to be gathered and eaten”) but not woodcock or deer. What strange animals we are.

I guess Hemingway never wrote a story called “The Big Two-Fisted River,” but he should have. Someone should. I am thinking of the one he did write, with the similar name. “Hearted,” not “Fisted.”

* Poking around, I have of course come across comparisons of Farmer with Lolita, reminding me of how utterly, shamefully ignorant many people are about Nabokov’s novel.

The pure aesthetic sensation of cruelty - the humane and inhumane Machado de Assis

2011-12-09T10:33:00.001-06:00

I want to look at one more Machado de Assis story before setting him aside for a while, another of his at least sixty masterpieces of world literature. It is Machado’s clearest statement about human cruelty. No one is in favor of cruelty – no, perhaps Céline and similar authors are in favor of cruelty – but many are indifferent. The narrator of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881) is indifferent, and not just because he is deceased. Machado can seem indifferent, or even cruel; “The Hidden Cause” is a cruel story.

A young doctor, Garcia, by chance encounters an older man, Fortunato, who has rescued the victim of a random stabbing. Fortunato assists Garcia in treating the man’s serious wounds. Garcia is impressed by Fortunato’s fortitude and dedication in the face of danger and pain. He can tell, though, that something is odd about Fortunato, “that the human heart is a well of mysteries.”

The doctor and Fortunato eventually found a hospital, and the doctor falls in love with Fortunato’s young, beautiful wife – heaven forbid we do not have this plot in a Machado story. The doctor again observes Fortunato’s unswerving dedication to his patients:

He flinched at nothing; there was no disease too painful or repellent; he was ready for anything, at any time of the day or night. Everyone was amazed and delighted. Fortunato studied and followed the operations, and no one else was allowed to apply the caustics.

The story has five pages left, so the title’s “hidden cause” had better appear soon. It does, in a scene from which I will refrain from quoting. Detailed, Saw-like torture of a mouse, that is what is in the scene. I have moved past the ‘orrible bits to get to the point:

Garcia, facing him, managed to control his disgust at the spectacle and observe the man’s expression. No anger, no hatred; just a vast pleasure, quiet and profound; what you might get from hearing beautiful sonata, or looking at a perfect piece of sculpture – something like a pure aesthetic sensation.

I had better stop, since one more ‘orrible bit follows. Fortunato’s wife is tubercular, and the story ends with a final demonstration of the hidden cause, one equally horrible but not grisly:

The kiss burst into sobs, the eyes couldn’t hold back the tears, which flowed thick and fast; the tears of silent love and irremediable despair. Fortunato, at the door, where he had stopped, quietly savoured this explosion of moral pain, which lasted a long, long, deliciously long time.

That last line is, I think, the only point in the story where the point of view fully meshes with that of the sadistic Fortunato. “Deliciously” is his word.

Machado’s cruel story does not condemn the sadist or argue with him. It simply exposes him.

I am looking at A Chapter of Hats: Selected Stories, translated by John Gledson. The same story is translated elsewhere as "The Secret Heart."

What a gulf there is between the spirit and the heart! - Machado's pessimism

2011-12-08T11:32:00.001-06:00

I would like to write something about the pessimism of Machado de Assis. I fear I lack the necessary philosophical foundation. It is easy enough to see that the philosopher in Quincas Borba, creator of the doctrine of Humanitas, is a kook – “To the victor, the potatoes!” is a summary of his beliefs. It is only slightly harder to do the tiniest bit of research and discover that Machado is satirizing positivism and Auguste Comte, which is pretty much a dead end for me.

The introduction to the Oxford University Press edition (tr. Gregory Rabassa) tells me that Quincas Borba has been interpreted as an allegory of the 1831 to 1889 reign of Emperor Pedro II. You do not say. That would be about as fruitful a path for me to pursue as a critique of positivism. What can I do here.

That line in the title is the first sentence of the single paragraph that is Chapter II. In Chapter I we learn that Rubião has just inherited a fortune, and that he would not have done so if events had not gone his way:

“See how God writes straight with crooked lines,” he thinks. “If my sister Piedade had married Quincas Borba it would have left me with only a collateral hope. She didn’t marry him. They both died, and here I am with everything, so what looked like misfortune…” (end of Ch. I)

The ellipses are where Rubião’s selfish feelings (“heart”) collides with his guilt (“spirit”) over enjoying the deaths of his sister and friend. He tries to distract himself by concentrating on a canoe that is floating by – “What a fine canoe!” But his heart “let itself go on beating with joy.”

Much of Machado’s pessimism or cynicism is little more than a clear-eyed view of human nature. Rubião is hardly a bad person, at least not the sort of monster Machado would portray in Dom Casmurro, his next novel. Quincas Borba, with all its variety of characters, may have no bad people, although each character is selfish in his own unique way. One minor character even approaches selflessness:

In spite of her cousin’s resistance, Dona Fernanda stayed on for Maria Benedita’s convalescence, so cordial, so good, so merry that it was a delight to have her in the house. The happiness of this place made her forget the unhappiness of the other, but when the new mother was fully recovered, Dona Fernanda turned her attention to the sick man. (Ch. CXC)

That Dona Fernanda eventually remembers the unhappiness of another is, in Quincas Borba, a moral triumph. That sick man is Rubião, who does achieve an escape from his egotism, although not in a way anyone would want to imitate.

In the last chapter, the narrator stands at a distance from his text:

Weep for the two recent deaths if you have tears. If you have only laughter, laugh! It’s the same thing. The Southern Cross [invoked early in the novel]… is so high up that it can’t discern the laughter or the tears of men.

Bras Cubas is dead, Dom Casmurro is deluded or even insane, and the narrator of Quincas Borba chooses the point of view of the stars. From far away, crooked lines look straight.

That’s what you would have seen had you read slowly - Machado insults me

2011-12-07T11:39:00.001-06:00

Quincas Borba, the mad Brazilian philosopher, is a secondary character in Machado’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1881). He appears in Machado’s next novel as well, Quincas Borba (1891), although the title may well refer to his dog, also named Quincas Borba (“I will survive in the name of my dog,” Ch. V).

Borba’s philosophy is some sort of extreme version of “everything happens for the best”: “His last words were that pain was an illusion and that Pangloss was not as dotty as Voltaire indicated” (Ch. XI). What happens in the novel that bears his, or his dog’s, name is that he dies, bequeathing his enormous fortune and his dog to his nurse, a 41 year-old nebbish named Rubião.

Newly rich, Rubião moves to Rio de Janeiro where he lives in luxury, is fleeced by opportunists, and begins to believe that the dog Quincas Borba actually is the deceased philosopher, or contains his spirit, or something like that, but anyway now talks to him. He also falls in love with the first woman he meets, who is unfortunately for him married and faithful, more or less.

As with Machado’s other mature novels, Quincas Borba is fragmented: 201 chapters in 267 pages. Unlike Bras Cubas or Dom Casmurro (1899), this novel is in the third person, with an intrusive narrator, which we all know is the worst of all possible narrators. Actually, most of the novel is written in a typically Flaubert-like manner, with the point of view centered on a single character at any given point, but hopping around from chapter to chapter, e.g.:

CLXXXVI

“It’s clear to me, Dr. Falcão was thinking on the way out. “That man was the lover of this fellow’s wife.”

That is an entire chapter, and close to our entire time spent in the thoughts of this character. Where Machado’s first person novels crush minor characters under the egotism of the narrator, Quincas Borba breathes life into many characters, including, as one might guess, a dog. The purpose of that interfering narrator, besides joking around, is to break up the ordinary novelistic narrative. Just as I think the novel is about Rubião’s pathetic pursuit of a married woman, say, Machado shifts somewhere else, to other characters with other problems.

Machado is dismantling the ordinary novelistic story but not replacing it with some clever alternative. I can read, with satisfaction, for the surprises along the way, but not for the pleasing resolution of all of the little plots. The reader looking for that will be less pleased.

Chapter CVI is revealing. Machado has distributed an elaborate set of clues about a couple having a secret love affair, but in these chapters he not only explains the mystery away but insults the reader who fell for it, calling him (me) a “wretch” and refusing to apologize for including the obfuscatory details: “There was no reason for me to cut the episode or interrupt the book.” Anyway, the real story was perfectly clear: “That’s what you would have seen had you read slowly.”

I read slowly. Machado is hectoring other readers.

I have gotten nowhere with this novel. So more tomorrow. What it all means, maybe.

Machado de Assis, slavery, and slave-catching - not all of them liked being beaten

2011-12-06T10:46:00.001-06:00

In the novels of Machado de Assis, or at least the four I have read so far, Brazilian slavery is taken for granted. I have been startled, at times, by the lack of criticism of slavery. See the episode in the center of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, for example, where the narrator comes across a man beating a slave in the street, and the violent master turns out to be a slave freed by the narrator! There is an irony here, but more about human nature than slavery. Is it relevant that Machado had grandparents who were slaves?

Machado is working on voice and psychology in the novels and his great subject is egotism, not so well suited to social crusading or even to Huckleberry Finn. His short stories are different, and there is one, “Father versus Mother,” where the tone is a little more critical. Just a little:

Slavery brought with it its own trades and tools, as happens no doubt with any social institution. If I mention certain tools, it is only because they are linked to a certain trade. One of them was the iron collar, another the leg iron. There was also the mask of tin plate.

That’s the first paragraph of the story. He sounds like no one so much as Victor Hugo. Machado spends five more acidic paragraphs on these tools and their purpose:

A half-century ago, slaves ran away frequently. There were many slaves, and not all of them liked slavery. It happened sometimes that they were beaten, and not all of them liked being beaten.

The story is about a poor man who makes his living catching runaway slaves, “one of the trades of the time,” in Rio de Janeiro. He marries when times are good, but his wife is pregnant when times are bad. Perhaps the couple will have to “carry the child that was soon to be born to the Wheel of abandoned babies.”

Machado squeezes as hard as he can. The father, the slave catcher, gets a hot lead on a high-reward runaway while carrying his baby to the foundling hospital. The runaway slave is, he finds, pregnant. Thus, the cruel dilemma – which baby to save? – except that there is no dilemma, even as the story takes a worse turn. The slave catcher saves his own baby; the slave catcher catches the slave. That’s that. What else did I expect?

Again, it would be strange, out of place, to hear the self-absorbed narrators of Machado's novels worry much about justice or abolitionism. But those narrators are not Machado.

“Father versus Mother” led Machado’s 1906 short story collection, but was presumably also published earlier. Quotations are from the Helen Caldwell translation, available in The Psychiatrist and Other Stories and Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story. Another version is in A Chapter of Hats and Other Stories.

We know absolutely nothing of the texts we gnaw - more gnawing on Dom Casmurro

2011-12-05T10:52:00.001-06:00

More Machado de Assis and Dom Casmurro.

1. What I would like to do, but cannot, is map out my Crazy Theory about Dom Casmurro, which would resolve the multiple layers of the novel into a single ingenious solution. Having read the novel once and browsed through it, I do not have more than the barest beginning or first scraps of evidence for my idea. It will have to wait for a re-read.

In brief: Our unreliable narrator destroys his happy family life because of his unreasonable jealousy. But if Dom Casmurro is a combination of Othello (an admitted association) and Iago (a hidden one), then things frankly go too well for everyone. A common interpretation is that the novel parodies tragedy, but I wonder if it actually conceals tragedy. Next time through.

2. The unreliable narrator game works only if the novelist imposes some sort of limits on the unreliability. If everything is in doubt, the novel crumbles. The fictional writer cannot simply lie, but must also provide some way for the canny reader to identify the lies. Thus, the need for a narrator who lacks control over his narrative, who is insane or boastful or weakly self-deluded. My Crazy Theory really demands an insane narrator.

3. Jenny, at Shelf Love, works on the problem, the most difficult question in the novel: who is the person at the center of the novel? He is “a tight-lipped man who doesn’t tell stories” (his “Casmurro” nickname means something like “taciturn”), but here he is telling stories for 260 pages. She points to a place where the narrator himself tells me that my job is to “fill in the missing middle” (Ch. 55).

4. Jenny picks out another good example of Machado’s rule-making. Casmurro and Capitú’s son Ezekiel looks suspiciously like Casmurro’s best friend, Capitú’s presumed lover. Or does he? Casmurro insists that he does, that this resemblance is the strongest justification for his jealousy and subsequent actions. But chance resemblances are a recurring theme of the novel – does the narrator understand this himself? Is it an unconscious suggestion of his doubts? A perverse form of proof? Does the resemblance between son of friend exist or not, and how can we decide if all we have is the narrator’s version of the story? Another odd Nabokov correspondence here: see Despair (1936).

5. What other puzzles do I need to solve, or play with, when I next read Dom Casmurro? A friend of the narrator writes a Panegyric to Saint Monica that baffles me. The symbolic role of a child who is killed by his leprosy sticks out too much for my comfort. And what about the worms?

I went so far as to pick up old books, dead books, buried books, open them, compare them, in order to track down the text and the meaning… I tracked down the very worms in the books that they might tell me what was in the texts they gnawed.

“My dear sir,” replied a long fat worm, “we know absolutely nothing of the texts we gnaw, nor do we choose what we gnaw, nor do we like or dislike what we gnaw: we gnaw.” (Ch. 17)

That’s what I will do next time: track down the worms and watch them gnaw, and maybe even gnaw on the book alongside the worms.

One was within the other, like the fruit within its rind - layers of Dom Casmurro

2011-12-02T15:05:00.001-06:00

Two stories in Dom Casmurro, surface and subsurface. Bento Santiago, a lawyer who lives in an exact duplicate of his childhood home, decides to write the story of his life with his teen sweetheart and later wife Capitú, the most important female of the Brazilian literature. This story turns into two stories, at least.

1. Despite early love and promises of devotion, Capitú has an affair with Bento’s best friend Escobar, and Capitú’s son Ezekiel is from Escobar. The memoir is actually the prosecutor’s case against Capitú, a presentation of the evidence of the affair.

I see that I have already violated my schema. The novel has branched. The memoir of Bento (story 1) is also the proof of Capitú’s guilt (story 2). This branch is visible in the structure of the novel, which, after an introduction, consists of a relatively straightforward and even sweet 100 pages of thwarted true love, and then another 100 pages of Bento's escape from the priesthood into marriage, leaving only 60 pages for marriage, children, death, betrayal, and that sort of thing. It is during this last section that it becomes clear that what started as one kind of story has turned into something else, even if Bento claims otherwise:

If you remember of Capitú the child, you will have to recognize that one was within the other, like the fruit within its rind. (Ch. 148)

This is from the last page of the novel. The narrator recognizes the problem, it seems, and insists that there is no branch at all, or if there is it is “the result of some chance incident.”

3. The evidence for Capitú’s guilt, is, it turns out, thin. Perhaps she did not have an affair at all, and Ezekiel is, in fact, Bento’s child, and he ruins everyone’s lives solely because of his jealousy and paranoia. Bento’s case against Capitú is actually the case for, or the case against himself.

References to Othello run through the novel – explicit ones, like Chapter 135, “Othello” – and Bento identifies himself with Shakespeare’s character, although he perversely recognizes that if he is right the role does not fit, since Desdemona is not guilty. He misreads Othello just a bit:

“And she [Desdemona] was innocent!” I kept saying to myself all the way down the street. “What would the audience do if she were really guilty, as guilty as Capitú? And what death would the Moor mete out to her then? A bolster would not suffice; there would be need of blood and fire, a vast, intense fire to consume her wholly, and reduce her to dust, and the dust tossed to the wind, in eternal extinction…” (Ch. 135, ellipses in original)

Bento no longer sounds like Othello at all, but like his namesake Iago, barely mentioned in Dom Casmurro aside from Bento’s last name. Strictly speaking, the reader, entirely dependent of the enclosed world of a narrator who may well be insane, has no certain way to judge the behind-the-scenes events of the novel. The contradictory stories coexist. The one in fact implies the other.

4. More branches. Bento writes his memoir to convince whom of Capitú’s adultery (himself, maybe, to assuage his guilt)? Or is Bento’s guilt entirely in his subconscious, repressed, leaking into his text without his knowledge? Is the memoir a prosecution, or a confession? I detect hints of another possibility, too. What if Bento is concealing something worse?

Well, when Brazilians complain that the English-speaking world undervalues their greatest novel, this is why. It is a deconstructionist masterpiece, a text which casts a shadow more real than the text itself; the shadow may in turn have its own shadow; the novel is the aggregation of the text and all of the implied shadow stories. The book is packed with uncanny echoes of The Good Soldier (Ford did not know Machado), Pale Fire (Nabokov never read Machado), and Borges (who read Machado long after he, Borges, had written his central works). (Or so I understand all of this).

You will see that I have borrowed and rewritten much of Jenny’s piece from yesterday.

I am also reading Helen Caldwell’s translation, by the way.

I have never quite understood a conversation... - "Midnight Mass," the greatest story, or so I am told, of Machado de Assis

2011-12-01T11:24:00.001-06:00

The Machado de Assis book I want to get to is his 1899 novel Dom Casmurro, which Jenny at Shelf Love describes here (brief response to Jenny: Yes!). I am going to continue my Machado-like indirect approach, though, and puzzle over another short story, the 1894 “Midnight Mass.” Jenny and other readers of Dom Casmurro will see the relevance.

The first paragraph:

I have never quite understood a conversation that I had with a lady many years ago, when I was seventeen and she was thirty. It was Christmas Eve. I had arranged to go to Mass with a neighbor and was to rouse him at midnight for this purpose.

The first phrase is itself classic Machado. The entire seven page story is the narrator trying to understand that conversation. Was his landlady, Conceição, in the couple of hours before midnight, trying to seduce him? Or did the timid seventeen year old just wish that she were? Was he perhaps just detecting signs of Conceição’s frustration with her husband, who is at a liaison with a married woman, or her longing for someone else with whom she is in love? Is she knowing or innocent; are her desires active, or unconscious (“I didn’t understand her denial; perhaps she didn’t understand it either”)?

The narrator’s response to Conceição is convincingly adolescent; he is all too conscious of her physical presence:

From time to time she wet her lips with her tongue.

Although thin, she always walked with a certain rocking gait as if she carried her weight with difficulty. I had never before felt this impression so strongly.

She took the ends of her belt and tapped them on her knees, or rather on her right knee, for she had crossed her legs.

The idyll or seduction is interrupted by the neighbor on his way to Mass. Conceição’ final words are:

“Hurry, hurry, don’t make him wait. It was my fault. Goodbye until tomorrow.”

Her fault that she kept the narrator from his appointment? Or her fault that she was too passive, that she did not make the first move? Or is she even talking to the narrator at that moment?

The narrator, by the end of the story, has no idea, nor does the reader. Machado’s strategy is to multiply possible interpretations. Some of the possibilities I mentioned above to not become visible until the last sentence.

“Midnight Mass” is often picked as Machado’s greatest story. Or so says the editor of the Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story, although, amusingly, he omits it from his collection, perhaps because it was already included in The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories (1997). I read “Midnight Mass” in The Psychiatrist and Other Stories; William Grossman translated.

Notes on Machado de Assis using his characteristic form

2011-11-30T10:50:00.001-06:00

I. No more than 37 pages into Quincas Borba, the 1891 Machado de Assis novel, I have no idea what the story might be. A schoolteacher inherits a fortunes and a dog from a mad philosopher, whose great saying is “TO THE VICTOR, THE POTATOES” (Ch. XVIII). The teacher is the victor, and thus he gets the potatoes, although I wonder about the dog. An earlier translation of the book is in fact titled Philosopher or Dog? Both philosopher and dog are names Quincas Borba. I guess this setup could go anywhere.

II. The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1881) could go anywhere, and does, while also going nowhere. Thinking over the story, I am surprised to recall how little there is. A man of leisure has a long-term affair with a married woman which eventually fizzles. He has other ambitions which also fizzle. Eventually, he dies, after which he composes his memoirs. How is that a novel?

III. The story of Dom Casmurro (1899) is more substantially novelistic. A teenage boy, Bentinho, does not want to go to the seminary, and does not want to become a priest. He is in love with the girl next door, the startling and original Capitú; she, for some reason, loves him, too. They scheme to keep Bentinho at home. Aside from some peculiar digressions by the narrator, the adult Bentinho, and the knowledge, from the early chapters, that something separates the lovers, the novel is almost a conventional love story. That lasts for about a hundred pages. Then the novel spins off into the void, but slowly, sneakily.

IV. Although I would not guess it from the novels, Machado de Assis was full of stories. He published over 200 of them among which – I have opened the Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story (2006) to Machado’s biography on page 37 – he “exhibits a polished, concise, and masterful style in sixty-three stories.” In fact, “at least sixty are masterpieces of world literature.” I greatly admire the confidence and precision of the biographer’s judgment.

V. It would be useful, certainly, if someone would translate and publish Machado’s final five volumes of short stories, home of the 63 world-class masterpieces, in their original format and order. Maybe half of them have wandered into English elsewhere, in three short collections, in this anthology, and in the little 1921 volume I wrote about here. That means I am missing out on at least thirty masterpieces! Of world literature!

VI. In 480 pages of stories, the Oxford Anthology gives 63 (10 stories) to Machado de Assis. Next is the linguistic innovator João Guimarães Rosa (56 pages, 6 stories), then the mysteriously symbolic Clarice Lispector (37 and 9). Érico Veríssimo, father of the author of Borges and the Eternal Orangutans, has three stories in 27 pages; no one else has more than two stories. The anthologist admits that this distribution slights Jorge Amado “who never specialized in the story per se.” So that’s Brazilian literature from one angle.

VII. I guess I will spend the next week or two pawing through Machado de Assis, although not in this irritating format. I believe one more reader will join me. Outstanding.

An impression of excess passed only fleetingly through us - jolly sexual confusion with the decadent Sá-Carneiro

2011-11-29T11:55:00.001-06:00

A wild-eyed loon today, Mario de Sá-Carneiro, Portuguese decadent, pal of Pessoa, self-poisoned at age 25, poor sap. I have read his short novel Lucio’s Confession (1913), and there is also a book of short stories, both translated by the overworked Margaret Jull Costa.

I am afraid that “Portuguese decadent” is almost sufficient to describe Sá-Carneiro’s novel. Any real ideas are recycled from the French, some dating back 60 years to Baudelaire. But what adult reads decadent literature for the ideas? Decadence, sincere or fake, gives an artist freedom. So gimme your best stuff, Mario, the weirdest nonsense you can imagine.

Lucio’s Confession is inventive. The central conceit is convoluted, but amusingly absurd. A handsome young poet materializes his repressed homosexual attraction for his friends in the form of a wife, Marta. The wife, you understand, is a product of the poet’s imagination, yet real. She can have affairs with the poet’s friends while he works on his book.

The novel is narrated by one of the writers, Lucio, who sleeps with Marta. He is completely nuts – unreliable and then some – so another interpretation is that the narrator is the one repressing his homosexuality. He either has an affair with the poet’s actual wife as a form of sublimation, or he imagines he has an affair with the actual woman, or he imagines he has an affair with an imaginary woman. Or something like that – maybe he has an actual affair with an imaginary woman – and then everything ends in violence, and thus Lucio confesses in the pages in front of me – “I wanted to write an honest account of my strange adventure, keeping it as simple as possible” (120). Mm hmm.

Colors and light give the book its coherence:

Her face was truly lovely, it had a vigorous beauty, as if carved out of gold. (61)

His reddish-blond hair, parted in the middle, fell gracefully over his forehead and his golden-shadowed eyes never left Marta, or so I was to remember in retrospect. (62)

Until at last, mysteriously, the fire faded into gold and her dead body floated, heraldic, upon the gilded waters – now calm and dead as well. (35)

Gold and red, fire and light. “Heraldic” even – “the gold coat of arms danced wildly before my eyes” (114).

In the first chapter of the novel an aristocratic Lesbian demonstrates her theories of sexualized light in a decadent Parisian extravaganza, “an orgy of flesh distilled into gold!” (31). It’s a wonderful crazy scene:

Her tunic was color gone mad. (30, italics courtesy of Sá-Carneiro)

A mysterious breeze blew through it, a grey breeze blotched with yellow (31, italics ditto)

Her legs, knotted with muscles, were hard, masculine and aroused in everyone present the violent urge to bite them. (33)

The line I put in the title is from the same scene. I assume I am reading all of this in the right spirit. I hate to think that poor Sá-Carneiro meant any of it too seriously, that it is much more than literary playfulness.

Some unsuspected secret life that included fun - Jean Thompson's The Year We Left Home

2011-11-28T10:13:00.001-06:00

I used to read a lot more contemporary American fiction. Realistic stuff, regionalist. Dirty realism, as it was amusingly called in an old issue of Granta. Bobbie Ann Mason and Tobias Wolff are the two writers whose work has really stuck with me, although I have not made much effort to keep up with either of them.

Jean Thompson’s new novel The Year We Left Home (2011) is comparably good. Over thirty years, four siblings and a cousin leave their home in rural Iowa, sometimes traveling far, sometimes just down the street. Each chapter is focused, often self-contained: we spend time with a single character in a single enlightening moment, ending in a dramatic Joycean epiphany, or perhaps a squelching anti-epiphany where nothing is learned.

For example, in the first chapter (January 1973) young Ryan is helping out at his sister’s wedding (“The whole import of the wedding embarrassed him powerfully, though he could not have said why”). Ryan gets stoned with his cousin Chip and they philosophize about family, Vietnam, and hideous AM radio hits. Ryan and Chip will be contrasted on a recurring basis as the novel goes on: restless sense versus free-ranging nonsense. Sense has less fun but gets to keep his teeth.

Early in the chapter we are introduced to Uncle Norm and Aunt Martha, stereotypical Lutheran farmers, representatives of Restful Sense, as well as hard work, reticence, “privation, thrift, cleanliness, and joyless charity,” and enormous quantities of food (“potatoes topped with shredded orange cheese, beef in gravy, chicken and biscuits, corn pudding”), the home the kids will leave.

Now Thompson has set us up for Ryan’s epiphany. The wedding band starts into a swing tune. Uncle Norm has a can of Dance Wax:

Little powdery flakes, like snow falling inside. Then Aunt Martha joined him, and the two of them clasped hands, Norm’s arms around her waist. They stepped together, stepped and twirled and glided, up and down and round and round, some fast step they must have learned back when they were kids and had been practicing ever since in some unsuspected secret life that included fun, moving in perfect time with each other and the jazzy music. (19)

It may take Ryan thirty years to absorb the moment, but we have the whole novel ahead of us for that.

Thompson’s prose does not get much fancier, although she has her little flights, like a wintry Carl Sandburg parody (215) or a bit of simple Nabokovian plotting (“the god of coincidences couldn’t be expected to attend to everything ,” 287), or a hilarious ranting visiting artist:

“But you know something? Those guys [Drake University art students] are never going to do squat, because they have all the creativity of one of the four basic food groups. They might as well be dark green leafy vegetables or dairy products.” (306)

A lot to like here. A lot of “Yes, it’s just like that!” For whatever reason, the contemporary writers that attract my attention are the international Modernists, the Surrealists and innovators and wild-eyed loons. I do not read so much of the kind of thing Jean Thompson writes, The Way We Live Now 2011. But it’s not because the insights are not true or the writing is not good. I assume there are plenty of recent American novels as good as The Year We Left Home. Well, no; a few as good.

Both theory and practice - The Psychiatrist by Machado de Assis

2011-11-23T11:25:00.001-06:00

Wuthering Expectations will be closed for the holiday on Thursday and Friday. Next week, if all goes well, I will balance my Eça de Queirós obsession with some Machado de Assis. Exact contemporaries, careful readers of each other’s work – Eça actually rewrote an entire novel because of Machado’s criticisms – they could hardly be more different.

A preview today, Machado’s novella The Psychiatrist (1881-2), a prescient satire of the new profession and of social science in general. I read it in The Psychiatrist and Other Stories (1963); William L. Grossman translated.

A famous psychiatrist, “one of the greatest doctors in all Brazil, Portugal, and the Spains,” returns to his obscure home town to conduct his researches, marries, and opens a mental asylum, although to many citizens “[t]he idea of having madmen live together in the same house seemed itself to be a symptom of madness” (3). Dr. Bacamarte’s reasons for choosing his wife (“neither beautiful nor charming”) tells us exactly who he is:

The doctor replied that Dona Evarista enjoyed perfect digestion, excellent eyesight, and normal blood pressure; she had had no serious illnesses and her urinalysis was negative. It was likely she would give him healthy, robust children… he would not be tempted to sacrifice his scientific pursuits to the contemplation of his wife’s attractions.” (1)

After the first surprisingly large “torrent of madmen,” Dr. Bacamarte’s theories evolve, and the definition of insanity expands. A revolutionary political plot develops, opposed to the coercive madhouse, at least until it takes power and the madhouse becomes a useful tool for enforcing the junta’s power.

Soon enough, eighty percent of the town’s population are in the asylum, which leads the psychiatrist to again revise his theories: because, statistically, insanity is the norm, the insane must therefore be sane, and the sane insane. The eighty percent are released; members of the bizarrely “mentally well balanced” twenty percent are put in the madhouse. Soon the asylum is full of the town’s most unusual inhabitants: the modest, the truthful, the wise.

Can you guess how the story ends?

“This is a matter of science, of a new doctrine,” he said, “and I am the first instance of its application. I embody both theory and practice.” (44)

Machado’s story zips through many of the next century’s critiques of psychiatry, from the shaky authority of the psychiatrist to the abuse of the field by totalitarians, all of this pre-Freud. His novels, first person and digressive, are quite different. The Psychiatrist is focused, fierce and purposeful.

It shakes accepted values–disperses former glory–dismays age-long courage - Georg Kaiser's The Burghers of Calais

2011-11-22T11:44:00.001-06:00

One last German-language play. Last for now. Georg Kaiser’s The Burghers of Calais (pub. 1914, perf. 1917) is, I am told, the signature Expressionist drama. I do not know what Expressionism is, exactly, or to the extent that I do know, I cannot see the relationship between Kaiser’s play and Expressionist artists like Franz Marc and George Grosz. Let’s not make this post about my ignorance, though.

The Burghers of Calais is inspired by one of Rodin’s most famous sculpture groups (here’s the plaster version at the Musée Rodin), itself inspired by an episode in Froissart’s Chronicles. During the Hundred Years War the English besieged the port city of Calais. Rather than sack the town, they demanded that six leading citizens surrender themselves while dressed in sack cloth and a noose. The humiliation and presumably execution of the six, in exchange for safety. Six leaders, including the city’s wealthiest merchant, volunteered for the sacrifice. Rodin’s sculpture enacts their most pathetic moment, as they leave the city to their deaths. Presumed, as I said, since the men were spared by the intervention of the Queen of England.

Kaiser takes advantage of the men’s humiliation in the play’s final act, where the public removal of their ornate garments and donning of the sack cloth and noose gains, as it is repeated, a ritual power that a much worse playwright could hardly damage. But Kaiser has a stranger, ahistorical purpose. He adds a number of ludicrous complications to the story – mainly that seven men volunteer when only six are needed – in order to test the meaning of the sacrifice. Ordinary concepts of glory, honor, or duty are somehow insufficient, not meaningful enough. The volunteers go through a scourging or purging process before their sacrifice, overcoming their fear of death and attachment to the world. I think.

Thick smoke swirls about your heads and feet and shrouds the way before you. Are you worthy to tread it? To proceed to the final goal? To do this deed–which becomes a crime–unless its doers are transformed? Are you prepared–for this your new deed? –It shakes accepted values–disperses former glory–dismays age-long courage–muffles that which rang clear–blackens that which shone brightly–rejects that which was valid! –Are you the new men? (114-5)

That passage is just a scrap of a characteristic two-page monologue. I picked it because the Nietzschean or visionary overtones are unusually clear. New men, huh?

I do not know if the odd use of the dashes in the translation is straight from Kaiser or if the translators are attempting to recreate one of the many peculiar features of Kaiser’s anti-naturalistic text. The play begins in crisis, at a high rhetorical pitch, and maintains the tone almost to the end – once the men have reached their apotheosis, the tension is allowed to relax. I was reminded of the unrelenting intensity of a contemporary drama, Charles Péguy’s The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc, with which Kaiser's play shares the theme of transcendent sacrifice.

I read the translation of J. M. Ritchie and Rex Last found in Kaiser’s Plays Volume One, 1985, John Calder. An admirably modest blurb on the back cover says “This book was worth publishing”; I agree. Kind of a low standard.

Oh yes, thanks to the Caroline and Lizzy for the poke in the ribs that was German Literature Month.

I for one welcome our new insect overlords.

2011-11-21T10:34:00.001-06:00

Why did I read a book about leafcutter ants? It interferes with all of my important projects, the one’s where I – do – well – all of those important things I was thinking of. I don’t remember what those things were. Ants, why not ants? The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization by Instinct (2011), by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, that’s the book.

I read the book because: a) it was on the New Books shelf at my library, b) it is short, c) it is full of hideously detailed close-up photographs of leafcutter ants cutting leaves and doing all of the other strange things they do:

Please note how the one mandible becomes a serrated knife while the other guides the path of the cut. Please note how the foreleg lifts the severed edge of the cut. Please note how horribly spiky the ant is.

Millions of leafcutter ants, all over South and Central America, are as I write sawing up vegetation, which millions of other ants carry back to their enormous underground fungus farms, where millions more tiny, specialized ants carefully dismember the plant fragments and feed them to the symbiotic fungus, while other tiny ants harvest the fungus to feed the hive. Other parasites and symbiotes wander through the system. It is all so wonderfully strange.

A team of Brazilians researchers have become leafcutter nest archeologists, specialists in “the megalopolis architecture of Atta colonies” (115). They pump a nest full of liquid cement (for one particular nest, over 6 tons of cement), and then excavate the ant city using standard archeological techniques:

One reason to read a book like this is to witness the creativity of scientists. There are so many kinds of creativity.

The little leafcutter ant book is an expansion of a chapter of another recent Hölldobler and Wilson book, The Superorganism, which is presumably packed with forbidden knowledge beyond the ken of mortal man. The leafcutter ants, though, are “the greatest superorganisms on Earth discovered to the present time” (127). That last qualifier scares me.

This schematic of a leafcutter ant brain is just a bonus illustration for 50 Watts, who likes this kind of thing, as do I:

If you have a niece or weird uncle who is into zombies, get them this book for Christmas. They will be furious at first, but they’ll enjoy it and will thank you, perhaps many years later.

The beautiful land of Portugal, so full of endearing charm - the party and the coda in Eça de Queiros

2011-11-18T11:20:00.001-06:00

Two tools that Eça de Queiros loved.

Party scenes. Not big ones, balls or weddings, but more intimate gatherings, friends gathering over dinner, drinking themselves senseless, arguing about profound nonsense. Sometimes the party is a regular event, not really a party at all but just a routine social activity. A little piano playing, some snacks, some cards. The Crime of Father Amaro and Cousin Basilio both structure the entire book around this kind of scene. Sometimes the party is a rarer bird, a chance to indulge. The Maias has some superb scenes of this type. Chapter 2 of The Illustrious House of Ramires has a good one, too.

The great advantage to the author is that the party almost forces the reader to plunge in to the world of the novel, just like in a real party where I only know the person I came with. I am introduced to a bewildering array of names and descriptions, lucky if I tack a characteristic or two onto each name. In Chapter 2 of Ramires, Gonçalo meets his friends for dinner. Here comes Titó (“powerful limbs… slow rumble of his powerful voice… idleness”) , maybe a bit of a weary libertine, and Gouveia (“very dark and very dry… a bowler-hat tilted over one ear”) who has an aversion to cucumbers.

Wait, do I need to remember that? Right now, there is no way to know. The dinner scenes are humorously exhausting. Luckily, the food is good:

Gonçalo , who claimed he had been miraculously cured [of a kidney pain] after the walk to Bravais and the excitement of the card-game, at which he had won nineteen tostões from Manuel Duarte – began with a dish of eggs and smoked sausage, devoured half the mullet, consumed his ‘invalid’s chicken’, cleared the dish of cucumber salad and finished off with a pile of quince jelly cubes; and as he accomplished this noble work, he emptied (without any flushing of that pure white skin) a glazed mug of Alvaralhão wine, because after the first sip of the Abbot’s new wine, he had cursed it, to Titó’s annoyance. (29)

What juicy, thick writing. It’s just a way to show the characters in action, any kind of action.

Then there is the coda. Every remotely longish Eça novel ends with a coda chapter, letting us look back (“Four years passed lightly and swiftly like a flight of birds over the ancient Tower” – that was swift!), often with a lot of irony, although I do not remember there ever being anything like a plot twist. The plot is finished.

The last chapter of Ramires does have a formal twist. We have spent the entire novel with Gonçalo, sometimes watching him, sometimes deep in his thoughts, but the limit of the limited third has been strict. The coda is entirely about Gonçalo, but he never appears in it, although he is described in a letter. Many of the characters are reunited – they are preparing for a party that we do not get to attend.

The gentle last line of the novel, in the voice of whom?:

Father Soeiro, his sunshade under his arm, made his way slowly back to the Tower, in the silence and softness of the evening, reciting his Hail Maries and praying for the peace of God for Gonçalo, for all men, for the fields and the sleeping farms, and for the beautiful land of Portugal, so full of endearing charm, that it might be for ever blessed among lands. (310)

Thanks, Scott, for the readalonging.

Where to start with Eça de Queirós, a non-answer

2011-11-17T10:45:00.001-06:00

Where should a reader start with Eça de Queirós? Or Charles Dickens, or Virginia Woolf, or William Shakespeare? These are not my questions. I assume the existence of a reader with a large appetite, and enough sense to not dismiss the judgments of previous good readers on the basis of a random encounter with Barnaby Rudge or Henry VIII.

As I get to know an author, the question I ask is: where should I stop? Which books are just trivia, or impenetrable period pieces, or juvenilia, or scrapbooks? For a certain kind of critic – Edmund Wilson, Frank Kermode – who reviews new novels only after reading something close to everything the author had ever written, there is no stopping place. How this was feasible, I do not know, except that I suppose these critics read a lot faster than I do, or magazine deadlines were more leisurely than I imagine.

Given enough time, almost anyone can read almost everything. Major works are read in pursuit of the experience of great art, minor works in the pursuit of knowledge. Knowledge about the major works, most likely. I am getting close to “everything” – well past the halfway point – with Eça de Queirós. Wilson and Kermode, unlike me, were not blockheaded enough to publish their notes, or to work for free.

But that’s not my point, which is, rather, that The Illustrious House of Ramires, although well-written, humorous, representative of Eça’s lifelong concerns, and on in this vein, may not be a great place to start, although Scott Bailey did darn well. Ramires is the most deeply Portuguese of the Eça novels that I have seen so far. It makes more demanding assumptions about the history and culture of the country. I suspect that the demands would be similar for Portuguese readers who are not medieval history buffs, but still, the names, dates, and places come thick and fast in the first few pages:

One of the most valiant of the line, Lourenço, nicknamed the Butcher, foster-brother of Afonso Henriques (with whom, the same night in Zamora Cathedral, he kept vigil over his arms before receiving his knighthood) appears at once in the Battle of Ourique where Jesus Christ also appeared, on fine clouds of gold, nailed to a cross ten ells high. (6)

One of those names I admit I already knew. Our hero Gonçalo, a coward, in fact a Portuguese nebbish, lives under the shadow of “a House ten centuries old, with more than thirty of its males killed in battle” (288). Over the course of the novel, we see Gonçalo make peace with his past and overcome his nebbishness – Ramires is, in form, a classic Nebbishroman – partly through the means of the historical novel about his own ancestors, The Tower of Don Ramires, that he is writing or more accurately rewriting, stealing the whole thing from a poem written by his uncle:

The whole plot, with its passion of barbaric grandeur, the savage battles in which family feuds were settled by the dagger, heroic words uttered by steely lips – there it all was in dear Uncle’s verses, sonorous and nicely balanced:

[poem snipped]

Really, all that was needed was to superimpose the mellifluous tones of 1846 Romanticism upon its terse, virile prose… Would this be plagiarism? No! To whom, more than to him, a Ramires, belonged the memory of these historic Ramires? (16)

A summary of the historical novel is, as it is composed, part of Ramires – more names, more history, and at first with only the broadest thematic connection to the contemporary story. It all works out in the end, though, in the third act, as Scott calls it – “you realize that you've been marvelously set up.” Gonçalo grows out of his plagiarism.

So, a place to start, why not, right, Scott? Bad place to stop, though.

What else should I write about? That Nebbishroman thing was just a joke.

Yes, really, all of them were so little guilty before God - the surprisingly sweet Illustrious House of Ramires

2011-11-16T10:21:00.001-06:00

I was reading an early novel of Eça de Queirós, The Crime of Father Amaro, alongside a much later one, The Illustrious House of Ramires (1900, published just after the author’s death). Eça may well have mellowed with age. Father Amaro is cruel; Ramires is almost sweet.

Young and aimless nobleman Gonçalo Ramires holds the oldest title in Portugal and lives in the shadow of a thousand year-old tower and a string of illustrious ancestors. He dreams of imitating the medieval exploits of his heroic forebears, but times have changed a bit – leading one’s feudal retainers to ravage one’s neighboring enemies is frowned upon – and anyways Gonçalo is a coward. He is also a terrible braggart, which is a kind way of calling him a congenital liar; he is also extraordinarily kind to children, the ill, and other weak people. Weak people like himself.

After the chilly elegance of The Maias, the savageness of Father Amaro, and the hysterics of Cousin Basilio, I am almost shocked at how gentle Ramires is, how nice Gonçalo is. Not that he’s not a fool – the last line in this passage (ellipses in original) could stand as a description of any number of Eça’s characters:

He, Gonçalo, had stupidly and irresistibly succumbed to the fatal Law of Increase, which had led him, as it leads everyone in their desire for fame and fortune, to pass rashly through the first door that opened to him, without noticing the dung that cluttered up the doorway… Yes, really, all of them were so little guilty before God, who had created man so variable, so weak, so dependent on forces that were less governable than the wind or sun! (218)

This is being thought by Gonçalo himself. One of his most endearing, and frustrating, traits is his changeability. He can be venal, but never for too long. He can be skeptically thoughtful, but is too easily comforted. He is ambitious, artistically and politically, but is too easily distracted. An inevitable result is self-pity. Another motto (ellipses again not mine):

“Why?” murmured Gonçalo, miserably removing his coat. “So much deception in such a short life… Why? Poor me!”

He fell upon his vast bed as if into a tomb, and hid his face in the pillow with a sigh, a sigh full of pity for so frustrated and helpless a fate. (235)

Gonçalo is an early edition of a popular Modernist character, the kind who through charm and good intentions quickly engages my sympathy, but then spends the rest of the novel making me wince. Oh, Gonçalo, pull yourself together!

I want to spend a couple more days with the book. Perhaps I will engage with the ideas of Scott Bailey, who write about the novel here and also here.

The Illustrious House of Ramires is translated by Anne Stevens. The translation is so good that the novel has not been re-translated by Margaret Jull Costa!

A kind Brazilian wrote a mystery novel for me

2011-11-15T09:00:00.000-06:00

The author is the Brazilian Luis Fernando Verissimo, the novel is Borges and the Eternal Orangutans (2000), the translator is the omnipresent Margaret Jull Costa, the page count is 129, the genre is ratiocinative mystery, the detective is Jorge Luis Borges, in the year before his death, and not Borges Luis Jorge or the poet Juan Carlos Borges, author of “botanical poems,” also characters in the novel.

That’s half of the title. The orangutans invoke Edgar Allan Poe, and the novel is in fact a locked room mystery, like “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” except this time a famous Poe specialist is murdered in his hotel room at an international Poe conference in Buenos Aires. Our narrator, Vogelstein, is a Brazilian translator who has been keen to meet Borges. Because of the murder, he gets his wish.

“Borges will like the fact that there were three knives,” I said.

“Yes, Borges will,” sighed Cuervo, as if that were a further reason for his probable migraine. (78)

Verissimo was unable to squeeze a reference to H. P. Lovecraft into the title, even though Lovecraft plays a role in the novel, along with the magician John Dee and the usual esoteric nonsense associated with Borges: cryptography and the Kabbala and mirrors and such.

For some time now, Cuervo had been squirming in his armchair.

“Really, Jorge!” he said at last. “Gozatoth, Soga-Tog… You don’t believe in all that!”

“Don’t confuse the author with the characters,” you replied. “I don’t believe in anything. The important thing is that they do.” (105)

“You” is Borges – the narrator actually addresses the novel to Borges, all of which is explained in the end when the “I” switches to Borges himself as he presents his ingenious and original solution to the crime, the clues to which have been slyly distributed through the novel. The one truly ingenious thing about the book, actually, is that the complex solution perfectly coexists with a simple solution that is never mentioned. Borges is surely aware of the easier answer, but rejects it as insufficiently interesting. He also faults the entire novel, in its last line, for lacking “a minimum of verisimilitude,” where we find the actual author's actual name.

I have no clue what the reader unschooled in Borges and Lovecraft and Poe, the sane and settled reader who has of course read “The Gold-Bug” and “The Purloined Letter” but has not neurotically read through the Library of America Poe all the way to “’X-ing the Paragrab’” – which is obscure enough that Verissimo explains the reference – what this reader will get out of Borges and the Eternal Orangutans. I fear it is a tad specialized.

For specialists, though, what fun. Thanks, V!

Verissimo does not count for the Portuguese Reading Provocação.

In short – it only confuses one. - Arthur Schnitzler seizes the day

2011-11-14T11:52:00.001-06:00

And I thought Spring Awakening was sex-crazed! Arthur Schnitzler’s Der Reigen (in the Carl Mueller version I read, La Ronde) is about nothing but. Pairs of characters approach sex via dialogue and groping, engage (concealed by three small dots), and gather up their things. One member of the pair advances to the next round, men and women alternating

In scene I, for example, The Prostitute and The Soldier dally under a Viennese bridge, and then in scene II The Soldier seduces The Parlor Maid, who subsequently topples upon The Young Gentleman, who is up to no good with The Young Wife, and on like this to scene X, when The Count is surprised to find himself with The Prostitute of scene I.

What a director does with the actual sex, hidden by Schnitzler, I do not know. Kill the lights for three seconds, perhaps. These days, probably not.

The scenes, and lines, expand as the play proceeds. The Prostitute is efficient with her Soldier:

PROSTITUTE: Shh! Police. Imagine. The middle of Vienna.
SOLDIER: Over here. Come on.
PROSTITUTE: Watch it. You want to fall in the water!
SOLDIER: (Takes hold of her.) You little –
PROSTITUTE: Hold tight.
SOLDIER: Don’t worry.
[Now, the modest dots]
PROSTITUTE: We should’ve used the bench.
SOLDIER: Who cares. Get up.

And then just a few more lines finish this indecorous scene. Later seducers have to work harder, and philosophize more:

COUNT: But there’s no such thing as happiness. The things people talk about most don’t really exist. Love, for example. It’s the same with happiness.
ACTRESS: You’re right.
COUNT: Pleasure. Intoxication. Fine. No complaints. You can depend on them. If I take pleasure in something, fine, at least I know I take pleasure in it. Or if I feel intoxicated. Wonderful. That’s something you can depend on, too. And when it’s over – well, then, it’s over.
ACTRESS: (Grandly.) Over!
COUNT: But as soon as you fail to live for the moment, and begin thinking about the future or the past – well then, the pleasure’s as good as dead. The future is – sad – the past uncertain. In short – it only confuses one.
ACTRESS: (nods, her eyes large with wonder.) I think you may have hit on something there.

That (Grandly) direction is pretty good. I would not want to argue strongly for the author’s view. Everyone gets his say, or hers, and everyone is undercut. The most common refrain is to seize the day, but the context is always pathetic, or ridiculous. The day, however, is always seized, in some crude sense, which may well be better than the alternative. The ennobled lemurs are doing what they can.

Austrian literature, concentrated in turn of the century Vienna, was the leading alternative to the Portuguese Literary Challenge. Maybe next time.

The grass, the graves and the cold mists; the essence of city life - the sublime endings of The Crime of Father Amaro

2011-11-11T11:21:00.001-06:00

The ending, or endings, of The Crime of Father Amaro.

Near the middle of the novel, a minor character dies; Amaro is her attending priest. Eça de Queirós uses the episode to give us a look at the genuine spiritual power of even a bad priest like Amaro. His delivery of the last rites is a serious and meaningful responsibility, meaningful to the dying and those around here, even if Amaro himself sees the duty only as a burden, and even though he uses the incident to chase women.

The early scene foreshadows two later deaths, one where Amaro fails in his ordinary priestly duties, and another where his failure is considerably worse than ordinary. Whatever Eça may mock, he takes death seriously enough.

This last death leads to a funeral scene, too, although a curious one, since the author mostly does not show us the funeral – he is using the limited third person for all it is worth. We follow the funeral procession to a chapel but do not enter it; we instead join a pair of servants who take the opportunity to “wander” into a tavern and gossip. The chapel door is a threshold Eça does not want to cross, the genuine religious service something he does not want us to see. It exists outside of this novel. The servants rejoin the procession for the burial, so we do get to see that. The scene ends with the point of view leaving the servants, the camera “pulling back”:

‘Amen,’ came the deep voice of the sacristan and the shrill voice of the choirboy.

‘Amen,’ said the others in a sighing murmur that was lost amongst the cypresses, the grass, the graves and the cold mists of that sad December day. (461)

This is not Father Amaro’s ending. We need a few pages more for him. A “man of state and two men of religion,” Amaro one of them, accidentally meet at the foot of the statue of Camões (see wiki for photo - when visiting Lisbon, you can recreate the scene!), author of The Lusiads, hero of Portuguese culture, representative of empire and glory. An ironic contrast might be on its way.

‘Well, just look around you! What peace, what vigour, what prosperity!’

And he made a sweeping gesture that took in the whole of the Largo do Loreto, which, at that hour, at the close of a serene afternoon, contained the essence of city life. Empty carriages rode slowly by; women in twos tottered past, wearing false hair and high heels and displaying the anaemic pallor of a degenerate race… (470)

More: a hungover nobleman, people sprawling in “idle torpor,” pimps, an ox cart (“the symbol of an antiquated agricultural system dating back centuries”), lottery-peddling urchins. The laying on, it is thick. The geography of the square, and the nature of Portugal, is finally summarized as “two gloomy church façades… three pawnshop signs… four taverns.” It’s a sublimely savage passage, worthy of one of Victor Hugo’s great explosions. In the last words of the novel, our bad priest and his worse superiors congratulate themselves, under the gaze of their great poet, for the marvelous achievements of their civilization, the very thing that the reader of the novel has spent the previous 470 pages watching them destroy.

It proves their true devotion to the priesthood - the mechanics of power in Father Amaro

2011-11-10T14:12:00.001-06:00

Many readers, although people of boundless curiosity, non-insular and anti-parochial, true citizens of the world, might be unsure if The Crime of Father Amaro, a novel about the misdeeds of mid-19th century Portuguese priests, has any continuing interest. The Catholic priesthood is now, just to pick one of the book’s sticky points, entirely voluntary and vocational. Fair point.

The abuse of power by the novel’s priests is just a specific example of a universal theme, though, and Eça de Queirós is a true artist, meaning that the only path to the large is through the small. An abuse of power can be reformed, but we need a novelist like Eça to see how it works.

I'm in the middle of the novel. Father Amaro and Amélia are in love but restraining themselves, and Amélia’s now-former fiancé is behaving, completely understandably, like a jackass, culminating in a pathetically ineffectual physical attack on the priest. A group of priests and devout ladies gather every evening at the house of Amélia’s mother, so here they are together after the attack. Father Amaro has turned the other cheek, and why not, since he is the victor:

Such saintliness drove the women wild. What an angel! They gazed on him adoringly, their hands almost raised in prayer. His presence, like that of a St Vincent de Paul, exuding charity, gave the room a chapel-like sweetness… (264)

So far, so satirical. Just a little vicious towards these women, fools, admittedly. But they are not Eça’s true targets. The most combative of the priests declares the fiancé has been automatically excommunicated and that having in the house any of the excommunicant’s possessions is a threat to the soul, for example, this magazine, and that cigarette case, and this stray glove:

‘We must destroy them!’ exclaimed Dona Maria da Assunção. ‘We must burn them, burn them!’

The room echoed now with the shrill cries of the women, in the grip of a holy fury. (268)

Eça and I are still mocking the superstitious biddies, it seems, but here is the punchline:

The clamouring women raced into the kitchen. Even São Joaneira followed them, as a good hostess, to watch over the bonfire.

Left alone, the three priests looked at each other and laughed.

‘Women are the very devil,’ said the Canon philosophically.

‘No, Father,’ said Natário, growing suddenly serious. ‘I’m laughing because although, seen from outside, it may look ridiculous, the sentiment behind it is good. It proves their true devotion to the priesthood, their horror of impiety. And that, after all, is an admirable sentiment.’

‘Oh, admirable,’ agreed Amaro, equally seriously. (269)

All of this nonsense is just an arbitrary demonstration of power, a prank. Eça, in scenes like this, shows how the older priests corrupt the younger, not by openly advocating for vice, but for their own power and privilege. Poor Amélia’s not going to have a chance against Amaro.

Tomorrow I think I will move to the end, to the two ends, of the novel.

Ah, a priest could have enjoyed himself then - beginning The Crime of Father Amaro

2011-11-09T16:34:00.000-06:00

Three readers have joined me to read The Crime of Father Amaro, the first (1875) or second (1876) or fourth (1880) novel of Eça de Queirós. I finished the book last, after Richard (Caravana de Recuerdos), litlove (Tales from the Reading Room), and ombhurbhuva. I believe this was the first Eça de Queirós for everyone but me, and I understand that everyone thought it was a good place to start with this fine novelist.

A young, worldly priest, Father Amaro, obtains a position in a provincial cathedral town, where he finds that the priestly class is venal, sexually active, gluttonous and domineering, especially of the city’s more pious and superstitious women. Amaro , who never wanted to be a priest and who has a purely instrumental ethical sense, soon seduces the beautiful and all-too-susceptible Amélia, the daughter of his landlady. Consequences ensue, mostly of the predictable variety. See the links above for better summaries, please.

I was nervous that the novel, which is brutally anti-clerical, would be a topical period piece, but the version we all read, at least, is like Eça’s other novels: humanist Zola, or Flaubert with a heart. Litlove called the novel “a study in how to keep a book engaging despite having a cast of unsympathetic characters”; Eça’s secret is that he allows us to understand everyone, no matter how stupidly they behave (and they can be awfully stupid), and cold understanding can sometimes melt into warm sympathy. Another way to say the same thing: Eça de Queirós is, more than anything else, brilliant with characters.

For example, Amaro, our hero, a less intelligent Julien Sorel, the center of The Red and the Black, begins the novel with my sympathy but squanders it as he becomes increasingly corrupted. His inner life, after a romantic setback:

And then the old despair returned that he was not living in the times of the Inquisition and could not therefore pack them off to prison on some accusation of irreligion or black magic. Ah, a priest could have enjoyed himself then. But now, with the liberals in power, he was forced to watch as that wretched clerk earning six vinténs a day made off with the girl, whilst he, an educated priest, who might become a bishop or even Pope, had to bow his shoulders and ponder his grief alone. If God’s curses had any value, then let them be cursed. (176-7)

And an external view, after romantic success:

For [Amélia], at least, [Amaro] was handsome and better than any count or duke, and as worthy of a mitre as the wisest of men. She herself had once said to him, after thinking for a moment:

‘You could become Pope!’

‘I am certainly the stuff Popes are made of,’ he replied gravely. (313)

Amaro’s vanity, humorlessness, and, worst of all, his sense of power is clear enough. A potential monster. One of the tragedies of this comic novel is that his potential is realized.

What else should I write about? The ending, the last page, certainly. Eça’s party scenes? Dona Maria da Assunçao’s museum of arsenal of saints? So many possibilities.

Margaret Jull Costa was, unsurprisingly, the translator of the New Directions edition I read.

The tormenting doubt of everything - Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening - I warm myself in my rotting decay and smile

2011-11-08T10:56:00.001-06:00

Once upon a time, perhaps earlier this year, when I was reading Alfred Jarry’s Ubu nightmares, I wondered, amidst the adolescent violence and adolescent scatology, why there was no adolescent sex. It turns out that the topic had already been covered in Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening: A Children’s Tragedy (published 1891, performed 1906), along with other pressing subjects like over-competitive schools and test anxiety, as if the theatrical avant-gardists of the 1890s had planned out an efficient division of labor. To be clear, they did not, and Jarry could hardly have known Wedekind’s work, but the plays are kin, in subject, in audacity, and in their destruction of the clichés of the theater.

Melchior and Moritz (not Max and Moritz) cram for exams and ponder the mysteries of their pubescence, while innocent but curious Wendla is protected from sex by her timid mother. The children are all fourteen years old, but they are all played by adult actors.* The result is pregnancy due to inadequate sex education, teen suicide, pornography (prints of famous paintings!), a botched abortion, homosexual exploration, nude modeling, and headless ghosts. Much of this actually takes place off-stage.

Strangely, this hormonally over-heated tragedy is actually a black comedy, or could be. In Act III, Scene One, Melchior is interrogated by his professors, accused of the crime of disseminating accurate information about sex. His professors are Thickstick, Flyswatter, Sunstroke, and so on, and they spend much of their time debating whether and which window should be opened. Conclusion:

FLYSWATTER: Should it appear to our respected colleague that our room is not sufficiently ventilated, might I propose that he has a ventilator bored in the top of his head?

And then Harpo pulls a hand drill from one of his enormous pockets and Chico says “Atsa no good!” The Ubu-like madness of the play comes from this lurch from Naturalistic “social issues” to surrealist nonsense to almost abstract pure theater, aided by the play’s short, fragmented scenes. In the climax, Melchior escapes from prison to confront his ghosts, or something like that, but is rescued, or damned, by the intervention of The Masked Man (“In the end everyone has his part – you the comforting knowledge of having nothing – you the tormenting doubt of everything”).

To reduce this play to an attack on the complacent German bourgeoisie or poor sex ed does it an injustice. Wedekind’s real concerns are existential.

Here’s the end, which is as likely as anything to spark curiosity about the beginning – the first line is meant literally:

MORITZ (alone): I sit here with my head in my arm. The moon covers its face, the veil falls away, and it doesn’t look any wiser. So I go back to my place. I straighten my cross after that clumsy idiot’s kicked it over, and when everything’s in order I lie down on my back again, warm myself in my rotting decay and smile.

* I am reading the Edward Bond translation, performed in 1974 – Moritz was played by a young Michael Kitchen, Detective Chief Superintendent Foyle himself.

Look at the disgraceful pair - looking at Max and Moritz

2011-11-07T11:41:00.000-06:00

I have been rummaging around in a peculiar book, The Genius of Wilhelm Busch edited and translated by Walter Arndt, who I know as a translator of Pushkin. Busch was an artist who inadvertently invented the comic strip, or at least a plausible prototype, particularly with the 1865 Max and Moritz, which Arndt calls “possibly the most universally cherished and quoted work of art in the German language,” which explains a lot.

Ah, the wickedness one sees
Or is told of such as these,
Namely Max and Moritz; there!
Look at the disgraceful pair!

Max and Moritz are a pair of hideous children who play seven hideous tricks which culminate in a hideous punishment, which they either deserve or do not, depending on whether Max and Moritz are actual children or kobolds, evil spirits.

The woodcuts are always accompanied by rhyming children’s’ verse. The text is integral to the images. Busch never tells a story with nothing but images – or Arndt does not include any examples where he does. I am drawn to the images that do stand on their own, like this unusually complex heist:

I need the text, though, to know what the woman in the basement is doing:

With a ladle to scoop out
Just a dab of sauerkraut,
Which she has a passion for
When it is warmed up once more.

Ah, so that is the cellar sauerkraut bucket. Mmmm. Those chickens were murdered by Max and Moritz as their first trick, stolen and eaten in the second. At least gluttony and greed is a motive here, but the little monsters mostly spread chaos among complacent working people – a tailor, a baker, a miller. There is also a teacher, but as an educated person he presumably deserves to have his pipe filled with gunpowder.

Master Lampel’s gentle powers
Failed with rascals such as ours;
For the evilly inclined
Pay preceptors little mind.

Max and Moritz are destructive chaos agents, gleefully destructive, with no independent existence, meaning Busch never made a panel with just one of the pair. They are sinister critters. They can be baked in an oven with no lasting consequences. The barnyard fowl get their revenge in the end, though.

Well, this has not been much besides “Look, ain’t that something.” I’ll keep looking. More Busch later, maybe. “Painter Squirtle” or “Jack Crook, Bird of Evil,” Max and Moritz rolled into one ugly, drunken crow.

I borrowed the color images from this Gutenberg.org file. The book was published by the University of California Press in 1982.

Are you happy? No. - acting in Uncle Vanya

2011-11-04T11:24:00.001-05:00

Does this look like much? It’s from Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (1897), and is part of a reconciliation scene between Sonya and her young step-mother Elena:

SONYA: Come, peace, peace! Let’s forget it.

ELENA: You mustn’t look like that – it’s not becoming. You must believe in everyone, otherwise it’s impossible to live. (Pause)

SONYA: Tell me honestly, as a friend – are you happy?

ELENA: No.

SONYA: I knew that.

The question is: what to do with that “No”? Is Elena earnest, sad, defeated, defensive? How about Sonya, in her answer?

I have seen two stage productions of Uncle Vanya, a flawless actor’s holiday at the Steppenwolf Theatre (2001), the other a cluttered and mis-paced 2007 Court Theatre version (no complaints about the acting, though). In both productions, the actresses played this scene in exactly the same way. They replicated what Julianne Moore and Brooke Smith did in Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), which can be seen here at about 2:40, although the whole seven minutes is choice. Excuse me – I am going to watch it again.

For most of the above dialogue the camera is over Sonya’s shoulder, so we only see Elena’s face, and her reaction to Sonya’s fumbling question, her genuine curiosity. “Are you happy?” – and Moore breaks into an enormous smile. She might even be about to laugh, but exercises restraint. Sonya – now the camera moves to her face – also smiles, broadly, happily. “I knew you weren’t,” matter of fact. Both actresses laugh, shaking their shoulders.

Sonya was genuinely anxious that her step-mother was happy, and is genuinely relieved that she is not. Elena has already moved beyond happiness. Her admission is old news, perhaps upsetting at some point in the past, but now something that can be treated ironically. Now the two women can be unhappy together, which makes them happy. Happier.

Vanya on 42nd Street is a showcase of interpretation via acting, full of actorly surprises, but for some reason this one stands out as a favorite, perhaps just because I have now seen live actors duplicate it twice, as if it is the standard interpretation of the lines, as if there is no other real choice. Or perhaps I am just enjoyably amazed at seeing how much an actress can do with the word "No."

Sometime I would like to write about Sonya’s monologue at the end of Uncle Vanya, the “We shall rest” speech, with its “life that is bright, beautiful, and fine.” It looks like it should ruin the play, just upend everything. I think of it as an Alpine challenge for the actress, but every time I have seen the play it turns out to be a triumph. Brooke Smith’s version is on Youtube here.

When reading a play, I have the book and my imagination, but I also have a lot of other people helping me out.

The translation is by Ann Dunnigan, found in an old Signet Classics paperback titled Chekhov: The Major Plays. The Vanya on 42nd Street version is by David Mamet.

Your Schillers and your Goethes & all the stupid bastards who don't give you nothing but lies - Gerhart Hauptmann's characters

2011-11-03T11:18:00.001-05:00

A weakness, or limit, of the German novella tradition is character, the lack of well-rounded, plumped up, lifelike characters. I can think of exceptions, but what I typically remember from an E. T. A. Hoffmann story is some brilliantly inventive piece of weirdness or ingenious dissociation – the moments when the story suddenly shifts from one plane to another – rather than telling details about the characters, who are often interchangeable from story to story. That cat in Tomcat Murr has a lot of personality – I said there are exceptions.

Some of this is the result of a complex exploration of the Ideal and the Real that begins with Kant, and Goethe’s response to Kant. Characters are often three-dimensional but made of porcelain, not flesh. Please see this marvelous example from Elective Affinities that nicole enjoyed.

The search for the uncanny is part of the story, too. The external world is just as important as the internal, and much of the best German fiction from the 19th century is about the interaction between the two. The forest and railroad in “Flagman Thiel” are at least as full and “real” as the title character, and have to be for Hauptmann to construct the sense of uncanniness that fills the last half of the story. In English and French fiction, the intense interiority and limited third person view of writers like Flaubert and Woolf has become a standard mode. German-language writers, before Fontane, were exploring a different method, one no less psychological or subjective, but different, maybe a little more mysterious, more willing to leave a character’s actions unexplained, and therefore distancing.

A playwright has the advantage that his characters, no matter how flat and empty, will be inhabited by actual humans with their own voices and gestures. The “real” becomes real, occurring right in front of me. As a reader, I have to imaginatively simulate all of this, as best I can.

Hauptmann’s characters in Before Daybreak are easy to imagine as genuine people. Horrible people, but plausibly horrible. The step-mother / mother-in-law, Mrs. Krause. See her fear and belittle her step-daughter’s education (ellipses in original):

MRS. KRAUSE. (With increasing fury.) ‘Stead o’ such a female lendin’ a hand on th’ farm… oooh, no! God forbid! Jus’ th’ thought o’ that makes ‘er turn green… Buuuut – ya take y’r Schillers ‘n y’r Goethes, ‘n all them stupid bastards who don’t give ya nothin’ but lies; thaaat gets to ‘er – thaaat she likes. It’s enough to drive ya crazy. (She stops, trembling with rage.)

I should note that mom has been hitting the Veuve Clicquot pretty hard, and that in the original she speaks a Silesian dialect, and that this is mostly not a dialect play: Mrs. Krause is special.

I would like to keep quoting her, because she is the most vivid, or most loud, character. Many other characters are just as good: Loth, the principled prig of an idealist; Helen, the only truly sympathetic character, whose intelligence and virtue are undercut by her entirely understandable emotional neediness; Hoffmann, who first seems like a decent enough guy in a bad marriage, but has been corrupted, hollowed out, by wealth. When I say “good” characters, I mean interesting artistic creations. I have some doubts about the “reality” of the story of Before Daybreak, which lays the wretchedness on pretty thick, but the characters, although a trying bunch, are pleasantly full of sap and vigor, and by themselves a reason for me to read more Gerhart Hauptmann.

It is exemplary, sets us an ideal which we may emulate - Gerhart Hauptmann's nightmarish Before Daybreak

2011-11-02T09:00:00.000-05:00

My translator* insists on Before Daybreak for the title of Gerhart Hauptmann’s 1889 shocker of a debut play; I think it is more commonly called Before Sunrise (Vor Sonnenaufgang is the German). The play has a subtitle, too: A Social Drama. We are once again in the world of Naturalism, heaven help us. The translator has a nice dig at the term, calling it, at its worst, the melodrama of the wretched. Fortunately, Before Daybreak is Naturalism at its best, so I can ignore the entire issue forevermore.

The second line of dialogue will set the tone (ellipses in original):

MRS. KRAUSE: (Screams) You sluts!!... Honest to God, I never seen scum the like o’ you girls!... (To Loth). Shove off! You don’t get nothin’ here!... (Half to Miele, half to Loth.) He got arms, he can work. Get out! Nobody gets no handouts!

Now that’s the way to start a play. Her face is “bluish red with rage,” “hard, sensual, malevolent.” She is in her early forties, so just imagine your favorite actress of that age chewing through this part. Jennifer Aniston, say.

The joke of the whole thing is that the abused Loth, a rationalist and idealist, is just there to visit his old but newly wealthy college pal, Mrs. Krause’s son-in-law. Coal has been discovered in Silesia; the riche are all nouveau, like the nightmarish former peasant Mrs. Krause; and Loth is there to reform the conditions of the workers. In the meantime, he becomes romantically entangled with the only not-entirely-horrible member of the family, the stepdaughter Helen, who is not vicious but merely hysterical and neurotic. Disaster comes crashing down in Act V. Hereditary alcoholism is in some sense the cause, but this is not really a “social issue” play. If t’weren’t t’one thing, t’would be t’other.

I’m just leafing through the play now, thinking about what I might quote. The post’s title is from a discussion about reading. Helen is reading, what else, The Sorrows of Young Werther, which earnest Loth calls “a book for weaklings.” He recommends a historical novel about virtuous, self-denying Romans which he calls “rational and reasonable,” “an ideal which we may emulate” (Act II, p. 35). The irony is that it is Loth who causes the final catastrophe by following his unreasonable ideals.

I might write more about the characters tomorrow. The success of the play is the mix of people, awful and otherwise. Hauptmann emulated Ibsen, but he reminds me a bit more of the slightly later Chekhov, if I imagine a Chekhov play with only two or three sympathetic characters, which is of course not Chekhov at all, since his great gift was to make us pity or understand or even indulge the follies of his puppets. Before Daybreak is dingy Chekhov, Chekhov where everything goes horribly wrong. I mean, you know, even worse.

* Peter Bauland, Gerhart Hauptmann’s Before daybreak, 1978, University of North Carolina Press. He argues, that the 1912 translation, the one available at Gutenberg.org, is a disaster: “substantially accurate, guts the play.”

The semblance of fiery snakes - Gerhart Hauptmann's grim and depressing "Flagman Thiel"

2011-11-01T09:00:00.000-05:00

I guess I have done my share of raving about the great tradition of the Romantic German novella, that shadowy, uneasy alternative to the overstuffed Victorian and ponderous Russian and elegant French books that define 19th century literature for so many readers. Because of its use by expert practitioners like Theodor Storm and Adalbert Stifter, among others, I associate the form with a mood of bittersweet weirdness. Not that the form required a particular atmosphere: Eduard Mörike’s Mozart’s Journey to Prague (1856), to pick one example of many, is positively joyful.

So I can think of plenty of early melancholy novellas, but none so unrelentingly grim* as Gerhart Hauptmann’s 1888 story “Flagman Thiel.” I am skeptical of the tastes of readers who do not like "depressing books", but I also doubt that any of us need too much “Flagman Thiel” in our reading diet.

Thiel is a stolid railroad signalman. He marries but loses his wife in childbirth, and remarries for the sake of his son. The first marriage is a sort of love match; the second a disaster. The story, after the first few pages, is the unfolding of the disaster, misery turning into tragedy, tragedy into nightmare. Hauptmann is labeled a “naturalist,” a word I never find helpful, but one possible use is to associate him with the intensely pessimistic stance of some of his contemporaries. I am told that they were all under the spell of Schopenhauer.

Aesthetically, though, Hauptmann’s method is identifiably within the tradition of Storm and Stifter, with the world around the characters knocking the unpleasant story off kilter. The railroad tracks “looked like the strands of a huge iron net drawn together to a point on the horizon,” and the telegraph lines are “spun by a huge spider,” but all of this is unnoticed by Thiel, who at this point in the story is merely depressed, for good reason:

The pillared arcades of the pine trunks on the yon side of the embankment took fire as from within and glowed like metal. The tracks, too, began to glow, turning into the semblance of fiery snakes… For a while a reddish sheen lingered on the extreme crowns [of the pines].

Then the train, “a snorting monster” blasts by in “a mad uproar.” Odd, odd, odd. Hauptmann’s “realistic” fiction can be as intensely uncanny as Storm or Hoffmann, especially in a series of hallucinations that foreshadow and follow the story’s tragic center. A plain “realism” to describe ordinary life, a peculiar lyricism to describe the natural world, and a disturbing bizarreness to describe Thiel’s extreme mental state: Hauptmann’s story does not merely contrast these fictional tones, but smashes them against each other, leaving nothing but wreckage.

I read an old translation of “Flagman Thiel” – the story has been translated many times, under many titles, all trying to be precise about Thiel’s railroad job. Adele S. Seltzer was my translator; the story is in the 1933 Modern Library Great German Short Novels and Stories. Hauptmann was still alive when this collection was published, a contemporary writer, his Nobel Prize twenty years in the past. German Literature Month – mustn’t forget that.

* Update: How could I forget Kleist's unflinchingly grim "The Earthquake in Chile" (1807)?

It was so dreadfully cold - the puzzling Little Match Girl Passion

2011-10-31T09:00:00.000-05:00

This post is holiday-inappropriate.

It was so dreadfully cold. It was snowing, and the evening was beginning to grow dark. It was also the last evening of the year – New Year’s Eve. In this cold and in this darkness a poor little girl was walking in the street, bareheaded and barefooted.

So begins Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl” as translated by Reginald Spink in the attractive Everyman’s Library edition. I have not been reading Andersen lately, but rather listening to a peculiar oratorio, The Little Match Girl Passion (2007) by David Lang. The 35-minute piece, written for four voices and a smattering of percussion, intermingles the thousand-word text of the Andersen story with fragments of the text of Johannes Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion (1727).

The Andersen story carries a weight of Christian symbolism, although as soon as I try to be specific I become muddled. The indifference of passersby, the cruelty of her father, and the transcendent promise of Heaven as personified by a hallucination of her Granny leads to the death by freezing of the little match girl.

Granny had never before been so beautiful and so big. Lifting the little girl on to her arm, she flew with her in radiance and glory so high, so very, very high. And there was no cold, no hunger, no fear: they were with God.

Come to think of it, this story is terrifying - forget what I said about its appropriateness for Halloween. Still, the direct identification of the match girl with Christ puzzles me. Lang’s most audacious stroke – the most audacious I could understand – is a little switch in Matthew 26:46 (King James version, which is not what Lang uses):

And about the ninth hour she cried with a loud voice, saying Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? That is to say, My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?

“She” of course replaces “Jesus.” If there is anything the little match girl does not do, it is loudly cry out. So, I get it and I don’t.

Although the text of The Little Match Girl Passion is organized along the lines of the St. Matthew’s Passion, the music is another thing entirely. It is minimalist and subdued, quiet yet bracing. Short musical phrases repeat and shift. The effect Lang achieves, as is often the case with contemporary composers of choral music, resembles “early music” – plainchant or madrigals – far more than Bach’s powerful masses of sound. As is often the case with me, I understood none of the words without consulting the underlying texts, so I mostly listen to the oratorio to enjoy the singing. Listeners with an allergy to minimalism will, I do not doubt, find The Little Match Girl to be exceedingly tedious.

I have been listening to the 2009 Harmonia Mundi recording of Paul Hillier, who commissioned the piece, conducting the Theatre of Voices. I can point the curious to YouTube samples: the Theatre of Voice perform the beginning here (skip the first minute and a half), and an excerpt from the middle, including the bit from Matthew, is here. Finally, this is David Lang failing to answer my question.

bird or rose or sea - learning Portuguese the Eugénio de Andrade way

2011-10-28T09:00:00.000-05:00

Who wants to help me learn Portuguese? So kind, thank you. My textbook is, as usual, Forbidden Words: Selected Poetry of Eugénio de Andrade (New Directions, 2003, tr. Alexis Levitin).

I picked an easy one (pp. 54-5).

Despertar

É um pássaro, é uma rosa,
é o mar que me acorda?
Pássaro ou rosa ou mar,
tudo é ardor, tudo é amor.
Acordar é ser rosa na rosa,
canto na ave, água no mar.

A little Spanish goes a long way here – it may help to know that “é” = “it is \ is it?” and “na” and “no” = “of the”. I am not joking when I claim to use Andrade as a study aid. The title of the poem is a vocabulary word by itself, and the nouns are all good basic ones – rose, sea, water, love, desire, song, and two words for bird, some repeated two or three or four times.

Some of Andrade’s poems are genuine lyrics, the words to an imaginary song. They perhaps create their own music, this one, for example, with all of its soft, rolling “r”s.

To Waken

Is it a bird, is it a rose,
is it the sea that wakens me?
Bird or rose or sea,
all is fire, all desire.
To awake is to be rose of the rose,
song of the bird, water of the sea.

The one little bend the translator has to make is in the sonorous fourth line. “Ardor” and “amor” are related but distinct, while “desire” and “fire” are much the same thing, one just a metaphor of the other. But Levitin is able to shadow the rhythm, keep the internal rhyme, and even mimic the soft “r” sounds. His melody is at least an audible variation of Andrade’s.

As for the content of the poem, I wish I woke up feeling like that. Not before coffee; rarely after. But I suppose the waking is metaphorical, the surprise of the bird or rose or sea (or, who knows, a poem) lifting us out of our sleepy ordinary life once in a while.

Philosophers, Hegelian and zombie, in the short fiction of Eça de Queirós

2011-10-27T09:00:00.000-05:00

A couple more Eça de Queirós stories, then I will set him aside for a little while. I mean, not write about him, since I am reading two of his novels simultaneously, each quite different, thank goodness.

The Mandarin and Other Stories, tr. Margaret Jull Costa. Yesterday, The Mandarin; today, the other stories.

“The Idiosyncrasies of a Young Blonde Woman” is early (1873) and not as painstakingly written as Eça de Queirós’s best work, although the anti-Romantic plot of obsessive love is fine. Costa tells me that it was the author’s “first largely realist story”; Portugal’s first “realist” novel, The Crime of Father Amaro, followed two years later. But this is all Portuguese literary history. A film version was released just two years ago; when the director, Manoel de Oliveira, made the film he was one hundred years old.

“The Hanged Man” (written 1895) is a largely unrealist(?) story, a medieval ghost story. Or, wait, the haunt is a hanged corpse, so I guess that makes it a zombie story! How of our moment!:

Don Ruy revealed neither terror nor disgust. Casually sheathing his sword he asked:

‘Are you dead or alive?’

The man slowly shrugged his shoulders.

‘I don’t know, sir. Who knows what life is? Who knows what death is?’ (136)

The zombie appears to be a philosopher. A Christian one, I should add (“it is from the Cross alone that I seek mercy”), animated by the Virgin Mary to – well, let me abandon the story right there.

“José Matias” (written 1897) is narrated by another philosopher, not a zombie but something worse, a Hegelian. He is at the funeral of the title character, and tells the poor fellow’s story, how Matias devoted his life, energy, and fortune to a perfectly idealized love affair. He falls in love with the married beauty next door, and she with him, but they conduct their affair in an entirely spiritual manner. Matias lives as if he is married to Elisa, furnishing his house as if she lived in it, giving up smoking “even when out riding alone” because she dislikes the smoke. The twists of the plot refine this perfect, or mad, affair; pure devotion is never pure enough.

Looking at the story now, I see a continual mix of the material and the spiritual. It is a kind of anti-Romantic Romanticism, or a Romantic anti-Romanticism. I do not know what either of those would be, but words like “naturalism” or “realism” are not helpful.

José Matias is buried; the story ends; the narrator, the philosopher who “proved beyond doubt the illusion of sensation,” ends the story with “Still, it is a lovely afternoon."

Dear reader, creature improvised by God, a poor creation shaped out of poor clay, my fellow and my brother - satirical Eça de Queirós

2011-10-26T11:45:00.000-05:00

More review-like recommendation-like Eça de Queirós writing today.

I direct the attention of the reader curious about Eça de Queirós but unwilling to commit to a thick novel, however juicy, to The Mandarin and Other Stories, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, a mere 160 pages of fictional text.

The novella that leads the collection is a Voltaire-like fantasy, told with gleeful zest. The premise is an old moral dilemma: if you could murder a distant Chinese mandarin and inherit his fortune with no consequences, would you do it? The clerk who narrates the story can and does (the devil is brought in as a mechanical aid, although the narrator does not believe in the devil), but amidst his new wealth and decadent hedonism, he becomes tormented by visions of the mandarin, not just of the man himself but of his family, his position:

I felt doubly guilty for having deprived a whole society of an important personage, an experienced man of letters, a pillar of the Social Order, a mainstay of public institutions. You can’t just remove a man worth one hundred and six thousand contos from a country without upsetting the balance.

This absurd imaginative specificity is what makes the novella work. The clerk actually travels to China to try to right his wrong. Eça de Queirós can indulge, like his characters in fantasies of China, presenting heights of elegance and horrors of poverty, beauty and disgust, wisdom and incompetence, all of which has about as much to do with the actual China as Voltaire’s Lisbon and Brazil related to the real ones. The invented exoticism paradoxically makes the themes of the novel universal. Everything the clerk wanted to escape or experience exists in China as well as Lisbon. Perhaps we bring it with us, whatever it might be.

The wealthy man ends his account with a cry of despair: "And now the world seems to me a huge mound of ruins where my soul cries out ceaselessly, in exile among the fallen columns." His only consolation is that “not one Mandarin would remain alive if you, dear reader, creature improvised by God, a poor creation shaped out of poor clay, my fellow and my brother, if you could snuff him out as easily as I did and thus inherit all his millions!”

What, no, not me. Plus, this could never happen.

Anyway, 68 pages of amusing reading.

A vast sunshade bristling with toothpicks - the meaningful monkey knickknacks of Eça de Queirós

2011-10-25T09:00:00.000-05:00

The only part of Cousin Bazilio that I must – must! – write about (we are in the home of a young, middle-class couple; some friends have come over; Juliana is the servant I mentioned yesterday):

The Councillor intervened gravely:

‘No,’ he said, ‘I cannot believe that our Jorge is serious. He’s too educated to have ideas which are so…’

He hesitated, searching for the right adjective. Juliana appeared in front of him bearing a tray on which a silver monkey was crouched in comical fashion beneath a vast sunshade bristling with toothpicks. He took one, bowed and concluded:

‘… so uncivilized.’ (40)

As usual, Eça de Queirós is right about everything. Jorge is only pretending to have such uncivilized ideas (I will omit the plot-relevant foreshadowing of the idea itself), and the silver monkey is comical!

Ha ha ha – well, slightly comical, but due to a critical failure of internet-based technology the only silver monkey with a toothpick parasol that I could find is mounted on an elephant, and I assume that the crouching of the unmounted monkey is much funnier, and that the sunshade is much vaster. I politely borrowed the picture from silverplateflatware.net, a place I bet you do not want to visit.

Anyway, that’s the sort of thing the novel’s heroine has in her house. It stands out. Eça de Queirós presumably had seen this delightful item somewhere, and perhaps even owned it himself. Within the novel, the toothpick monkey tells us something about the bourgeois taste of its owners, and introduces a silly taste of colonial exoticism.

No novelist worthy of Flaubert will stop at that point – there is a second monkey connected to the first. We move to a “domestic employment agency,” run by a working-class con-woman who will assist Juliana with her blackmail scheme:

Above the sofa [it pains me to omit the details of the repulsive sofa] hung a lithograph of Senhor Dom Pedro IV. Between the two windows stood a tall dresser and, on it, flanked by a statue of St Anthony and a box made of shells, was a small stuffed monkey with glass eyes, balanced on the branch of a tree. (237)

I did not try to find an image of this hideous object. We see why Eça de Queirós had Juliana handle the silver monkey in the first passage, since the monkeys are links between the servant’s two worlds. Whatever was in marginal or even good taste is sordidly parodied at the crooked employment agency. The crouching of this monkey, between Church and State, is also comical.

Whenever I go on about the method or technique of Flaubert, I usually mean devices like these matching monkeys. They can be awfully hard to detect on a first reading of a novel, but the toothpick monkey happened to be odd enough that I was able to remember it. I was not in the least surprised by its grotesque reprise - that's how this sort of book works. I am sure there are more monkey-like goodies in Cousin Bazilio that I missed.

Somehow I forgot to mention yesterday that the translator of Cousin Bazilio is the unsurpassable Margaret Jull Costa.

This is like something out of Eugénie Grandet! - recommending Cousin Bazilio by Eça de Queirós

2011-10-24T12:26:00.001-05:00

Cousin Bazilio, the 1878 second novel of José Maria Eça de Queirós, would make a good Portuguese Literature Challenge choice. It is well-plotted, with a lot of forward motion; the central characters are excellent; the novel is enjoyably thick (435 pages in the Dedalus paperback I read) without becoming an unwieldy tome like The Maias (1888). If I think The Maias is the stronger book, larger in reach, more carefully constructed, the distinction is trivial, especially for a reader new to the author, as I am.

I have described the novel so baldly because I do not want to write too much about it, in part to encourage Challengists who have not otherwise committed to think about reading the book. The books I typically read are so rich and complex that my usual five post, three thousand word approach barely blows the dust off the cover, but I fear that it can sometimes seem like I am beating the stuffing out of the poor book. Wuthering Expectations is far from exhaustive, but is often exhausting. I would prefer that Cousin Bazilio, or the idea of reading it, remains fresh and lively for a while longer, so I will not do much more with it, although tomorrow I will have to write about the bric-a-brac monkeys. I do not see how I have any choice.

‘This is like something out of Eugénie Grandet, Sebastião! What you’re telling me is straight out of a Balzac novel. It is, it’s Eugénie Grandet!’

Sebastião looked at him, horrified.

Balzac’s 1833 masterpiece shares a returning Brazilian relative with Cousin Bazilio – he’s the title character, this time. Bazilio, a male of the species known as “a dog,” arrives in Lisbon just as his married cousin, also at one time his fiancée, is feeling bored, lonely, and listless, her husband off on a long business trip. But the invocation of Balzac is misdirection: as The Maias is a theme-and-variations on A Sentimental Education, this novel is a recasting of Madame Bovary. A great difference, and the reason the novel is so easy to recommend, is that the author is not contemptuous of his characters, or even of their stupid mistakes. Eça de Queirós is more humane than Flaubert, or the Zola of Thérèse Raquin. Readers will be more likely to sympathize with his characters, as they say. I did.

The other difference is that the Portuguese Emma Bovary is cursed with an enemy, an amazing character, her maid Juliana. The war between the two women is the real story of the book, not Luiza’s adultery. This is Juliana:

She envied everything in the house: the desserts that the master and mistress ate, and even their underwear. Soirées and visits to the theatre infuriated her. If it rained on a day when a walk had been planned, she was over-joyed. The sight of the ladies all dressed up and with their hats on, staring miserably out of the windows, delighted her and made her almost loquacious:

‘Oh dear, madam! What a downpour! It’s absolutely pelting. It looks set in for the day too. What a shame!’ (72)

Luiza, the wife, is a first-rate creation, but her struggle with Juliana, the Old Prune makes the book.

Coming up: weird German playwrights for German Literature Month

2011-10-21T10:59:00.001-05:00

German Literature Month, so designated by Lizzy’s Literary Life and Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat, approaches. At either link, you will find an orderly, well-defined schedule for the month. My understanding is that it is should be followed only in spirit, although the schedules for the readalongs of Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest and Heinrich Böll’s The Silent Angel might have more meaning.

I have written before, if I am not imagining it as the result of a wine and tobacco induced E. T. A. Hoffmann-style dream, about my bewilderment and irritation at the poor status in the English-reading world of pre-20th century German-language literature. Goethe, a titan, the equivalent, in English terms, of Shakespeare, Johnson, and Wordsworth combined in a single person, shrivels down to the author of Faust (part I only) and the “autobiographical” Sorrows of Young Werther. German poetry is hopeless, despite numerous fine translations; German fiction, the rich line of novellas, is too weird. Theodor Fontane can be credited with bringing Flaubert into German, Frenchifying German fiction, so I hope many readers in the “too weird” crowd will enjoy Effi Briest a lot. The business with the crocodile and Chinese servant is still a little weird.

Weirdest of all, though, is the startling German dramatic tradition. The strange and wonderful things one found on the German stage. That stage might well be imaginary – I am thinking of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, “finished” (by his death) in 1837, published in 1879, performed in 1913. Large parts of Faust seem unstageable, too, although they have all been staged.

My point here is actually to pin up my German Literature Month reading list, except that I have not really decided yet. I will mess around with some of the late 19th century playwrights, that’s all I know, the three almost exact contemporaries – Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, and Frank Wedekind. (Sorry – Wedekind’s first name must be Franz, not Frank. Let me look that up. Ah, his full name is Benjamin Franklin Wedekind. Of course.)

Wedekind is most famous, I think, for Spring Awakening, which was recently bent into a Broadway musical, and the two Lulu plays. Schnitzler’s best known play is Der Reigen / La Ronde. Hauptmann won the Nobel Prize in 1912, but seems to now be the least known in English, meaning: the titles of his plays do not ring bells for me.

I am tempted, too, by some younger playwrights, like Hugo von Hofmannsthal, lively poet, librettist for the dreary Richard Strauss – someday I hope to be able to spell Hofmannsthal’s name correctly without looking it up. Or I might try the Expressionist Georg Kaiser, author of Gas and also Gas II. The titles alone attract my interest. I’m not going to read all or even much of this in November, though.

This piece must be among the most ignorant I have ever written for Wuthering Expectations. Speculative might be a kinder word. Corrections, admonitions, and recommendations are most welcome.

Oh, there will also be some of this in November:

That’ll be fun, right?

Your manly body so brown - The rest is literature - the Songs of António Botto

2011-10-20T11:46:00.000-05:00

António Botto was a Portuguese poet, his poems collected, Whitman-like, in a series of continually revised books titled Songs, the first published in 1920. The 1932 version is available in English, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2010, but actually translated long ago by, I am amazed to say, Portugal’s greatest poet, Fernando Pessoa.

Botto is a fine example of the French-styled decadent aesthete:

The most important thing in life
Is to create – to create beauty. (“Curiosity” 1)

In your last letter
You called me decadent
How funny!
Your letter
Made me laugh. (“Dandyism” 10)

I’m always glad to make people laugh. Botto’s great distinction is a series of poems about a sexual relationship with another man. They lead the collection:

No, let us kiss, only kiss
In this evening’s agony.
Keep
For some better moment
Your manly body so brown. (“Boy” 1)

Who is it that clasps me to him
In the half-light of my bed?
Who is it that kisses me
And bit my breast till it bled? (“Boy” 6)

And so on like that, the poet overwrought perhaps – or convincingly passionate – but straightforward in his desire, jealousy, and regret. Other than a poem about Salomé the placement of which I did not understand, the clusters of openly homosexual poems – the sequences “Boy,” “Curiosity,” and “Olympiads” – do not strike me as decadent at all, actually, but earthily romantic, or even realistic. The decadent pose is reserved for other parts of the poet’s life.

I am informed that the open homosexuality of the poems was scandalous, but that can mean anything. Pessoa wrote an obfuscatory defense of them, emphasizing the artifice of Botto's persona, in other words transforming Botto into another heteronym of Pessoa's, another imaginary poet.

Because I am so often befuddled by the way people use the word “beauty,” I found this amusing:

Beauty
Was always
Just a secondary thing
In the body that we love.
There is no beauty at all.
Anyhow, it can’t endure.
Beauty
Is no more than the desire
That makes our weary heart move.
The rest is literature. (“Boy” 10)

That’s just what I have been saying! Or maybe not. Now I am not sure. The contradictions within the passage give it whatever interest it might have.

Botto’s poems, or Pessoa’s version of them, do occasionally rhyme or employ a more formal structure or bounce off of a more complex image, but the excerpts I have given here are typical – the stance of the poet, the intensity of the voice, is what Botto has to offer. My favorite poem is told by an ostrich who endures being plucked for ladies’ hats:

They tear off my feathers
But no complaint of mine is heard.
I am a very
Well-bred bird.

“The Gray Ostrich” is not remotely typical of Botto.

I seem to have assembled a little Minor Portuguese Literature week. Let’s do something else tomorrow.

Everything Eça de Queirós wrote was enjoyable - The Yellow Sofa

2011-10-19T10:56:00.001-05:00

We talked about Eça de Queirós; we said that we wished there were more of Eça's books; that everything he wrote was enjoyable…

I am again poaching from the enormous Borges diary of Adolfo Bioy Casares that Richard of Caravan de Recuerdos has been reading (the translation is his). I have only begun Book #5 of Eça de Queirós, but that is enough to think that the claim of Borges and Bioy Casares is plausible. Likely, even.

Consider The Yellow Sofa (1925), also translated, more accurately, as Alves & Co. The publication date is twenty-five years after the death of Eça de Queirós; the date of composition is presumably sometime in the late 1870s or 1880s.

One might suspect – I suspected – that this 106 page novella is inferior for some reason, unfinished or inadequate. But no, the story is complete, the characters fleshy, the action meaningful, the insights real. And enjoyable, highly enjoyable. By the end, my question was why Eça de Queirós had left the manuscript in his trunk.

The Yellow Sofa begins in tranquility. Alves is in his office; business is good; his partner reliable; it is his fourth wedding anniversary. He knocks off work early – always a terrible idea in a novel – only to discover, well, you can guess:

On the yellow damask sofa, fronting a little table on which there stood a bottle of port, Lulu, in a white negligee, was leaning in abandon on the shoulder of a man whose arm was around her waist, and smiled as she gazed languorously at him. (19)

Lulu is his wife; the man is of course Alves’s business partner. The first 80 pages of the novel contain only two days of action – the discovery and aftermath, including the farcical arrangement of a duel. For example, the friends Alves picks as seconds cannot stop talking – the subject is in the air, after all – about their own and others’ “conquests”:

Medeiros knew of a case much worse than that: a friend of his, Pinheiro, not the thin one but the other pock-marked one, had hidden in a pigsty for six hours. He had nearly died! And now, when he saw a pig, he turned as white as chalk.

Then, between Carvalho and Medeiros there was a whole string of anecdotes about infidelities. Only Alves, a faithful married man, had none of these stories. (78)

The final twenty-five pages of the story accelerate. Days and decades pass. I wonder if this imbalanced structure is a clue to why Eça de Queirós abandoned the novel. Perhaps he wrote a complete version of the story but never chose or figured out how to turn it into a novel. Despite the presence, in the quotations above, of the pock-marked Pinheiro and the yellow damask sofa, the novel is less filled out, less thickly imagined, than the other Eça de Queirós novels I have read. As a story, The Yellow Sofa is complete and satisfying, but it lacks the connective details that give a novel an extra level of artistic structure and meaning.

Still, however minor the book may be compared to The Maias, at the end, and also in the middle, and also near the beginning, I thought “This is the quality of stuff Eça de Queirós threw away!”

Some Brazilian Tales, useful and otherwise

2011-10-18T11:12:00.000-05:00

A neat little discovery by mel u of The Reading Life: the 1921 Brazilian Tales, a pocket collection of six curious-to-good short stories. The link goes to Google Books, where the PDF scan is available; mel has links to the Gutenberg version. The book has three stories by the great Machado de Assis and three stories by writers new to me (these links go to mel's posts):

“The Vengeance of Felix” by José de Medeiros e Albuquerque, a rough tale of rough folk and rough revenge.
“The Pigeons” by Coelho Netto, terribly sad, a father’s angry response to the death of his child.
“Aunt Zeze’s Tears” by Carmen Dolores, also sad, in which an old maid gets her hopes up.

Hey, look at that, a woman writer! You won’t find any of them on the lists I made for the Portuguese Challenge, because I did not know of any.

Netto’s story is about indigenous laborers; the Medeiros e Albuquerque story is about urban working class characters. The description of the title character has a lot of energy:

Old Felix had followed his trade of digger in all the quarries that Rio de Janeiro possessed. He was a sort of Hercules with huge limbs, but otherwise stupid as a post. His companions had nicknamed him Hardhead because of his obstinate character. (opening lines)

I rarely emphasize the point, but these good post-Maupassant short stories have another use for me: they fill in some more of the background of turn of the century Brazil. What was life like there, what were people like? This is fiction, so watch your step, but maybe something like what these writers show me. For this purpose they are more useful than the stories of the more original writer, Machado de Assis.

“The Attendant’s Confession” is by the Machado de Assis I recognize, a cynical, dodging and weaving first-person story. A murderous act of anger is rewarded. The narrator is confessing to the murder, but why – and when? Similarly, “The Fortune-Teller” is as much concerned with its own structure as the world outside the story. And then there is “Life,” a hallucinatory dialogue between the Wandering Jew and Prometheus about the value of life and mankind which I did not really get, at least not until the punchline.

None of these Machado de Assis stories are in The Psychiatrist and Other Stories, the one collection I have read, but they may well be in The Devil’s Church and Other Stories or A Chapter of Hats: Selected Stories. I am amazed that there are three collections of Machado de Assis stories in English.

A good find by mel – thanks for that.

Griffinism

2011-10-17T11:23:00.001-05:00

After all my jabber about John Ruskin’s griffins, it occurs to me that I should show them:

The plate is in Chapter VIII, “Grotesque,” of the third volume of Modern Painters (1856). The left-hand griffin, medieval griffin, the “true” griffin, resides on the cathedral of Verona, while the “false” classical griffin on the right is from the Roman temple of Antoninus and Faustina.

Neither creature is true in the sense that it exists or existed. Ruskin is arguing the case for imaginative truth:

The Lombard workman did really see a griffin in his imagination, and carved it from the life, meaning to declare to all ages that he had verily seen with his immortal eyes such a griffin as that; but the classical workman never saw a griffin at all, nor anything else; but put the whole thing together by line and rule.

“How do you know that?”

Very easily. Look at the two, and think them over. (§12-13)

Taking “easily” ironically, and taking for granted that Ruskin’s arguments will be fanciful, the passage does turn out to be a masterpiece of the core of criticism – look and think. Ruskin saves it (too easy), but I will start with the most bizarre flaw in the classical griffin, that the left foreleg is nearly twice as long as the right; Ruskin is amused by what the griffin is doing, gently touching a leaf or flower:

We may be pretty sure, if the carver had ever seen a griffin, he would have reported of him as doing something else than that with his feet. (§ 14)

The Gothic griffin is actually clutching a little dragon in its powerful claws, which is unfortunately a bit hard to see in the plate – that’s the dragon’s curled tail and wing running up the griffin’s throat.

I do not want to repeat Ruskin’s analysis. The conclusion is that the classical griffin is a hodgepodge assembled from earlier models, with decorative elements added to hide the flaws, while the medieval beast is not a scrapbook but a wholly imagined original creation. Just look at that beak full of lion teeth.

So that taking the truth first, the honest imagination gains everything; it has its griffinism, and grace, and usefulness, all at once; but the false composer, caring for nothing but himself and his rules, loses everything, -- griffinism, grace, and all. (§ 20)

I can hardly imagine arguing on Ruskin’s terms (“honest,” truth”), and he in fact begins the next chapter with “I am afraid the reader must be, by this time, almost tired of hearing about truth.” But much of what I look for in art and literature, much of what I am trying to do at Wuthering Expectations, is in that passage. I am looking for true imagination when I read, for a book’s griffinism.

I make no apologies for this extremely prosy paragraph. I have been ordered to write it. (How interesting this is!) - the Wilkie Collins griffins

2011-10-14T11:06:00.000-05:00

The Woman in White has spurred or focused my puzzlement over the role of enjoyment in criticism because it is one of the most sheerly enjoyable Victorian novels. Stretches of prose are functionally ordinary (“Half an hour later I was speeding back to London by the express train,” that sort of thing), and the plot is, stepping back a bit, nonsense, but perfectly paced nonsense, thrilling nonsense. Collins attributes the success of the story not to its ingenuity but to the characters who drive it, to “their existence as recognizable realities” (Preface, longer quotation here). This sounds suspiciously like a version of Ruskin’s question: Is it so? Some – I do not think all, but some – of the characters in The Woman in White are “so,” wonderfully “so.”

Richard at La Caravana de Recuerdos has been reading an amazing book, a thousand-page diary of Adolfo Bioy Casares entirely about his friendship and conversations with Jorge Luis Borges. The book sounds as bookishly juicy as The Life of Johnson. In a passage Richard just posted (translation his), Borges and Bioy Casares assemble a list of “lifelike characters”:

Pinkerton from The Wrecker; the father from Douglas' The House with the Green Shutters… Cousin Basilio's heroine… Shylock; perhaps King Lear (not Macbeth)… Martín Fierro; Grandet and Eugénie… Jesus; Count Fosco and the paralytic uncle from The Lady in White [sic, English in original]; according to my father, Félicité from Flaubert's Un coeur simple and the woman that's in The Crime of Father Amaro.

I have heavily trimmed the list to emphasize my own recent and upcoming reading. If there was any doubt about why Borges is one of my guiding figures, I can see here how my entirely arbitrary and random matrix of tastes lines up so well with his. Not my point, though, which is more that several people are reading The Crime of Father Amaro soon and it is not too late to join in and meet “the woman.” No, that’s not my point either.

Count Fosco and Mr. Fairlie, the paralytic uncle, are just the characters I pick as the ones with the most vivid “existence,” the ones who Collins was able to infuse with “real” imaginative truth. Fosco is a villain who is observed and described in the heroine’s diary, and whose written confession is the imaginative climax of the novel; Fairlie is a peripheral plot device who only plumps up during his own firsthand testimony, which mostly consists of this sort of thing:

That is to say, I had the photographs of my pictures, and prints, and coins, and so forth, all about me, which I intend, one of these days, to present (the photographs, I mean, if the clumsy English language will let me mean anything) to present to the institution at Carlisle (horrid place!), with a view to improving the tastes of the members (Goths and Vandals to a man).

I was very unreasonable – I expected three days of quiet. Of course I didn’t get them.

I make no apologies for this extremely prosy paragraph. I have been ordered to write it.

He waved his horrid hand at me; he struck his infectious breast; he addressed me oratorically – as if I was laid up in the House of Commons.

That last “he” is Count Fosco, and much of Fairlie’s letter is his version of the encounter between the novel’s two best characters. Readers of Samuel Beckett’s novels might detect something familiar here. This is the Borgesian definition, and Ruskinian, and Amateur Readerian, of “lifelike.” Not that the character resembles an actual living creature, but that his creator truly saw the imaginary beast. Mr. Fairlie and Count Fosco are like Ruskin’s Lombardian griffin, imaginary but true.

I will leave Count Fosco’s extraordinary letter alone, except to give Collins more credit: the villain’s confession contains almost no information that a half-awake reader does not already know, so is functionally almost useless, except that it is the best thing in the book, all due to the character’s force of personality, to his language. “(Pass me, here, one exclamation in parenthesis. How interesting this is!)”

Most of the other characters are like Ruskin's Renaissance griffin. I have seen reviewers of the novel single out the heroine, Marian Halcombe, as a great character, but I have had trouble seeing how she is not more than a high-quality adventure novel heroine, one of those Strong Female Characters we are trained to praise. I ask her fans for a passage, or line, or action that pulled her out of the book, something that belongs just to her. Something not relative to novels of her time (where I see no shortage of plucky heroines, honestly), but to the timeless. Where does she feed the monkey, so to speak?

Their feelings pleasantly stirred and their fancy gayly occupied - Ruskin's suspicion of enjoyment - Is it so?

2011-10-13T11:58:00.001-05:00

There is the certain test of goodness and badness, which I am always striving to get people to use. As long as they are satisfied if they find their feelings pleasantly stirred and their fancy gayly occupied, so long there is for them no good, no bad.

I am still in Chapter X, “The Use of Pictures,” of the third volume of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1856), an idea-packed masterpiece of rhetorical prose. Many of the ideas are wrong, or, provocative. For example, it is clear enough that for many consumers of art a pleasantly stirred fancy is the exact definition of good, the more pleasure the better.

Anything may please, or anything displease, them; and their entire manner of thought and talking about art is mockery, and all their judgments are laborious injustices.

I am just continuing the quotation here. The end, Ruskin’s “certain test,” will not be satisfying, I promise. “Injustice” seems awfully strong, no? I enormously enjoy seeing Ruskin work himself up to this high pitch. Pleasure-based judgment of art has its narrow use, the equivalent of matching my tastes against a blogger’s star ratings. I discover with experience that I enjoy any 4 or 5 star book rated by my favorite book blogger, BookGullet, while I consistently enjoy only the 5 star books chosen by BookGrump, and I never get along with even the 5 star books of BookGoon. I am comparing my arbitrary matrix of tastes against everyone else’s and using the results of the algorithm to read bloggers and their recommended books.

So, not an injustice, or even a mockery, but for the reader who arbitrarily values knowledge as much or more than experience (myself, John Ruskin), frustrating. I learn a lot about the taste of readers when I wander around book blogs, but not so much about the literature they read.

But let them, in the teeth of their pleasure or displeasure, simply put the calm question, -- Is it so? Is that the way a stone is shaped, the way a cloud is wreathed, the way a leaf is veined? and they are safe. They will do no more injustice to themselves nor to other men; they will learn to whose guidance they may trust their imagination, and from whom they must forever withhold its reins.

“Simply” – oh please! In Chapter VIII of the same book, Ruskin compares two carved griffins, and preposterously, convincingly demonstrates how one is so, and one is not so – “the Lombard workman did really see a griffin in his imagination, and carved it from the life.” So the “so,” the Truth of a work of art, even of a drawing of a leaf, is an imaginative truth.

The Woman in White is a mystery and a thriller, and Collins’ skill with pacing and tension must still be a model for suspense writers. It is an easy book to enjoy, even if it is often a silly book. Is it so? Obviously not, except that, at its best, it is. Collins really did see it, and wrote it from life.

There's a thread to follow tomorrow.

Enjoyment - romances, science fiction, reading

2011-10-12T11:41:00.002-05:00

I must ask permission, as I have sometimes done before, to begin apparently a long way from the point. (John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Vol. III, Ch. X)

The problem with invoking Ruskin like this is that he knew the point at which he would end. I intuit my point.

I have said, here and in comments elsewhere, that I am not so interested in the enjoyment of books, not just your enjoyment, but even my own. Typical Wuthering Expectations contrarianism, except that I mean it, as I always do. Pleasure, our reasons for enjoying anything, are so arbitrary. Anyway, I enjoy literature, reading as an activity. I even enjoy the books I do not enjoy. Your enjoyment of a book is likely a much more interesting subject than mine.

The Argumentative Old Git does not enjoy science fiction, as he discusses here – since I am not going to mention it otherwise, his catalogue of the praise of Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker is hilariously excellent. Himadri has given the genre the old college try, and then some, and has concluded that whatever the merits of the best books, he is finished for now. Some well-meaning commenters urge him to keep trying, but they fail to understand the statistics of the problem. Himadri is engaging in sequential analysis, which was mathematically formalized during World War II as an efficient way to test explosive shells for duds. Rather than fire off the entire lot of shells, the tester can stop once a statistically significant number of shells have misfired. Himadri has read enough misfires, given his sample size, to call it quits.

Rohan Maitzen is engaging in the same exercise with romance novels. So far, the results are more positive, although she understands that she has not yet fired enough shells to make a statistically sound judgment. The criteria, again, is enjoyment – “amusing and entertaining.” My own experience with romance novels is similar, although my pool is awfully narrow.

Or is it? This fascinating post at Something More led me to the results of a methodologically sound romance readers’ poll, a list of the best or favorite or “top” 100 romance novels, as of 2007, as determined by a large and well-read group of voters. I see that I have read and enjoyed three of them: Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and Jane Eyre, the only 19th century novels on the list. Three Georgette Heyer novels (1932-1965) follow, and then seven novels from the 1980s (Judith McNaught is the big name), meaning that 87 of the best 100 novels are from the last 20 years. I wonder what other genres or audiences would give a similar result. Romance seems to have an unstable canon. New novels quickly replace old ones. Would I enjoy any of those 87 as much as I enjoy Jane Eyre?

I have been thinking about writing up the case against the enjoyment of literature, but I have concluded that the point is too obvious. To read well, we should cultivate patience, question our preferences, moderate our consumption of junk, and when writing about reading try to imagine ourselves in the place of others. Consider sacrificing short-term for long-term enjoyment (study, cultivate tastes, read some quantity, however small, of dull but useful books), all within the inevitable constraints of time, energy, and concentration. Everyone knows this, already, so enough of that.

I am still writing about The Woman in White, if I can figure out how to return to it. Through Ruskin, somehow.

The Woman in White, lookalikes, and the ol' switcheroo

2011-10-11T11:01:00.000-05:00

The Woman in White contains a pair of lookalike characters. The “ominous likeness” is introduced early in the novel, as it must be, because the reader needs to be on the alert for the only possible reason for using lookalikes. At some point, there’s gonna be a switcheroo. In the service, presumably, of some preposterous scheme.

The novel is told in first-person documents, mimicking firsthand testimony (the “documents” are assembled for a lawsuit that never happens), and much of the fun of the novel lies in seeing events from more than one angle, or, even more fun, discovering how the piece missing from one person’s observation is filled in by someone else. But the lookalikes are conspicuously absent. Their story is always told by someone else.

The documentary technique is perfect for the ol’ switcheroo because it leaves all sorts of gaps when the lookalikes are out of the narrator’s, and thus the reader’s, observation. The savvy reader, trained by Alfred Hitchcock, will pounce at each gap, anytime both lookalikes are offstage. Ah ha – they switched! And I attend carefully to every gesture, every stray phrase, of the lookalike who has come back on stage. No, I guess they have not switched yet, she seems to be the same character she was before. But here comes another gap – !

Collins is good at teasing me, allowing for the possibility of several false switches. His novel branched as I read it. Perhaps the story could include multiple switches, with the villains and heroes constantly shifting the lookalikes back and forth to confound each other. Or perhaps – the most devilish possibility – perhaps there is no switch at all, just the looming possibility of a switch. I ask the reader familiar with the story of The Woman in White to imagine what happens to the last quarter of the novel, and to the end, if the lookalikes never switch places, but the other characters believe that they do. This is not the novel Collins wrote, but rather one he came very close to writing. Just a few tweaks, and there it is. In fact – well, never mind.

I am not particularly familiar with Hitchcock, but I am astounded by how much he has pilfered from The Woman in White, how many devices and clichés he has repurposed. But I hardly needed Hitchcock to see what Collins was doing, to be on the alert for the lookalike switcheroo. Contemporary readers must have been just as suspicious.

The Woman in White was serially published in All the Year Round from November 26, 1859 through August 25, 1860. All the Year Round was owned and edited by Charles Dickens, and was the home for one of his most popular novels, A Tale of Two Cities, which first appeared in the April 30, 1859 and ended in the November 26, 1859 issue. That’s right, A Tale of Two Cities ends and is immediately followed by the first piece of The Woman in White (pdf).

Two novels in a row, both with lookalikes switching places. I speculated a bit about the lookalikes in the Dickens novel. I particularly appreciated how Dickens laid the foundation for a revelation about why or how the lookalikes look alike, but never bothered to fill in the details. What difference does it make, after all? The suggestions are at least as interesting as the answer. Collins, for whatever reason, provides an answer, the exact same answer Dickens would have given. I did not need it here either, but there it is.

Her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness - the visibly deformed The Woman in White

2011-10-10T11:32:00.002-05:00

Descriptions of people, of characters in novels, particularly thorough introductory top-to-bottom inventory descriptions, are typically useless, by which I mean artistically useless, because the details are so often unconnected and almost random, and useless to the reader who has no hope of remembering anything but a general impression. All of that detail just disintegrates.

Here is an amusing exception, from early in The Woman in White (1860). It is the narrator’s first view of a major character, Marian Halcombe, from a distance, with her back turned:

Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays. (The First Epoch, VI)

Readers of Wilkie Collins know that the nature of the description changes when the woman turns around, but I am not so interested in that right now. What caught my attention was, of course, the peculiarity of the description. The “easy, pliant firmness” of the head, for example, or that “natural circle.” Who talks or writes like this?

In fact, the description is natural for the character, because he is a drawing master. He is breaking his subject down into her component parts, as he might do if he were to draw her, or as he might instruct a student. I would guess that a search through contemporary guides to drawing would unearth that “natural circle.”

It’s a nice touch. Too bad Collins does not follow through with more passages like this, but I suspect he feared making his hero – the narrator is the novel’s action hero, so to speak – too eccentric. His (the hero’s) later descriptions are more conventional. The genuinely eccentric Mr. Fairlie has a face that is “thin, worn, and transparently pale, but not wrinkled,” eyes that are “rather red round the rims of the eyelids,” hair that is “soft to look at,” "little, womanish, bronze-leather slippers" and so on, lots of nice writing but much too much to remember, well-suited to create a strong impression of Fairlie’s personality, if not his actual appearance.

Well, hair that is “soft to look at” is kind of strange. My point is that the first look at Mr. Fairlie does a good job of creating the Mr. Fairlie who I carried through the rest of the novel, but does not tell us much of interest about the character who describes him, while the catalogue of Marian’s form a few pages earlier reveals the mentality of the narrator too. That’s it; that’s my point. Collins works on the idea throughout the book, unfortunately indulging himself more when the minor characters are narrating, "unfortunately" because the minor characters are weirder and funnier. The major characters are visibly deformed by stays, the conventional constraints of being the hero or heroine (of the strong or weak variety) of a Victorian novel.

Perhaps I will think of something else to say about The Woman in White later.

It’s bitter, and I daresay it won’t suit your taste, but how about a bite? - Chikamatsu's puppet plays

2011-10-07T10:58:00.001-05:00

The puppet plays of Chikamatsu Monzaemon are built on ethical and aesthetical values that are foreign and baffling to me. I turn them this way and that, shake them, gnaw on them a bit, trying to figure out how they work. They are a wonderful challenge. I have come across readers who resent that an author includes history or names or anything else they do not understand. I instead want to thank Chikamatsu, and Donald Keene, the translator and editor of Four Major Plays of Chikamatsu (Columbia UP, 1961). How will I know what I do not know if no one tells me?

Two titles clarify the problem: The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (1703) and The Love Suicides at Amijima (1721). Love suicides? The heroines are prostitutes; the heroes are young men who have exhausted their wealth on their love affair. The plays end with the bloody, detailed deaths of the protagonists; the scene preceding the deaths is an allegorical journey of Buddhist spiritual cleansing:

KOHARU: If I can save living creatures at will when I mount a lotus calyx in Paradise and become a Buddha, I want to protect women of my profession, so that never again will there be love suicides.

NARRATOR: This unattainable prayer stems from worldly attachment, but it touchingly reveals her heart. (203)

The narrator is present in all of the plays, describing the action and setting and passage of time, inserting songs and poems and wisdom. He is often the only actor, so he also does the voices of all of the puppets as well. I have to imagine the painted scenes, the multi-jointed puppets and their movements, the puppeteers in their trench, and, hopelessly, the music. I also have to imagine the weeping audience.

The Battles of Coxinga (1715) is a historical epic in which a Japanese general expels the Tartar invaders from China. It features magic spirits, single warriors defeating armies, visions and dream sequences, utterly baffling honor suicides, endless weeping, and an allegory based on a game of go. Also, a less allegorical use of go:

GO SANKEI: This go board has been kneaded of taro root, and is harder than stone. It’s bitter, and I daresay it won’t suit your taste, but how about a bite?...

NARRATOR: When Bairoku shows his head, Go Sankei smacks It squarely; when he shows his face, Go Sankei strikes it smartly. He belabors Bairoku with repeated blows, till brains and skull are smashed to bits, and he perishes. (123)

I am not familiar enough with Japanese action movies to know how often villains are beaten to death with go boards. Quite often, I assume.

Donald Keene, the translator of the edition of Chikamatsu I read, is unapologetically obscure, including every name, reference, and joke he can bring into English, explaining the inexplicable in abundant footnotes. For some reason, though, he omits the opening scene (“virtually unrelated to the rest of the play”) of The Love Suicides at Sonezaki “consisting chiefly of an enumeration of the thirty-three temples of Kwannon in the Osaka area (with a pun on each name).” Can you believe the outrageous liberties taken by translators?

I should go fill out the paperwork at Dolce Bellezza’s Japanese Reading Challenge, shouldn’t I?

We have to strike straight inland - visionary Martín Fierro

2011-10-06T11:16:00.001-05:00

The Gaucho Martín Fierro is a political book, a protest book. The gaucho narrator is an oppressed minority; his unique way of life is threatened, or already destroyed; his contribution to the nation ignored.

All of this may feel a little distant to the non-Argentinean reader. It may well be opposed by a skeptical reader. In the introduction to the 1974 translation, I am told that the gauchos had “performed a major role in the country’s independence from Spain” (good for them, vivan los gauchos!) and “had cleared the pampas of marauding Indian bands that plagued the pastoral development of the region” (good for - hang on there - vivan los indios!).

The outlaw gaucho Martín Fierro, at the end of his verse novel, flees across the desert to live with the Indians. If his vision of a life of indolence (“you live lying belly-up \ watching the sun go round”) and happiness is a fantasy, he may be right that “We’ll find safety over there \ since we can’t have it here.”

Except that his decision is also an acceptance of death. The canto begins with a section that is the closest thing this earthy poem has to a visionary interlude. God gave beauty to flowers and birds, and strength to beasts and the wind, but he gave more valuable gifts to men – speech, intelligence, courage – balanced by the hardships from which Martín Fierro now longs to escape:

We have to strike straight inland
towards where the sun goes down –
one day we’ll get there, we’ll
find out where afterwards (2205-2209)

Martín Fierro takes a drink, smashes his guitar, steals some horses, and disappears across the frontier. Who knows what happened to him, the narrator tells us, but everything you have heard is true, “EVILS THAT EVERYONE KNOWS ABOUT \ BUT NO ONE TOLD BEFORE” (2315-2316, the last lines of the poem, capitalization supplied by the poet).

I have switched here to the plainer, more accurate 1967 translation by C. E. Ward, revised by Frank Carrino and Alberto Carlos. The latter two also did the “cowboy” version.

The Gaucho Martín Fierro - classic 19th century knife fights

2011-10-05T09:00:00.000-05:00

I need to slip across the border for a post or two, from Brazil to Argentina. JenandthePen thought people should read some books from Argentina; I have made my opinions on that subject clear enough.

This time, rather than mess around with the howling lunatics and unassuming librarians of the 20th century, I went back to the root of Argentine literature, to The Gaucho Martín Fierro, the 1872 epic gaucho poem by José Hernández.

I will confess that I was expecting something – I don’t know – stiff, Longellowish. Imitative Romantic twaddle. What fun to discover that Martín Fierro is more of a Western. The English translators go so far as to turn it into a cousin of cowboy poetry.

When brandin’ time came
you got a warm feelin watchin’
all those gauchos ropin’
and throwin’ steers right and left.
ah, what times… there ain’t
ever been nothin’ to match it. (II.217-22)

The translators, I should say, are trying to match “substance and tone” and nothing else:

Cuando llegaban las yerras,
¡cosa que daba calor
tanto gaucho pialador
y tironiador sin yel!
¡Ah tiempos… pero si en él
Se ha visto tanto primor!

The poem is a lament for the lost life of the gaucho, destroyed by military conscription, war and settlement. Martín Fierro narrates – actually sings – the poem to describe the loss of his home and family, his brutal treatment in the army, and his violent life as an outlaw.

When he rolled up his cuffs
I took off my spurs
since I suspected this guy
warn’t goin’ to be easy to handle.

There is nothin’ like danger
to sober up a drunk;
even your sight clears up,
no matter how much you’ve guzzled. (VII.1199-1206)

As any reader of Borges will guess, someone’s gonna get knifed. I mean readers of Borges stories not about books, although the existence of Martín Fierro is a reminder that Borges’s stories about gauchos knifing each other are also about books. Different books. This book.

I have barely touched the Martín Fierro. Maybe one more dusty, lonesome, bloody day.

SUNY Press published two editions of the poem. The 1967 version has facing-page Spanish, extensive notes, and a longer sequel, The Return of Martín Fierro that I did not read. The 1974 version, source of the English above, is smaller, lighter, and zippier.

But I’m either mistaken or I’ve just written a useless blog post - Machado de Assis at his best

2011-10-04T10:45:00.000-05:00

No, I need to compensate for the dud. I am not exactly reading but thumbing through The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881), the first of Machado de Assis’s mature novels, the novel where the author severed himself from his earlier work and created something distinctively his own. Something like this:

CXXXVI

Uselessness

But I’m either mistaken or I’ve just written a useless chapter.

That is the entirety of chapter 136. I will bet that for many readers, this chapter by itself is either a recommendation for the book, to see how this kind of writing works, or a clear warning to avoid Machado de Assis.

“Uselessness” is the only single sentence chapter in the novel, if I count this as more than one sentence:

CXXXIX

How I Didn’t Get to Be Minister of States

……………………….
……………………….
……………………….

The narrator of the novel, the author of the memoir, is recently deceased, dead at sixty-four of pneumonia, as he tells me in the first chapter. In the hands of almost any other writer, the mechanics and curiosities of posthumous authorship would occupy some substantial part of the book, allowing the real author to demonstrate his imaginative chops, but Machado de Assis does nothing of the sort, provides no glimpses of the afterlife or gags about publishing in heaven.

The posthumous gimmick solves a couple of technical problems. First, the memoirist can complete his story, all the way to his death. Second, he is freed from worry about what anyone else might think of his life. Machado de Assis wants a reliable narrator, one who may have trouble understanding himself, but otherwise has nothing to hide.

The narrator is also free to wander, double back, digress and regress, but I do not believe he needs to be dead to do that. He cites the “free-form” of 18th century writers Laurence Sterne and Xavier de Maistre as models. Chapter titles include “What Aristotle Left Out,” “The Author Hesitates,” and “The Defect of This Book,” yet a story is told, a surprisingly ordinary one. Girl trouble, mostly. The telling of the story is the extraordinary thing.

In the novel’s fictional preface, Brás Cubas calls his book “playful” and “melancholy” and suspects that it will have about five readers. But he does not mean to be obscure or unfriendly:

The work itself is everything: if it pleases you, dear reader, I shall be well paid for the task; if it doesn’t please you, I’ll pay you with a snap of the finger and goodbye.

I had thought that I was just browsing the novel, but I seem to be reading it again.

I am using the Oxford University Press edition, translated by Gregory Rabassa.

Helena, a Machado de Assis dud - Do not blame me for anything romantic you may find in it

2011-10-03T11:29:00.001-05:00

After my enthusiastic praise for Eça de Queirós I should, for justice or symmetry, devote some equally effusive time to his Brazilian contemporary Machado de Assis. Unfortunately the last Machado de Assis novel I read is a – what is the technical term? – a dud. An instructive dud, though.

No one will dropping by here will read Helena (1876) so I can summarize the plot with abandon. A half-brother and half-sister, Helena, are reunited as young adults. They are both attractive, so an attentive reader might guess the path of the story right here. Even I, the Naïve Reader, noticed that an incest plot was on its way, that the siblings had fallen in love.

But no, in a twist we discover that noble Helena and her brother are not related at all! They can marry and be happy, except that they are both engaged to other people by now, and Helena is just too good for the world, so in the final five pages she has to stay out too long in the rain, and catch a fever, and die (“her soul burst its delicate earthly sheath” 196). I was a’feared of that.

That story is not so bad – no, not until the very end, at least. It is the plainness of the writing, the lack of much out of the ordinary that makes the book dull. Still, the treatment of the secondary characters has some life, a little sign of the more stinging novels to come, and a priest character is used in a peculiar manner that may be uniquely Brazilian. The casual treatment of the subject of slavery is so different from what I know from U. S. literature and is interesting for that reason alone. Subjects to keep in reserve.

I am amazed that the writer of Helena is also the author of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, published only five years later. The change in style, voice, and method is radical. I don’t know another case like it, an example where a mature writer makes such an extreme change. Machado de Assis added a foreword to the 1905 edition of his 1876 Helena to explain himself a bit:

Do not blame me for anything romantic you may find in it… Even now that I have long since gone on to other works, of a different style, I hear a faraway echo on rereading these pages, an echo of youth and ingenuous faith.

I do not blame him. No, I understand, completely. But if Portuguese Reading Challengers will stick with the books of the later astringent Machado de Assis and skip the early Romantic ones, that would be appreciated. One was sufficient.

The translation of Helena is by the Machado de Assis scholar Helen Caldwell.

One could hear only the [Amateur Reader's] voice, like the high-pitched gobble of a turkey, saying of everything: c'est charmant, c'est trés beau - a Maias miscellaney

2011-09-30T10:02:00.000-05:00

The Maias is about many things.

* The novel is organized in eighteen long chapters, each with its own narrative arc, each complete in its own way. I could imagine a couple of them, with minor adjustments, standing on their own in the sense that “The Dead” stands on its own. Or, because so many of the chapters include party scenes, I can compare Eça de Queirós to Proust. Most of the chapter, the party, is not concerned with advancing the plot. It may not be clear until the next chapter that the plot has advanced at all.

Chapter X, the horse race chapter in the center of the novel, is a standout. The long, complex scene, an expansion, I think, of a short horse race scene from A Sentimental Education, ranks near the horse race in Anna Karenina (1877) as one of the century’s greats. I worry that I have been overrating the novel as a whole; I do not worry about overrating this chapter.

Eça de Queirós uses the horse race to do – everything, just everything. Carlos, our hero, pursues one woman and is pursued by another, so that takes care of the story. Nearly every character in the novel intrudes on the scene, including all sorts of new ones, some never to be seen again, such as “Little Sá Videira, the daughter of a wealthy shoe merchant, entered on her brother’s arm, looking like a small petulant doll, rather irritated with everything and talking very loudly in English” (277, this post's title, slightly modified, is on the same page). I feel like Eça de Queirós could have followed her off into another novel if he had not been preoccupied with this one.

The great accomplishment of this chapter is that it shows the protagonist at his most elegant. Surrounded by chaos and nonsense – the Portuguese cannot even operate a horse race correctly – Carlos is effortlessly graceful: “They had all lost; he had swept the board, won all the bets, got away with everything. What luck!” But I had been with Carlos for a long time at this point, so I could tell the difference between luck and grace.

* The Maias is a male novel. Eça de Queirós never, that I can remember, wanders into the thoughts of a woman, and there are really only two female characters of consequence. One of them, the Grand Passion, has an especially dangerous role, since she has to embody a lot of Romantic clichés while still having some personality. Little touches have to counter or complicate the protagonist’s view of her as an Ideal Object.

I think both characters are successful, but I did wonder where the rest of the women were in the world of Eça de Queirós. It turns out that they are in Cousin Basilio (1878). One of the central women there is a maid – servants stay in the background in The Maias – and she is a terror. I was just a bit worried, having read The Mandarin and a chunk of The Maias, that Eça de Queirós might be like Robert Louis Stevenson: not so great with female characters. Never mind. No worries now.

* With The Maias (long) and The Mandarin (short) and a substantial piece of Cousin Basilio behind me, my enthusiasm for Eça de Queirós has not yet flagged. Challengists: The Crime of Padre Amaro is coming up sometime, no need to be too specific, I think? And The Illustrious House of Ramires sooner than that. I’m never sure what I am accomplishing, but I hope anyone who skimmed through this first set of pieces on Eça de Queirós is clear enough on what will likely be found in his novels: a less bitter-tasting Flaubert, a less icky Zola, Anna Karenina without the soul-searching. Something like that.

A work of art lives only through its form - Eça de Queirós and originality

2011-09-29T15:26:00.001-05:00

The Maias is about originality. Eça de Queirós wrote near the beginning of the great turn-of-the-century change in tastes across the arts, the shift towards innovation as the central measure of artistic value. Let us not argue the existence of this change, but rather pause for a moment and be thankful that the effect was not as pronounced in fiction as it was in poetry, painting, or music.

Eça de Queirós was really responding to something particularly Portuguese, the dominance of Portuguese culture – elite culture, artistic culture – by France. France was the source of the “isms” to which the restless young Portuguese intellectuals reacted:

there were noisy passionate debates, in which Democracy, Art, Positivism, Realism, the Papacy, Bismarck, Love, Hugo, and Evolution each had its turn to flame and flicker in the cigarette smoke, as light and vague as the smoke itself. These metaphysical discussions and even revolutionary certainties tasted more exquisite still in the presence of the liveried valet uncorking the beer or serving croquettes. (75-6)

An aside: note that Victor Hugo is a one-man literary movement. His name recurs with some frequency in The Maias, as often as that of Zola, who is the New Thing, the creator of “lavatorial” literature, as a bitter Romantic poet calls it (139).

Is originality possible in Portugal? Eça de Queirós argues the case by writing a massive imitation of Flaubert, the great innovator. Some readers may have thought the carriage scene I mentioned yesterday sounded awfully familiar, since it is stolen from Madame Bovary; the great source, though, is A Sentimental Education (1869), which is obliquely invoked repeatedly. It has been too long since I read that novel for me to be sure, but I suspect that The Maias is often a direct parody or imitation of A Sentimental Education. A project for some other day, figuring that out.

The curious phenomenon is that Portuguese literature is often imitative. The greatest 19th century Portuguese poem is an imitation of Baudelaire; The Lusiads is an imitation of Virgil. Living after the Modernist turn to innovation, I am likely to reflexively associate “imitation” and “imitative” with more negative words (“derivative,” “unoriginal”), but If I were an early modern Humanist, imitation, imitatio, would be a virtue. Virgil's works are, after all, imitations of Theocritus, Hesiod, and Homer. Perhaps “adaptive” would be a friendlier word. Eça de Queirós brilliantly adapts French models and techniques to Portugal. The great Renaissance writer imitates the great classical form, the epic; Eça de Queirós imitates the great form of his time, the “realistic” novel:

Caught between two fire, Ega thundered forth: the trouble with realism was precisely that it wasn’t scientific enough, so that it ended up having to invent plots, create dramas, and lose itself in literary fantasy! The pure form of naturalist art should be the monograph, the clear-eyed study of one character, one vice, one passion, just as if it were a pathological case, stripped of all picturesque detail and all style.

“That’s absurd,” said Carlos, “characters can only be described through their actions.”

“And a work of art,” added Craft, “lives only through its form.” (141)

Do you, a family man, really think love an indelicate matter? - the frank Eça de Queirós

2011-09-28T14:42:00.003-05:00

The Maias is a novel about sex. I could argue that the men in the novel have so much trouble accomplishing anything of value, writing books or reforming politics or whatnot, because they expend all of their time and imaginative energy chasing women. Thus the attention paid to possessing the proper bed.

Unmarried women are hidden away, and in fact barely exist in The Maias, leaving prostitutes and married women, and because elegant gentlemen like Carlos da Maia are too refined for prostitutes – brothels are strongly associated with vulgarity in The Maias – the married women are the only possible partners. And then the marriages of older men to younger women arranged for the sake of status or money maintain a steady supply of bored, sexually adventurous married women, so the system maintains a decadent, ineffective equilibrium.

Eça de Queirós is direct about all of this, quite frank about the sexual behavior of his characters, startlingly so for a novel from 1888:

Ega protested vehemently. A woman with accomplishments, especially of the literary variety, with opinions on Thiers and Zola, was a monster, a freak, and would be better off joining the a circus and jumping through hoops astride a horse. A woman should have only two accomplishments: she should be good in the kitchen and good in bed. (343)

Startling for an English or American novel from 1888, I should say. Maupassant and Zola and Flaubert are hardly much different. I should mention that Ega is, I am afraid, not merely a devil’s advocate but at times an actual devil; he means none of what he says in that passage but is tweaking the moustaches of some pompous idiots.

Some readers, not me, certainly, with my mind always on loftier things, may have wondered about the specific mechanics of affairs back when people, women especially, wore such enormous quantities of cloth. The observant Eça de Queirós has some answers. A tryst in a carriage, a “verbena-scented bower of love,” has just ended:

The Countess had got out in Largo das Amoreiras, and Carlos had taken advantage of the quiet Rua da Patriarcal in order to dismiss the decrepit old carriage with its hard seats, in which, for the last hour, legs numb, he had been suffocating in the heat, not daring to lower the windows, and feeling wearied and irritated by the yards of crumpled silk and by the interminable kisses which the Countess kept planting on his beard. (260)

And in fact, the Countess is always associated with the weight and sound of her clothes. During their first embrace “[h]er silk dress brushed against him, rustling gently in his arms… [t]he silk train of her dress became tangled about his feet… a long sigh died on the air amid the murmur of crumpling silk” (257-8). To Carlos, his affair with the Countess is like her clothes, beautiful and even daring (see her outfit on p. 283, “cream cashmere” with “black musketeer’s gloves”), but unnecessarily heavy.

Michael Wood, in an LRB review of Margaret Jull Costa’s translation of The Maias, includes another scene from the affair – another bed! – which is one of the best single paragraphs in the novel (“her hard bed was left as turbulent and disorderly as a battlefield”). Wood uses the passage to compare Costa to an earlier translation; the entire piece is easily recommended to anyone who would like another 4,200 words, and better ones, on The Maias.

Furniture should be in harmony with the ideas and feelings of the man using it, damn it! – The Maias as furniture showroom

2011-09-27T13:59:00.000-05:00

The Maias is a novel about furniture.* Eça de Queirós is a master of the “showroom scene.”

And the first thing he wanted to show Carlos was his bedroom, decorated in red cretonne sprigged with white, and entirely filled and dominated by the bed. The bed appeared to be the raison d’etre, the very centre of Villa Balzac, and into it Ega had poured all his artistic imagination. It was made of wood, and set low, like a divan, with a high headboard, a lace valance, and, on either side, a luxuriance of scarlet plush rugs; it was draped about with voluminous, red, Indian silk hangings, which gave it the air of a holy tabernacle; and inside, on the headboard, hung a mirror, as if it were a bed in a brothel.

Carlos, very gravely, advised him to remove the mirror. (Ch. VI, 126)

The novel contains at least five or six house tours, room by room inventories. To the theoretical reader considering the tedium of these passages, fare thee well! The dry humor of the last line is typical of the book, as is the irony that “Ega had poured all his artistic imagination” into a bed. Villa Balzac (“his patron saint”), meant to provide a work space, “a literary cloister,” for Ega to finish his long avant garde poem, Memoirs of an Atom, turns out to be a love nest and party house, a fine setting for the proper enjoyment of champagne.

Later in the novel Carlos builds, or buys ready-made, really, his own love nest, and the tour of that house parodies that of Villa Balzac two hundred and fifty pages earlier: “the bedroom glowed like the inside of a profaned temple, transformed into the lascivious inner sanctum of a seraglio” and the bed is “built for the large, voluptuous pleasures of some tragic passion from the days of Lucretia or Romeo” (Ch. XIII, 373-4). A joke again follows, puncturing this overwrought sexualized rhetoric: “And it was there that Craft, peaceful and alone, a silk scarf tied about his head, snored away his seven hours of rest each night.”

Craft is the house’s previous owner, and English connoisseur and collector of antique furniture, and both the narratorial and thematic device by which Carlos and his mistress are connected to the house. Carlos and Craft – I have leapt back to Chapter VI again – are discussing furniture collecting. Craft mentions the house where he stores his collection, its first appearance in the book, which summons, by a flick of the magician-novelist’s wand, its future occupant, “a very tall fair woman, wearing a thick dark half-veil,” along with her carriage and her servant and her silver terrier. This is also her first appearance in the novel.

Reading the novel for the first time, I did not know who this woman was or who she would become, nor did I guess that the offhandedly mentioned house would become so important – how could I? But now I can start to decipher the mysterious formulas of the novel, how old furniture leads to intriguing women and over-aestheticized bedrooms led to the decline of Portugal.

* “a novel about furniture” is Nick’s description of The Spoils of Poynton in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, if I remember correctly.

He's one of the best things in Lisbon. You'll love him! - introducing The Maias, Eça de Queirós' elegant masterpiece

2011-09-26T12:15:00.000-05:00

The Maias: Episodes from Romantic Life (1888) is the enormous Eça de Queirós masterpiece, a standard candidate for Greatest Portuguese Novel, and a credible longshot candidate for Greatest 19th Century Novel, as long as one discounts Importance and Influence and just takes the text on its own terms. What I will not do is spend a week justifying these claims.

The novel is easy to misdescribe. I have seen it called a multi-generational family saga – the Maias are the family – but nearly ninety percent of the novel centers on a single character, the handsome, talented, wealthy, and elegant young doctor Carlos da Maia, during two years or so, autumn 1875 to 1877 (or 1878? - high on my re-read priority list: pin down the timetable).

Carlos arrives in Lisbon, fresh from college and his Grand Tour, full of energy and ideas. He will start a medical practice, write a history of medicine, reinvigorate arts and letters, and on like that. He in fact manages to furnish an office, nap, and fall into an affair with a married countess. His friends – poets, composers, patrons of the arts, wealthy nitwits – have similar troubles accomplishing anything. Portugal, I fear, is in decline. The slow-building plot of the novel is about a second affair, one that turns into a grand passion but has melodramatic complications. The Maias is a conceptual demonstration of the use of a Romantic plot in a Naturalistic context. Doesn’t that make the novel sound exciting? Let us never mention this again.

The Maias is written on exact Flaubertian principles. The author is well-hidden, the third person is tightly limited, imagery and metaphors are generated from within the setting, and sensual details are abundant. The details and imagery are artfully repeated and modified to form a complex structure that reinforces, foreshadows, and ironically comments on the surface story. The novel required eight years to complete, and I can see why.

Browsing through the book now, I see that I am only beginning to notice the sophistication of the structure, of the deployment of the elements of the novel. The use of the bewildered Finnish ambassador, for example, who was dropped in when needed for color and comedy, I had assumed, wrongly. This novel almost requires maps – actual maps, of Portugal, and Lisbon, and a couple of the houses, as well as diagrams of the thematic elements and imagery.

One huge and enormously appealing difference from the gleefully vulgar Flaubert: The Maias must be one of the most elegant novels ever written.

What he loved about Craft was his imperturbable air of the perfect gentleman, for with the same air he would play a game of billiards, ride into battle, lay siege to a woman, or set sail to Patagonia.

“He’s one of the best things in Lisbon. You’ll love him. And you should see his house in Olivais, he has the most wonderful collection of antiques!” (131)

In a typical deflection, this description of a minor character also fits the protagonist, to whom it is directed. Carlos is Fred Astaire or Clark Gable. The style of the novel is perfectly matched to this character. Everything is managed with the lightest of touches. Trec chic, as an irritating minor character cannot stop saying, and as I will say all week.

Margaret Jull Costa’s translation was typically expert. The modest amounts of French dialogue are untranslated, even in footnotes, which I know annoys some readers. Her comments on the novel appear in an afterword, not an introduction, which I know delights some readers.

This fog where the light of Lisbon begins - trying to learn Portuguese

2011-09-23T09:00:00.004-05:00

A logistical note: During the Scotch Challenge, I hit my mark like a pro, posting right along with my co-readers. My library access is not as good as it was then, and for some reason I have picked a language where my library is particularly weak, although it is strangely well-supplied with Machado de Assis. I may need a little extra warning if we want to preserve simultaneity. If we do not, that is fine; I can catch up. Maybe I will just order a big pile of books and salt them away.

The Portuguese Reading Challenge has a second piece, a much greater challenge for me: I am going to learn some Portuguese. Note my strained confidence. No, I will. In the past, I have had two great successes with teaching myself the rudiments of a language (German and Turkish), and one complete wipeout (French). I acknowledged my failure and took a couple of years of classes at the Alliance Française, covering the equivalent of first semester college French, and as a result my French, however appalling, is alive, while I remember only a few words of German and Turkish. I claim to have “some Spanish” as well, acquired in the classroom, cemented, however roughly, by a couple of months of immersion.

For Portuguese, Spanish is an asset but also a trap, a path to disastrously bad pronunciation. I have been following, weakly, Prof. Mayhew’s advice for learning a language, just listening to some Portuguese every day. The podcasts at Escriba Café have been especially enjoyable. It is too bad that I cannot tell you what that site is, since I do not understand Portuguese.

I do not plan to learn Portuguese, not really, but I have discovered that knowing the most elementary elements of a language – pronunciation, numbers, the most basic words – allows the tourist, or reader, to leap ahead. I just want to be able to compare a translation of a translated poem to the original.

For example: a poem from Forbidden Words: Selected Poetry of Eugénio de Andrade, tr. Alexis Levitin, 1974, pp. 116-7.

Lisboa

Esta névoa sobre a cidade, o rio,
as gaivotas doutros dias, barcos, gente
apressada ou com o tempo todo para perder,
esta névoa onde começa a luz de Lisboa,
rosa e limão sobre o Tejo, esta luz de água,
nada mais quero de degrau em degrau.

Lisbon

This fog upon the city, the river,
seagulls of another day, boats, people
in a rush, or with all the time in the world,
this fog where the light of Lisbon begins,
rose and lemon upon the Tagus, the light of water,
I wish for nothing else as I climb from street to street.

The translation is nearly literal. I need almost nothing to see this. No rhymes to worry about, although the vowel sounds of the last three lines are abandoned. The repetition of “Esta névoa / This fog” is the most artificial or poetic device, and it is intact. I presume that “o tempo todo para perder” is an idiom, something “like “all the time to lose,” fair game for the substitution of an English equivalent. The cognate, perhaps false, in the phrase “gente apressada” has a nice feel – “pressed people” – but that’s not really English.

I have spent so little time with the language, but I know that “o” and “a” and “as” are “the,” that “e” is “and,” that I need to pronounce all of the vowels. The vocabulary in the poem is so simple, isn’t it? Those gavotting seagulls stand out, allowing me to pick up a new word. Only “de degrau em degrau” remains a total stumper.

Perhaps I should abandon Teach Yourself Brazilian Portuguese and just study the poems of Eugénio de Andrade. I am not sure that I would learn any less Portuguese.