One good book, at least, in the literature of the year 1865!

So declares - that is an actual quotation - the greatest critic of his age, Matthew Arnold; the one book is a translation of the letters of the 19th century French Catholic mystic Eugénie de Guérin.  See Arnold’s essay “Eugénie de Guérin” in Essays in Criticism, another good book in the literature of the year 1865, so there are at least two.

Ah, Arnold’s nuts; 1865 was a terrific year for literature.  1815 had so few surviving books, or I was so ignorant about them, that I had to think of something to write.  In 1865 I can just list books.

First, there’s this:

Charles Dickens completed Our Mutual Friend.  Anthony Trollope completed Can You Forgive Her? and can it be true that two more Trollope novels date from 1865, Miss Mackenzie and The Belton Estate?  He must have been writing some of them simultaneously, too.

Algernon Swinburne’s debut, the dense, allusive faux Greek play Atalanta in Calydon, made his reputation.

In Russia, Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crocodile.”

In Germany, Wilhelm Busch’s Max and Moritz, more or less inventing the comic strip, and the first volume of Adalbert Stifter’s long historical novel Witiko, rumored to be the dullest novel ever written.

In Italy, Giosuè Carducci’s “A Satana,” a toast to progress and rationalism.

In Brazil, José de Alencar’s Iracema, considered the beginning of Brazilian fiction.  I’ve read it; it’s second-rate but interesting.

In India, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Durgeshnandini, considered the beginning of Bengali fiction.  I have not read it; I’ll bet it’s interesting.

Two novels in French that jump out are From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne and Germinie Lacerteux by the Goncourt brothers.  I haven’t read either of these, either.

The United States presents some interesting cases.  Walt Whitman published Drum-Taps, his Civil War poems, to some success, but they would be eclipsed by the elegies for Abraham Lincoln he published in 1866.  Mark Twain published the first version of “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” giving Twain his first taste of fame.  I find it quite hard to imagine Twain as an unknown writer.

Then there is Hans Brinker; or, the Silver Skates: A Story of Life in Holland by Mary Mapes Dodge, likely the most popular book of the year.  I am pretty sure that I have read it, but I would have been no older than ten, so I do not remember a thing about it, beyond the iconically obvious.  You cannot say that this book has not survived pretty well.  It has more readers than Swinburne or Arnold.

I could keep going (John Ruskin, Henry David Thoreau, Francis Parkman).  For me, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Our Mutual Friend make 1865 a landmark year, enriched especially by Leskov’s unique novella.  But even within the limits of my ignorance, what a year for literature.  “One good book, at least”!

“Nonsense!” said Alice, very loudly and decidedly, and the Queen was silent.

Sylvie and Bruno, begun and Concluded - It are ever so many other things

Little, Big has a major character named Sylvie.  She has a lookalike brother named Bruno.  Her adventures have some vague resemblance to the title character of Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno (188) and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), the most flummoxing Victorian novels I have ever read.  Perhaps the resemblance is more than vague, but if so I missed it.  As I said, I was flummoxed.

The narrator, a character not so different than Charles Dodgson, falls into dreams and trances that move him back and forth between a crazy Alice in Wonderland-like dream world and a no less unreal world that is like a sentimental Victorian romance, with noble renunciations and temperance pledges and self-sacrificing doctors heroically exposing themselves to the Plague.  Neither of these worlds are especially “real.”  Behind both of them is a vaguely glimpsed Fairyland, the home of the fairies Sylvie and Bruno, which overlaps with the other worlds during “eerie states” distinct from the dreams and trances.  The process is “such as we meet with in ‘Esoteric Buddhism’” (SBC, Preface).

So there is this mode, in which fairies lead a laborer to take a temperance pledge:

I know full well that the taste for this kind of sentimentality thrives today, but some of this stuff feels like kitsch.

“It’s a miserable story!” said Bruno.  “it begins miserably, and it ends miserablier.  I think I shall cry.  Sylvie, please lend me your handkerchief.”

“I haven’t got it with me,” Sylvie whispered.

“Then I wo’n’t cry,” said Bruno manfully.  (SBC, ch. 23).

Bruno is not referring to the melodramatic plot, but to a poem that runs like this:

Little Birds are writing
    Interesting books,
    To be read by cooks:
Read, I say, not roasted –
Letterpress, when toasted,
    Loses its good looks.

I was happier with the ample nonsense of the other plot, when cruel, fat, spoiled boys turning into giant porcupines:

Or when the Gardener recounts his autobiography in verse:

“He thought he saw an Argument
    That proved he was the Pope:
He looked again, and found it was
    A Bar of Mottled Soap.
‘A fact so dread’, he faintly said,
    ‘Extinguishes all hope!’”  (SBC, ch. 20)

Or when the Professor describes the famous 1:1 scale map:

“We very soon got to six yards to the mile.  Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile.  And then came the grandest idea of all!  We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”

“Have you used it much?” I enquired.

“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight!  So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”  (SBC, ch. 11)

That map is Carroll’s invention, yes?  I always thought it was; now I have seen it with my own eyes.

Some of the transitions between the “worlds” of the novel are uncanny and surprising.  The puns are incessant and destabilizing, actively interfering with the movement of the plot (I am listing good things about the book now – this is a plus, the element that led James Joyce to wonder if it would be possible to make every single word a pun).  Characters transform in lively and unpredictable ways.  The inset sentimental novel I found so irritating is pretty clearly both what it seems but also a parody of its genre.

“It are ever so many other things,” said Bruno. “Aren’t it, Sylvie?” (SBC, ch. 11)

Bruno’s insufferable cutesy-poo baby talk is another difficulty.  Oh well.  He is right, he has hit the Sylvie and Bruno novels smack on the snout.  I don’t know what they are.

Conventional signs and the absolute blank - some nonsense aesthetics (guest starring Swinburne and Morgenstern)

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
    Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
    A map they could all understand.
“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
    Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
    “They are merely conventional signs!
“Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
    But we’ve got out brave captain to thank”
(So the crew would protest) “That he’s bought us the best –
    A perfect and absolute blank!”   (Lewis Carroll, “The Hunting of the Snark,” Fit the Second)

The nonsense poems I have been reading are not so far, looked at kind of cockeyed, from the early modern descendants of Petrarch I was writing about last week.  Elizabethan sonneteers were working under narrow constraints, rewarded for ingenuity as much as, or more than, meaning.  It was at times hard to see the difference between dozens of tiny variations on an entirely conventional idea and the absence of any idea at all.  “They are merely conventional signs!”

The two orders of poetry also share a common ancestor in the classical pastoral poetry tradition.  Thus ends today’s sermon in literary history.

It is not that nonsense and its cousins are not meaningful.  The Alice novels are as deep as I want them to be, rare examples of fiction with something to say about metaphysics.  But there is a side of nonsense that directly addresses the possibility of meaning, that tries to see how close it can get to the blank map.

I have been paging through The Faber Book of Nonsense Verse (1979), ed. Geoffrey Grigson, where I came upon a cluster of Christian Morgenstern poems including “The Great Lalulā,” of which I present the final stanza:

Simarar kos malzpempu
silzuzanlunkrei (;)!
Marjomar dos: Quempu Lempu
Siri Suri Sei [ ]!
Lalu lalu lalu lalu la!

Well said.  All punctuation in the original.  Morgenstern is often described as untranslatable for some reason.

The poem is selective in its chaos, keeping rhyme, meter, sound and, what else, alphabetical characters, although I bet it was originally published in Gothic script.

Algernon Swinburne achieves a similar effect with English words and grammar in “Nephelidia”:

From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn
        through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine,
    Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that
        flickers with fear of the flies as they float,

A page and a half of this, frankly very hard to read for more than a few lines at a time.  It constantly seems to approach meaning, but that is hardly the point.  Wonderful stuff, and just a smidge over from the way Swinburne often sounds in his serious – I hate to call them serious – poems.

Little children seem to figure all of this out without any help, the fun of turning everything, including language, upside down.  In a comment to yesterday’s Carroll post, Jenny from Reading the End praised the sheer joyfulness of Carroll’s nonsense.  He shares that sense of play with all of the nonsense and light verse writers, the delight created by the discovery that an unrelated jumble of words, placed together in a particular order, have turned into something marvelous even without meaning a thing, which is itself meaningful.  And thus I have invented aesthetics.  A little late.

Lewis Carroll's nonsense - Exactly and perfectly true.

Lewis Carroll is the hard one for me to write about.  When I read the Alice books last year, I had no interest in writing about them, although I had no qualms about using out of context quotations to support unrelated arguments.  And I have called Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland the Greatest Novel of the 19th Century, and sometimes even meant it.  It is a defensible position.

I have also called the “Pig and Pepper” chapter the high point of Western civilization, and the “Turtle Soup” poem from the “Lobster-Quadrille” chapter the greatest of the century, or of the English language, maybe, but I was joking.

Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
    Beau---ootiful Soo---oop!
    Beau---ootiful Soo---oop!
Soo---oop of the e---e---evening,
    Beautiful, beautiful Soup!

Etc.  Joking to a certain extent.  “’Chorus again!’ cried the Gryphon,” who has critical judgment much like mine.

Adam Roberts, novelist and Victorianist, has been teaching the Alice books.  He said he had trouble finding critical distance from them.  He overcame the problem with a series of essays so good I dread linking to them, since few will return here.  The one where Roberts deduces the shape of the missing third book of the Alice trilogy, Carroll’s Paradiso, using the principle that two points form a line, is something to see.

Carroll’s nonsense is so sensible.  It often has rules and logic, just the wrong rules and bad logic.  Thus the incessant riddles, puzzles, and even math.  Mathematics is to Carroll both utterly logical and a marvelous game.

As one Snark hunter explains to another:

“Taking Three as the subject to reason about –
    A convenient number to state –
We add Seven, and Ten, and then multiply out
    By One Thousand diminished by Eight.
The result we proceed to divide, as you see,
    By Nine Hundred and Ninety and Two:
Then subtract Seventeen, and the number must be
   Exactly and perfectly true.”  (“The Hunting of the Snark” (1876), Fit the Fifth)

Or 3 = 3, or 3 x (a set of calculations equaling 1) = 3.  But in verse.  Every word is true, the calculation accurate, yet the result is nonsense.  Logical, accurate nonsense.

Miguel of St. Orberose wrote about, and posted generous excerpts from, Carroll’s 1869 book Phantasmagoria and Other Poems, a collection more like Gilbert than Lear, satirizing ghost stories, amateur photography (in Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” measure for some reason), and fashionable poetic attitudes.  In “Poeta Fit, Non Nascitur,” a novice poet asks advice of an expert:

“For instance, if I wished, Sir
    Of mutton-pies to tell,
Should I say ‘dreams of fleecy flocks
    Pent in a wheaten cell’?”
“Why, yes,” the old man said: “that phrase
    Would answer very well.”

In other words, plenty of nonsense lies elsewhere, in the poems of other people, not Carroll.

Chorus again!  Everyone, sing along!  Careful with ending of the third line.

Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish,
Game, or any other dish?
Who would not give all else for two p
ennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
    Beau---ootiful Soo---oop!
    Beau---ootiful Soo---oop!
Soo---oop of the e---e---evening,
    Beautiful, beauti---FUL SOUP!

Realists are people who think reality isn’t how you think it is. - Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos

Another kind of fantasy novel, a new one: Down the Rabbit Hole (2010, tr. Rosalind harvey), the tiny first novel by Mexican author Juan Pablo Villalobos.  It is narrated by a boy named Tochtli (“rabbit” in Nahuatl) who is – here is the big fantasy conceit – the only son of a Mexican druglord.  He lives in a bizarre world where every ordinary value is inverted and every material comfort is instantly available.  Or almost every comfort, since Tochtli’s demand for a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus is complicated even for a narcotics kingpin.  Not impossible – the characters spend the middle of the book in Liberia – but challenging.

Some voice – the whole novel is voice:

Yolcaut is my daddy, but he doesn’t like it when I call him Daddy.  He says we’re the best and most macho gang for at least eight kilometres.  Yolcaut is a realist and that’s why he doesn’t say we’re the best gang in the universe or the best gang for 8,000 kilometres. Realists are people who think reality isn’t how you think it is.  Yolcaut told me that.  Reality is like this and that’s it.  Tough luck.  The realist’s favourite saying is you have to be realistic.  (4-5)

Yolcaut = rattlesnake, a footnote informs me.  Does the voice sound like that of a seven year-old?  How about a seven year-old who is obsessed with vocabulary words?

What happens is I have a trick, like magicians who pull rabbits out of hats, except that I pull words out of the dictionary.  Every night before I go to sleep I read the dictionary.  My memory, which is really good, practically devastating, does the rest.  (3)

Alice merely visits the world down the rabbit hole; the rabbit lives there.  Tochtli’s off-kilter facility with language is one of many nods to Lewis Carroll, although the novel hardly has the linguistic dazzle of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking-Glass.  Of course if Alice had narrated those books they would sound quite different.

That line above has the rabbit paired with the hat, so that’s a nod to Carroll.  Tochtli’s second obsession is hats (“I don’t think I’m odd for wearing a hat”).  Amusingly, the hippopotamus is also a reference, an obscure one.  Each of the Alice books contains exactly one mention of a hippopotamus, both pretty arbitrary, used, I assume, because the word is fun to say and the beast is fun to imagine, but incongruous enough for me to notice them when I revisited Carroll recently.

Another Carroll reference gets right at the power of Villalobos’s little book.  Tochtli is young enough to be genuinely innocent, but the world he lives in is a violent nightmare.  His father is a psychopath and anyone he meets is likely to suffer a bloody death.  No surprise that Tochtli is fascinated by beheadings, but through the safe distance of history, by means of the samurai sword in Japan or the guillotine in Revolutionary France.

The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, screamed 'Off with her head! Off –'

'Nonsense!' said Alice, very loudly and decidedly, and the Queen was silent.

But that's not how things work down Tochtli's rabbit hole.

Idly checking Amazon, I see that Down the Rabbit Hole is due for an American release in October.  The copy I read was purchased in England (see spelling of “kilometres” above) and smuggled into the United States.  If I were a professional critic I would embargo this review, but I ain’t and it’s done been wrote so off it goes.

In which I divide books into binary categories

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here.  I’m mad.  You’re mad.”

This is of course from the “Pig and Pepper” chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the high point of – of – let’s say – English literature – too weak, too weak – so – Western civilization.

Alice has a point, doesn’t she?  Many fine readers agree with her, and try to minimize their time among the lunatics.  We could come up with a long list of outstanding works of literature for those readers to avoid.  Other readers sympathize more with the Cheshire Cat and find more truth in the fiction of Franz Kafka or the poetry of William Blake.  Or perhaps just a rarer truth.

Sane and insane, sense and nonsense.  I fear these are the categories of someone with a strong taste for nonsense.  What are some alternatives?

“Explain all that,” said the Mock Turtle.

“No, no!  The adventures first,” said the Gryphon in an impatient tone: “explanations take such a dreadful time.”  (Ch. X, “The Lobster Quadrille”)

The Gryphon is the ideal reader for Stevenson and Conrad, while the Mock Turtle is likely a fan of Trollope and Eliot.  The adventure novel versus the domestic novel, both terms broadly defined.  The gender difference I noticed yesterday may now be explained a bit.  Is anyone surprised that more of the great women writers of the time wrote about settings (public or private) and problems involving women?  Some of the great writers I have dropped into the adventure category were able to ingeniously contrive novels with no women characters at all.

A related category might be fluid versus static, novels with more scenes of movement versus those with more conversation or thought.  Trollope’s most common strategy is to write scenes with varying combinations of characters.  They are rarely required to do much, and the story advances through their conversation and reflection.  Victor Hugo’s novels are always in motion.  The precise details of space and position are essential – where is Jean Valjean in relation to the pickpocket?  Pride and Prejudice is static, Mansfield Park is fluid, relative to each other.  Both are domestic novels.

The grand old split is between the picturesque and the sublime.  My thoughts on the sublime can be found in the usual place, in a piece on Little House on the Prairie.  Novels in the nonsense category like the Alice books try to reach the sublime by means of the ridiculous, which tames the sense of fear inherent in the sublime.  Sensible books like Adam Bede or Dubliners move gradually towards surprising and sublime moments; crazy novels like Salammbô or The Toilers of the Sea sometimes attempt to maintain a sense of the sublime over the course of an entire book, which is impossible but thrilling to try.

What do I have, four binary categories?  Now I can construct a four-dimensional grid and map every book onto it, like Kellogg’s does with the sweetness and crunchiness and mouthfeel of breakfast cereals.  Readers can then match themselves to books in their quadrant.  A fair amount of book blogging is not much more than this, honestly.  I do it a lot, although unconsciously or automatically, not like here – I hope not like here – although in another sense my case is not so useful, since I like everything, although I do lean sublime-wards.

Anyway, none of this has anything to do with why or how or whether a book is any good.

I hope there will be nonsense in it - two Victorian literatures

Three sisters beg a tale from a math professor:

In gentler tones Secunda hopes
    “There will be nonsense in it.”

Secunda is also named Alice; these lines are from “All in the Golden Afternoon,” a poem recounting the origin of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Alice is an eminently Victorian novel, yes?  If I compare it to Rohan Maitzen’s advice on How To Read a Victorian Novel, I find myself in a suitably Carrollian mirror world.  Do I need tissues, a social conscience, time, or a set of non-modern assumptions?  No, no, no, and no.  Not really.  Modernist assumptions turn out to be particularly useful.  The Mad Reader who believes that Alice is the Greatest Novel of the 19th Century (I am speaking of myself in a certain mood) needs a different How To, one based on a different but still coherent set of aesthetic principles.

“Although British literature as a whole has to rank as one of the most overrated examples of a national literature anywhere,” declared Richard at Caravanas de Recuerdos, he found that he enjoyed The Woman in White well enough, as did Jorge Luis Borges.  St. Orberose recently discussed Borges’s assembly of a pair of series of books, his “Personal Library” and a “Library of Babel,” both of which contain plenty of Victorians – Kipling, Conrad, Wells, Shaw, Wilde, Collins, the Scientific Romances of Charles Howard Hinton, and perhaps most importantly the Robert Louis Stevenson who argued in “A Gossip on Romance” that “[f]iction is to the grown man what play is to the child.”

Borges put an especially high value on ingenuity and pure invention.  Is it new, is it delightful, is it at least a little bit askew?  Like Abbott’s Flatland and Stoker’s Dracula, or the visionary Lilith of George MacDonald, and the savage The House with the Green Shutters of George Douglas Brown.

Versus other questions:  Is it true, is it meaningful?  If I put more weight on the “creat[ion] of the possibility of sympathy” as Rohan Maitzen does, I will spend my time with authors who are more likely to satisfy the latter questions, likely including the exemplary Victorian novelists Rohan mentions in her How To: Eliot, Thackeray, Dickens, Gaskell, E. Brontë, Trollope, and Collins (Oliphant and Bulwer-Lytton receive rhetorical nods).  Collins overlaps the lists, greasy Dickens straddles the camps, Gaskell wrote ghost stories – the differences are far from absolute.  Wuthering Heights is, for example, completely bonkers through most of the novel.  I love it when Trollope surprises me, when his characters leap onto the tables, but Trollope’s books, like Gaskell’s and Eliot’s, are nothing if not sane.

The French literary tradition, for whatever reason, has been particularly welcoming to Crazy Lit, to writers like Baudelaire and Nerval, and even to Evil Lit like Sade and Lautréamont (19th century English literature has no equivalent of the latter set, not that I know of).  I have mentioned several times that I am fascinated by the way that Borges’s home tradition, the Argentinean Literature of Doom, often seems to consist of nothing but the violent or fantastic or bizarre.  Wuthering Heights and Heart of Darkness would fit right in.  Middlemarch and Cranford would be the freaks.

As for myself, I think the 19th century English novel is one of the glories of human civilization.  Plenty of individual novelists from other literatures are as great or greater (well, maybe not greater than Dickens), but no other literature of the time has the immense scope.  Dracula plus North and South plus Through the Looking Glass plus The Mill on the Floss plus Treasure Island.  Sense and nonsense, both of the highest quality.  I put a high value on both.

Addenda:

For what it is worth, I give the 19th century poetry prize to France.

You may have noted that Rohan’s “sense” list includes many women novelists, while the “nonsense” list includes none.  Yes indeedy.  This may be meaningful in some way.