Medea by Euripides - No other soul can hold so many thoughts of blood

With Euripides’s Medea (431 BCE) we’ve reached the point that inspired me to read the Greek plays in some kind of chronological order.  From Medea on for more than twenty-five years, there is a surviving play, sometimes two or three, in almost every year, a mix of Euripides, Aristophanes, and Sophocles.  And meanwhile, the Peloponnesian War begins, just a few months after the performance of Medea, ending in 404 BCE with the conquest and destruction of democratic Athens.  I have, perhaps incorrectly, placed the final surviving tragedy, Oedipus in Colonus in that year, rounding off not the great tradition of Greek tragedy just as the culture that supported it is violently transformed into something else.

Euripides and Aristophanes, in the plays we have, directly respond to the events of the war in their plays.  They perhaps invent the protest play.  Sophocles may well have been above it all.  The reader interested in putting the plays alongside the History of Thucydides will find many interesting things.  I am not so interested in that right now, but rather the literary interactions among the playwrights, the way they respond to each other.  But of course the entire tradition was always deeply intertextual, telling the old stories again and again.

As with Medea.  I wondered, as I read it, what a reader unfamiliar with the story might be thinking.  The audience knew it in detail, so from the first lines, as soon as we learn where we are in Medea’s story (meaning, this is not about the Golden Fleece, and not about the gruesome trick murder of King Pelias) we anticipate a series of horrible deaths, even if, give the variety of stories, we are not sure exactly how everyone will die.  Was the audience prepared for the detailed gore of the Messenger’s description of the death of Jason’s bride, eaten away by Medea’s poisoned dress?  Or was the gore an innovation?

The prizes were likely awarded as much on the costumes, music, and dancing as for the plays themselves, and we know nothing of the competition, or of the other three Euripides plays presented with Medea, but still, Euripides came in last place that year. It was later writers – Ovid, Seneca – who identified Medea as one of the best plays.

Let’s see.  What do I think about this one.  Medea is an archetype of the Strong Female Character, getting stronger as the plays progresses, transcending humanity by the end, if she were ever such a thing:

Let no one think me a weak one, feeble-spirited,

A stay-at-home, but rather just the opposite,

One who can hurt my enemies and help my friends;

For the lives of such persons are most remembered. (p. 86, tr. Warner)

Medea cannot give up the murder of her own children because it might make her look weak.  To whom, I wonder, but as is often the case in Euripides the psychology is pretty individual.  The gods and fate are distant.  Himadri, the Argumentative Old Git, has been writing about the curious split structure of so many of the plays, but Medea is pure – one single rising, or falling, action, from Medea’s feminist manifesto in her first speech (”We women are the most unfortunate creatures,” 67 - the bit in the title is also from this speech) to, mounted on her dragon chariot, her triumphant humiliation of her no-good ex-husband at the end.

The clueless chorus is amusing.  The open flattery of Athens is odd, except see above.  As the Peloponnesian War progresses, the flattery will dry up.

Quotations have been from the Rex Warner version.  I also read Jean Anouilh’s 1946 Médée, an adaptation, not a translation, and I found it thin, humanizing Medea a little too much, making her into a “crazy ex-girlfriend” without any mythic weight.  Not as interesting as his Antigone or Eurydice.  The French was easy, at least, a sign of progress.

I put a 1606 Italian print, an illustration from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, atop the post.  It is at the Met.

Next week’s play is The Heracleidae or The Children of Heracles, dated to 429 BCE entirely because of a link to a contemporary event.  So who knows, really.  It is, in a number of ways, a strange play.  I believe we are all used to that by now.

Dorothy Richardson's Honeycomb, and also her manifesto - where no plant grows and no mystery pours in from the unheeded stars

I’ve been cooking along with Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage novels, along with a few people on Twitter.  This month was the third book, Honeycomb (1917), in which our heroine Miriam, having made two attempts at teaching, becomes a governess, which also does not work out despite being a posh gig and the children not being so bad.  It’s the adults in the house who are unbearable, at least for a smart, restless, somewhat acid nineteen-year-old who really ought, at this point, to be a studying art history and English literature at a liberal arts college.  But that’s not an option in 1895.

The style of the novel is much like that of the earlier two novels, highly interior and Flaubert-like until it takes a curious turn at the two-thirds mark, only a hundred pages, since this is a short novel, when the family and children and philistine parents, all of the new characters in the novel, are abandoned, likely never to return.  Miriam goes to a family wedding for one long chapter, and spends the next and last caring for her deeply depressed mother.  After the radical break in the story, the narration itself becomes radically fragmented.  The withholding of information that I take as Richardson’s great innovation becomes more severe.   A shocking, life-changing event, for example, occurs in the white space just before the last paragraph in the novel.  I am not sure I would have caught it if I did not have some knowledge of what happens next in the series, and of Richardson’s biography.

What I am saying is that as much as I enjoy Richardson’s writing at the sentence level, I am no longer wondering why she is not read so much.  Most readers hate this sort of thing.  I like it all right.

The 1938 edition that collected Pilgrimage into four volumes begins with a remarkable four page – what is it – a defense, let’s say.  It is a remarkable text.  I have to keep in mind that it was written twenty years after the last novel that I have read, and that I have no idea what stylistic changes occur in that period as Richardson moves her Miriam up to the point where she (meaning, I guess, they) publish the first volume of their flowing novel.

Something must change in the style.  This is the first sentence, and paragraph, of the Foreword - the novels I have read so far are not written like this:

Although the translation of the impulse behind his youthful plan for a tremendous essay on Les Forces humaines makes for the population of his great cluster of novels with types rather than individuals, the power of a sympathetic imagination, uniting him with each character in turn, gives to every portrait the quality of a faithful self-portrait, and his treatment of backgrounds, contemplated with an equally passionate interest and themselves, indeed, individual and unique, would alone qualify Balzac to be called the father of realism.  (p. 9)

Ah, Balzac, she’s talking about Balzac.  And realism.  “Realism.”

Richardson pulls in Arnold Bennett as the “first English follower” of Balzac.  “Since all these novelists happened to be men” (9) Richardson deliberately searches for a feminine realism, which she believes she finds after much struggle.  The great conflict, as I understand her cryptic lines, is that if the goal is to allow “contemplated reality” to “hav[e] for the first time in her experience its own say,” then the subject of the fiction is completely arbitrary.  So Richardson writes about her own life by default.  It is a bit – a lot – like Gustave Flaubert’s friends arguing that given his aesthetic goals he should reign in his excesses by picking a boring local Normandy subject, like Balzac would pick.

Next Richardson invokes Proust, implicitly defending herself from charges of imitation, since she was writing her roman fleuve long before Du côté de chez Swann (1913) was published.   Fair enough, but was she aware of the Jean-Christophe books (1904-12, in English 1911-3) by Romain Rolland (Nobel Prize, 1915)?  And what is this: “the France of Balzac now appeared to have produced the earliest adventurer” (11) – in Proust!  Flaubert, a blatant influence on Richardson, is mentioned nowhere.  An example of the anxiety of influence.

Henry James suddenly appears.  Is this sentence (and again, paragraph) a parody?

And while, indeed, it is possible to claim for Henry James, keeping the reader incessantly watching the conflict of human forces through the eye of a single observer, rather than taking him, before the drama begins, upon a tour of the properties, or breaking in with descriptive introductions of the players as one by one they enter his enclosed resounding chamber where no plant grows and no mystery pours in from the unheeded stars, a far from inconsiderable technical influence, it was nevertheless not without a sense of relief that the present writer recently discovered, in ‘Wilhelm Meister,’ the following manifesto: [Goethe omitted].  (11)

The next page states that “feminine prose… should properly be unpunctuated” (12)  I love this Foreword.  It is filled with evasions, puzzles, and traps.

Richard Eberhart, American visionary poet of death - Praise to the cry that I cannot understand

I’ve been enjoying the poetry of Richard Eberhart recently.  “Once considered one of the most prominent American poets of the 20th century…” says his bio at the Poetry Foundation, the eventual, likely not so distant fate of almost all of the prominent American poets.  He was a great poet of death; his two famous anthology pieces, “The Groundhog” (1934) and “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment” (1945) are death poems, the latter large-scale moving to the personal, the former small but moving towards the cosmic:

I stood there in the whirling summer,

My hand capped a withered heart,

And thought of China and of Greece,

Of Alexander in his tent;

Of Montaigne in his tower,

Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.

I suppose people with an interest in American poetry still know these two.

And bones bleaching in the sunlight

Beautiful as architecture…

They are memorable poems.

I read, in this pass, Eberhart’s second, and third books – the first was mostly renounced – Reading the Spirit (1937, home of “The Groundhog”) and Burr Oaks (1947, home of “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment”), as well as a pair of tiny but career-spanning collections, New and Selected Poems: 1930-1990 (1990) and Maine Poems (1989).  Jay Parini, selecting the Selected, says Eberhart “printed too many poems that stand up badly to his best work,” and it is clear enough from those earlier books that Eberhart would often write multiple poems with similar conceits and rather than picking the best one just include them all.  These little, late books do not suffer from that problem.

Eberhart is essentially a nature poet, a Blakean visionary unafraid to begin from a naïve premise, as in “Gnat on My Paper,” about what the title says:

Small creature, gnat on my paper,

Too slight to be given a thought,

 

I salute you as the evanescent,

I play with you in my depth.

Small to big, big to small.  Eberhart looks into a nest, into the eye of a juvenile sea-hawk:

To make the mind exult

At the eye of a sea-hawk,

A blaze of grandeur, permanence of the impersonal.  (from “Sea-Hawk”)

Maybe that is why he is “once prominent.”  For a while, the general mood of poetry readers has leaned more towards the personal.  Let’s look at another bird, a loon – a lot of birds in these poems:

Perfect cry, ununderstandable essence

Of sound from aeons ago, a shriek,

Strange, palpable, ebullient, wavering,

A cry that I cannot understand.

Praise to the cry that I cannot understand.  (from “A Loon Call”)

There are plenty of people, too.  Leafing through The Maine Poems I see clam diggers, sailors, fishermen, farmers, a fence-builder – “Bad neighbors make good fencers” (from “Spite Fence”).  Oh no, here are the people who bury Leo, a beloved Pekingese, in two poems, the tragic “Summer Incident” and the pathetic “Dog Days,” another variation, one of many on “The Groundhog”:

They laid him in, blanket and all, placed a crude wooden marker,

Silence, not a dry eye among the group of homo sapiens.

They were witnesses to starkness, the cruelty of nature,

Aware of their own deaths, come as they may.  (from “Summer Incident”)

For all of his innocent, open-eyed, visionary feeling, Eberhart does have a sense of humor.  One of his poems should be the Maine state anthem:

But when you return to ancient New England

The first question asked on Main Street,

With breathless expectations, is,

Are you going to Maine?

 

Are you going to Maine, oh,

Are you going to Maine?

And I say, yes, we are going to Maine,

And they say, When?  (from “Going to Maine”)

I’m not sure when this poem was written, but it is till accurate.  Somebody set it to music.  The Mountain Goats song of that title is not the same song, although it shares a sensibility.

Alcestis by Euripides - that’s why we all gotta think human thoughts

Alcestis (438 BCE), this is more like it, this is an introduction to Euripides.

HERAKLES:  I mean, we all gotta die.  Right?

Well, that’s why we all gotta think human thoughts,

and live while we can.

Eat, drink, and be merry.

Take it from me,

the way those gloomy, bellyachin’ tragedians gripe,

life isn’t life at all, it’s just a goddam

funeral.  (tr. William Arrowsmith, pp. 74-5)

That’s from an extremely drunk Herakles, to be specific, with a number of Euripidean ideas crammed into one passage.

I have been puzzled by the satyr plays, the hundreds of lost satyr plays.  The strange fact is that every set of profound, moving, powerful tragedies was immediately followed by something quite different, perhaps thematically linked to the earlier plays, perhaps not, but typically, I am told, featuring a chorus of drunken, dancing, singing satyrs.  Perhaps it was meant as a palate cleanser, or a return to the Dionysian part of the Dionysian Festival, or a reminder, as Herakles say, not to take everything so seriously. 

Imagine the Oresteia followed by dancing drunk satyrs.  Imagine Aeschylus, pious Sophocles, each writing fifty or sixty of these things, a new one every year.  With the competitors, three new satyr plays every year.  Scholars disagree completely over whether the Cyclops of Euripides, the only real satyr play that by chance survived, is early or late in his career.  I put it late in our schedule, but I was tempted to put it early just to take a look at it, to remind myself that every tragedy we read was accompanied by something similar.

Unless they were not, because Alcestis was performed in the spot of the satyr play, and aside from Herakles getting drunk in place of the satyr chorus it is clearly some other kind of thing.  William Arrowsmith, in his 1974 translation, points to The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest as kindred plays.  Alcestis is a fairy tale play, a tragicomedy, dependent for its effect on radical changes in tone and rhetorical mode, the mix of high and low as we say with Jacobean tragicomedy.  By the end the effect is sublime, I find.

Young Alcestis has agreed to die in place of her callow husband Admetos – fairy tale stuff, Greek-myth version.  Admetos, scene by scene, humanizes, grows even, until by the end he is perhaps worthy, or at least ordinarily unworthy, of the gift of his wife.  Drunk Herakles, engaged in a hospitality competition, replaces the fairy godmother or talking bird as the demi-deus ex machina who retrieves Alcestis from Death.  There they are up above, in a late 18th / early 19th century print by John Flaxman owned by the British Museum.

Some scenes are melodramatic, full of pathos, like the maid reporting on the perfect behavior of dying Alcestis.  Some are comic, as with Herakles quoted above, or sharply ironic (Apollo arguing with Death).  Alcestis has a visionary moment:

He is pulling, pulling – don’t you see? – pulling me away

To the place where the dead gather.

I see his blue eyebrows, black wings beating – Death!

Let me go, Admetos, what are you doing?  Let go.

The dark road opens before me.  (tr. Anne Carson, 264, from Grief Lessons)

Then she snaps out of it, in a radical shift of tone, and gives clear instructions to her husband about her children and remarriage.

These shifts in register and mood do, much like in Shakespeare, remarkable things.

We do not have any other Euripides plays like Alcestis, but some will get close.  We have several more young people offered as human sacrifices but miraculously rescued (or not).  We have two more plays featuring Herakles. 

There will be some gloomy bellyaching, too, although I do not think that describes the extraordinary horrors of our next play, Medea (431 BCE).  Don’t miss this one.

Rhesus by Euripides - You must not go beyond what has been destined for you.

Well, that was not so bad, Rhesus, I mean. Curiously, it is the only surviving Greek play taken directly from the Iliad, and it feels a bit like an episode from a serial adaptation of Homer.  Like a television series.  It is efficient; it cooks along; it features a number of star characters, some in tiny roles.  It is also plainly written, lacking much imagery, original or otherwise, and as far as I am concerned lacking interesting lines.  It was probably entertaining enough to watch.  The stubborn Hector and blustery Rhesus are amusing to watch.  The Rhesus part is another tiny one, given that his name on the marquee.

The ethos of the play is summarized once Athene appears, accompanying her favorite heroes Odysseus and Diomedes in a midnight murder rampage.  Their enemy Hector can be caught unaware, too:

DIOMEDES:  Well, should he not be killed and his account settled?

ATHENE:  No.  You must not go beyond what has been destined for you.

There is no authority for you to kill this man.  (33)

Fate is taken to its logical end: that is not how the story goes.

I also enjoyed the way Athene openly lies to Paris when she bumps into him.  The gods simply cheat.  What can you do?

ATHENE:  Fear not.  Here is your faithful Aphrodite

watching over you.  (33)

And then Paris directly, accidentally, insults Athene as ironically as possible:

PARIS:  I think the best thing I ever did

in my life was to judge you first and win you to my city.  (34)

These quotations have all been from the Richmond Lattimore translation.  Up to this point, I have been reading two versions of each play, which has been rewarding, but with Rhesus I did not bother.

The authorship of Rhesus has been questioned since antiquity, mostly on the grounds that it is not especially good, as if the genius Euripides could not have written such a thing, which seems preposterous to me, although I do like the theory that the Rhesus we have is the mistaken substitution of 4th (BCE) century hackwork – by that television writer – for a lost Euripides play of the same title.

Still, there is a puzzle here.  Centuries later, Greek copyists of the 3rd (CE) century radically contracted the body of extant Greek plays, to the seven each by Aeschylus and Sophocles that we have, and ten by Euripides.  Perhaps the survivors were saved by being included in anthologies for students.  By pure chance, a Byzantine manuscript containing nine more Euripides plays survived long enough to be copied twice, the treasures going to the Laurentian in Florence and the Palatina in the Vatican.  The manuscript looks suspiciously like a section of the complete plays of Euripides in alphabetical order: Elektra, Helen, Herakleidae. Herakles, Hiketides / The Suppliant Women, Ion, Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphigenia in Tauris, Kyklōps / Cyclops (my Greek transcription is likely a hash).  This is why so many Euripides plays begin with “H” and “I,” alphabetical luck.

The alphabetical plays are comparable in quality to the anthologized batch, so as long as I have known about this distinction, I have wondered about the process that saved not just the ten Euripides plays but all of our Aeschylus and Sophocles.  What I mean is, they – whoever “they” were, however it all worked – deliberately saved Oedipus Rex and Agamemnon and Bacchae, which seems obvious, but also Rhesus.  Why?  What did they want with it?  What did they do with it?

The Getty has a 6th century amphora depicting the episode.  Up above I showed Diomedes killing Rhesus, but the amphora is worth seeing more for its extraordinary horses.

Our next four plays are by Euripides.  I remember three of them as masterpieces, including the next one, the peculiar Alcestis (438).  It is not a tragedy, not a comedy, not a satyr play.  What is it?  William Arrowsmith has a great version, and I will try Anne Carson’s translation, in Grief Lessons, as well.

Antigone by Sophocles - I know / that wild and futile action makes no sense.

 ISMENE:                                               I know

 that wild and futile action makes no sense. (p. 161)

Antigone’s sister is trying to undermine the very premise of Greek drama, of literature.

Long, long ago, I read Sophocles’s Antigone (c. 441 BCE) in a class naively titled “Western Civilization,” which was required of all liberal arts undergraduates at my university.  So everybody had to read one Greek play, this one, before exiting college.  Almost everybody – not the engineers, I guess, and too bad for them.  Although I knew the Greek stories pretty well, Antigone was thus the first Greek play I ever read.

Pretty good choice for if-you-only-read-one.  Antigone, even for Sophocles, feels classical, ethically serious and dramatically balanced, the kind of play from which a literary critic will derive rules.  When I describe Euripides as a “screwball,” it is in comparison to plays like Antigone, which invite later art like William Henry Rinehart’s 1870 sculpture “Antigone Pouring a Libation over the Corpse of Her Brother Polynices,” on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In Western Civ, we turned Antigone, and every other text assigned, into an ethical debate.  Duty to the state versus duty to – what, exactly, is Antigone serving?  Religion, higher law, family, the integrity of the self.  Jean Anouilh, in his 1944 existentialist adaptation, pushes strongly towards the self, while Seamus Heaney, partly inspired to adapt the play as a protest against the American war in Iraq, in The Burial at Thebes (2004 ) is more interested in the justness of the law, in human rights (p. 76).  Antigone at times, at her least sympathetic, comes across as a religious fanatic, guilty only of what she calls “the crime of piety” (161), although she is usually more sympathetic:

ANTIGONE:  I cannot share in hatred, but love.

CREON:  Then go down there, if you must love, and love

     the dead.  No woman rules me while I live.

Creon, as usual, has a point but goes too far.  His animus against women, specifically, is mentioned several times, as is his blinding materialism.  He seems more worried about bribery than anything else – that his guards or the prophet Teresias are against him because they have been bribed.  No wonder he has so little understanding of divine law. 

Now I am wandering.  I was surprised to see that the Guard is a legitimate clown role, much like in Shakespeare.  Jean Anouilh greatly expanded the part, but a lot of it is right there in Sophocles.  Here is the guard not clowning:

We saw the girl.  She cried the sharp and shrill

cry of a bitter bird which sees the nest

bare where the young birds lay.  (173)

I have trouble, in the Greek plays, sorting through the metaphorical language, distinguishing between the clichés and the original images.  The “ship of state,” right, that shows up constantly, including in Antigone; everyone drags in that one.  But this image of bereaved animal motherhood applied to Antigone seeing her brother’s desecrated corpse, that seemed original and interestingly ironic.  Antigone has a few of these. 

Antigone begins at dawn.  How many of the plays we have read so far begin at dawn?  Agamemnon, Ajax, etc.  I have not kept track.

All of the translations here are by Elizabeth Wyckoff.  I would likely prefer to see a performance using the Heaney translation because it is easier to understand, not necessarily a virtue while reading or looking for quotations.

As perfect as the Rinehart statue is, I was tempted by another Met-owned piece, an 1893 lithograph by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec of a performance of Antigone.  And why not include it, too.

Next week, we move to Rhesus by Euripides (probably), his earliest play (probably).  It is a good choice for if-you-only-skip-one.  I remember it as a dud.  How lucky we are to have so many Euripides plays that some of them are duds.  Well, I’ll take another look at it.

Terrible kindly ones, come to your rest - The Eumenides by Aeschylus – Come, Furies, dance!

Here we see, in a representation likely dated fairly close to The Eumenides (458 BCE), Apollo protecting Orestes from a Fury, from the British Museum:

I know, I know, the wings:

PRIESTESS: Black, like the rags of soot that hang in a chimney,

Like bats, yet wingless.

Each of their faces a mess of weeping ulcers –

The eyes, the mouth, ulcers.  (Hughes, 152-3)

Another great bit from a minor character.  Again, I will mostly use the Ted Hughes translation for quotations, and Robert Fagles for one exception.

Orestes is pursued by the Furies for the murder of his mother.  He is defended by Apollo, and judged by Athena and a juror of Athenian citizens, who successfully end the cycle of bloodshed means of a move to a new mythic stage of civilization.

There is the first extant courtroom drama, the beginning of a genre, with a remarkable number of the pros and cons of the genre present from the beginning, the big con being the opaqueness, the arbitrariness, of the jury’s decision, and in a fate-driven ethos like this, close to rigged.

I particularly enjoy the moment when the prosecuting and defense attorney begin screaming insults – “Filthy witches – rubbish of creation” (180) – at each other.  I suspect this is an example of Athenian realism.  Audience members were thinking “That’s like when I was on the jury.”  The defense attorney tries to bribe the jurors; the prosecutor threatens them.  The core of the genre is ready to go.

The big mythic story is the old gods versus the new, the earth gods versus the sky gods, big primal forces versus human civilization, with, implicitly, the humans absorbing both into a new humanistic third era.  The Furies are underground creatures, “Made of darkness, clothed in darkness” (168), and when they lose their case they lament that:

The earth is overthrown.

Our laws are obsolete.

You younger gods

Who argue us out of court,

And rob us of what is ours –

You violate creation!  (187)

But, in a compromise, they end up living in an Athenian cave, transformed into The Kindly Ones (“Terrible kindly ones, / Come to your rest,” 197), which for them is a happy ending.  They like caves.  Everyone, old, new, and newer, claims to be following the law; everyone is following some law.

I wonder, as usual, but more so this time, what the Athenian audience was thinking.  Aeschylus did not invent this story.  The cave, the cult site, in which the former Furies lived was real, on the opposite side of the Acropolis from the Dionysian Theater where the Athenians were watching the Furies howl, argue, and dance.  Seeing these protective but ancient powers out in the open, casting their spells, must have been pretty strange. I’m switching to Fagles:

FURIES:     Come, Furies, dance! –

link arms for the dancing hand-in-hand,

now we long to reveal our art,

our terror, now to declare our right

    to steer the lives of men,

we all conspire, we dance!  (Fagles, 245)

Ted Hughes, I am sad to say, omits this passage.  His Furies do not dance.

Next week’s play is Antigone by Sophocles, a great among the greats, and a good choice for the person who has never read a Greek play.  I’m going to see what Seamus Heaney’s adaptation is like.

"It’s me, me; this is me being alive" - Dorothy Richardson's Backwater - words and phrases that fretted dismally at the beauty of the scene

The pointed roofs of Pointed Roofs (1915), the first volume of Pilgrimage, Dorothy Richardson’s roman fleuve, were in Hanover, abroad, and inherently rewarding for our teenage heroine Miriam, even if teaching English to German girls was not, in the end, for her.  But in the next volume Miriam is teaching again, this time in “a proper schooly school” north London suburb, a Backwater (1916), where everything is worse.

It would be cold English pianos and dreadful English children – and trams going up and down that grey road outside.  (Ch. 1, p. 198 in the collected edition)

Which is about right.  The children are not that bad.  The loss of serious German music is a disaster.

At this point, and in Backwater even more than in Pointed Roofs, Richardson’s novel is a Kunstlerroman, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, with numerous curious resemblances to Joyce’s novel, also published in 1916.  Both novels are highly, entirely interior, with some passages moving to some kind of stream of consciousness, if that is a helpful term.  Chapter II, one long party scene, or Chapter V, where Miriam tries to fall asleep, especially impressed me as being as dense as the later chapters of Joyce’s novel.

Richardson should get some of Joyce’s credit for the “epiphany,” too (all Joycean parallels are coincidental, artists working on similar problems and coming to similar conclusions).  What else is this but an epiphany:

She tried once or twice deliberately to bring back the breathless moment standing still on a stair.  Each time something of it returned.  ‘It’s me, me; this is me being alive,’ she murmured with a feeling under her like the sudden drop of a lift.  (III, 245)

There we have, I suspect, the metaphysics of Pilgrimage in a few words.  Reality that is more real, or at least better written.

Here we see Miriam, an 18 year-old schoolteacher, becoming a writer, as she watches fog move across the lawn:

Several times she glanced at the rich green, feeling that neither ‘emerald,’ ‘emerald velvet,’ nor ‘velvety emerald’ quite expressed it.  (IV, 247)

There follow more shade-and-light effects, one source of Ford Madox Ford calling Richardson an “Impressionist.”  Then a bit so good I can’t resist:

The back door, just across the little basement hall, scrooped inwards across the oilcloth, jingling its little bell, and was banged to.  The flounter-crack of a raincloak smartly shaken out was followed by a gentle scrabbling in a shoe-box, - the earliest girl, peaceful and calm, a wonderful sort of girl, coming into the empty basement quietly getting off her things, with all the rabble of the school coming along the roads behind.  (IV, 247)

Richardson’s prose provides many rewards.  Miriam, in the novel, is training her taste in fictional prose:

Miriam returned to her book.  The story of Adèle had moved on through several unassimilated pages.  ‘My child,’ she read, ‘it is important to remember’ – she glanced on, gathering a picture of a woman walking with Adèle along the magic terrace, talking – words and phrases that fretted dismally at the beauty of the scene.  Examining later chapters she found conversations, discussions, situations, arguments, ‘fusses’ – all about nothing.  She turned back to the early passage of description and caught the glow once more.  But this time it was overshadowed by the promise of those talking women.  That was all there was.  She had finished the story of Adèle.  (II, 232)

Brutal, but a good critic, with admirable taste, taste like mine.  Mostly.  “Cheese – how could people eat cheese?” (II, 238).  Someone get Miriam to Neal’s Yard, quick.

The reading theme expands near the end of the book, when Miriam sabotages her teaching, binge-reading wholesome and then trashy novels rather than working on her teacher’s certification.  But she is no teacher, and in the next novel she moves to another of the four professions allowed to women of her class at the time (teacher, governess, nurse, supreme monarch of the British empire).  A comparison with George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893), published at the time Backwater is set, would be fruitful.  The odd women in that novel learn typing and dictation so they are not trapped by draining jobs or worse husbands.  Of course, if I think of Stephen Dedalus again, I see what Miriam should be doing: going to college and reading better books.  Now I have to keep reading the Pilgrimage novels just to see what happens once she starts reading better books.

The Libation Bearers by Aeschylus - How can we hope to do what has to be done?

 

ELECTRA:  Everything dies – the dust is forgotten.

How can we hope to do what has to be done?  (Hughes, 109)

Robert Fagles calls it The Libation Bearers; Ted Hughes prefers Choephori; in either case it’s the play where the bloodthirsty chorus of female slaves howls for avenging the murder of Agamemnon that we all enjoyed so much in the previous play.

CHORUS:  Let me scream

That holy scream of joy.

Why should I smother it?

If Justice shares my hope,

If God rides the savage storm

That shakes my heart for vengeance –

Vengeance, vengeance, vengeance.  (Hughes, 111)

Will we enjoy the murder of Clytemnestra as much?

I would have guessed that this chorus, captives taken by Agamemnon over the course of the Trojan War, would not be so firmly on his side, but he is dead and his murderers and their current enslavers, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, are alive.  The chorus, as we have often seen in Aeschylus, gets a lot of good lines.

The Libation Bearers is tragedy mixed with fairy tale, with its cute brother and sister recognition scene, where Electra recognizes the presence of her brother by the shape of his footprint in the dust – remember this when we get to Euripides – and a parallel pair of curious anti-recognition scenes in the second half of the play, when first the Orestes’s mother and then his nurse fail to recognize him.  The nurse’s failure is admittedly a little more conceptual and thematic, part of the nursing theme that is itself part of the larger washing theme, corrupting blood countered by cleansing water and milk.  Agamemnon was all blood.

Not that The Libation Bearers does not have plenty of blood.

CHORUS:  But Orestes fought, he reached the summit

of bloodshed here…  (Fagles, 219)

This is more or less at the moment when Orestes kills his mother, egged on by the chorus and his best friend.  My understanding of the ethics of the play is that the killing of Aegisthus, the uncle of Orestes and an usurping tyrant, is at worst neutral, just power politics, while the killing of his mother is an abomination, one more in a long line for this family.  The most curious moment to me was just before the lines above, when Orestes hesitates and doubts:

ORESTES: Pylades, can a man kill his mother?

Can he perform anything more dreadful

Than the murder of his own mother?

What shall I do?

PYLADES:  Remember the words of Apollo.

Obey the command of the god of the oracle.

Embrace the enmity of mankind

Rather than be false to the word of heaven.  (Hughes, 134-5)

The strange thing is that these are the only lines of Pylades, who has otherwise been silently shadowing Orestes through the play.  If I think like a fantasy writer, then this creature is clearly some kind of double, Apollo, or an agent of Apollo (or of someone else?} who has taken the form of, or possessed, the friend of Orestes.  Just a few pages later, we see that “Pylades” is essentially lying: it is the Furies, not men, who begin to torment Orestes.

They are climbing out of the earth,

Out of their burrows in old blood.

Eyes like weeping ulcers,

Mouths like fetid wounds.

Their whips whistle and crack. (Hughes, 144)

In an earlier speech (Hughes, 106), Orestes says this is what Apollo told him would happen if he did not avenge his father.  Apollo is a liar.

CHORUS:  Where will it end? –

where will it sink to sleep and rest,

  this murderous hate, this Fury?  (226, tr. Fagles)

And curtain, although the Greeks did not have curtains. An intermission, a week long for us, and then we will get the answers to those question in The Eumenides, or The Kindly Ones, where we will say farewell to Aeschylus.

One more curious thing is that we will return to this story three more times, in Sophocles and Euripides.  So few of the plays survive, but we have four versions of this story.

The painting is Louis Jean Desprez’s “The Tomb of Agamemnon,” a study for an 18th century Swedish opera, a surprising item owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  One more Aeschylus play with an altar in the center of the stage.

Agamemnon by Aeschylus - Find some other blood-glutted / Family tree of murder

Agamemnon by Aeschylus.  What a quotable play.  Here’s a two-line summary:

CHORUS:  Where is the right and wrong

In this nightmare?  (77, tr. Ted Hughes)

War is over.  Queen Clytemnestra is thrilled that her husband Agamemnon is coming home after a decade of war, because it will finally give her the opportunity to murder him in revenge for his murder of their daughter Iphigenia, killed in a ghastly human sacrifice that, if we stick to my schedule, we will see with our own eyes sometime next fall.  How horrible; who would want to see that?  The chorus on the sacrifice of Iphigenia:

Some called it a monstrous act

But it seemed to work.

Anyway, that’s all in the past. (40)

Agamemnon’s family history is so cursed and blood-soaked that this is just usual business.  Here Clytemnestra welcomes Agamemnon home, laying out carpets dyed with “all the colours of blood”:

You have come like a spring day, opening the heart

After locked-up winter.

When Zeus treads the unripe grape

And lets the wine flood out

Then the whole house is blessed.

As it is now

When you step through your own doorway. (45)

In one of those masterpieces of Greek irony, she openly tells Agamemnon that she is about to murder him.

I had forgotten the unrelieved violence of Agamamnon.  We get not just the murder of Agamemnon, described in detail before it happens by the traumatized prophetess Cassandra, plus her murder, but also graphic descriptions of the cannibalistic murder of the sons of Thyestes, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and the sack of Troy.  These descriptions take up most of the play.  Horror literature.

Or other kinds of literature.  The quality of the little parts is so impressive.  Agamemnon is arguably the worst part in the play, the most minor.  The watchman who begins the play has some superb lines – “And then – what follows, / Better not think about it” (6) – smart man; the arrogant tyrant Aegisthus is pure ham; and the Herald briefly turns Agamemnon into war literature:

Then on the beaches it was worse. Dug in

under the enemy ramparts – deadly going.

Out of the sky, out of the marshy flats

the dews soaked us, turned the ruts we fought from

into gullies, made our gear, our scalps,

crawl with lice…

But why weep now?

It’s over for us, over for them.

The dead can rest and never rise again;

no need to call their muster.  We’re alive,

do we have to go on raking up old wounds?

Good-bye to all that.  Glad I am to say it.  (124, Fagles)

I have mostly been using the 1999 Ted Hughes translation of Agamemon, which simplifies but also clarifies the language of Aeschylus, but I could not resist Robert Fagles in this passage, with his direct invocation of Robert Graves’s combat memoir, which I doubt is in the original Greek.

Hughes is good, too.  The Chorus of old men on how the war looked to them:

The men came back

As little clay jars

Full of sharp cinders.  (26)

But the big part is Clytemnestra’s, magnificent all the way through.  She is like Prometheus or Ajax, a rebel against the gods.  Much of this blood is supposedly demanded for unknown reasons by the cruel, perhaps insane gods.  Her own grievances irrevocably revenged, she addresses “You Powers, whoever you are”:

Find some other blood-glutted

Family tree of murder –

Go and perform your strange dance

Of justice in their branches.

Leave us.

I ask for nothing,

Now the killing is over –

Only to be left in peace.  (79-80)

Imagine if Agamemnon were the only play of the trilogy that had survived.  But no, so next week we’ll see if the next generation can lift the curse in The Libation Bearers.  Good luck, kids!

I’ve illustrated this post with a 1906 “galvanoplastic” reproduction of the famous, so-called Mask of Agamemnon, owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Ajax by Sophocles - Shall I not learn place and wisdom?

We have reached our first Sophocles play, Ajax, generally thought to be “early.”  Putting it before Aeschylus’s Oresteia (458 BCE) gives me the first eighteen years of Sophocles’s long career, which should be enough.  Aside from Ajax, we are missing the first thirty-two years of Sophocles.

Things have changed.  Now there are clearly three actors, outside of the chorus, with speaking parts, while the early Aeschylus plays (probably) always used just two speaking actors.  I have been struck by the number of non-speaking parts, like the grieving Tecmessa at the end of Ajax, who only contributes to the tableau because the three actors are used for other parts.  Aristotle says that the third actor is an innovation of Sophocles.  Here it is.

The skene, the structure in the middle of the stage, is definitely there now, too.  It may have been present in the Aeschylus plays we have read, but now there is no ambiguity.  There is a structure, it has doors, actors can appear on top of it, it may well support wheeled platforms.  The sophistication or gimmickry of the stage business has moved up a notch.

I would love to have a better idea of what the Greek audience saw.  Ajax, the hero described by Homer as “gigantic,” the shield of the Greek army, a warrior second only to Achilles, has gone mad as a result of losing the armor of dead Achilles to Odysseus.  Thinking that he is taking revenge on his enemies – meaning, his Greek allies, which is crazy to begin with – he instead, in a frenzy, slaughters and tortures a herd of livestock.  The play is about the perfect soldier coming to terms with his madness and shame.  With minor changes, the play could be about a good soldier who snaps under stress.  Perhaps with no changes.

Ajax first appears, near the beginning of the play, surrounded by mutilated animals, covered with their blood.  With what detail, I wonder; how much blood?  The moment of his appearance is built up to be shocking.  The audience is warned, but here he is:

AJAX: Look at this swirling tide of grief

    And the storm of blood behind it,

    Coursing around and round me.

CHORUS:  Horrible!  (20)

But how horrible?  I have no idea.

Ajax’s madness is complicated by the fact that Athena directly intervenes in events, perhaps as punishment for Ajax’s impiety and arrogance, or what I would call his individualism and humanism.  He is fool enough to think humans govern their own affairs, or at least he governs his own.

AJAX:                Don’t you know by now

    That I owe the gods no service any more?  (29)

This way well count as a “tragic flaw.”  Madness is a central epistemological issue.  However hardheaded an empiricist I might be, I know that there are people who experience reality in different ways than I do.  However “real” reality seems, there is always, logically, doubt.  Attributing this doubt to the actions of gods is perhaps just a question of definition. I love the odd detail – Sophocles is full of such touches – that the rational, pious Odysseus, who frequently speaks with his protector Athena, can never see her, while the cursed, visionary Ajax can.

Ajax has a magnificent speech in the exact center of the play that is a monument of literary irony.  The hero is planning his suicide, but telling his family and followers the opposite.

Strangely the long and countless drift of time

Brings all things forth from darkness into light

That covers them once more. Nothing so marvelous

That man can say it surely will not be –

Strong oath and iron intent come crashing down. (31-2)

What a beginning.  Every line has two meanings.

I must give way, as all dread strengths give way…

Shall not I learn place and wisdom? (32)

In death, Ajax means, but his audience hears something else.  And when he leaves, the chorus of the sailors who follow him “shudder and thrill with joy” (32).  That won’t last.

The story of the death of Ajax was for a time a popular subject for vase painting.  I’ve borrowed a remarkable example from the Getty, a shallow wine cup, which shows Tecmessa covering Ajax’s body in the bowl.  The sides of the cup show two other scenes from the story, including the voting for the armor of Achilles that launches the tragedy.  Another irony is that armor ends up at the bottom of the Mediterranean.  Nobody gets it.  All a waste, like the entire Trojan War.

I’ve stuck to the John Moore translation (University of Chicago Press), but I also read the Helen Golder and Richard Pevear version (Oxford) which was punchier and had better annotation.

Next we return to Aeschylus for Agamemnon, the beginning of the Oresteia.  If you haven’t read it, don’t miss this one.  I have the ubiquitous Robert Fagles translation at hand, but I also plan to read the Ted Hughes version.

I. B. Singer's Satan in Goray and Mori Ōgai's The Wild Geese - as though space had shrunken

Another edition of a Wuthering Expectations staple: “Get these books back to the library.”

***

Satan in Goray, Isaac Bashevis Singer (1933), his first novel, about a wave of mid-17th century Jewish millenarianism in what is now southeastern Poland.  It is a book of extraordinary violence and cruelty.  Maybe not as openly violent as Red Cavalry or the stories of Lamed Shapiro, but up there.  The world view is at least as bleak.  The Jews of Goray are recovering from a nightmarish round of the usual warfare of the time, so are susceptible to the promise of a Messiah.  All tradition, all reason, is abandoned.  Why not chop up your own house and use it as firewood?  Soon we will be in Jerusalem!

Although Singer describes strange, magical events in a way that makes it hard to distinguish between the “facts” of the story and legend, it is all plausible, as a description of religious hysteria of the time and various other hysterias we know all too well.  The visionary central female character is exactly the person who accuses day care workers of witchcraft.

Singer’s older brother, as I saw in Yoshe Kalb (1932) and The Brothers Ashkenazi (1936), is as strong in novelistic sociology, but I. B. is superior in language and invention.  He is rich in metaphor, like a great fantasy writer.  It is Rosh Hashanah – surely the Messiah is coming today:

The sky, which all summer long had been as blue as the curtain of the Torah Ark, and somewhat broader and higher than usual, contracted.  Now the town seemed enclosed in a dark canvas tent.  The hills, which had been green and evocative of the holy land, disappeared, wiped off the face of the earth.  The smoke, reluctant to leave the chimneys, spread over the houses, as though space had shrunken.  (p. 180, tr. Jacob Sloan)

The landscape, the sky is full of meaning.  Of course the Messiah does not come, leaving sixty pages for things to get even worse.

***

The Wild Geese, Mori Ōgai (1911-3), a little novel by a writer often mentioned alongside Sōseki Natsume as a founder of modern Japanese fiction, a subject about which I know very little.  This particular book seemed awfully minor. 

Small-time loan shark Suezō, sick of his wife, buys a pretty young mistress, Otama.  Here’s Donald Keene in Dawn to the West (1984), the “Fiction” volume: “Otama in the course of the novel develops from a trustful, innocent girl into a woman who discovers how to use the man who is using her; Suezō, though a moneylender, is portrayed with surprising sympathy, especially in the scenes with this harridan of a wife” (369).  I would say yes about Otama, and her development is by far the most interesting thing in the book; no no no about the repellent Suezō, who is wrong about everything, ethically and otherwise, and is fortunately abandoned around the middle of the book, which I will again note is only 107 pages long in the Tuttle edition, so I did not suffer too much, or, really, at all.

Mori’s prose, at least as translated by Kingo Ochiai and Sanford Goldstein, is plain and distant.  I don’t see anything I’m dying to quote.  The last ten pages take a curious, digressive structural turn (the narrator is nominally the author, telling a story from his medical student days):

In a European book of children's stories, there is a tale about a peg.  I can’t remember it well, but it was about a farmer’s son who got into a series of difficulties on his journey because the peg in his cartwheel kept coming out.  In the story I’m telling now, a mackerel boiled in bean paste had the same effect as that peg.  (107)

The last pages of the story certainly surprised me, even if I was not surprised when the symbolic geese in the title finally appeared.

This one gets slotted into Dolce Bellezza’s ongoing Japanese literature event.

Prometheus Bound by let's-call-him Aeschylus - This is what you get / for loving humankind.

This week’s play is Prometheus Bound, by Aeschylus, or maybe not – A Common Reader here reviews a book arguing the “not” case – and first written and performed nobody knows when.  The translator of the Penguin version, Philip Vellacott, wants the play to be late, even posthumously performed, in order for Aeschylus’s ideas about Zeus, to “develop” in a particular way, as if the ideas of writers have to move in a straight line.  No one knows.

But the play is in fact about Zeus, the specific mythical figure but also the concept of godhood.  We are way, way back in the mythological timeline, at the moment Zeus and his siblings have overthrown their parents, the Titans.  Prometheus has been sentenced by Zeus to imprisonment and torture on a Scythian mountaintop, where the play opens with embodiments of Power and Violence dragging Prometheus onto the stage.  Says Power:

He must submit

      To the tyranny of Zeus

And like it, too.

He’ll learn.  (29, tr. Scully and Herrington)

Or, in Vellacott, “Till he be taught to accept the sovereignty of Zeus” (20).  I read the Oxford translation by poet James Scully and classicist C. J. Herington as well as Vellacott’s version; this bit sure shows the difference.

Power?  Violence?  Which gods are these?  Violence does not even have any lines.  How do I even know she is there?  Hephaistos the blacksmith – there’s a god I know – addresses them by name.  Greek plays did not have stage directions, but in Prometheus Bound detailed directions often appear in the dialogue, as during Hephaistos’s violent binding of Prometheus to the rock, under the orders of Power:

POWER: Now, hard as you can, hammer the shackles INto him!

                Watch it now.  The Boss checks everything out.

HEPHAISTOS:  I can’t tell which is worse: your looks or your loud mouth.

The possibilities for staging Prometheus Bound are so interesting.  A 2013 outdoor production at the Getty used a five-ton wheel as the mountaintop.  Characters are constantly flying onto the stage, in winged chariots, or in one case on “a winged four-footed creature” (Vellacott, 29).  Were characters lowered on decorated cranes, or was it all left to the imagination of the audience?  This play seems visually richer than the others we have read, even keeping in mind, however poorly, the masks and costumes and dancing.

There’s another thing we know nothing about, the dancing, the music.  At least the masks and costumes are depicted in art.  At one point, another victim of Zeus appears on stage, Io who was turned into a cow (her mask clearly has horns) and raped by Zeus, then hunted and tortured by jealous Hera.  Aeschylus told Io’s story in The Suppliants, while that story is retold in Prometheus Bound.  Her scene ends with the return of her torments:

spirally wheeld

by madness, madness

stormblasted I’m

blown off course

my tongue my tiller

it’s unhinged, flappy

words words thrash

dashed O at doom

mud churning up

breaking in waves

                               (IO charges off)  (73, Scully & Herington)

I assume that is pretty free.  But if I imagine it as song, along with Io’s maddened, terrified cow dance, it could be shocking to see.

Or ridiculous.  I was surprised by all of the humor in Prometheus Bound, as in Hephaistos’s response to Power up above.  The scene with the blustering Ocean, the character who rides the winged beast, is essentially comic.  The argument between Prometheus and Hermes near the end of the play is comic.  Prometheus gives Io a long prophecy because “I’ve more spare time than I could wish for” (69, Scully).  The play begins with a torture scene and ends with another, possibly mental, that leads perfectly into Percy Shelley’s Romantic sequel, but in between there is quite a lot of comedy, audible in both versions I read.

This is what you get

for loving humankind.  (30, Scully and Herington)

Is that comic or tragic?

Next, for a change, is a Sophocles play, Ajax, thought to be an early one which just by probability puts it before the Oresteia.  With a subject from the Trojan War and a cast of famous heroes and themes of human folly and divine fate, Ajax may look more like my stereotype of a Greek play.  It’s another good one.

Benjamin Labatut's physics fantasy A Terrible Verdure - The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions

 I.

Benjamin Labatut’s Bolaño-Sebaldian 2020 novel-like object, Un verdor terrible (A Terrible Verdure, although Adrian Nathan West’s English translation is titled When We Cease to Understand the World) has been getting a lot of attention.  It is a fantasy novel where major twentieth-century scientists and mathematicians are mystics who make their discoveries through glimpses of the reality behind the veil.  Several, but not all, of the figures Labatut writes about were, in fact, mystics, although the relation, in what I call the real world, between their work and their mysticism is not so clear. 

In fantasy fiction, metaphors are made literal.  In A Terrible Verdure, high-cognition scientists are not just like mystics, but are mystics.  What do we get from this particular physics fantasy?

One thing is that the “genius poet” problem is solved.  Nabokov somewhere says that the hardest character to make convincing is the poet of genius, because the author has to actually be a poet of genius to provide the evidence that the character is such a thing.  Just asserting genius does not work.  The same is true for physicists and mathematicians.  By using real figures – primarily Fritz Haber, Karl Schwarzchild, Alexander Grothendieck, Erwin Schrödinger, and Werner Heisenberg – Labatut can use, or at least name, their actual contributions, while inventing much of the story around them.  Schrödinger, for example, comes up with the wave equation at the base of quantum mechanics (non-fiction) while reenacting sexy scenes from the contemporary novel The Magic Mountain (fiction).

Labatut turns everything mathematical into metaphor, and what else is he supposed to do?  “I understand about as much physics as you can without understanding mathematics” he says in an interview in Physics Today.  At least the physics problems suggest something in the material world; the chapter on Alexander Grothendieck is especially abstract, since his specialty was pure mathematics, so abstract that even the names of the fields barely mean anything.  In my own study of mathematics, I tapped out at real analysis, already getting too abstract for me, so poking around in Grothendieck’s actual work was amusingly pointless.

The speaker here is a Chilean mathematician who, inspired by Grothendieck’s retreat, afraid that math is destroying the world, retired long ago to cultivate his garden:

We know how to use it [quantum mechanics], it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it.  The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions.  It’s as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.  (187)

Which words are doing all the work?  “[A]ctually,” “true”?  In another sense, lots of people understand quantum mechanics, thousands of people.  “You [physicists, but also anyone] need to let the book do what it’s trying to do, which is going to be harder if you’re a physicist,” Labatut says in the Physics Today interview, which I think is right, but the other side is that non-physicists should be clear about what the book is not doing.

II.

In the old days, a novel like this would have likely been about the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear war, but Labatut barely gestures in that direction.  His recurring catastrophe is environmental, not the familiar one of climate change, but rather a disaster of superabundance caused by artificial nitrogen fixing, the great discovery of chemist Fritz Haber, who was also the father of modern chemical warfare, an irony that has been explored many times.

Haber is the eventual subject of the first chapter, “Prussian Blue,” which is a direct imitation of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995).  The first paragraph covers German soldiers hopped up on Pervitin, which moves us to post-war suicides, and thus to cyanide, discovered as a by product of the invention of the chemical pigment Prussian Blue, which brings us to silkworm cultivation, and so on to Haber and his life and work.  Just like a Saturn chapter, except shorter and simpler.  The silkworms are taken directly from Sebald, and I mean directly:

The Reich Association of Silkworm Breeders in Berlin, a constituent group within the Reich Federation of German Breeders of Small Animals, which in turn was affiliated to the Reich Agricultural Commission, saw its task as increasing production in every existing workshop, advertising silk cultivation in the press, in the cinema and on radio, establishing model rearing units for educational purposes, organizing advisory bodies at local, district and regional level to support all silk-growers, providing mulberry trees, and planting them by the millions on unutilized land, in residential areas and cemeteries, by roadsides, on railway embankments and along the Reich’s autobahns. (293, Sebald, tr. Michael Hulse)

Labatut compresses the first seventy-three words into two:

The Nazis planted millions of such trees in abandoned fields and residential quarters, in schoolyards and cemeteries, in the grounds of hospitals and sanatoria, and on both sides of the highways that criss-crossed the new Germany. (16, Labatut)

This is the only time I noticed the literal rewriting of a Sebald sentence (“sanatoria” is added to foreshadow the Schrödinger chapter), but now I wonder if there are more, and plenty of other bits are dropped in, like the herring on the last page.  I don’t exactly want to say that Sebald’s sentences and maze of connections are better than Labatut’s, but they are clearly more complex.

Someone with a copy of Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996) could, I suspect, enjoy a similar, or perhaps quite different, exercise.  See that Physics Today interview.

I enjoyed When We Cease to Understand the World quite a lot. But part of that pleasure was recognition, part was flattery, and part was because it was all kind of easy.