Mere lifelong sacrifice itself may not suffice - or, not writing about Ibsen

Am I frittering because a good idea is percolating, or am I avoiding the emptiness of my ideas?  Prof. Ape boldly claims “that book blogging is no longer principally the purview of rank amateurs (most are at least competent amateurs),” but I do not believe he reads Wuthering Expectations.  I guess he did say “principally” and “most,” and our definition of “competent” may differ.

It is not as if there is nothing to say about Ibsen’s Brand, the 1866 book (it was published long before it was staged, and is more of a poem than a play).  The title character, the martyrdom-obsessed minister, a man who is not himself a troll, a force of nature, but wishes he were:

My God is the great god of storm,
absolute arbiter of doom,
imperious in His love! (Act I)

He is not Captain Ahab, but wants to be, which is worse.  The whale bites off one leg; Brand seeks out the whale not to kill it but to offer another limb.  His humanity is allowed to surface, but each time it does, something happens to remind him of the need for sacrifice, for nothing but sacrifice.  Perhaps God actually does desire his purging and martyrdom, although for what, now there’s a mystery.

All or nothing.  That
is my demand.  The task
is very great.  And the risk,
also, is very great.
There’ll be no mercy shown.
There’s no provision made
for weakness or dread.
Falter, and you go down
into the depths of the sea.
Mere lifelong sacrifice
itself may not suffice. (Act 2)

Mere lifelong sacrifice!  So Brand is a substantial work, ethically complex, poetically invigorating.  Geoffrey Hill’s adaptation is a treat, Ibsen’s rhymes replaced by a deft mixture of slant rhymes and alliteration.  The “storm \ doom” pair up above is a sample of what Hill does with the entire play.    The short lines make the play hurtle forward.  I might have read it too fast, gulped without chewing.

And I have moved on to Peer Gynt (1867), and want to write about it, not Brand.  Just look at these characters:  A Voice in the Darkness, An Ugly Brat, The Statue of Memnon (ah ha, this critter reappears in Ubu Cuckolded), Prof. Begriffenfeldt, Ph. D., A Lean Person, The Troll King.  I have been trying to sell Ubu Roi as a compendium of crazy, but Peer Gynt is completely insane.    And, of course, realistic.  Ibsen = realism.

Well, as non-writing goes, I have written worse, so I should stop and fritter away my time in some other manner.  Vacation preparation, maybe.  Are three kinds of Trader Joe’s candy sufficient for a long car trip, or should I bring something more substantial as well, like a box of doughnuts?  Ibsen offers no guidance on this question.

its last thoughts tetter the furrows - the mystery of The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc

The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc.  The title, that got my attention.  Hard to parse.  Written by Charles Péguy, published, self-published, in 1910.

It’s a play, or maybe a poem.  It has been a play, much shortened, rearranged.  The translation, the only translation of the whole thing, is 200 pages long.  The centerpiece of the play is a French nun’s seventy page meditation on Mary’s perspective on her son Jesus, a Passion of Mary.

For the last three days she wept.
For the last three days, she wandered, she followed.
She followed the procession.
She followed the events.
She followed as you follow a funeral.
But it was a living man’s funeral.
A man who was still alive. (117)

Joan, Jeannette, is “thirteen and a half.”  She spends the entire play, a few moments aside, spinning wool, always working.  The story, so to speak, is Jeannette’s discovery of her sainthood, of her role as the deliverer of Catholic France from the godless English – “Do you know they feed their horses oats on the venerable altar?” (70).

The nun and Jeannette argue about sacrifice, about charity.  The nun tries to persuade Jeannette to accept suffering, to be loyal to the church.  Aspiring sainthood resembles heresy.

Jeannette is not dissuaded.  Rather, if I understand the poem correctly, the nun’s arguments backfire, actually convincing Joan to become a martyr for France.  “Can it be that so much suffering is lost?” asks Jeannette.  She will, like Christ, redeem France’s suffering.

I suspect I can pinpoint the exact moment when Jeannette enters her vocation.  But who knows.  The women do not debate so much as exchange monologues.  Entire pages could be best performed as chants, like a church liturgy.  Péguy’s poetics are irregular and repetitive, looping, strange. Strange, strange.

Oh, if in order to save from the eternal flame
The bodies of the dead who are damned and maddened by pain,
I must abandon my body to the eternal flame,
Lord, give my body to the eternal flame;
My body, my poor body, to that flame which will never be quenched.
My body, take my body for that flame.
My wretched body.
My body worth so little, counting for so little.
Of little weight.
My poor body of so little a price.
                      (A pause)          (83-4)

The most common stage directions are (A pause) and (A long pause).

Péguy was a socialist, an atheist, a Dreyfusard, who had somehow returned, by the time he wrote The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc, to Catholicism, although not, paradoxically, to the Church.  In 1914, forty-one years old, he enlisted in the French army as an officer and was killed almost immediately.

Geoffrey Hill’s poem “The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy” (1983) is, I would guess, read more – read more by readers of English – than Péguy himself.

The blaze of death goes out, the mind leaps
for its salvation, is at once extinct;
its last thoughts tetter the furrows, distinct
in dawn twilight, caught in the barbed loops. (stanza 8)

Hard to write about, this poem.  Hard to think about.

This little essais is indirectly related to my trip to Quebec City.

Excerpts and page numbers, from the Julian Green translation, Pantheon, 1950.