Daniel Kehlmann's Tyll - All this is true, he says, even what has been made up is true.

One of the new books I read last year, Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll (2017 in German, 2020 in Ross Benjamin’s English) was from the future.  I accidentally bought an Advanced Reader’s Copy – “Not for Sale” the cover declares.  But surely at this point I can think of myself as an Advanced Reader, in English, at least.  Maybe an Intermediate Reader in French still.

Tyll is the merry prankster, a German medieval folklore figure who wreaks havoc with his honestly not-so-merry pranks.  He has some importance in German literary history because Tyll stories were among the early products of German printing.  Some old Tyll leaflets appear on page 4, along with those about “the Ship of Fools and the great priestly folly and the evil Pope in Rome and the devilish Martinus Luther of Wittenberg and the sorcerer Horridus and Doctor Faust and the hero Gawain of the Round Table and indeed about him, Tyll Ulenspiegel, who had now come to us himself.”

In the novel Tyll the archetype Tyll come to life for another tour of central Europe, this time during the Thirty Years War (a new round of the evil Pope versus the devilish Luther).  Perhaps the spirit of Tyll inhabits a boy with a talent for juggling and tightrope walking.  Perhaps that boy consciously takes on Tyll’s identity.  If the spirit of Tyll has returned, it is not clear why.  The world of the Thirty Years War is irredeemably awful.  Juggling and ventriloquism can’t solve that problem.  But the novel puts Tyll in the background, mostly, of a number of other people’s stories.  He gives them little nudges, sometimes just by existing.

If I understand Michael Orthofer’s more thorough review, he would like the novel to have been more about Tyll himself.  But it is not.  It is more about the meaning of Tyll.

All this is true, he says, even what has been made up is true.  (126)

The world was once enchanted, and then became disenchanted, by science and bureaucracy and so on, argued Max Weber and many others.  The world of Tyll is still enchanted, in the sense that everyone believes in magic and religion, and the representative scientists are experts in crystals, or dragons, or, in the case of Athanasius Kircher, literally everything.  Kehlmann has some fun with Kircher’s cat piano; I would include an illustration if I could stand the cruelty.

Using the irony of a novel about a magician, Kehlmann seems to be arguing for disenchantment, for a little less magic in the world, for less religion, or at least less religious war, and for modern science, not Kircher’s science:

Kircher had grasped early on that one had to follow reason without being flustered by the quirks of reality.  When one knew how an experiment had to turn out, then the experiment had to turn out like that, and when one possessed a distinct conception of things, then, when one described them, one had to satisfy this conception and not mere observation.  (264)

A good novelist is likely all right with mere observation.  It is not so “mere” in the hands of an artist.  We can have as much enchantment as we want, by means of art.

The book I read begins with a letter to the Dear Reader from Dan Frank, the Editorial Director of Pantheon Books, that is filled with guff, especially the closer: “Whether you are a fan of Neal Stephenson, Jorge Luis Borges, George R. R. Martin, or Margaret Atwood, you will be captivated by the unique and original vision of Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll.”  Stephenson wrote books set in the same century, which is something, although leafing through Quicksilver I will say that Kehlmann is rather lighter on his feet; Borges has me stumped; I have not read Atwood but looked up descriptions of her most famous books and am again baffled; as for Martin, Tyll does not have much in common with the only book of his I have read, the morally instructive Sandkings (1981) but does feature a Winter King and a Winter Queen and lots of characters who are murdered in the usual horrible ways.  I guess Martin fans like that?

I assume this letter is just part of the ARC, not the soon to be published version?  You people who get free books, do they usually come with this nonsense?  How can you stand it?

El Folk-Lore Filipino by Isabelo de los Reyes - an early instance of the encyclopedia novel, a compendium of worldview.

The great Caravana de Recuerdos, as part of Spanish Literature month, asked me to recommend criminally overlooked Spanish-language works.  I gestured towards medieval and early modern literature, which would be my answer for Italian, French, and English literature, too.  I don’t remember writing the answers to Ricardo’s questions, but they sound plausibly like me.

Of course no actual crime is involved.  That is a rhetorical device.

Rise, author of the extraordinary In lieu of a field guide, offered El Folk-Lore Filipino (1889) by Isabelo de los Reyes:

It may be a "folklore novel" and perhaps an early instance of the encyclopedia novel.  It is revisionary and revolutionary in intent, a compendium of local fables, customs, and traditions set off against Spanish colonialism.  More than a sociological and cultural curiosity, it is a compendium of worldview.

The first half of the book has been translated by Salud C. Dixon and Maria Elinora Peralta-Imson – university of the Philippines Press, 1994 – and the university library on which I lean impressed me by owning a copy.  So I can take one small step towards rectifying the crime.

The book is both what it says it is, an early work of anthropology, and something else.  Isabelo is collecting folklore, mostly from the northern region of Ilocos, the home of his family, but he also wanders in other directions.  The folklore is interesting, but I began to look forward to the digressions.  Most charming is a long section devoted to the poetry of the author’s mother, who was a master of the occasional poem.

Often the folklore is more than interesting.  A demon, the “pugot,” is described as a cat or dog or black giant:

Imagine him, my dear readers, seated on the window sill of a house, 18 meters high, his feet touching the ground. The common people say the pugot smokes giant-sized cigars.  (57)

The author is more hard-headed, a skeptic about the supernatural.  But he reports it all with enthusiasm.  It was odd, and enjoyable, reading Folk-Lore Filipino while reading about Dada.  The riddles, for example:

What cake cannot be sliced with a knife? – Water on a plate.

What well is deep and strewn with sharp weapons? – The mouth and teeth.  (491)

The riddles of my culture are amusing kid’s stuff; everyone else’s riddles are surrealist weirdness.  Maybe even stranger, because it is given as ordinary behavior of the Ilocanos:

They have dreams, even ridiculous ones like wishing they were taller but realizing the hopelessness of this, they discard the idea.  (197)

Running through, or underneath, the folklore is the Spanish culture that is after hundreds of years of colonial governance deeply tangled with older Philippine traditions.  It is startling to see a supernatural guardian described only as “like a European” (115) or that certain illnesses during pregnancy are “a sign that an anti-Christ will be born” (113).

Most surprising was the short story that ends the English volume, and is thus in the middle of the Spanish, a piece of “Administrative Folklore?” (question mark in the original) that describes an honest man’s journey through corruption, political power, mysticism, godhood, and revolution.  It’s the Philippine version of “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888).  As it ends, it seems to slip backwards in time, into history, concluding with this footnote:

Since these names and dates have no bearing on the administrative problems that are the concern of this article, we would appreciate it if our readers do not try to check their veracity, because they may have been distorted by my imagination.  (615)

Yes, what exactly is this book?

Rise’s essays on Philippine literature – see this annotated list of books that have made it into English – are like a glimpse of another world.

Sicilian folktales and a storyteller of genius - and then I go on vacation

This will be the last post for a while as I vacate the premises.  Calvino’s Italian Folktales will top the blog for a couple of weeks.

About the only thing I have learned this year about Italian literature as a whole is to pay careful attention to the region of the writer and the book.  Italian literature is more fragmented than even German.  Italian Folktales is organized by region, moving from north to south, roughly.  No surprise that the northern stories are more Grimm-like, more German, with some exceptions like the impoverished backwater of Friuli, which we all remember as the region so remote that pagan fertility battles against witches survived into the 17th century, where the specialty is stories about the dim, greedy, peasant-like St. Peter who is always getting into dumb scrapes from which he is saved by his pal Jesus.

Poorer regions have different stories.  Calabrian tales are especially blunt and brutal.  And Sicilian tales – we have moved into another world here.  44 stories from Sicily, over a quarter of the book, eleven of them from a single story-teller of genius, Agatuzza Messia, “seventy-year-old seamstress of winter quilts.”

Messia’s stories are longer and more complex, with more unusual imagery and more imaginative attention to scene and action.  She tells her stories more like a novelist. 

They washed their hands, mixed up a bit of Majorcan flour, made four fine pies, and sent them off to be baked…
Then she made another one exactly like it, only with regular flour and water drawn from the trough in which she washed the oven broom.  (#150, “Pippina the Serpent,” p. 535)

Or how about:

Two of the loaves were ring-shaped and seasoned with anise and sesame seed.  (#149, “Misfortune,” 531)

Or examples that do not involve baking.  That same story has a description of laundering that on its own is too dull to quote, but in context plumps up Messia’s world a little bit.  Compared to most folktales, a lot.  One of her gifts as a storyteller is that she can pause on an action or description without losing her thread.

With that pile of money, she had all the rooms hung with tapestries.  She bought furniture, chandeliers, portals, mirrors, carpets, and everything else they have in princes’ palaces; she even employed a doorman with livery from head to toe and a stick topped with a gold knob. (#156, “The Wife Who Lived on Wind,” 562)

It is that gold knob that caught my attention, as it must have caught the attention of this Palermo peasant at some point, unless she never saw it but merely picked it up from someone else’s story.

Her characters are a step or two better than the norm, too, never exactly two-dimensional, but something more visible than the usual one dimension.  And her women, are they ever resourceful.  Folktale characters are always oddly resourceful, but Messia’s women are that and the more.

How lucky that her employer, a doctor named Giuseppe Pitrè, became interested in folklore and complied her stories.  Maybe she is why he became interested.

What I am saying is rather than start at tale #1 and stall out by #10, some readers might want to skip to #147, the highly original, Lovecraftian “Nick Fish” which is immediately followed by Messia’s great stories, and then by the rest of the Sicilian tales.  By itself, these would make a terrific book.  Then you can go backwards, by which I mean north.  The gory Calabrian tales are next – “’So you’re the farmer’s daughter!’ exclaimed the serpent, and he bit her on the throat and killed her” (#144, “Serpent King”).

My investment in Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales finally pays off - the key to the door was in the possession of the hairy man

What a wise investment!  I bought Italo Calvino’s gigantic Italian Folktales (1956) for $11.95, going by the back cover.  In today’s dollars, that is $22.92, but now the list price is $25.00.  It’s like I made $2.08 just by storing and moving the book for twenty-six years.  Let’s not look at the discounted Amazon price.

The important thing is that I have finally read it, all two hundred tales, all 713 pages.  It is a great book, comparable in many ways to a Grimm collection, comparable in every way except significance.  The book would not exist without the example of the Grimms, who set off an flurry all over Europe of folklorists tracking down elderly peasant women and transcribing their weird stories before it was too late.

Calvino ransacked every old collection he could find, selecting, combining, and improving as he went along, again following the precedent of the Grimms.  For example: “My personal touches here include the prince’s yellow suit and leggings, the description of the transformation in a flutter of wings, the gossip of the witches who traveled the world over, and a bit of stylistic cunning” (note to tale 18, “The Canary Prince,” p. 719).

One great result of the folklorists’ research was that that many old stories had made their way all over the world, so the reader of any collection of folktales has to have the patience for more versions of Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, and Jack the Giant Slayer, among many others.  I am on the alert for novelty, for small touches and original oddities.  In Italy, when a king is needed  in a story, he is often the King of Portugal.  In “Ill-Fated Royalty,” more kings are needed – how about the King of Scotland?  “At the bottom of the mountain was a door that led directly into Scotland, and the key to the door was in the possession of the hairy man” (283).  In northern Italian folktales, kings often live next door to each other, observing the household business (and beautiful princesses) in the palace across the street.

The motifs and devices repeat in their own patterns.  It was amusing to read Italian Folktales alongside John Crowley’s Little, Big, which is practically an Aarne-Thompson tale type index disguised as a novel.  A Calvino tale has three sisters who each gives her brother a gift, along with instructions about when to open it; the identical scene pops up in Crowley.  Here is Crowley’s talking fish, there is one of many in Calvino.  All of your favorites are here, assuming you have learned to enjoy folktales.

Calvino was, at the point he compiled and wrote Italian Folktales, working for a publisher in Turin.  The publisher in fact commissioned him to write the book.  Publishing was different back then. He had written several books of fiction, all of interest – I have recently revisited most of them – but his first masterpiece, The Baron in the Trees, would appear in the following year.  Unless Italian Folktales is his first masterpiece.  I will present the evidence for that tomorrow.

A pleasant surprise of Italian Folktales has been to see how much later Calvino is germinating among these old stories.  What luck that he was able to write them.

Golem Week! Golem Week!

It's Golem Week! Why? Because Joachim Neugroschel put together a collection of Yiddish golem stories (The Golem, 2006) and I read it. And one book led to another, as always seems to happen.

The 16th century Rabbi Leyb (or Loew) wants to save the Jews of Prague from the blood libel, or some other peril, or he has wood that needs chopping, so he creates a man out of clay and animates him by writing God's name on the golem's forehead, or on a piece of paper which he puts in his mouth, or perhaps he whispers the name in the golem's ear. At some point, the golem goes out of control and has to be destroyed. Or it doesn't. There are a lot of variations.

I've never been to Prague. My understanding is that it is now crammed with golems. See left, see right, see everywhere. Actually, the image on the right is from the 1920 movie The Golem. I've been scrounging golem photos from the internet. Some of the little Prague golem souvenirs are pretty cute.

How strange to finally read a golem story, then, and find that the golem looks perfectly human. His name is Joseph. He has a beard. He eats and sleeps. If you prick him, does he not bleed? He does. That's in Yudl Rosenberg's The Golem or the Miraculous Deeds of Rabbi Leyb (1909), at least.

The Rosenberg book is sort of like a dime novel. It's clumsy, pulpy. A bunch of folktales about Rabbi Leyb are strung together in a more or less logical order, the language is standardized, and Joseph the golem is shoehorned into every adventure whether he is needed or not. In one familiar story, the Rabbi's wife plays Mickey Mouse and the golem plays the water-carrying broom. I see why the book is important - it's a lot of golem stuff in one place - and I enjoyed it, even if it's not exactly good.

What's coming up this week? H. Leivick's golem-in-crisis; Dovid Frishman's golem-in-love; I. L. Peretz and Jorge Luis Borges; and one of the craziest novels I've ever read (or will read, inshallah, since it's in process). And more golem pictures, pilfered from the internet.

There are also souls who belong nowhere - Ansky's The Dybbuk

"The souls of the dead do return to the world, but not as disembodied spirits. There are souls which must go through several incarnations before they are finally purified. Sinful souls return to earth in animals, in birds, in fish, and even at times in plants... There are also souls who belong nowhere, who find no peace anywhere; they take possession of another person's body in the form of a dybbuk, and in this way they achieve their purification." (The Messenger, Act II)

An arranged marriage is announced. A young man, a mystic, a student of the Kabbalah, is in love with the bride; hearing the news, he dies (he was not what you would call healthy). The bride, on the day of her wedding, becomes possessed by a dybbuk, the unhappy spirit of her lover, the student. A famous rabbi tries to exorcise the dybbuk. That's most of the story of S. Ansky's The Dybbuk, I guess. Not too complicated.

That's not how it seems on the page, though. In the first act, set in a synagogue, a dozen or so characters wander in and out, most with at least a line or two. Modernist, definitely. Leah, the star of the show, only appears briefly. The students debate and tell stories. It's unclear what the story might be. The short second act is a spectacle of its own, mostly a pre-wedding dance.

The play is based on folklore about dybbuks that Ansky had collected during the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition. It weaves in the old tale of the couple killed on their wedding day that I mentioned yesterday. But, ingeniously, almost everything in the play can be interpreted psychologically. For example, the quotation up above is spoken by the mysterious Messenger. He is telling Leah the legend of the dybbuk. Soon after, she claims to be possessed by one. Is Leah actually possessed by the spirit of her lover, or is she resisting the forced marriage?

That must be a great part for the actress. Must be great fun to watch, too. This is Hanna Rovina, in the 1922 Moscow production.

I read The Dybbuk in the Golda Werman translation in The Dybbuk and Other Writings. Joachim Neugroschel's version, in The Dybbuk and the Yiddish Imagination (2000), seems good, too, a bit more slangy, perhaps. The latter is an ingenious idea, an anthology of nothing but dybbuk-related writings, from 1602 to 1956. One thing I learned from it is that I don't care about dybbuks, in and of themselves, enough to read the whole book. Neugroschel has also edited an anthology about golems, which awaits me at the library as I write.

Pushkin Street, Gogol Street, Lermontov Street - The Destruction of Galicia and literature

S. Ansky's tone in The Destruction of Galicia reminds me more than a bit of Chekhov. I suspect a direct connection to Chekhov's Sakhalin Island book, a report on a Siberian prison, but I haven't read it, so who knows. I am sure Ansky had I. L. Peretz's Impressions of a Journey through the Tomaszow Region in the Year 1890 (1891) on his mind. That one is nominally the report on a statistical survey of the countryside; it is extremely Chekhovian, even derivative, one could say. Peretz himself is actually a character in Ansky's book, in the earlier parts set in and near Warsaw.

What do I mean by tone? That Ansky's voice is professional, subdued, sometimes even a bit detached. His job is to stay calm, so that's what he does. He may express his frustration, anger, or sorrow, but he is writing with some distance. Of course, the most important part of the story is not his own. Ansky is bearing witness to a catastrophe. We're all too familiar with that genre, now.

Literature infiltrates the book:

"We walked around in the ruins for quite a while and I noticed something odd: In every corner of the burnt street, on the walls and on the destroyed houses, there were newly affixed signs on which street names were written in Russian letters. The Russians had given all the streets new, highly literary names: Pushkin Street, Gogol Street, Lermontov Street, I think there was a Turgenev Street, too. Apparently the victors didn't understand how cynical it was to call the horribly disfigured, fire-gutted streets after the greatest representatives of Russian culture, nor did they think it insulting to the memory of the great writers. The street signs left me with the same feeling as did the icons which the Christians put in their windows during the pogroms." (The Dybbuk and Other Writings, p. 180)

Since Ansky had recently been collecting folktales, he was always on the lookout for new ones, what we for some reason have taken to calling "urban myths." In Galicia and Poland, there were two sets of stories. One set was anti-Semitic, used to justify Russian depredations. For example, the Cossacks were riding through town, and everything was peaceful, until a Jewish girl fired at them from a second-story window. So the pogrom was merely retaliation. Ansky heard this story again and again, always with the girl in a second-story window. A lot of the stories involved Jewish spies, and telephones. All the Jews are spies for the Germans, or all the Poles, or both, and they all have telephones hidden away somewhere, with direct lines to the enemy.

The second set of stories are the Jewish ones, responses to the anti-Semitic stories:

"One version simply told how a number of Jews were hanged as a result of the telephone libel; other Jews would have been hanged too, were it not for a priest, carrying a cross, who appeared before the judge and testified that it was the Poles who were guilty. The priest's evidence proved to be correct; all the Jews were immediately freed and the Poles were hanged instead - sixteen in all." (p. 174)

Or the Jews caught in the cellar, on the telephone with the Austrians, turn out to be Poles in disguise. These stories are always from one or two or three towns over, absolutely true, none of us saw it, but we all heard about it.

The Beatrice Weinrich edition of Yiddish Folktales includes a few stories about Czar Nicholas I (enemy of the Jews), Emperor Franz Josef (friend of the Jews), Napoleon (complicated), or one of the Rothschild bankers, all typical, old-timey folktales, but updated with new heroes and villains. In the old story, the beggar who rewards the generous and punishes the stingy turns out to be the prophet Elijah in disguise; in the up to date ones he's Franz Josef. Some of the stories Ansky collects are about Austrian or Russian generals, ones who were known to be particularly anti- or philo-Semitic, inserted into the old stories.

"The most popular folktale among Jews was about two soldiers who confronted each other on the battlefield. As one stabbed the other, he was shocked to hear the dying soldier cry out, 'Shma Yisroel, Hear, O Israel.'... I heard many different variants of this folktale in at least eight or ten different localities - St. Petersburg, Moscow, Minsk, Kiev, Warsaw, in short, every place where there were homeless Jews or soldiers. Most people thought that this was a factual account about real people, not a folktale. (pp. 175-6)

In the ellipses, Ansky mentions the story about the bride and groom who were murdered under the bridal canopy during the 1648 massacres, and buried together where they died - "in at least fifteen or sixteen shtetls I was taken to a grave near the synagogue where the bride and groom were supposed to have been buried." (175) This is Ansky's one hint in The Destruction of Galicia of what he was doing when he wasn't hauling money and medicine across a war zone.

He was writing a play, now the consensus choice for Greatest Yiddish Play. Tomorrow, I'll look at The Dybbuk.