Where does my song come from? - the poet Rubén Darío

So I will pick any poem.  That is what I said to do yesterday.  That’s a way to write about Rubén Darío.

No, not just any poem.  Some of Darío’s earliest poems are neo-Romantic imitations of Bécquer, and his breakthrough was as a poet who moved the innovations of Verlaine and other French avant-gardists into Spanish.  A number of Darío’s early poems are flawless takes on Verlaine.  So not those.

And not the long “Dialogue of the Centaurs,” even though Stanley Appelbaum calls it “very possibly Darío’s finest single poem” (xviii).  It is a philosophical dialogue among centaurs, in rhyming couplets:

I comprehend the secret of animals.  There are malevolent [Malignos]
beings and benevolent ones.  Between them are exchanged signals [signos]
of good and evil, hate or love, or else pain  [pena]
or joy:  the raven is evil and the ringdove is good.  [buena]

Darío’s range grew, though, his formal command and his subject matter.   His set of references moved far past classical antiquity to include the full range of Latin American history and Spanish-language literature, as in his prayer to “Our Lord Don Quixote,” who is enjoined to relieve the poet from his lost faith and “Nietzsche’s supermen,” or the lightly worn couplets of his “Epistle to Mrs. Leopold Lugones.”  And swans, always swans.  But I need to pick a poem.

It is 1906 or 1907.  Darío is living in Majorca for the winter, which sounds all right to me.  The title means “Alas!”:

Eheu!

    Here, beside the Latin sea,
I speak the truth:
In rock, olive oil, and wine I feel
my antiquity.

    Oh, how ancient I am, holy God,
oh how ancient I am!...
Where does my song come from?
And I, where am I going?

    The knowledge of myself
is already costing me
many moments of dejection,
and the how and the when...

    And this Latin clarity and brightness,
what good was it to me
at the entrance to the mine
of the self and the nonself?...

    A contented cloudwalker
I believe I can interpret
the secrets of the wind,
the land and the sea…

    Vague secrets
about being and nonbeing,
and fragments of awareness
about now and yesterday.

    As if in the midst of a wilderness,
I began to cry out;
and I gazed at the seemingly dead sun
and I burst into tears.

Ellipses all Darío’s.  Appelbaum’s translations are meant to assist language learners and are as literal and non-poetic as possible, so they are awfully thumping.  The Spanish verse sings:

    Y esta claridad latina,
¿De qué me sirvío
A la entrada de la mina
Del yo y el no yo…?

But even in prose, this poem has as much “claridad latina” as any of them.  Romantic subjectivity, Modernist cultural exploration; books and nature; that which is right in front of him and those “fragments of awareness” about what he feels must be out there, just within reach of the artist – no, just out of reach, always escaping him.

Thanks to Richard and Stu for Spanish Literature Month.  More, por favor, someday.

And I, lyric poet, mocked Faun, stood there watching the large alabaster birds seemingly making fun of me - Rubén Darío's stories

Where Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer was a narrow poet who did one or two things perfectly – although he died young, so who knows what he might have done –  Nicaraguan writer Rubén Darío revolutionized Spanish poetry by doing many things well.  I cannot get a fix on him, which makes him hard to write about.  Or perhaps I am wrong  and he is easy to write about.  Pick any poem or story and go, it is bound to be interesting.

So I will ignore his poetry for the moment and look at his stories.   Darío first made his mark with the 1888 Azul…, a volume of “9 stories, 6 poems, and some prose sketches about Chile.”*  Amazing what 9 stories and 6 poems can do.  It “marks the official birth of Modernism,” or so Octavio Paz tells me, although “[t]oday, it is an historical curiosity.”**  Paz means Spanish-language Modernism, modernismo.  Darío was among the first writers – and was likely the best writer – to bring the innovations of contemporary French writers like Paul Verlaine into Spanish.

The stories, or at least the ten I read, are short, punchy, and a lot of fun.  They verge on the prose poem or sketch, but always retain some minimum form of plot and character and visible meaning.  “The Case of Miss Amelia” (1894) is a genuine supernatural fantasy story, even if much of it is a parody of supernatural stories (the frame takes up four of the story’s five pages).  “The Bale” (1887) is pure Naturalism, a short but detailed account by a father of his son’s death in a workplace accident.  No lesson is presented or perhaps even possible.  A fairy story, an allegory, a fable about poetry, a bit of Parisian decadence.  A little of everything.

What do they have in common?  A light touch, aesthetic elegance.  The first line of “The Bale”:  “Far off there, on the line, seemingly drawn in blue pencil, that separates sea and sky, the sun was setting, with its powdery gold and its whorls of purplish sparks (torbellinos de chispas pupuradas), like a huge disk of white-hot iron.”  Every kind of story, even this brutal tale of a meaningless death, is draped with fine writing.

“The Death of the Empress of China” (1890) might be the purest of Darío’s stories.  A sculptor and his wife live in a sort of sticky bliss:

Suzette was the name of the little songbird that had been placed in a silk, plush, and lace cage by an artist, a dreamer and a huntsman who had captured her one May morning when the air was full of light and many rosebuds had opened.

Birdsong, flowers, fragrances fill the little story.  The woman is a metaphorical caged bird, but she also owns a caged bird, one that “becomes sad and stops singing whenever Suzette plays Chopin.”  The sculptor falls in love with a porcelain Chinese empress until the living doll Suzette reasserts her rights; that is the story as such.  Everything is aestheticized.  Is Darío critiquing the idea of “art for art’s sake” in this fantasy, or indulging it, suggesting that people should be treated like art objects.

I don’t know.  Darío’s stories are self-conscious art objects, meant to be admired on occasion and then returned to their jewel case.

The cryptic title is from a different story, "The Nymph (A Parisian Tale)," which is about imagination and inspiration, plus it mentions swans.  Darío was obsessed with swans.

* Stories and Poems, the 2002 Dover book edited and translated by Stanley Appelbaum, is my source for the stories.  The quote is on p. xi.

**  The version of the Paz essay I read is in Selected Poems of Rubén Darío, 1965, University of Texas Press, tr. Lysander Kemp.

We wanted only to amuse ourselves with him, but he took things too seriously - the beginning of the Argentine Literature of Doom

I am writing later than usual on this Friday evening in order to minimize the number of people reading this post at work.  “El matadero (The Slaughter House)” (written circa 1838, published 1871), the famous short story by the Argentine writer and politician Esteban Echeverría, is not safe for work.  Or play, for that matter.  It’s grisly.

We are in Buenos Aires during Lent.  A flood has prevented cattle from reaching the slaughterhouse.  No one should be eating beef during Lent except those with special dispensation for their health, but that seems to cover everyone.  A “sort of intestinal war between stomachs and consciences began.”  The stomachs are likely to win; among other things “there existed a state of intestinal flatulence in the population, brought on by fish and beans and other somewhat indigestible fare.”

I will pause to consider all the other fiction written in 1838, or published in 1871, containing such a sentence.  That did not take long.

Once cattle arrive at the slaughter house, the real action of the story, nine of its thirteen pages, can begin.  First forty-nine steers are dismembered, to great celebration and scavenging.  Maybe this would be a good place not to include a quotation.  The fiftieth and final animal is, by accident, a bull, who takes three pages to subdue.  A child is accidentally killed in a vivid and repulsive passage.

Now the butchers are worked up.  What horrors will they commit in the final four pages?  It helps at this point to know that the story was written as a protest against a specific dictator.  A civilian wanders by, an opponent of the regime, identifiable by his dress and beard and English saddle.  He is abducted, bullied, and murdered, although he may have willed himself to death to avoid torture:

“Poor devil, we wanted only to amuse ourselves with him, but he took things too seriously,” exclaimed the Judge, scowling tiger-like.

I should give some sort of sample of the writing.  The description of the bull is good: “snorting, casting reddish phosphorescent glances right and left.”  The bull is always on fire somehow.  It has escaped the slaughter house and nearly collided with a group of women:

It is said that one of the women voided herself on the spot, that another prayed ten Hail Mary’s in a few seconds, and that two others promised San Benito never to return to the damned corrals and to quit offal-collecting forever and anon.  However, it is not known whether they kept their promises.

Echeverría’s story stands at the beginning of Argentina’s Literature of Doom.  César Aira seems less peculiar measured against this particular forebear.  Those Latin American specialties, the brutal dictator novel like the recently translated Tyrant Banderas (1926) by Ramón del Valle-Inclán, or the bloody civil war novel like Mariano Azuela’s The Underdogs (1915), seem like logical outgrowths of “The Slaughter House.”   But I suppose it is the reverse that is true, that the later turmoil of Latin American history made Echeverría look like a literary prophet.

I read “The Slaughter House” in the valuable Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories (1997), tr. Angel Flores.

I tried my best and what I got for it was a kick in the jaw - Benito Pérez Galdós and Torquemada

Are Spanish novels long?  The 19th century ones, I mean.  The Spanish novel seems to face the “Russian novel” problem:  the standard “great Spanish novels” are a behemoth, Fortunata and Jacinta (1887) by  Benito Pérez Galdós (850 pages in the Penguin Classics translation, although I have seen a 1,000 page Spanish) and La Regenta (1884-5) by Clarín (a slender 750 pages).  And since neither novel has the prestige of War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov they mostly go unread, as does 19th century Spanish literature.  I haven’t read them either!

In fact, I discover as I poke around, Spanish books are short.  Clarín mostly wrote short stories, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón is best known for a novella, Emilia Pardo Bazán’s The Manor of Ulloa (1886) is short, Juan Valera’s Pepita Jimenez (1874) is short.  The intimidating figure is Galdós, not just because his great masterpiece is so long but because his body of work is gargantuan, 77 novels including a stunning 46 volume series of historical novels.  Over twenty of his novels are available in English, so you cannot say people have not tried to find English-language readers for Galdós.  A couple of years ago, studying the shelves of a good university library, I was pleased to discover that his novels were mostly quite short.

Galdós, following Balzac, used recurring characters, the best known of whom is probably the Madrid money-lender Torquemada who graduated from a small part in Fortunata and Jacinta to a series of his own novels.  Dwight, The Common Reader, has read the Torquemada novels (1889+) and made them sound most appealing.  I just tried them out myself, via “Torquemada in the Flames” (found in Great Spanish Stories, tr. Willard Trask), which I believe is a shortened version of the already short novella that begins the series.

Oh, it is a horrifying tale.  Torquemada is cunning and venal, a mean-spirited materialist.  When his son is afflicted with meningitis, though, he tries to reform.  He has picked up the idea that he will be rewarded by God – that he can save his son – by good works, but he is not in the habit.  Thus, when he gives coins to mendicant he cannot help telling them how virtuous he is, “’because I am poor too, and more unfortunate than you are – if only you knew it.’”  When he meets a freezing beggar, he cannot sacrifice his cape – “’If only I had on my old cape instead of this new one’” – but he does go home, retrieve the old one and give it away, which should count as a good deed, yes?

Much of the pleasure of this savagely ironic story comes from Torquemada and his ferociously perverse behavior, and also from his speech.  Here he is how the new, merciful Torquemada responds to a plea for clemency from one of his tenants:

‘And who told you, you foulmouthed so-and-so, that I have come to squeeze you?  I’d like to see any of you ill-conditioned hags maintain that I have no humanity.  Just any of you dare to say it to my face…’

And here is the lesson he has learned at the end of the story:

‘And I answer you that I tried my best and what I got for it was a kick in the jaw.  All the mercy I have, they are welcome to bash in my skull with!’

Dwight suggests (see the end of the above link) a Fortunata and Jacinta readalong for October.  This October, the one coming up.  I’ll do it, although I will likely need an October-and-a-half to finish the book.

The lyre went mute for want of content - but there will always be poetry! - abstract and concrete Bécquer

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer wrote stories as well as poems, the posthumous Leyendas (Legends).  I have read one of them, “Master Pérez the Organist” (1861), again in Great Spanish Stories (tr. Martin Nozick).  An obscure but great organist dies at the organ and then haunts it.  The story is a good knockoff of E. T. A. Hoffmann, and has some particularly good passages describing the music (“The organ exhaled a strange discordant sound, like a sob, and fell silent”) and some excellent Seville local color.  You can, in fact, visit the church – you can see the organ.  Just scroll down a bit past the “cuerpo incorrupto” of the nun who founded the convent.  Now there’s some Andalucian local color.

It is funny how little it matters that the Bécquer story is derivative.  The changes in locale and custom are sufficient to give it some interest, even if it were otherwise a pure copy of a Hoffmann tale.  Just moving from Berlin to Seville is an interesting change in the hands of a skilled writer.

I am less convinced that moving typical Romantic ideas from French or German into Spanish is similarly interesting.  Thus I suggested that the value of Bécquer’s poetry lies more in its intrinsic qualities than in its ideas, however much trouble this causes for a translator.  Bécquer seems to agree:

Do not say, Its treasure exhausted,
the lyre went mute for want of content:
it may be there’ll be no more poets,
but there will always be poetry!  (IV)

Translation can provide the narrative of a poem , if it has one, and can give us a good sense of the concerns of a poet, and poetic translation is usually good with imagery.  Bécquer’s poems are as stuffed with imagery as any poets, little of it especially original or surprising.  I can imagine him sacrificing an original image for an original sound.  He compares himself, his artistic self, in one poem to an “[a]rrow randomly shot,” a “gale-whipped leaf,” a wave and “light in trembling rings,” and in another his “inspiration” is like a hurricane or madness  or “a flying horse \ with no reins to guide it” or

Misshapen silhouettes
of impossible beings,
landscapes that appear
as if through tulle  (III)

which is pretty good, right, but also awfully fuzzy.  Those rings or circles of light, a recurring image, actually do strike me as original, but abstract.  But Bécquer’s aesthetic is abstract.  He is describing his poetry accurately.  I will not get a good look at those “impossible beings” but perhaps the sound and shadow of them will work on my imagination, as it did on a generation of Spanish-language poets who followed Bécquer.

A concrete setting forms at the end of the Rimas sequence* when the beloved woman dies and is entombed.  “The startled owls that pursued me” and “From a clock was heard the pendulum’s rhythmic beat” and

Pick-axe on shoulder
The gravedigger,
Crooning,
Faded into the distance.  (LXXIII)

Still, even these last poems, although set in a church and a crypt, also find the poet in “the silent world of ideas” – “I do not know if that visionary world lies within or outside us” (LXXV), about as succinct a summary of Romanticism as I know.  In the poems of Bécquer, more within than outside, although I wonder what he might have found if he had lived even a few years longer.

*  The  sequence Michael Smith provides, at least.  I am sticking with him and Collected Poems (Rimas) today.

What is poetry? - singing along with Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

“Spanish poetry of the late seventeenth  century and of the eighteenth is not very interesting, and that of the early nineteenth contains nothing that was not done better  in France, in Britain, or in Italy,” or so say J. M. Cohen in the introduction to The Penguin Book of Spanish Verse (1988, p. xxxvi), and thus he skips from almost two hundred years from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (“the last considerable poet of the Spanish Golden Age”) to Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (“the greatest of Spain’s poets of the 19th century”).  What is the greatest etc. like?

What is poetry? You ask
as you fix your blue eyes on mine.
What is poetry!  And it’s you who ask me?
Poetry… it is you. 

Hmm.  Yuck!  What goo.  This is Michael Smith, not Cohen, in Collected Poems (Rimas) (Shearsman, 2007, p. 65).  The English is nothing, but the Spanish is something:

¿Qué es poésia?, dices mientras clavas
en mi pupila tu pupila azul.
¡Qué es poésia!  ¿Y tú me lo preguntas?
Poésia… eres tú.

The sentiment is still trivial, but there is poetry here, particularly in the rhythm and the repeated vowel sounds.  That musical second line, for example, with its “i u i u i u,” resonating with the later repeated “tú.”  The rhymes and near-rhymes are unusual for Bécquer, but the mastery of assonance is not.

Although this poem does not seem to do all that much, it contains almost all of Bécquer’s subject matter.  He wrote love poems, expectant, joyous, anguished, and despondent, most of which also seem to be about poetry as much a woman.  He died young, having written poems for about a decade and leaving just one posthumous book, Rimas (1871).  The poems are from manuscript, so an editor can arrange them as he likes.  In the Collected Poems I am reading, a sort of story is formed in which poetry is replaced by (or turns into?) a woman who, sadly, dies, allowing the poet a full range of passionate poetic moods.

I find it hard not to mock, gently, lightly, lovingly, such a purely Romantic artist.  Another kind of reader, perhaps younger, may well take him more seriously.  He and I both take Bécquer’s vowels seriously (I am switching to Cohen’s prose translation):

Volverán las oscuras golondrinas
en tu balcón sus nidos a colgar,
y otra vez con el ala a sus cristales
     jugando llamarán;   

The black swallows will return to hang their nests on your balcony, and once more, as they sport, to knock with their wings against its window-panes,

pero aquellas que el vuelo refrenaban
tu hermosura y mi dicha al contemplar,
aquellas que aprendieron nuestros nombres…
    ésas… ¡no volverán!

but those that stopped their flight to observe your beauty and my good fortune, those who learnt our names…  they…  will not return!

Two more stanzas follow with similar “Something (honeysuckles, words of love) will return, but the ones who were here when we were happy will not return."  The rhythm is that of a song, perhaps a flamenco; I in fact have a tune in mind and if you were here I could sing it for you.  Thus if “golondrinas” and “colgar” and “cristales” and “llamarán” do not rhyme, the singer can stretch the “a” sound as if they do.  I also recommend that the singer employ a dramatic pause (and, if dressed appropriately, a dramatic pose) in the middle of that last line – “ésas [pause, longing gaze into the distance, that flounce of the skirts the flamenco singers do] ¡no volverán!”

It is just a question of finding the right tune.

Prosaic uniformity and savorless realism - Alarcón's jolly Three-Cornered Hat

Spanish Literature Month continues at a blistering pace – here is one week, just one short week, of the effort.  So many books, and nothing from the 19th century, as is statistically all too likely.  Much of the century falls in the curious two hundred year canonical gap in Spanish literature.

Spain’s medieval and early modern literature rivals that of any European tradition, but something happened  in the mid-17th century – the standard explanation is “the Counter-Reformation” – that did not do in the production of literature as such, but, remembering that judgments like this are always retrospective, killed off the imaginative literature that people today want to read, canonical literature.  Please check my work in any history of Spanish literature – how quickly does the author want to get out of the dreary 18th century?

The drought lasted well into the 19th century, although once the rain started the result was a flood.  That is not such a good sentence but I did not want to mix my metaphors.  My point is that by the end of the century Spanish literature was alive and rich, in verse and prose, in Europe and America.

The Three-Cornered Hat (1874) by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón is at the head of the new tradition, a charming and funny novella about an ugly miller and his lovely wife  and the comic misunderstandings that result when a local official sets his sights on the wife.  Much of the plot depends on the ancient device where changing your clothes changes your identity so that whoever is wearing the big three-cornered hat is assumed to be the big man in charge, although Alarcón does cheat a bit – he critiques the old device while using it.  The result is a story that feels like a direct descendant of Cervantes and Lazarillo de Tormes, as if Alarcón had simply stepped across the intervening centuries.

Perhaps this is why Alarcón is so careful to place his story in history:  “The year is not precisely known; it is certain only that it was after 4 and before 8” (Ch. I) which puts it before the Napoleonic Wars devastate Spain, and before anyone thought they might, “as if, in the midst of all these novelties and upheavals, the Pyrenees had grown into another Great Wall of China.”  The story could well seem timeless, or at least nostalgically remote, without this context but Alarcón deliberately sets it on the eve of convulsive change.

The Three-Cornered Hat is essentially a story about the abuse of authority.  “[T]he good old times symbolized by the Three-Cornered Hat” (Ch. 36) were corrupt and ruinous for ordinary people, but happy times for the powerful:

Happy times, in which our land enjoyed quiet and peaceful possession of all the cobwebs, dust, moths, all the observances, beliefs, traditions, all the uses and abuses, sanctified by the ages!...  Happy times, I say, especially for the poets, who might find round every corner an interlude, a farce, a comedy, a drama, a mystery, or an epic, instead of this prosaic uniformity and savorless realism which came to us on the heels of the French Revolution!  Happy times indeed!  (Ch. II)

Little of The Three-Cornered Hat is written so sarcastically.  None of it is without savor.

I read The Three-Cornered Hat in Great Spanish Stories (1956, Modern Library), tr. Martin Armstrong.

A "too tired to write a post" post

I was going to write up something last night about how I was too tired to write anything, but I was too tired.  By Monday I will be rested and relaxed, or so I hope.

Travelers of a certain energetic type would be shocked and perhaps embarrassed by how little I did and saw in France.  Day trips shrunk to half days, rest days were spontaneously added to the schedule, the length of meals expanded to civilized lengths.  No Barcelona, no Carcassonne, no Montpellier, even though these marvels were only a few hours away.  Still, I managed to fill the time while barely leaving Roussillon.

The two themes, so to speak, of the trip were food and – well, food is always a theme.  I was particularly successful with cheese, chocolates and produce, moderately so with wine and restaurants.  If in Perpignan, do not miss the narrow but superb Don Jamon – do not click if bothered by lovingly photographed Spanish ham.

The second theme was an attempt to make some sense of medieval France, inspired by a brief stop on the way south in Chartres and an attempt or two to look at Chartres Cathedral, all under the misleading guidance of Henry Adams and Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904).  Adams’s book, like its ancestor,  John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, moves far beyond the title edifices, discussing medieval French poetry, philosophy, and religion.  The book provides a strong misreading of the Middle Ages with Chartres as the primary text.

“Reading,” in the context of a cathedral, is just a metaphor, but in the case of Chartres a near literal one.  A couple thousand sculptural figures surround the entrances, and hundreds more are in the stained glass, all characters in stories, some of which I knew well and some that were utterly baffling.  The construction and history of the cathedral is yet another story.  Chartres is useful not just because it is a masterpiece, or an agglomeration of masterpieces, but because its story is, for a Gothic cathedral, unusually coherent.  The window that tells the story of The Song of Roland was hidden by renovation, so I will have to go back just for that.

Traveling, tourism, is like reading in this way – I read a complex book as preparation for the next reading, I visit a complex place to prepare for the next visit.  I was just getting somewhere, I think, when I have to leave, but next time I will be ready.  Or perhaps I will never return, never re-read, and the preparation is really for the next trip, the next book, or some trip or book in the distant future, one I have not yet imagined.

Walking beneath the stars - then all collapsed - Sergio de la Pava and Herman Melville

Tomorrow I go to France.  Back in a couple of weeks.  My attention has turned to sifting and sorting the books that will accompany me, judging them by weight per word and required concentration and disposability.  That tattered Lord Jim could stay in Europe, couldn’t it?  I wanted to take the Selected Writings of Paul Valéry, since I might visit his home town, but the book fails the Concentration Test.  Who am I kidding?  So it’s Trollope instead.

For example Sergio de la Pava's novel, A Naked Singularity, self-published in 2008, other-published a couple of months ago, is too heavy for travel, so I had to get through it's 670 pages before I left.  The book is excellent, a fine imperfect American mess in the tradition of Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis, as is often mentioned, but also of Richard Russo and Chuck Pahlaniuk, less often mentioned because less prestigious.  A young public defender gets caught up in a variety of this and that, including a capital punishment appeal and a Tarantino-ish heist.  The book is all about the voice of this character.  The Magnificent Octopus has typed in many representative quotations accompanied by enthusiastic criticism - please, sample.

It has been a while since I read one of these books (five years, Pynchon’s Against the Day), these discursive rambles through whatever has been gnawing at its author (say the career of boxer Wilfred Benitez), stuffed with whatever amusing nonsense he has thought up (like a fresh fruit-themed luxury hotel).  One chapter is in the form of a court transcript, another is a children’s story in verse, another the correspondence between a lawyer and a prisoner of Death Row.  The latter contains a deft little turn, a change in the tone of the lawyer’s letters after he actually meets the prisoner, that is one of the most moving things in the book.  De la Pava, ya big showoff.  Anyone tried the empanadas recipe yet (pp.118-20)?

The granddaddy of this tradition is Moby-Dick, so what fun to discover that the villain, so to speak, of the book is an invincible, immortal giant whale.

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

I guess that is Melville’s ending, or close to it, not De la Pava’s, although A Naked Singularity also ends in a collapse.  Each of the three parts of Singularity ends not with the sea but with stars, though, the word “stars.”  New York City is enjoying a blackout:

I looked up just in time to witness a celestial transfiguration.  The new terrestrial darkness allowed the heretofore invisible above to emerge, as the sky, now cleansed of all mortal light, became dotted with astral pinpoints.  I went out and wandered the streets; for the first time in that hyperkinetic place, walking beneath the stars.  (525)

The narrator is like “those old astronomers [who] were wont to mount to the apex, and sing out for new stars; even as the look-outs of a modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing in sight.”  That is Melville again.  Hard to stop quoting him.

I guess this is what will be floating atop the site until I come back.  Levi, let me know how many books I sold for you (my guess: 0).

Maybe  I will be able to check in sometime.  I heard somewhere that they have installed the internet in France.

Nobody write anything too interesting while I am away, please.

He is a great poet; in a future life you should really study him - Cees Noteboom's The Following Story

I see that I am late for Dutch Reading Month.  Iris already has a wrap up post!  I will try to be more punctual about Spanish Literature Month.  Great literature, though, is timeless, or so I have heard, so I will plunge forward.

I had the luck of coming across a book that complemented some earlier reading.  In Cees Noteboom’s The Following Story (1991) a Dutch travel writer finds himself magically transported to a Lisbon hotel room, the same one he once shared with a woman he loved: “they were still there, the vapid portrait of that overestimated seventeenth-century poet Camões, and the engraving of the great Lisbon earthquake with minute faceless creatures scattering in all directions to escape the toppling buildings” (19).  The narrator, Herman Mussert, is also a classicist – Ovid’s Metamorphoses is his “bible, one that really helps” (18) – so I understand his grotesque error.*

In more than one place Harold Bloom has argued that we read as a way to prepare for death.  The Following Story is the most literal novel on that subject that I have ever encountered.  The novel is almost entirely about literature (and death), even though the ordinary boundaries of life interfere with literature in all the usual ways.  Pessoa is invoked, as is Plato and, over and over, in some detail (“See Book XV, verses 60-64” (18)), Ovid, as the narrator undergoes a metamorphosis of his own.

A particularly ingenious scene near the end interweaves Mussert’s intimate knowledge of Ovid with the names and meaning of the constellations.  A scholar of Chinese poetry happens to be present, allowing Noteboom to sidestep the Western canon and Western constellations for a moment.  The Charioteer is transformed into the Pool of Heaven, as described, the Chinese professor tells us, by the poet Qu Yuan:

“One of our classics.  Earlier than your Ovid.”

He sounded apologetic.  (81)

The title of the post also comes from this character (p. 83).  It perhaps offers a solution to a common reader’s lament.

Tony, of the Reading List, recently wrote about the bad excuses some readers have cooked up for avoiding translations, a puzzle given the one irrefutable not excuse but reason for not reading a book in translation, or any book at all:  “I’m doing something else.”**  Noteboom’s novel fails two of Tony’s three arguments in favor of literature in translation, the instrumental reasons (cultural experience – Noteboom actually makes some subtle and amusing criticisms of the act of foreign travel! – and alternative perspectives), but it meets the third – it is a well-written novel.

Ina Rilke is the translator.

*  The overestimated sixteenth century poet!

**  The conversation was continued by Amanda at Simple Pastimes and by Jillian, who accuses me of making literature less popular and "read[ing] with ego rather than earnestness" – that last word is inaccurate, at least; I read with irony.

The meaning of Flaubert's meaninglessness - he condemned the ideas but admired the style

Madame Bovary’s preposterous philistine pharmacist M. Homais has four children, all with meaningful names:  “Napoléon stood for fame, Franklin for liberty; Irma was perhaps a concession to Romanticism; but Athalie was a tribute to the most immortal masterpiece of the French stage” (I.3).  The Irma business has me stumped, but I have read Racine’s Athalie (1691) and get the joke.  The play is sincerely religious and Homais is a free-thinker, but as a “man of discrimination” he “condemned the ideas but admired the style, abhorred the conception but praised all the details.”

Generally anything Homais does or thinks is a target of scorn, but here he seems to be describing a large number of the readers of Madame Bovary.  Also, perhaps, its author.

Madame Bovary is actually the fourth novel Flaubert wrote, if I am counting correctly.  The third, the first version of The Temptation of St. Anthony, barely has any story or characters or any of the usual novelistic apparatus but is just, as Flaubert’s friend Maxime du Camp wrote, “harmonious phrases expertly put together…, noble images and startling metaphors” (Steegmuller, 163), and nothing else.  Another friend, Louis Bouilhet, planted the seed of the real-life incident on which Madame Bovary is based as a vehicle to constrain Flaubert and allow him to correct his faults. But:

How could he [Flaubert] bear to spend several years describing such people as those?  The prospect revolted him. (Steegmuller, 260)

More than one reader of Flaubert says “Hey – me, too!”  But the subject obviously worked as a purgative.

The obstacle here is the notion of creative expression.  The artist  - any artist – is presumably trying to express something, and in a novel it is generally safe to assume that the characters and events of the story are a significant part of what he is trying to express.  They take up so much room.

But what if the incidents and insights are only in the novel because the form of the novel requires them?  Say that Flaubert chooses to write a novel, and as a result of that choice seeks to perfect every necessary element of the novel, but that whatever meaning he is trying to express is inherent in the creation of the object.  Rohan Maitzen, champion of Middlemarch and a tradition not just different than but antithetical to Flaubert’s, wonders if Madame Bovary’s achievement lies “in its perfect realization of its own concept, perhaps.”  Yes, I think so, and here we see the difference between the amateur and the professional.  I had to read four books by Flaubert culminating in the sublimely absurd Salammbô to get this point; the English professor only needed one.

Flaubert’s purpose resembles that of his neighbor Claude Monet.  Monet did not paint two dozen grainstacks because he wanted to express an idea about Normandy agriculture, nor did he paint his series of paintings of the Rouen Cathedral, the setting of the one of the best scenes in Madame Bovary, because of an interest in religion or architecture or the novels of Gustave Flaubert, but in both cases because the forms of the haystack and cathedral allowed him to explore changing light and shadow effects.  Flaubert is creating a novel, though, not a series of paintings or a symphony, so he includes signifiers of novelistic meaning.  It’s the light effects and harmonies he is after, though.  That’s where whatever he is trying to express can be found.  The opportunity to mock the Normandy bourgeois who irritate him so is just a bonus.

White and black butterflies & Flaubert's visible narrator

The unadorned Flaubert I mentioned yesterday was a necessary piece of what Mario Vargas Llosa calls in The Perpetual Orgy the Invisible Narrator, “a glacial, meticulous observer who does not allow himself to be seen” (188), the narrator who resembles a movie camera.  I always think of the cab scene (III.1) as the perfect example, the scene that the journal publishing the Madame Bovary serial suppressed as obscene even though the camera shows us nothing but 1) the exterior of an enclosed carriage, 2) the face of the “demoralized” cabbie, and 3) the streets of Rouen, sometimes from the perspective of the cabbie, sometimes, seemingly, from the air, sometimes perhaps on a map.  A film version might resort to animation.

I am amazed to note that the famous scene is only two pages long.  The narrator keeps his cool, never glancing in the carriage, avoiding adjectives and metaphors until the end, when he gives us a useful one that serves as a naughty punchline:

Along the river front amidst the trucks and the barrels, along the streets from the shelter of the guard posts, the bourgeois stared wide-eyed at this spectacle unheard of in the provinces – a carriage with drawn shades that kept appearing and reappearing, sealed tighter than a tomb and tossing like a ship.

The cinematic version of the scene places the camera among the bourgeois, perhaps in a café.  Prose allows Flaubert to compress the appearances of the carriage into three words.  Having changed the path of the fictional sex scene forever, Flaubert indulges himself with a showstopper (Emma is discarding a letter she had written to Léon):

At a certain moment in the early afternoon, when the sun was blazing down most fiercely on the old silver-plated lamps, a bare hand appeared from under the little yellow cloth curtains and threw out some torn scraps of paper.  The wind caught them and scattered them, and they alighted at a distance, like white butterflies, on a field of flowering red clover.

Silver, yellow, white, red.  Re-readers, or first-timers with a better memory than mine, will remember the black butterflies that went up the chimney back in I.9.

Aspiring and impressionable writers of a certain temperament read this passage, these sentences, and swore fidelity to Gustave Flaubert.  This was what they would write.  Hugo is too crushingly present, Balzac is too sloppy, Stendhal too – well, I do not understand Stendhal so well.  Different models, all “realists” in their own way, for different creative tendencies.

And anyway Flaubert is not all that invisible in Madame Bovary.  Reading this astringent novel after the all-Hugo, all-the-time Toilers of the Sea perhaps exaggerated the difference.  Vargas Llosa identifies “no more than half a hundred” (194) intrusions by the Philosopher Narrator.  I included one of the strongest yesterday, Flaubert’s lament for the dancing bears, but others are more ambiguous and amusing:

Here they make the worst Neufchâtel cheese in the entire district; and here farming calls for considerable investment: great quantities of manure are needed to fertilize the friable, sandy, stony soil. (II.1.)

The objective narrator, almost an agronomist here, cannot resist the chance to attack their cheese.  Who among us could?

We long to make music that will melt the stars - Flaubert's plain prose

We now start to enjoy yet another masterpiece, yet another fairy tale. Of all the fairy tales in this series, Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary is the most romantic. Stylistically it is prose doing what poetry is supposed to do. (Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, 125)

Given that last sentence, and it is easy enough to find other critics saying the same thing, it can be surprising how ordinarily well written so much of Madame Bovary can be.  An obsessive attention to the perfect sentence and most original metaphor is one of the legacies of Flaubert, perhaps a bad one.  Descendants of Flaubert like Marcel Proust and Nabokov and John Banville strive to make every sentence intensely interesting and to make every metaphor new.  Sometimes they succeed.  So shouldn't their ancestor be more dazzling?

Flaubert, in his letters, whines, moans, and howls, accurately, it seems, about the difficulties of producing single sentences.  He tested his sentences by “bellowing” them, as did his friend and collaborator, the poet Louis Bouilhet, scrutinizing not just the images or words but the assonances, alliterations, and rhythms.  The music of the writing is obviously impossible to capture in English and no one tries, although I would love to read a translator’s attempt at a passage of imitation Flaubertian verse.  Herman Melville is the only fiction writer working in English before Flaubert whose prose does what poetry is supposed to do, whose prose can frequently be converted to verse.  Melville risked – and achieved! – the incoherence of compressed verse; Flaubert was nothing if not clear.  He could write plain prose as well as fancy.

Rohan Maitzen has assembled a sampling of some of Madame Bovary’s striking metaphors.  Every one is good – the snake-like hiss of the corset string is a favorite of mine.  Maitzen emphasizes Flaubert’s restraint.  His imagery and metaphors are not written in the interest of bee-yoo-tee, and he is only lyrical or, worse, luminous, on special occasions.  Flaubert savagely expunged metaphors, adjectives, and effusive description from Madame Bovary.  He wrote lots more than he kept.  This is what André Gide was getting at when he criticized as inartistic Victor Hugo’s “uninterrupted mobilization of all the possible resources,” for “not spar[ing] us a single one.”  Hugo gives us every metaphor he can think of; Flaubert only keeps the best one, the one that best serves the novel.  Or such is the idea.

Look at me go on and on, without offering a single sentence of Flaubert’s, brilliant or indifferent.  All right, another favorite.  The first sentence belongs to Emma’s first lover Rodolphe, the “he”; the second is one of the novel’s rare direct addresses to the reader, the purest merging of narrator and author in the book, a barely concealed statement of purpose:

Since he had heard those same words uttered by loose women or prostitutes, he had little belief in their sincerity when he heard them now:  the more flowery a person’s speech, he thought, the more suspect the feelings, or lack of feelings, it concealed.  Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.  (II.12)

I am relying on Francis Steegmuller’s biography of creativity Flaubert and Madame Bovary (1950) for any biographical details.

Fishmongers, cigars, knives, and broken bridles - Madame Bovary's motifs

Gustave Flaubert uses imagery and ordinary objects to create an elaborate pattern that complements the surface meaning of the novel, or ironically comments on the surface meaning, or is perhaps completely independent of it but nevertheless neato, interesting or beautiful or meaningful for its own sake.  I know, I know, everyone does this.  Everyone does it now, in 156 AMB (Anno Madame Bovary).

Flaubert was not really the first fiction writer to build up this kind of pattern – he was never the inventor of any of the innovations critics, and I, commonly associate with him – but he thoroughly systematized a number of elements of the novel into something more or less new.  This is what I mean by Madame Bovary being less fun to write about.  So I’ll drop it.

No, one digression.  Mostly an innovation in fiction is little more than a new emphasis on some aspect of fiction that was there all along, perhaps inherent even in the act of storytelling.  But hasty and easily distracted readers like me have to be trained by an especially insistent novelist to see what has always been right in front of me.  Thus the strange phenomenon of discovering that Cervantes and Don Quixote already did everything.

An example of the patterning, a guest at the wedding of Charles Bovary and Emma Roualt:

The bride had begged her father that she be spared the usual pranks.  However, a fishmonger cousin (who had actually brought a pair of soles as a wedding present) was just beginning to spurt water from his mouth through the keyhole when Roualt came along and stopped him, explaining that the importance of his son-in-law’s position didn’t permit such unseemliness.  (I.4)

Early in her marriage Emma, dissatisfied with provincial life, becomes obsessed with the idea of Paris.  I think this is the only other fishmonger in the novel:

At night when the fishmongers passed below her window in their carts, singing La Marjolaine, she would awaken; and listening to the sound of the iron-rimmed wheels on the pavement, and then the quick change in the sound as they reached the unpaved road at the end of the village, she would tell herself: “They’ll be there [Paris] tomorrow!”  (I.9)

So not only do we have a pair of passages with fishmongers, but in both cases they are associated with waking Emma.  Flaubert is using what at first seems like an unnecessarily fussy detail to link the two scenes.  At a high point in Emma’s life, a fishmonger was beneath her, while later she absurdly associated them with glamour and escape.  For good measure, throw in a curious scene near the end of the novel in which Emma is awakened by the “metallic clang” of “a wagon laden with long strips of iron” (III.6), just after Emma has experienced a sort of parody of the life she imagined in Paris.

The entire novel is built like this.  Returning from the ball in I.8 “they had to stop: the breeching broke, and Charles mended it with a rope,” while the romantically indulgent finale of Emma’s seduction (“her blood flowing in her flesh like a river of milk” and so on) is punctured by “Rodolphe, a cigar between his teeth, was mending a broken bridle with his penknife” (II.9).  Back in the first scene, Charles discovers a fancy cigar case, lost by the nobleman who hosted the ball, so again Flaubert gives me two chances to remember the connection.  Later Emma gives Rodolphe a cigar case; she also gives him an expensive riding crop, which takes me back to the riding crop in the scene where Charles and Emma first meet (I.2).  A riding crop and a broken bridle are just part of the elaborate horse motif (Vladimir Nabokov tears into it with gusto in Lectures on Literature).

And is there not a scene in which Emma, not yet seduced, is embarrassed that her oafish husband  (“like a peasant!”) carries a knife? There is: II.5.

Little of this is visible on a first pass, even though Flaubert makes use of so many strands.  It was only near the end this time that I discovered the barking dog motif.  I would figure out how the scenes with barking dogs were connected if I had kept track of where they were.  Next time.

This is what I usually mean when I say someone writes like Flaubert.  It is really very difficult to do.

All quotations from the Francis Steegmuller translation.

There really is a time before Flaubert and a time after him - but this week is "during"

The idea seems worse the more I think about it, but I am going to spend the week writing about Madame Bovary (1856).  I mention Gustave Flaubert frequently, but the only book of his that I have really written about is his overheated Salammbô, surely a special case, except that Flaubert’s vulgar historical epic was as much fun to write about as anything I have done here, and I was thrilled to see Mario Vargas Llosa have his fun, too:  “I remember a number of Olympian discussions I had, in that summer of ’59, with friends who laughed when I heatedly asserted that ‘Salammbô is a masterpiece, too.’”  My concern is that writing about Bovary will be less fun.

Less enjoyable because, just as an example, I have read too much about the novel.  The Vargas Llosa quotation is from p. 31 of The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary (1975, tr. Helen Lane), a model study, specifically from the fifty page love letter to the novel and to the title character with which Vargas Llosa begins his book before turning to more technical questions.  All I want to write about are technical questions which, if they have not been covered by Vargas Llosa are likely to be at least glanced at in How Fictions Works (2008) by James Wood:

There really is a time before Flaubert and a time after him.  Flaubert established, for good or ill, what most readers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible.  (39)

That first sentence is at once trivially true when taken literally, and mostly false when taken as a metaphor, only true in the sense that we can retrospectively see the split which was created not by Flaubert but by later writers reacting to and against him.  But when I invoke Flaubert, I am using him as a shorthand reference for exactly the break Wood identifies.  My idea for the week is to try to write out what I mean.

One word I will not use is “realist” or any variation.  Absolutely useless as a designation, I have concluded, in fact pointlessly confusing.  Best to ignore it entirely.

I plan to ignore the sympathy question, too, even though it is central and has been productive to later writers.  Meaning, the author clearly despises his heroine – and in letters says he does – except often it is anything but clear how he feels about her, and what a reader is “supposed” to feel may well have little to do with what the cantankerous author feels.  The ambivalence is built into the novel.  Vargas Llosa claims that the first time he read the novel, at the end of Part II (the opera scene), “he knew that from that moment on, till my dying day, I would be in love with Emma Bovary” (9).  I align myself with Vladimir Nabokov, who, opening his lecture on Madame Bovary, calls the novel a “fairy tale” and reminds his sensitive Cornell undergraduates that “Emma Bovary never existed” (125).

So that will be my approach, I guess.  Form, style, imagery, language, when not necessarily expunged by the valiant but helpless translator.  Delight.  We’ll see.  Or just some goofing around with the parts I like best; that would be all right, too.

Scott Bailey has, by coincidence, just written something about Madame Bovary.  Perhaps he will gently correct my worst errors as I move along.  Thanks in advance!

Tumult and silence combined - a Hugolian miscellany

As usual, while playing around with The Toilers of the Sea I have paid little mind to the characters and plot and ethical conundrums and that sort of thing.  The story I have mentioned, at least.  There is a long stretch in which Hugo relates every single little thing that has struck him as unusual about Guernsey:

On all the walls of Guernsey is displayed a huge picture of a man, six feet tall, holding a bell an sounding the alarm to call attention to an advertisement.  Guernsey has more posters than the whole of France.   This publicity promotes life; frequently the life of the mind, with unexpected results, leveling the population by the habit of reading, which produces dignity of manner.   (33)

Sometimes Hugo writes the oddest things.

But then comes the heist plots, zip zip zip, and then Gilliatt and the shipwreck and the storm and the octopus, most of which is amazing, and then a romantic plot, a Romantic romantic plot to round out the book.  Most of the best writing is in the long sea-related section.

The hero is another of Hugo’s super-strong characters.  I have read three Hugo novels, and all three star strongmen, Quasimodo, Jean Valjean, and now Gilliatt.  They are also super-resourceful and super-agile.  The latter two are super-knowledgeable.  They are Batman, basically, as is the Count of Monte Cristo and Balzac’s super-criminal Vautrin.  The hero of Flaubert’s Salammbô is also superhumanly strong, although that character is certainly not like Batman, but is rather a forefather of Conan the Barbarian.  This is a peculiar feature of 19th century French fiction.  I have no explanation.  Victor Hugo was a sort of superhero himself, but his powers were super-energy and super-imagination.

And this is as good a time as any for you, gentle reader, to learn that I can wander a bit while storytelling so that the very imminent digressive passage on the judicial creation of Miranda warnings can be entirely skipped by the uncurious without the slightest loss of narrative steam.

Now this is the narrator of Sergio de la Pava’s A Naked Singularity (2008, p. 5) behaving in a typically Hugolian manner.  Hugo should be a deity to the postmodernists, the Pynchon and Wallace readers, the information overload crowd.  Is he?  I have doubts.

I also recommend The Toilers of the Sea in particular to the readers of W. G. Sebald, who was clearly a powerful influence on Hugo.  Hugo is always careful to tell me what I can still see, what is left from the time of the story, forty years in the past.  Can I see Gilliatt’s house, for example?  No, it is gone, as is the land on which it rested.

… the island of Guernsey is in course of demolition.  The granite is good: who wants it?  All its cliffs are up for auction.  The inhabitants are selling the island by retail… (52)

Guernsey is being systematically blasted apart and shipped to London.  But the story is more complex than predatory man versus helpless nature.  English is replacing French.  Can we find the boarding house in St. Malo I mentioned a couple of days ago?  No, “[i]t no longer exists, having been caught up in improvements to the town”  (162).  Can I see the rock towers that trapped the shipwreck, the Douvres, the setting of most of the novel?  Well, the tallest tower is gone:  “on October 26, 1859, a violent equinoctial gale overthrew one of them” (186).

Man versus nature, man versus man, nature versus nature.  Perhaps Henry Adams is the relevant precursor.  Hugo’s endlessly energetic and profligate novel is a classic of entropy, of the passing of all things.

The solitudes of the ocean are melancholy: tumult and silence combined.  What happens there no longer concerns the human race.  Its use or value is unknown.  Such a place is the Douvres.  All around, as far as the eye can see, is nothing but the immense turbulence of the waves.  (186-7)

The octopus attacks - Hugo's uninterrupted mobilization of all the possible resources

Among the fine features of the recent Modern Library paperback of The Toilers of the Sea, the edition I read, are a selection of Victor Hugo’s watercolors, the ones which were illustrations not for the published book but for Hugo’s manuscript.  He pasted them in himself.  The friendly fellow on the left is acknowledging his creator with the V and H he is creating with his tentacles.  If that is hard to see, please visit the much larger version at 50 Watts, from whom I borrowed the picture.

  When God so wills it, He excels in the creation of the execrable.  Why He should have such a will is a question that troubles religious thinkers.  (II.4.ii, 349)

The chapter title is “The Monster,” the subject of which is described at length, and width and depth, too.  As impressive as the description is (“It looks like a rag of cloth, like a rolled-up umbrella without a handle”) Hugo has not convinced me that religious thinkers, pondering the existence of evil, have actually given all that much thought to the jolly, squashy octopus.  But in Toilers it is a physical embodiment of the evil of nature.  What an odd idea.

These creatures almost cause her [Philosophy] concern about the Creator.  They are hideous surprises.  They are the killjoys of the contemplator:  he observes them in dismay.  They are deliberately created forms of evil.  In face of these blasphemies of creation against itself what can be done?  Who can be blamed for them?  (354)

This is hardly Hugo’s only idea about the force or purposefulness of nature, though.  He has plenty of  ideas.  The novel’s hero, Gilliatt, once he has survived, through heroic effort, the great storm I mentioned a couple of days ago, insults nature:

Then, taking up in the hollow of his hand a little water from a pool of rainwater, he drank it and cried to the clouds: “Fooled you!”

… Gilliatt felt the immemorial need to insult an enemy that goes back to the heroes of Homer.  (343)

Hugo is clear enough about the tradition he wants to join.  Achilles merely battles and defeats a river in the Iliad; Hugo’s champion defeats the sea.

Hugo’s profligacy, of ideas, of images, and of himself, of his own massive personality, is fascinating but also maddening.  André Gide writes in his journal, developing a complaint about my nemesis Richard Strauss:

And same causes of shortcomings: lack of discretion of the means and monotony of the effects, annoying insistency, flagrant insincerity; uninterrupted mobilization of all the possible resources.  Likewise Hugo, likewise Wagner, when metaphors come to mind to express an idea, does not choose, does not spare us a single one.  Fundamental lack of artistry in all this.  (Journals, Volume I: 1889-1913, tr. Justin O’Brien, May 22, 1907, p. 213)

The octopus is a rag and an umbrella, a wheel and a harpoon, “spiderlike” and “chameleon-like,” a disease.  In a passage that approaches self-parody, Hugo lists every animal the octopus is not like:  “The whale is enormous, the devilfish is small; the hippopotamus is armor-plated, the devilfish is naked,” and on to the howler monkey, the vampire bat, the lammergeyer, and many more.  Inartistic, sometimes, yes, but it is still thrilling to watch Hugo perform his feats of superhuman literary endurance and strength, however preposterous.  Who else could have done them?

Visual Hugo - imagining goffered seaweed and skull-like houses

The Toilers of the Sea is an intensely visual novel.  But do I “see” what Hugo wants me too?  He is describing an abandoned hilltop house, perhaps haunted, certainly used by smugglers:

The house turns its back on the sea.  The side facing the ocean is a blank wall; but if you look closely you can see a window that has been walled up. ..  On the first floor – and this is what strikes you most as you approach the house – are two open windows; but the walled-up windows are less disturbing than these.  They have lost their glass, and even the frames are missing.  They open on the darkness within.  They are like the empty sockets of two eyes that have been torn out.  (I.5.iv., 148)

Even with my omissions, I say the answer to my own question is yes.  Where is that walled-in window, to the right or left if I am facing the back wall?  Who cares?  Put it somewhere.  The empty windows in front, where do they go?  The final metaphor is not so original in and of itself, but I read it and know instantly where Hugo wants me to see those holes in the wall.

The skull that is suggested actually links the scene to another skull we will discover two hundred pages later, but that is a different kind of novelistic effect, not necessarily a visual one.

Let me try another one.  A ship has wrecked against a reef, and a subsequent storm has actually lifted the ship out of the sea, wedging it between two rock towers.

The two Douvres, raising the dead Durande above the waves, had an air of triumph.  It was like two monstrous arms emerging from the abyss and displaying to the storms this corpse of a ship.  It was like a murderer boasting of his achievement.  (II.1.i, 241)

These rocks, the Douvres, have already been described several times by Hugo – “two black columns… their roots were in underwater mountains.”  I think I see them.  Or, even though I have never seen a shipwreck suspended between two pillars, I can imagine it at a certain level of abstraction.  “The huge capital H formed by the two Douvres linked by the crossbar of the Durande stood out against the horizon in a kind of crepuscular majesty.”

The hero of the novel will clamber all over this reef.  He will scale the towers, store equipment on ledges, and construct a forge in a cave inside one of them.  My mental picture has to shift now.  The letter H is pitted with holes big enough for a man to walk into.  One of the columns is in fact is close to hollow.  Five pages is given to describing the cavern within the tower.

A luxuriant growth of moss in every shade of olive concealed and enlarged the protuberances in the granite.  From every projection hung slender goffered ribbons of varech, a seaweed used by fishermen as a form of barometer, their glistening strands swaying in the mysterious breathing of the cavern.  (II.1.xiii, 277)

I cannot imagine every shade of olive – hardly any, in fact.  I replace Hugo’s specific seaweed with my generic one.

A film would solve all of these visual problems for me.  A set designer would choose one plastic seaweed out of all of the possibilities at hand, spray it with some sort of oil, and hide an intern behind it to make it sway.  There it is; I see it now.  And he would discard the goffered ribbons and crepuscular majesty and empty sockets.

A dilapidated old novel and a witch are not unlike each other - like the tongue of a trigonocephalus - Hugo and getting on with it

The pacing of The Toilers of the Sea is strange.  Perhaps even stranger than Les Misérables, although the scale of the book is more manageable.  Hugo does not have as much space to linger on the Waterloo battlefield or its aquatic equivalent.

Still, his basic method is to constantly break his own momentum.  A hurricane approaches; our hero’s efforts – and mine, since I read about them for 100 pages – will likely be destroyed. “The abyss was making up its mind to do battle.”  How does Hugo kill time waiting for the storm, which we can see in the distance, “a small unwholesome-looking stain,” what does he do while the hero and I are waiting?  He tells me about storms for five chapters and twelve pages.  Winds and clouds around the world.  Science (“winds that construct circumcumuli, and those that construct circumstrati”) and metaphor (“[winds] that shake out of their clouds, like the tongue of a trigonocephalus, the fearful forked lightning”).  I am wandering around Part II, Book III, waiting for the storm.  Then it hits, in a single eighteen page chapter.  This is Hugolian pacing.  Frustrating, tense, profoundly satisfying.  I am half convinced that, born a century later, he would have been a film director.

During the heist plot, a character arranges to buy a contraband gun.  I have witnessed this scene before, more than once, although never in the setting in which Hugo puts it, in a sort of tenement rooming house in Saint-Malo that “no longer exists, having been caught up in improvements to the town.”  The house and its occupants are described in some detail over five or six pages with sentences like this:

A dilapidated old novel and a witch are not unlike each other.*

This is the rubbish heap of souls, piled up in the corner and swept from time to time by the broom that is called a police raid.

This is the spittle of society rather than its vomit.

We should not, out of hand, value a Louvre highly or despise a prison.

Hugo writes interesting sentences.  At this point, I do not actually know about the revolver and have no idea why Hugo is telling me about this place.  The house has a courtyard with a well in the center.

Beyond the feet, in the semidarkness of the shed, your eye might distinguish bodies, forms, sleeping heads, figures lying inert, rags of both sexes, the promiscuity of the dunghill, a strange and sinister deposit of humanity.  This sleeping chamber was open to anyone and everyone.  The occupants paid two sous a week,  Their feet touched the well.  On stormy nights rain fell on those feet; on winter nights it snowed on those bodies…  The order of society is complicated by such human debris.  (I.5.vi., 164)

Ah, I don’t want to stop.  “The rags and tatters seeded the rubble” (166).  That’s something, right?  “The multitude of spiders provided some reassurance against the immediate collapse of the building.”  Why does Hugo give so much space to this house; why do I?  The book is about the sea, and after the next chapter we never return here.  But Hugo’s imagination created the space and then got tangled up in it.  Once he saw the alley, he saw the house; the house gave him the well; the well gave him the feet, and the rags, and the spiders.  Get on with it Hugo!  But he is – “it” is everything, characters and stories but also clouds and poverty and Sri Lankan vipers.

*  Hugo's word is actually "hovel," not "novel."

The Toilers of the Sea, Victor Hugo's amazing heist \ engineering \ sea novel

The Toilers of the Sea (1866) is Victor Hugo’s fifth novel, and his third masterpiece in a row.  I should note that I have not read the first two, Hans of Iceland and Bug-Jargal, despite their immensely appealing titles.  Notre-Dame of Paris (1831) followed those two, and Les Misérables (1862) came thirty-one years later.  The number of novelists with a gap that long between their two best novels must be few.  Admittedly Les Misérables is long enough for four or five ordinary novels, if one can say that anything about Hugo is ordinary.

In the meantime, in that gap, in those thirty-one years, Hugo had also written and published a body of poetry that should have made him the greatest French poet, as for a time it did, but gnawing worms named Baudelaire and Flaubert and Les Fleurs du Mal and Madame Bovary were at that moment undermining the firmament; these writers were well known to Hugo but not understood by him, or actually strongly misunderstood as followers of, who else, Victor Hugo.  If I had a copy of the letters of Baudelaire with me I could give his exact response to being congratulated by Hugo on writing poems for the struggling People.  I can paraphrase Baudelaire, though: “I hate the People!”

How Hugo loved the People; how they loved him.

The Toilers of the Sea, despite the first word of the title, is not about the People.  It is not a political novel at all, even though it was written during Hugo’s exile from France.  Unless – oh no, how awful – it is an allegory, and the shipwreck is France, and the octopus is Louis Napoleon.  The novel is very much about the Sea, though.  Hugo claims, in a Preface, that Notre-Dame de Paris is a denunciation of dogmas, Les Misérables is about laws, and Toilers is about things, the elements.  All three are about “the fatality within [man]… the human heart.”  Ah, how sad!  This is why Hugo lost his readers.

That and the lack of actual story.  The Toilers of the Sea has a ratio of story to non-story that may approach a 19th century novelistic record.  In much of the story that the novel does tell, a man tries to salvage a ship in a superhuman feat of engineering.  A rare genre:  the novel of engineering.

The floor of the engine room was framed between the eight cables from the hoists, four on one side and four on the other.  The sixteen openings in the deck and under the hull through which the cables passed had been linked with one another by sawing.  The planking…  (plenty more of this in II.3.vi, p. 300)

The other story is what may be – what must be – the greatest heist film of the century.  Not a film, I guess.  But there’s a hundred page stretch that bangs along like an Elmore Leonard novel.  A Leonard novel that spends a surprising amount of time describing rocks.

In a Hugo novel, you get everything.  Whether you want it or not.

Early on in Toilers, I was worried that Hugo was getting a bit stiff.  He loosens up.  The novel has some passages that approach unbelievability (not the one sampled above, not exactly).  I could write about the book all week.  I will.

I read the 2002 Modern Library / James Hogarth translation, an excellent edition all round. I read Les Misérables in the revised Wilbour version which goes back to 1862, and the Quasimodo novel in (I think) the Walter Cobb version from the 1960s.  My tribute to all three translators: their books all sound and feel like they were written by the same writer.