It’s just the greatest thing that ever was! - Kipling's Great Man, and Carlyle's

Kipling writes seven fine chapters on ordinary life in the cod fisheries, extraordinary only because so risky.  He has to wrap the book up, though.  The hold is full of fish; our hero Harvey returns to shore; his parents learn that he is not dead.  For thematic reasons as well as elementary story-telling, Harvey, having lost his callowness at the hands of a substitute father, the sea captain, Captain Courageous #1, needs some sort of scene with his father, the self-made millionaire, Captain Courageous #2.  Thus the odd plural title.

Mr. Cheyne is in San Diego and needs to get to Gloucester, Massachusetts.  He will travel by private rail car – we get a scene where he and his secretary plan the necessary connections and couplings:

The train would take precedence of one hundred and seventy-seven others meeting and passing; despatches and crews of every one of those said trains must be notified. Sixteen locomotives, sixteen engineers, and sixteen firemen would be needed – each and every one the best available.  Two and one half minutes would be allowed for changing engines, three for watering, and two for coaling. (Ch. IX)

And then we see the trip unfold just as planned.  The entire section, of roughly six pages and two thousand words, is “a classic of railway literature,” as a Wikipedist succinctly describes it.  Of trainspotting literature, says I.  The intricacies of private intercontinental rail travel have a mild interest, and I was anxious for Harvey’s parents to reunite with their lost son – I’m not a monster! – but the whole thing is baffling.  Nothing is at stake.  At least Phileas Fogg was trying to win a bet.  So a connection is missed and the reunion is twelve hours late.  So what.  Some vague attempts are made to symbolically mix the father’s rail journey with the son’s sea voyage, the effects of which are vitiated by the next scene, the one suffused with the ideology of Thomas Carlyle.

The depth of Carlyle’s influence continues to astound me.  Here we are, fifty-five years after the publication of Past and Present, and a writer as strong as Kipling has nothing more original to offer than Carlyle’s idea that the Captains of Industry are (or at least should be) the new Great Men of history, filling the roles of Frederick the Great and Oliver Cromwell and Odin (yes, the Norse god – see On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History, 1840). Harvey’s father tells the story of his rise to wealth and power (“Harvey gasped.  ‘It’s just the greatest thing that ever was!’ said he.”), and offers Harvey a choice:  he can be a layabout or a lawyer.  Useful or useless, labor or laziness.  I spent the book watching Harvey develop, so I know that he will choose to produce! produce!

Captains Courageous does thus modify the boys’ book formula.  Harvey does not just learn through adversity how to be a man, but how to be a Great Man, a Carlylean hero.  The idea that he might be inspired to become, I don’t know, an ichthyologist, that never comes up.  The novel demonstrates how an other-made man can becomes just as heroically useful as a self-made man.

It’s the dangedest thing, and between that and the railroad nonsense almost staves in the end of the book.  Luckily, there is one more scene.

The wrench and shloop of torn heads, the frizzing of tiny silver fish - Kipling's Captains Courageous

Captains Courageous (1896-7), Rudyard Kipling’s short second novel, is a pure boys’ book.  It does not transcend its genre or undermine the conventions.  It is, or would have been if I had read it as a boy, Improving.  Too late now, I fear.

Harvey is a poshie, son of a self-made American millionaire (railroads, steamships), falls off a passenger ship into the Atlantic, where he is rescued by a fishing boat.  The fishing captain refuses to interrupt the catch, in part because he thinks Harvey is delusional about the whole “millionaire father” business, in part because that is not how things are done.  Harvey overcomes his petulance and joins the crew, where he does honest work, acquires practical skills (knots, for example), overcomes his class prejudices, and learns to appreciate useful work.

If I mock, I mock myself more than the book.  My respect for what Kipling was doing began to rise about a third of the way into the book as I began to suspect that there would be no big plot twist, no big surprises, and no implausible adventures.  Nothing Treasure Island-ish.  The only truly unlikely event is the first one, Harvey’s rescue.  Then Kipling writes seven detailed chapters about the ordinary life of cod fisherman off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland (there are two chapters of epilogue I will ignore for a bit).

Songs, jokes, work, fish, fog, sailing, rowing.  Readers who hate any talk of staysails and foc’sles will find Captains Courageous unreadable.  Some of the ordinary events are actually extraordinary – Harvey witnesses the sinking of two fishing vessels, for example, one sunk by a passenger liner, the other by incompetence – but they are all within the bounds of plausibility.  Kipling does not cheat much.  Harvey does not – what would be a good adventure novel climax? – save the ship during the hurricane by means of his pluck and new skill with knots.  He just becomes and remains one of the crew.

Here the crew is cleaning and salting the day’s catch:

Down below, the rasping sound of rough salt rubbed on rough flesh sounded like the whirring of a grindstone – a steady undertune to the "click-nick" of knives in the pen; the wrench and shloop of torn heads, dropped liver, and flying offal; the "caraaah" of Uncle Salters's knife scooping away backbones; and the flap of wet, opened bodies falling into the tub. (Ch. II)

So the other thing that caught my eye  – or ear, in this case – early on was the writing, Kipling’s vigorous style.

Let me find another one.  Near the end of the novel, Harvey’s ship joins a hundred others at a spot where the cod are so thick they leap out of the water:

The sea round them clouded and darkened, and then frizzed up in showers of tiny silver fish, and over a space of five or six acres the cod began to leap like trout in May; while behind the cod three or four broad grey-black backs broke the water into boils.  (Ch. VIII)

Then the fishermen in their boats try to grab the cod out of the air with nets, all while avoiding the whales (those grey-black backs) and each other.  What an adventure!

From every boat dories [the rowboats] were dropping away like bees from a crowded hive…  The schooners rocked and dipped at a safe distance, like mother ducks watching their brood, while the dories behaved like mannerless ducklings.  (Ch. VIII)

Now I am just wallowing in the metaphors, avoiding what the book is really about:  Death and Thomas Carlyle.  That’ll be fun for tomorrow, hmm?  Maybe I will say something about zhiv’s fine piece on Captains Courageous, too.  “[I]t would bore kids on its own” he says, correctly.  Plenty of adults, too.

Picking through Edwin Drood

The main reason I know that The Mystery of Edwin Drood is not a mystery novel is that it is a Charles Dickens novel, and Dickens novels are where Charles Dickens went to solve problems and rework ideas from earlier Dickens novels.  Some of the revisions are at the level of devices.  A new character, the mysterious Datchery, plops into Edwin Drood in what should be the middle of the book.  For a stranger, he has an unusual interest in the murder of Edwin Drood and the doings of the other characters.  He is likely not what he seems.  If he is another character in disguise, who is he?

The previous Dickens novel, Our Mutual Friend, features a character who is thought murdered.  He is, unknown to anyone, alive, and, as any of us would, takes the opportunity to wander around in disguise, doing all sorts of odd and dubious things.  Dickens does not really mean for the identity of the character to be a secret so he reveals it fairly early in the book – it is a long book, so “early” might mean after 200 pages, but still.

In the half of Edwin Drood that we have, the presumed murder is a drowning and no body is ever discovered which leaves the possibility that the supposedly murdered man has returned in disguise to solve his own murder, which would make a great mystery novel and probably has.  One great novel, six mediocre novels, and fifty bad ones, is my guess.  It is just that the use of the device for nothing more than suspense is so unlike Dickens.

I think the impetus of the novel is another continuation from Our Mutual Friend.  The love triangle in that novel includes a harmless schoolteacher who is driven into an insane, murderous rage by his jealousy.  Bradley Headstone at first seems like a purely comic character, but he warps as the novel moves along.  He becomes evil.  The love triangle does some strange things to the other fellow, too.  The woman is unfortunately the usual Dickensian nullity.  Himadri was writing about this topic earlier this year.

Jasper Drood begins close to where Headstone ends.  He is planning his crime – see  the amazing chapter 12, “A Night with Durdles.”  The murder occurs about a third of the way through the phantom finished novel.  The missing half of the novel would have been split between the investigation of the crime and the self-torments of the killer, his attempts to escape justice, his guilt and agony, his lunges at some sort of redemption.  I have just made Edwin Drood into a different kind of mystery novel, a noirish crime novel from the point of view of the desperate killer.  Except written in a Dickensian style, and interspersed with comic scenes and a romance in which an orphan marries a sailor.  Boy, the book would have been a mess.  Well, that’s Dickens’s specialty.

I was thinking about writing about how the feral, stone-throwing child Deputy is like a refugee from a László Krasznahorkai novel.  Would that have been a better post?  I’ll just give that one away.  The novel has an opening that rivals that of Bleak House except somehow on a smaller scale.  That also might have been better.  The novel is full of amazing things.  I would create another binary category – there are people who like their books complete and people who do not care – but I guess the distinction does not come up much.

The mystery in The Mystery of Edwin Drood - setting aside assumptions

The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) might make a good test case for what misleading assumptions can do to a novel.  Charles Dickens’s final novel looks like a mystery, acts like a mystery, and is titled Mystery, but it is in fact probably not a mystery novel, except that it is.  Because the novel is unfinished – we have half of it – there is no way to decisively prove that it is or is not a mystery (which it is (not)).

I can decipher my own gibberish.  Edwin Drood is now a mystery novel, without a doubt.  It is the third entry in H. R. F. Keating’s Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books, for example, preceded (the list is chronological) by Poe and The Moonstone.  If people who read and write mysteries call it a mystery novel, it is.  Genres and canons form retrospectively.  And the novel has a murder, suspects, clues, a detective – or it probably has these things.  Later writers of mysteries learned from it, imitated it, and turned it into a mystery novel.

I have no idea when people started calling detective novels and crime fiction “mysteries,” when there was a genre known as “mysteries.”  In England in the 1920s it can seem like every third novel published has the word “mystery” in the title, but before then?  Sherlock Holmes always has “adventures.”  Perhaps a passerby will know the answer to this question.

But there was no mystery genre in 1870, even though Dickens was helping create it.  If I read the novel as a generic mystery I begin creating problems for myself.  The mystery has a straightforward solution (mad choirmaster and opium addict John Jasper murders his nephew Edwin but in such a way as to throw suspicion on another) but the conventions of the mystery novel, of our mystery novel, almost demand that the plain answer is not the actual answer, and that all of the fairly blatant clues are red herrings or tricks.

The result has been a series of continuations and ingenious theorizing which is all, admittedly, a lot of fun.  Angus Wilson wrote the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition I read, and he describes a favorite example, Felix Aylmer’s The Drood Case (1964), in which Jasper is defended  with “a complicated, closely argued, but to me inherently improbable solution based upon the old Islamic family feud code” (13).  I love this sort of thing – I wish this were the solution!

But then I remind myself that 1) Edwin Drood is almost certainly not a puzzle mystery, and that 2) it was written by Charles Dickens, a writer whose methods and purposes are well understood and who was not going to make too wild of a leap in novel #15, although he sure as heck does not stand still.  In particular, Edwin Drood  contains all sorts of fascinating expansions and revisions of the some of the major themes of Dickens’s previous novel, Our Mutual Friend.  It would be a shame to toss all of that aside for a puzzle mystery.

Not that I know I am right.  Perhaps more novels should remain unfinished.  No, I suppose I believe that the author is better at finishing his own story than I am, even when the author is a notch or ten less inventive than Charles Dickens.

In which I divide books into binary categories

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here.  I’m mad.  You’re mad.”

This is of course from the “Pig and Pepper” chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the high point of – of – let’s say – English literature – too weak, too weak – so – Western civilization.

Alice has a point, doesn’t she?  Many fine readers agree with her, and try to minimize their time among the lunatics.  We could come up with a long list of outstanding works of literature for those readers to avoid.  Other readers sympathize more with the Cheshire Cat and find more truth in the fiction of Franz Kafka or the poetry of William Blake.  Or perhaps just a rarer truth.

Sane and insane, sense and nonsense.  I fear these are the categories of someone with a strong taste for nonsense.  What are some alternatives?

“Explain all that,” said the Mock Turtle.

“No, no!  The adventures first,” said the Gryphon in an impatient tone: “explanations take such a dreadful time.”  (Ch. X, “The Lobster Quadrille”)

The Gryphon is the ideal reader for Stevenson and Conrad, while the Mock Turtle is likely a fan of Trollope and Eliot.  The adventure novel versus the domestic novel, both terms broadly defined.  The gender difference I noticed yesterday may now be explained a bit.  Is anyone surprised that more of the great women writers of the time wrote about settings (public or private) and problems involving women?  Some of the great writers I have dropped into the adventure category were able to ingeniously contrive novels with no women characters at all.

A related category might be fluid versus static, novels with more scenes of movement versus those with more conversation or thought.  Trollope’s most common strategy is to write scenes with varying combinations of characters.  They are rarely required to do much, and the story advances through their conversation and reflection.  Victor Hugo’s novels are always in motion.  The precise details of space and position are essential – where is Jean Valjean in relation to the pickpocket?  Pride and Prejudice is static, Mansfield Park is fluid, relative to each other.  Both are domestic novels.

The grand old split is between the picturesque and the sublime.  My thoughts on the sublime can be found in the usual place, in a piece on Little House on the Prairie.  Novels in the nonsense category like the Alice books try to reach the sublime by means of the ridiculous, which tames the sense of fear inherent in the sublime.  Sensible books like Adam Bede or Dubliners move gradually towards surprising and sublime moments; crazy novels like Salammbô or The Toilers of the Sea sometimes attempt to maintain a sense of the sublime over the course of an entire book, which is impossible but thrilling to try.

What do I have, four binary categories?  Now I can construct a four-dimensional grid and map every book onto it, like Kellogg’s does with the sweetness and crunchiness and mouthfeel of breakfast cereals.  Readers can then match themselves to books in their quadrant.  A fair amount of book blogging is not much more than this, honestly.  I do it a lot, although unconsciously or automatically, not like here – I hope not like here – although in another sense my case is not so useful, since I like everything, although I do lean sublime-wards.

Anyway, none of this has anything to do with why or how or whether a book is any good.

I hope there will be nonsense in it - two Victorian literatures

Three sisters beg a tale from a math professor:

In gentler tones Secunda hopes
    “There will be nonsense in it.”

Secunda is also named Alice; these lines are from “All in the Golden Afternoon,” a poem recounting the origin of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Alice is an eminently Victorian novel, yes?  If I compare it to Rohan Maitzen’s advice on How To Read a Victorian Novel, I find myself in a suitably Carrollian mirror world.  Do I need tissues, a social conscience, time, or a set of non-modern assumptions?  No, no, no, and no.  Not really.  Modernist assumptions turn out to be particularly useful.  The Mad Reader who believes that Alice is the Greatest Novel of the 19th Century (I am speaking of myself in a certain mood) needs a different How To, one based on a different but still coherent set of aesthetic principles.

“Although British literature as a whole has to rank as one of the most overrated examples of a national literature anywhere,” declared Richard at Caravanas de Recuerdos, he found that he enjoyed The Woman in White well enough, as did Jorge Luis Borges.  St. Orberose recently discussed Borges’s assembly of a pair of series of books, his “Personal Library” and a “Library of Babel,” both of which contain plenty of Victorians – Kipling, Conrad, Wells, Shaw, Wilde, Collins, the Scientific Romances of Charles Howard Hinton, and perhaps most importantly the Robert Louis Stevenson who argued in “A Gossip on Romance” that “[f]iction is to the grown man what play is to the child.”

Borges put an especially high value on ingenuity and pure invention.  Is it new, is it delightful, is it at least a little bit askew?  Like Abbott’s Flatland and Stoker’s Dracula, or the visionary Lilith of George MacDonald, and the savage The House with the Green Shutters of George Douglas Brown.

Versus other questions:  Is it true, is it meaningful?  If I put more weight on the “creat[ion] of the possibility of sympathy” as Rohan Maitzen does, I will spend my time with authors who are more likely to satisfy the latter questions, likely including the exemplary Victorian novelists Rohan mentions in her How To: Eliot, Thackeray, Dickens, Gaskell, E. Brontë, Trollope, and Collins (Oliphant and Bulwer-Lytton receive rhetorical nods).  Collins overlaps the lists, greasy Dickens straddles the camps, Gaskell wrote ghost stories – the differences are far from absolute.  Wuthering Heights is, for example, completely bonkers through most of the novel.  I love it when Trollope surprises me, when his characters leap onto the tables, but Trollope’s books, like Gaskell’s and Eliot’s, are nothing if not sane.

The French literary tradition, for whatever reason, has been particularly welcoming to Crazy Lit, to writers like Baudelaire and Nerval, and even to Evil Lit like Sade and Lautréamont (19th century English literature has no equivalent of the latter set, not that I know of).  I have mentioned several times that I am fascinated by the way that Borges’s home tradition, the Argentinean Literature of Doom, often seems to consist of nothing but the violent or fantastic or bizarre.  Wuthering Heights and Heart of Darkness would fit right in.  Middlemarch and Cranford would be the freaks.

As for myself, I think the 19th century English novel is one of the glories of human civilization.  Plenty of individual novelists from other literatures are as great or greater (well, maybe not greater than Dickens), but no other literature of the time has the immense scope.  Dracula plus North and South plus Through the Looking Glass plus The Mill on the Floss plus Treasure Island.  Sense and nonsense, both of the highest quality.  I put a high value on both.

Addenda:

For what it is worth, I give the 19th century poetry prize to France.

You may have noted that Rohan’s “sense” list includes many women novelists, while the “nonsense” list includes none.  Yes indeedy.  This may be meaningful in some way.

What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations? - or, a note on how to read a Victorian novel

This is gonna be a rambler.

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?' (opening line of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)

Alice will grow up, I predict, to be a great reader of Victorian novels, which generally had plenty of both.  What a shame that novels have lost their illustrations.  I am with the Victorians on that one.

Rohan Maitzen has written an amusing guide on How to Read a Victorian Novel.  It has pictures and conversation and is useful, so Alice will be happy.  Most of Rohan's how-to secretly applies to all literature, non-Victorian and less novel, but not all of it (e.g., “they will be aiming at reforming you as much as (or more than) they aim at reforming society,” an idea that is not uniquely Victorian but is disproportionately represented).

I want to extend one of Rohan’s precepts:  “it will help to put aside modern(ist) assumptions about what novels should and shouldn’t do.”  She is right, it will help, sometimes enormously.  I have made runs at a number of literary traditions and periods, Classical and modern, European and otherwise.  Early on, every time, everything was a mystery.  I grasped what I could.  As I read more, though, obscurities lightened and mysteries evaporated.  Sometimes a repeated reference finally fit into its contextual slot, and other times the issue is one of vocabulary, when an archaic usage suddenly becomes clear, like the 17th and 18th century use of the word “aversion”:

LYDIA  Madam, I must tell you plainly, that had I no preferment for any one else, the choice [of suitor] you have made would be my aversion.  (Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Rivals, 1775).

We should bring this usage back.  This play is on my mind since, oddly, it is appears in detail in the Willkie Collins novel I am reading.  Back to my point.

The point is that the answer to any problem is: read more.  The answer is not: throw the book aside as hopeless.  Renaissance Italian epics, Elizabethan plays, and Siglo de Oro poetry were constructed on aesthetic principles that are not the same as those of the contemporary novel, of any contemporary novel, but they have their own logic and illogic that can be deduced and inferred by the basic act of reading, and re-reading, and reading more.  Reading all of Shakespeare is a great idea; reading Shakespeare along with much of Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and John Webster (and Philip Sidney and John Donne and so on) is a better idea.  The Shakespeare is better, and in some sense easier, after reading the Webster and Donne, and vice versa.

Victorian novels are an 800 page breeze compared to that stuff, but the idea is the same.  I cannot emphasize how much reading Walter Scott and Lord Byron has affected my understanding of later Victorian novels, or the extent that Thomas Carlyle turns up in Dickens and Gaskell, or how Thackeray’s voice in Vanity Fair is absorbed by Charlotte Brontë and Anthony Trollope.

Well, I know I have not reached any surprising conclusion here – anyone who wanders by Wuthering Expectations understands the idea.  Yet every example I mention was a surprise to me not so long ago.  I could redo the argument with German or French or Russian fiction (Scott and Byron help with all of them).  And I am just reading as an amateur – the professional specialists find even more, at the admittedly high cost of diminishing returns and increasing tedium.  Fortunately for me they write down the best discoveries and share them.  Put aside your assumptions, like Rohan suggests.  Learn to use new assumptions.

Also, though, do not set aside your assumptions while reading a Victorian novel!  I should save that idea for tomorrow.

Not without a touch of poetry - sublime, savage Trollope

I do not always think of Anthony Trollope as a novelist of especially strong technical skill or imaginative power, but every novel of his I know contains a scene or two that shows otherwise.  If someone else would read Orley Farm and work through the big fox-hunting scene, chapters XXVII through XXIX, I would appreciate it - there you will find the skill.  I want to instead look at the “newly invented metallic tables and chairs lately brought out by the Patent Steel Furniture Company”:

“There's three tables, eight chairs, easy rocking-chair, music-stand, stool to match, and pair of stand-up screens, all gilt in real Louey catorse; and it goes in three boxes 4-2 by 2-1 and 2-3.  Think of that, sir.”

The salesman Mr. Kantwise is working the magic of his own craft on the lawyer Mr. Dockwrath.  We are  at this point only in the sixth chapter of eighty.  The lawyer is an enemy of Lady Mason, so I know he will be important.  But what am I supposed to do with this group of traveling salesmen he has encountered, Mr. Kantwise and his collapsible tables, the obese Mr. Moulder (“What did the firm care whether or no he killed himself by eating and drinking?  He sold his goods, collected his money, and made his remittances”)?  Will I need them later?  Trollope is more efficient than he first seems, so the answer is yes; the commercial travelers are eventually pulled into the plot, but just at its fringe.

Comic is not quite the right word.  Sublime relief.  Mr. Kantwise has assembled his wares and given us a paragraph to admire them:

The top of the table was blue, with a red bird of paradise in the middle; and the edges of the table, to the breadth of a couple of inches, were yellow. The pillar also was yellow, as were the three legs. "It's the real Louey catorse," said Mr. Kantwise…

And then he does something amazing:

And then Mr. Kantwise, taking two of the pieces of whitey-brown paper which had been laid aside, carefully spread one on the centre of the round table, and the other on the seat of one of the chairs. Then lightly poising himself on his toe, he stepped on to the chair, and from thence on to the table. In that position he skillfully brought his feet together, so that his weight was directly on the leg, and gracefully waved his hands over his head. James and Boots stood by admiring, with open mouths…

I am with Boots – what a performance.  “Gracefully” is a well-employed word.  Kantwise perched on the bird of paradise, flapping his wings, has become for me the emblematic image not of the Orley Farm Trollope actually wrote, but of the Evelyn Waugh-like novel hidden within it, a novel of high merit.  This set of furniture, for example, is put to almost savage use as it becomes (see Ch. XXIII) the worst Christmas gift in all of England.

Speaking of Christmas, I will join the grotesque Moulder and his wife for theirs.  Mr. Kantwise is a guest, but he stays off the table, which is already full.  Mr. Moulder is carving:

When he had done all this, and his own plate was laden, he gave a long sigh.  "I shall never cut up such another bird as that, the longest day that I have to live," he said; and then he took out his large red silk handkerchief and wiped the perspiration from his brow.

"Deary me, M.; don't think of that now," said the wife...

"And how does it taste?" asked Moulder, shaking the gloomy thoughts from his mind.

"Uncommon," said Snengkeld, with his mouth quite full. "I never eat such a turkey in all my life."

"Like melted diamonds," said Mrs. Moulder, who was not without a touch of poetry. (Ch. XXIV)

I of course omitted many other interesting bits about the turkey in order to have room for that one unimprovable line, by itself worth reading 825 pages of Trollope, pages worse than those found in Orley Farm.

As I have told her story that sympathy has grown upon myself till I have learned to forgive her - Trollope manipulates my sympathies

Lady Mason may or may not have altered her husband’s will, but the dispute was resolved in her favor twenty years earlier in “the Great Orley Farm Case” (Ch. I). Her stepson, nursing his wrong, receives new information that causes him to try the court system again, this time accusing his stepmother of forgery.  That is more or less the big story at the core of Orley Farm. 

Lady Mason has an adult son, and some sympathetic neighbors, and then there are all of the lawyers, so that almost but not quite gives us a cast that can fill 825 pages.  The son plus two of the attorneys and also one of the neighbors are young men of marriageable age, but by the middle of the book we only have two eligible young women, which gives us a romantic plot and the certainty that not every character will be happy in the end.

Two examples of the basic character arc of the novel:  Mr. Furnival defended Lady Mason’s position in the first trial and won the case.  Although now “his hair was grizzled and his nose was blue” (Ch. X) he is irresistibly attracted to the still-handsome Lady Mason, more, it seems, than to the “stout, solid” Mrs. Furnival.  So of course Furnival will assist Lady Mason when her legal troubles revive, and of course he thinks her innocent.  As time passes, though, he begins to have doubts – what if Lady Mason is, in fact, guilty? –  and his story changes.

Or:  A gentleman – Sir Peregrine Orme, an elderly baronet, a neighbor  – is obligated, given Lady Mason’s fine character and social status (and innocence), to be publicly supportive against her vulgar enemies.  But what if he begins to have doubts, too?  And what if he has doubts only after he has fallen in love with her?  Sir Peregrine’s story is about as moving as anything I have read in Trollope, but it is only one  variation on the theme.

All of this re-positioning happens gradually.  Much of the repetition in Orley Farm comes from characters thinking and re-thinking, changing their ideas by inches.  The pace and psychology is admirably realistic.  Realism can at times be awfully dull.  As can blog posts about Trollope novels.

Trollope’s point, stated plainly in Chapter LXXIX, all the way at the end:

I may, perhaps be thought to owe an apology to my readers in that I have asked their sympathy for a woman who had so sinned as to have placed her beyond the general sympathy of the world at large.  If so, I tender my apology, and perhaps feel that I should confess a fault.  But as I have told her story that sympathy has grown upon myself till I have learned to forgive her, and to feel that I too could have regarded her as a friend.  Of her future life I will not venture to say anything.  But no lesson is truer than that which teaches us to believe that God does temper the wind to the shorn lamb.

And then that of course goes on for a while, but what is interesting to me is how sympathy for Lady Mason grows in Trollope, how it moves from being taken for granted, from being shallow, to being earned and meaningful.  The multiple positions and points of view, each narrow and partial, allows the reader, me, to change in ways that the characters cannot since I can see the narrowness and know everyone’s argument.  The big clumsy omniscient narrator is powerful, and perhaps not actually all that clumsy.

Agriculturists will gain nothing from my present performance - disappointed by Trollope's Orley Farm

France, check; Spanish, check.  Back to England for a while.

Some time ago I promised Rohan Maitzen a three-part series on manuring techniques in Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm (1861-2) but that was just a joke – you can’t hold me to that!  And anyway, here is how Trollope begins the novel, with an assurance to the suspicious reader:

I say so much at commencing in order that I may have an opportunity of explaining that this book of mine will not be devoted in any special way to rural delights.  The name might lead to the idea that new precepts were to be given, in the pleasant guise of a novel, as to cream-cheeses, pigs with small bones, wheat sown in drills, or artificial manure.  No such aspirations are mine.  I make no attempts in that line, and declare at once that agriculturists will gain nothing from my present performance.  (Ch. I)

So an opportunity has been missed here, but by Trollope, not by me.  If anyone knows of a good Victorian novel about cream-cheeses and small-boned pigs, please let me know.  As it is, Orley Farm may well hold the Victorian novel record for the use of the word “guano” (fifteen occurrences).*  No mention of mummified cats as fertilizer at all.  Oh well.

Instead, Orley Farm is a legal – I was about to say thriller.  Ha ha ha ha!  No, that is the wrong word.  Orley Farm climaxes in a trial, and Trollope creates a reasonable amount of tension about the result, although it was clear enough that one verdict was ethically more interesting than another, and Orley Farm, like every Trollope novel I know, is fundamentally an exploration of an ethical problem.  Or several, really, all spun out from the one that kicks it off, a dispute over an inherited property.

When the novel is not about property it is about love and marriage.  Somewhere, long ago, I read an anecdote in which Trollope, descending to breakfast, declares that he has just written his fiftieth proposal scene.  Perhaps I should replace “fiftieth” with “Xth,” where X is some absurdly high number.  Not as absurd as I thought, though, since Orley Farm alone contains six (6) marriage proposals!  One is purely comic; one is necessary to the plot and meaning of the novel.  One pair of proposals, both to the young romantic heroine, I am apparently supposed to care about (I do not, not much); the final pair, again to one woman, serve as ironic counterweights.  Orley Farm is a standard 20 part Victorian serial, 835 pages in the Oxford edition I read, which meant I got a marriage proposal every 140 pages or so, which was plenty for me.

Orley Farm is comparable in quality to the six Barchester novels.  To be clear about the post's title, I am disappointed that it contains so little about the latest mid-19th century advances in scientific manuring (it admittedly has more on the subject than any novel I have ever read).  The book's length likely encourages Trollope’s slackness and sometimes maddening repetition, but also gives him room for a big yet intricate story.  In some sense I wish the novel had been 200 pages shorter, but the least essential pages of the novel were exactly my favorites and I am glad Trollope had room for them.  But they belong in another post.

* No, wrong - The Prime Minister has seventeen! See comments.

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.