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.

They procured several books and settled on a system - Flaubert attacks knowledge in a book packed with everything he knows

Bouvard and Pecuchet, Gustave Flaubert’s unfinished 1882 conceptual novel, is what I have here.

The two title characters are Paris clerks who become friends, come into some money, and retire to the Normandy country side to pursue – well, what exactly?  They need something to do, so they do everything.

Bouvard and Pecuchet are good comic characters, and their adventures as city fools in the country – ruining their farm, offending their neighbors – have enough of the manner of a story to make Bouvard and Pecuchet something of a novel.

The bulk of each chapter, however, is more akin to a list.

“Six months later they had become archaeologists, and their home looked like a museum” (first line of Chapter 4, p. 87).  A couple of pages describe the contents of the museum in Flaubertish detail.  “The frame of the mirror was decorated with a black velvet sombrero, and an enormous clog, full of leaves, held the remains of a bird’s nest” (87), etc.  Then comes the activity.  B & P visit churches, fortresses, manors; they buy or dig up all sorts of artifacts; they investigate lots of tedious questions.  “No effort or sacrifice was too great” (90).  Faced with difficulties, some caused by their own folly, their enthusiasm for architecture and history wanes and is replaced by – let me move to the next chapter – a passion for literature.  “First they read Walter Scott” (first line of Ch. 5, 115).

Repeat.  Chapter 3 was about science.  Chapter 6 is about politics – 1848 intrudes.  Chapter 7, love.  Chapter 8, medicine.  Exercise, first, actually.  “Pleased with their regimen, they decided to improve their constitutions with gymnastics” (first line of Ch. 8, 170).  The failure of exercise leads to medicine, the failure of medicine leads to philosophy, the failure of philosophy leads to religion, the failure of religion leads to education.  “They procured several books about education and settled on a system” (first line of Ch. 10, 245).

The novel is as repetitive as it sounds, in places close to mechanical.  B & P clumsily grind through a field, preceded by the author who read the same books, and more, in order to extract little chunks of knowledge with which to pelt his characters.  One field after another, to exhaustion.  I had not realized that Flaubert had written an Omnibook, but here it is.

Flaubert is satirizing amateurism, which is painful enough, but more broadly he is satirizing the pursuit of knowledge, the value of knowledge, which is a rough message.  What drives B & P crazy is uncertainty.  Even the experts don’t agree!  They can’t even follow Voltaire’s advice to cultivate their garden, since no two sources agree on fertilizing techniques.

Then their minds developed a piteous faculty, that of perceiving stupidity and being unable to tolerate it. (205)

Everything ends wells at least.  The novel is unfinished, but there is an outline up to the end.

The friendship of the two characters is a treat, and there are the usual scattering of fine Flaubertian lines – “Dusk was falling; crows dropped into the furrows”  (25) is a particular favorite, the second verb making the translator do some work.

But the novel is conceptually pretty pure, even for Flaubert.

Page numbers and translations are from Mark Polizzotti’s outstanding recent version of the novel.

There are many things a novel does not say - The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira

November and December 2013 is the perfect time to sample the Argentinean Literature of Doom, says Ricardo de la Caravana de Recuerdos.  Why, I do not know, but I did it, enjoying one of last year’s César Aira translations, The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, originally published in 1998.

The title is well-chosen.  It warns readers of the contents – CAUTION: Contains meta-fiction.  The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira turns out to be about fiction.  The Miracle Cure is fiction.  Dr. Aira is César Aira.  Or all of this is a trick to encourage such a surface interpretation by a shallow reader like me.  The other César Aira translation from last year, the 2002 Varamo, was also about the fiction of César Aira.

I know there are readers who loathe this sort of thing, who are instantly bored by it.  In this case, fair warning, I say.

Dr. Aira performs Miracle Cures.  He is fifty, though, and thinking that it is time to finally write a book about his methods, published in installments of “four or eight” pages, “no more than that” (42), amounting to “the penning of an Encyclopedia of all things from all times” (39).  In other word, one of my favorite literary curiosities, the omnibook.

Dr. Aira’s method is not that of César Aira, but it is related.  He has thousands of manuscript pages which he plans to assemble into a collage.

He could start anywhere; no introduction was necessary because the subject was already well defined in the collective imagination…  The same thing was happening here: life, death, illness – there’s nobody who doesn’t know what they’re all about, which would allow him to create small, delightful variations that would seem like inventions even if they weren’t (thereby sparing the author the exorbitant effort of inventing a new story).  (37-8)

In the first chapter, Dr. Aira is asked to perform a cure but refuses.  In the second, he theorizes about his cures, as above.  In the third and final, he is asked to perform a cure and does.  So Aira does not cheat on this aspect of his conceit, as I suspected he might, since given his method he may well have launched the novel without knowing exactly where he was going.

The Miracle Cure applies the omnibook to reality, something like an application of the memory palaces of Giordano Bruno, and not so far from the central conceit of John Crowley’s Aegypt books, and of course akin to this and that infinite bit of Borges.  It is even more like an application of the power cosmic by the Silver Surfer or Thanos, the ludicrous yet god-like space-faring characters from Marvel Comics.  Aira scholars should figure out which comic books he read.  Here is a Spanish reviewer who is way ahead of me: “without doubt,” he says, Aira grew up with the bizarre and inventive comics of the DC Silver Age, which explains a lot.

There are many things a novel does not say, and this absence makes it possible for action to take place within its restricted universe.  Hence, the novel is also an antecedent of Miracles, precisely because the events the novel recounts can happen as a result of what it excludes.  (67)

Each Cure destroys and then replaces the universe.  This is the most Doom-like part of the Miracle Cures.

I have avoided describing the first chapter because it is the funniest piece of extended Aira I have yet read, wonderful Monty Python stuff.  The metafiction-hating reader could enjoy it and skip the rest of the book.

Katherine Silver translated this one.  Fun gig.

Salamanders, unknown; Devils, ditto - Melville's Enchanted Islands

“The Encantadas” (1954) is a strange hybrid of fiction and travel writing, or strange for writers besides Herman Melville, who had been writing fictionalized memoiristic allegories for almost ten years at this point.

The Encantadas are better known as  the Galápagos Islands.  The symbolic attraction of the Spanish name is obvious.  Melville reinforces the enchantment by giving each chapter an epigram from The Fairie Queene, such as:

Most ugly shapes and horrible aspects,
Such as Dame Nature selfe mote feare to see,

and so on before “Sketch Second,” which is all about giant tortoises.

“The Encantadas” has chapters, ten of them in fifty pages, telling multiple stories.  It really feels more like a tiny little book.  I don’t know what it is.

Melville’s fairy-land sounds suspiciously like hell (“A group of rather extinct volcanoes rather than of isles; looking much as the world at large might after a penal conflagration,” or “Like split Syrian gourds left withering in the sun, they are cracked by an everlasting drought beneath a torrid sky”), or an abandoned cemetery, or a city in ruins,  or the Dead Sea.

Now that is curious.  Everything has been from “Sketch First,” by the way.  Melville’s massive 1876 poem Clarel is about a trip to the Holy Land, include a long visionary descent to the Dead Sea that is perhaps the highlight of the book.  Yet, here several years before Melville’s trip, we have:

Nothing can better suggest the aspect of once living things malignly crumbled from ruddiness into ashes.  Apples of Sodom, after touching, seem these isles.

So much of Melville’s writing comes from his own experience that it can be surprising how much comes from his reading, with his imagination stirring it all together.  Thus he describes a strange place he has actually visited with a strange place he has only read about, but will, in fact, someday visit.  I suppose this is no more strange than the way he constantly compares the Holy Land to the sea.

As “The Encantadas” progresses, Melville adds inhabitants, first tortoises, then birds, then, surprisingly, given his insistence on uninhabitability, people.  This point is borrowed from bibliographing nicole.   Also strange given this census, from “Sketch Fourth”:

Men,                         none
Ant-eaters,            unknown
Man-haters,          unknown
Lizards,                   500,000
Snakes,                    500,000
Spiders,                   10,000,000
Salamanders,        unknown
Devils,                      do.
                           _____________

Making a clean total of 11,000,000,

exclusive of an incomputable host of fiends, ant-eaters, man-haters, and salamanders.

But this is just one island.  The men live elsewhere.  I have no idea what the joke about the ant-eaters is supposed to be.  I assume it is a joke.

The strangest thing of all is that “The Encantadas” is Melville’s second text that explores an archipelago.  The first was his massive, mad 1849 novel Mardi, Melville’s first attempt at an omnibook, where a group of travelers debate the meaning of everything while exploring an island chain representing the world and including everything – countries, religions, book collectors.  “The Encantadas” is the tame version of Mardi, with a “real” setting, “real” reptiles, and stories based on “real” events.  The result is another surprise, a small, clear, readable Melville masterpiece.  Just look at the tortoises.  Maybe tomorrow I will look at the wonderful tortoises.

It was large and it was small - Hugo's omnibook

Les Misérables is an Omnibook, a book that contains everything.  All of Hugo, everything he knew, and he knew everything, poured into one book.   Absurd but admirably ambitious.  Every reader of the novel can identify a section or two or ten he would not miss.  I myself have doubts about a long chunk describing the history of a Paris convent.

I have seen French abridgements that follow a single character, so we have a Cosette novel and a Gavroche novel and a Jean Valjean novel, with parts that overlap and parts that stand alone.  I doubt too many novels could survive this treatment.  I can also imagine a version that skips the story and characters completely, or contains only one character, the inescapable one, M. Hugo.  Hugo on History, Hugo on War, Hugo on God, Hugo on All Things.  A preposterous book, but Hugo was a preposterous figure.

About a fifth of Les Misérables is devoted to a few days in 1832, during the futile July Revolution.  Students and workers build a street barricade in a corner of the Marais, prepared to give their lives for liberty, fraternity, and equality.  The description of the barricade and its construction is extraordinary, but it is somehow only a warm-up to a long passage about two other barricades, “two frightful masterpieces of civil war,” both from the 1848 revolution – the novel  is as much about 1848 (and 1789) as about 1832:

The Saint-Antoine barricade was monstrous; it was three stories high and seven hundred feet long…  Of what was this barricade made?  Of the ruins of three seven-story houses, torn down for the purpose, said some…  It was the collaboration of the pavement, the pebble, the timber, the iron bar, the scrap, the broken windowpane, the stripped chair, the cabbage stump, the tatter, the rag, and the malediction. It was large and it was small. (1171)

Hugo is not finished.  He has another two pages to go.  He cannot stop describing this beast, even interrupting himself to add more details – “disjointed chimneys, wardrobes, tables” (what it all means) “knuckle bones, coat buttons” (more interpretation) “its crest was thorny with muskets, with swords.”

Hugo has trouble looking away, as did I.*   The barrier, like his novel, contains everything.   But he has to get to the next one:

This wall was built of paving stones.  It was straight, correct, cold, perpendicular, leveled with the square, built on a line, aligned by the plummet…

It was fitted, dovetailed, imbricated, rectilinear, symmetrical, and deathly.  There was in it science and darkness.  You felt that the chief of that barricade was a geometer or a specter.  You beheld it and you spoke softly. (1174)

These fragments may entirely fail to convey the dual nightmare that Hugo conjures in this passage, the creation of these two horrors, objects that should not exist, renegades from Borges or Kafka that somehow escaped into the past, into a work that is mostly thought of, incorrectly, as an old-fashioned and sentimental adventure story, Dumas with a social conscience.

Les Misérables, more than any novel I can think of, except, perhaps Samuel Richardson’s hilariously long Clarissa (1747), begs for abridgement.  Not just one, though – many abridgements.  A different abridgement for each reader.  The reader wanting to Get On With It will want to snip away this interruption of the actual story.  I am certainly not that reader.

* C. B. James has provided more of this description of the first barrier, from a different translation, the lightly abridged Penguin Classics version, or the recent Julie Rose version.  I'm using the revised Wilbour translation, Signet Classics.

Whatever interests the rest interest me - my favorite bit of Whitman

This is the city and I am one of the citizens,
Whatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars,
    markets, newspapers, schools,
The mayor and councils, banks, tariffs, steamships, factories,
    stocks, stores, real estate and personal estate.

Here we have my favorite piece of Walt Whitman.  It’s from “Song of Myself,” part or canto or chapter 42, 1881 revised version, I think.*

First, please, just soak in the sheer beauty of Whitman’s verse.  Read it alound, rolling the words around on your tongue. Plunge in.  Revel in it.  Think of it as a poetic spa treatment, a mud-seaweed wrap.  “Banks, tariffs” - wonderful. 

Are these lines even bad?  They’re close to nothing, to nothing at all.  The lists are one of Whitman’s great innovations, but they’re seldom as unadorned as this one.  The original 1855 version had “churches” instead of “wars, markets” and “Benevolent societies, improvements” in place of “The mayor and councils.”  My ear is not especially subtle – what I hear in either one, rhythmically, is something like a muffled thud, Whitman dropping his Brooklyn city directory on his foot.**

Whitman is (in the 1855 edition) three-quarters of the way through “Song of Myself” at this point.  The poem circles back on itself.  Whitman is again reaffirming his omni-identity, but without the World Spirit mysticism found in other sections of the poem.  Earlier, he sees everyone else, or hears them, or even is them, while here he is simply one of them.  Now his interest is universal. 

I think this actually is a profound line.  I resist “Song of Myself” when I read it – I know that I cannot become the wasp, I cannot become the rock.***  Then, late in the poem, Whitman’s position relaxes, and I see myself.  What interests the rest interests me, too.  Within, I admit, ordinary human limits. It’s an ideal.

The prosaic stanza, the dull list, is deliberately chosen. The next stanza (I’m back to 1855):

They who piddle and patter here in collars and tailed coats
    . . . . I am aware who they are . . . . and that they are not worms or fleas,
I acknowledge the duplicates of myself under all the scrape-
    lipped and pipe-legged concealments.

This now, this looks more like poetry, the writing of someone working with English, doesn't it?  And before the newspapers and real estate and blah blah blah:

Here and there with dimes on the eyes walking,
To feed the greed of the belly the brains liberally spooning,
Tickets buying or taking or selling, but in to the feast never
    once going;
Many sweating and ploughing and thrashing, and then the
    chaff for payment receiving,
A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming.

The yawp may have become overly barbaric – grammar has been expelled, sense soon to follow.  Whitman needed a stop.

This really is my favorite passage of Whitman, of Leaves of Grass, this ungainly, unpoetic, list.  Fifteen years ago, I identified it as the perfect epigraph for my dissertation, which is just as boring as the choice suggests.  I needed at least one good sentence in the dissertation, but not, you know, not too good.  Plus, it has that inspirational motto, good enough to repeat: whatever interests the rest, interests me.

* Frankly, I’ve completely confused myself about Whitman’s timeline.
** Before phone books, there were city directories, which had addresses in place of phone numbers.
*** I'm actually thinking ofa scene in A Passage to India here.

The whole world in a book

Landívar's Rusticatio Mexicana is part of a tradition of describing the whole world in a book. Anyway, some enormous chunk of it. Landívar's Latin poem on beavers reminded me that Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton wrote his own ode to the beaver* in his enormous Poly-Olbion (1613/1622), his attempt to describe all of England in verse - the history, the rivers, the animals, everything:

Being bodied like a boat, with such a mighty tail
As served him for a bridge, a helm, or for a sail,
When kind did him command the architect to play,
That his strong castle built of branchèd twigs and clay;

And then it goes on and on like that. And then on some more. Drayton claims the idea for the sled came from watching beavers drag branches across the snow.

The poly-whatever impulse goes back to Pliny, at least, but early modern writers really went to town with it. The all-time champion must be the 17th century German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher,** who wrote numerous books, on China, geology, music, and everything, and planned many, many more, mostly on enormous topics. If I remember correctly, one of his ideas was to write a book cataloguing the heights of all the trees in the world. Not all of the species of trees - all of the individual trees.

The idea is still alive. Here is Borges skewering Pablo Neruda's Cantos, in "The Aleph" (1945):

'Only once in my life have I had occasion to look into the fifteen thousand alexandrines of the Polyolbion, that topographical epic in which Michael Drayton recorded the flora, fauna, hydrography, orography, military and monastic history of England. I am sure, however, that this limited but bulky production is less boring than Carlos Argentino's similar vast undertaking. Daneri had in mind to set to verse the entire face of the planet, and, by 1941, had already dispatched a number of acres of the State of Queensland, nearly a mile of the course run by the River Ob, a gasworks to the north of Veracruz, the leading shops in the Buenos Aires parish of Concepción, the villa of Mariana Cambaceres de Alvear in the Belgrano section of the Argentine capital, and a Turkish baths establishment not far from the well-known Brighton Aquarium. He read me certain long-winded passages from his Australian section, and at one point praised a word of his own coining, the colour "celestewhite," which he felt "actually suggests the sky, an element of utmost importance in the landscape of the Down Under." But these sprawling, lifeless hexameters lacked even the relative excitement of the so-called Augural Canto. Along about midnight, I left.'

* In this case, a species of English (Welsh?) beaver, already extinct when Drayton was writing.

** For more on Kircher, I would go to Ingrid Rowland's The Ecstatic Journey, or the essays in Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, neither of which I have read.