Eudora Welty is difficult, Poul Anderson is easy

The hardest book I’ve read recently, and the easiest.  The hardest not in French, a separate category of difficulty.

Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding (1946) is one of the first novels I really dismantled, studying it piece by piece.  This complex novel likely informs the way I understand fiction in ways I do not even know, but it certainly taught me that finding the patterns behind the surface is worthwhile.  The better understood work of art becomes more beautiful.  At least this kind of art.

The Golden Apples (1949) is a relative of Delta Wedding, but linked short stories, all set in the same little Mississippi delta town; how hard can it be, I thought?  And then the difficulties of the book defeated me again and again.  Comical, sometimes – oh no, I was supposed to be keeping track of that!  So I’ll write this off this attempt as something of a failure, except that it is useful preparation for my next reading, when I will be braced and alert and properly equipped.

It was a bit of a relief to poke into the Welty scholarship – don’t be afraid to ask for help! – and see The Golden Apples routinely described as her most difficult book.  By difficult I mean: layered patterning; concealed multi-directional references (the title, is that Hesiod or Yeats? Both); original symbolism; overlapping time; lots of characters; deferred information.  Mostly the latter, really.  Every basic who / when / what question will  be answered, but I may have to hold onto it for ten or a hundred pages.

It’s all the usual Modernist stuff, employed with a high level of art and craft.  Here’s the last sentence:

They heard through falling rain the running of the horse and bear, the stroke of the leopard, the dragon’s crusty slither, and the glimmer and the trumpet of the swan.

Next time, I’ll know what all of that means.  Next time.

I have a box or two of fantasy paperbacks, mostly well-known books, that are causing me anxiety (keep, sell, give away?).  I just re-read one of them, Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade (1960), with real pleasure.   It is a book written on principles opposite of Welty’s.  It is an easy book.  I am supposed to get it – all of it – right away.  I re-read this kind of book to repeat but not deepen the pleasure.

Given what it is, though, Anderson’s book is good fun.  Extraterrestrial invaders make the mistake of landing in a medieval village.  Soon enough, three knights and their yeoman archers and sturdy peasants have conquered an interstellar empire.  It is all preposterous but also episodically, logically inexorable.  The narrative pleasure is watching Anderson move the stakes up, notch by notch, until he runs out.

The High Crusade is an example of the genre of human triumphalism, a descendent of Aristophanes’s Birds (414 BCE), where the Athenians conquer Olympus through sheer exuberance.  Like the Aristophanes play, Anderson’s novel has elements that critique imperialism, but they are all swept away by the energy of the upstarts.  Empires are overthrown and replaced by new empires.  The overthrowing is so enjoyable that the replacement is barely noticed.

There are three more Anderson novels in that box, and come to think of it Tau Zero (1970) is also a human triumphalist book.  Anderson rigs things so humans conquer the next universe, the one that comes after the heat death of our universe.

If you see me reading old fantasy novels, you will know I am rummaging in the box.  They should go, mostly.  Like I need my own copy of The Martian Chronicles.  Like that book is hard to find if I want it.

Another opening of another Danish novel - Herman Bang won't tell me anything

All right, I was wrong, I am not going to write about the characters in Pelle the Conqueror quite yet.  I want to write about the opening of another Danish novel.  Compare and contrast, as they say.

The novel is Herman Bang’s 1889 Tina.  I have just read the long first chapter, and have little idea about what the novel is about except for two things, 1) it is “about” or at least set during the 1864 Dano-Prussian War, which ought to be interesting, and 2) it does appear to be “about” the title character, who is female, a schoolmaster’s daughter heading towards old maid-dom.  The latter point is only of interest because after reading Niels Lyhne, Pelle the Conqueror, and reading about Henrik Pontoppidan’s Lucky Per through Scott Bailey’s many posts, I began to suspect that all classic Danish novels were Bildungsroman about young men.  Whatever Tina might be, is definitely not one of those.

But I just want to look at the beginning, since the beginning of Pelle the Conqueror is fresh in my mind.  Nexø begins with pure description, slowly introducing any people at all and only slowly moving to his main characters.  This is how Bang starts:

Tina,

The first word is the novel’s title.

Tina, in tears, continued to run beside the carriage, while Mrs Berg shouted her last words into the darkness and the wind.

“You’ll make up the bed then – in the Blue Room – tonight – from tonight, don’t forget.”

“Yes – yes,” answered Tina, unable to speak for tears.

“And remember me – remember me to everybody,” sobbed Mrs Berg.  The wind carried her words away.  One last time Tina ran up and tried to grasp her outstretched hand, but she could no longer reach it.  She stopped, and the carriage, like a great shadow, vanished into the darkness.  Soon the sound of its wheel could be heard no more.

Splash, right into the middle.  This may not be so obvious to you folks who spend your time with new-fangled novels, but for a 19th century novel this opening is radical.  Who is Tina?  Who is Mrs. Berg?  Who knows?  What relationship do they have with each other – is Tina Mrs Berg’s servant, or daughter?  Why the tears?

Perhaps this will all be cleared up in the next paragraph, but it is not.  A new character is mentioned, Herluf.  He is absent, but he has toys, so he is a child, or else a pet.  Next paragraph: Lars, probably a servant, since he is in the “servants’ hall.”  Next: Maren, also a servant.  no, I was wrong, a crofter.  Then “Sophie the housemaid.”  Finally Bang violates the purity of his system a bit.  But the narrator never stops to explain.  He has moved close to the idea of narrator as movie camera.  He can read thoughts, so a telepathic movie camera.  I see what it sees and hear what it hears and have to piece the rest together as information gradually, naturally reveals itself.

No, not a camera, since it sees so selectively.  What does Tina look like, for example?  Madame Bovary begins with a description of Charles Bovary, his height and hair and boots and hat.  Tina refuses to simply tell me that, or anything.  I really have to pay attention and piece it all together as I go along.

How fun.  Bang is writing, in this sense, like William Faulkner, or like Eudora Welty in Delta Wedding (1946), which I think of a particularly artful examples of this kind of technique with its huge extended family and complicated history, although as I look at it I see that the first paragraph is close to what is now called an “infodump.”  Laura is nine years old, she is going to her cousin’s wedding, her mother is dead, etc.  In a few pages Laura will be plopped into the middle of her extended family where she and I are both disoriented by all of the uncles and aunts and cousins, although I will be able to piece the family tree together eventually if I pay attention.

Maybe I should dump everything else for Delta Wedding.  No, no, Bang and Pelle are good, too.

Paul Christophersen is Bang’s translator.