What are brief? What are deep? - Christina Rossetti's nursery rhymes

This week at Wuthering Expectations:  educational literature.  Or literature about education.  Whatever.  I don’t care.

First up, the former, Christina Rossetti’s Sing-song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872).  I read this copy, housed at Indiana University.  I wanted an edition with the original illustrations by pre-Raphaelite painter Arthur Hughes.

Sing-song is not a great book, as a collection of Rossetti poetry or as something of interest to the youngsters of today, but it still has some interest to me.  Sometimes the Rossetti quality seeps through the poems.

Like here, p. 10:

I have no trouble hearing that this is the author of “In the bleak midwinter.”  Aside from the music of the poem, the specificity of the basket and the plant is appealing.  The “tombstone of snow” is almost too symbolically meaningful.

The snowberry bush, and the thrush, too, are part of the educational content of Sing-song.  Poems educate the littl’uns about flowers and birds, colors, sums, months, currency, time, and kindness to animals – again and again, kindness to animals.

I know that the point of the illustration is that the little boy – note his grisly snare in the background –  should leave the mole alone as well as the other critters, but given the mole’s central placement, and given that he is not mentioned in the poem, it is almost as if the poet is urging the mole to leave the worms and bugs alone, even taunting him by calling the beetle “fat.”  At least she omitted “juicy.”  Poor hungry mole.

Another sad example:

Hear what the mournful linnets say:
   “We built our nest compact and warm,
But cruel boys came round our way
   And took our summerhouse by storm.

“They crushed the eggs so neatly laid;
   So now we sit with drooping wing,
And watch the ruin they have made,
   Too late to build, too sad to sing.”  (14)

Poems like this one complement those about dead or dying children, of which there are at least eight.  The poems also have some value for mothers:

Crying, my little one, footsore and weary?
  Fall asleep, pretty one, warm on my shoulder:
I must tramp on through the winter night dreary,
  While the snow falls on me colder and colder.  (19)

Meanwhile the baby sleeps and dreams “of pretty things…  of pleasure.”

Rossetti also includes riddles and nonsense.  My favorite example of the latter, when a bit of nightmarish Carrollian surrealism intrudes:

The riddles can have their own beauty.  This example has obvious rhymes and sentiments, but is pleasingly sonorous:

What are heavy?  sea-sand and sorrow:
What are brief?  to-day and tomorrow:
What are frail?  spring blossoms and youth:
What are deep?  the ocean and truth.  (34)

I am perhaps making the book sound better than it really is.  Most of the poems are trivial, merely cute, no different than in a hundred other similar books.  The Poetry Foundation singles out this one for some reason:

Mix a pancake,
Stir a pancake,
    Pop it in the pan;
Fry the pancake,
Toss the pancake, –
    Catch it if you can.

Not that I am against pancakes – what a terrible thing to even suggest – but I do not think it required the genius of Christina Rossetti to come up with that poem.

Still, I went looking for Rossetti and found her.

I see them with my blurred understanding - more Inger Christensen

All of Inger Christensen’s poetry in English comes from one translator, Susanna Nied, who worked closely with the poet, who knew English well.  So I have been able to enjoy six books of Christensen’s poetry, five tiny and one the beast, it, I described yesterday.

The first two, Light (1962) and Grass (1963) seem typical of a lot of European poetry written at the time.  I would never have guessed that the highly formalized, schematic, and long it (1969) could have grown out of them.

Christensen also wrote some novels around this time.  Azorno (1967) and The Painted Room (1976) are in English, both translated by Denise Newman.  They both seem to me like good but unexceptional imitations of the French New Novel.  The Painted Room is about Andrea Mantegna and the perils of being an artist in the Mantuan court, which could be pretty exciting in different hands.  These are formalist, intellectual novels. 

Likely I am misunderstanding most of these works.  Luckily, from here on out Christensen returned to poetry, and the poems are shorter, warmer, and easier.  “Luckily” really just applies to “easier” – I don’t mind the help.  The books are Letter in April (1979), alphabet (1981) and Butterfly Valley: A Requiem (1991).

Since alphabet is built from a two-part scheme combining the alphabet with Fibonacci numbers, that is not the poem to use to make my case:

I write like wind
that writes in water
with stylized monotony  (59)

The formal poetry in fact is personal, working with the world as she sees it.  But it does help that Letter in April has people, characters, the poet and her daughter on a vacation in Italy:

We arrive early one morning
almost before we’re awake.
The air is pale, a bit cool,
and it curls a bit over our skin
like a membrane of moisture,
We talk about spiderwebs
– how do they work –
about the rain that washed the water
as we slept along the way
while we rolled
over the earth.
Then we’re at the house
and we bathe in the dust of the gravel walk
as among sparrows.  (103)

The next poem continues the water imagery as it moves into the house (“this waterfall / of images”), but another direction is offered as each poem in a section is marked so that the poems can be read in at least two different orders.  I can stay outside and follow the spiderweb theme rather than the house theme.  The result is not too different stories but rather two different poetic ways of thinking.

Who knows,
maybe the pomegranate
itself is aware
that it’s called
something else.
Who knows,
maybe I myself
am called
something else
than myself.  (109)

the title poem of Butterfly Valley lacks people, aside from the poet,  but has butterflies.  She is in Macedonia, watching the butterflies.  The work is a sequence of fifteen sonnets, as traditional a scheme as Christensen uses, except – of course there is another rule – the first line of a poem is the last line of the previous poem.  Then the fifteenth and final poem is nothing but the first lines of each of the previous fourteen poems.  Every scrap of that last poem has thus appeared three times. 

Up they soar, the planet’s butterflies,
pigments from the warm body of the earth,
cinnabar, ochre, phosphor yellow, gold
a swarm of basic elements aloft.

Is this flickering of wings only a shoal
of light particles, a quirk of perception?
Is it the dreamed summer hour of my childhood
shattered as by lightning lost in time?

No, this is the angel of light, who can paint
himself as dark mnemosyne Apollo,
as copper, hawk moth, tiger swallowtail.

I see them with my blurred understanding
as feather in the coverlet of haze
in Brajčino Valley’s noon-hot air.  (Sonnet I)

And now you have the first two lines of the last poem, too.  “Butterfly Valley” is the most openly beautiful poetry of this tricky poet, beautiful in the way most people understand beauty.  But Christensen finds beauty in form, in repetition, less an antipoet than a poet of the greatest possible purity.

Build into the rules of the game the inevitable breach of the rules as if it were a rule - Inger Christensen's it

Build into the rules of the game the inevitable breach of the rules as if it were a rule.  As if inevitable death were a natural turn.  Needing only to be rephrase right.  O death where is thy breach?  So changed now that the system catches hold.  So free.

I have been reading, over the last couple of years, the works available in English of Danish poet Inger Christensen.  The above is from early on (p. 4 of Susanna Nied’s translation)  in it (1969).  The word “it,” with no capitalization, that’s the title.  In Danish, det. 

It.  That’s it.  That started it.  It is.  Goes on.  Moves.  Beyond.  Becomes.  Becomes it and it and it.

Those are the first lines, while up top are the last, of the first part of the PROLOGOS of it, which in Danish consisted of 66 lines of 66 characters each.  The translator had to relax that last constraint.  The second part of the PROLOGOS is two poems of 33 lines each, 66 characters across, on to the eighth part which has 66 poems of one line of 66 characters. 

Someone walks into a house and looks at the street from his window.

Someone walks out of a house and looks at his window from the street.

Someone walks down a street and looks at the others on this way.

Etc. for 63 more lines, remembering that in Danish each line is exactly the same length.  Passages like this can have the feel of reading a completed crossword puzzle.  In translation.

This is just the prologue!  Each of the poems subsequent parts has its own formal restrictions or purpose, some relatively traditional.  The first connection to A. R. Ammons is obvious – it is another typewriter poem, like, Tape for the Turn of the Year, where ideas about how the poem will look comes before ideas about content, and will inevitably, or so the poet thinks or guesses, influence the content.

The other link with Ammons is that it is, like Sphere, a cosmogony, a poem about the creation of all things, in the tradition of Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony.  Anne Carson covers all of this in the introduction to the New Directions edition, stealing my fun.  Epigrams in specific sections link the poem to William Blake and Novalis a number of French wild men like Bataille and Lautréamont, ecstatic Romantics:

a black storm in a sealed cave
black lilacs smelling of sulfur
black snow

conversations with death:
freedom freedom freedom

the snow falls
piles itself in great drifts on the sky
and the sky is completely black

In May the lilacs will bloom; they must!  (82)

it is maybe a poem where a question like “is it good” is beside the point.  Not always, perhaps not often.  Christensen, in the spirit of antipoetry, is writing poetry where “the standard expressions, torn loose, flutter around, turned to dust, tentatively seek a form…  the place where the unexpressed in the expressionless finds expression” (10).

As strange as it is, or because it is strange, and because the poem covers sex, drugs, ecology, and anti-war protests, it was a huge hit in Denmark.  From the translator:

Some of its lines are so familiar to Danes that they have slipped into conversational use.  For example,  the journal of Denmark’s city planners took its title, Soft City, from a line in det.  (p. x)

That last line is like a transmission from a distant planet.

It’s not random
It’s not the world
It is random
It is the world
It’s the whole thing in a mass of different people
It’s the whole thing in a mass of difference
It’s the whole thing in a mass
It’s the whole thing
That’s it
It                                           (p. 237, last lines)

I want to be named the area where charlatan rationality comes to warp - Ammons looks at the sphere

well, I don’t know about that: will the worms
send us back to the chef: will we be too rare

or too tough or overdone or sauceless: I
think not: I think we will be acceptable:

anyhow,

     LET’S NOT SPOIL THE TRUTH
                  WITH BEAUTY
                    HERE, OKAY

That’s from Glare (1997), A. R. Ammons as cranky old guy, staring death in the face, getting everything off his chest while he still has a chance, even resorting to all caps like a true crank.  He is a quotable poet, from the earliest poem in Collected Poems: 1951-1971 up through Glare, as far as I’ve gone, forty years of poetry.

The unique voice was in place in the mid 1960s, circa Tape for the Turn of the Year, and runs through the rest of his work.  At times it feels like one giant mega-poem.  I’ll pick one and thumb through.  How about Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1974):

my last fallacy of imitative form, my book on
roundness, disappointed me some (oh yes, it did), I meant
to write one unreadable, but a lot of people have

bought it, reading it or not: I wanted something
standing recalcitrant in its own nasty massiveness,
bowing to no one, nonpatronizing and ungrateful:
 I don’t know why:         (from “Summer Place”, Brink Road, 1996, p. 185)

And in fact I found Sphere to be by far Ammons’s most difficult book, an impossible attempt at the meaning of all things inspired by a photo of the Earth from space, something we now take for granted.   The subtitle, The Form of a Motion, comes, hilariously, from a college faculty meeting.* The form is 155 stanzas of four triplets each, long lines as opposed to Tape’s fragments, unrelenting, massive in feel even though the poem is only 69 pages long.  “it's hard to tell what an abstract poet wants” (stanza 132) – true, all too true.  Sphere is Ammons’s attempt at a cosmogony, although Hesiod never wrote a line like “if you bite me in the ear, I will knee you in the nuts” (st. 58).

Not much of an abstract reader, I searched the poem for passages like this:

                                                                           I thought
I saw a piece of red paper in the grass but it was a
cardinal: and I thought I saw  a clump of quince blossoms

move but that was a cardinal: one morning three orioles
were in the green-red quince bush: that was what it was:
the pear tree look like lime sherbet with whipped cream

topping: the bottom part all leaves and no blossoms and
the top part all blossoms and no leaves: a green sailboat
or a spring mountain, from tree-green to conic, glacial white:  (st. 96)

Or the manifestos, lines that maybe tell me how to read this dang poem (“now, first of / all, the way to write poems is just to start,” st. 125) or that are a statement of purpose:

         I want to be declared a natural disaster area:
I want my ruins sanctioned into the artifice of ruins: I
want to be the aspect above which every hope rises, a

freshening of courage to millions: I want to be, not shaved
marble in a prominence that cringes aspiration, but the
junkyard where my awkwardness may show:  (st. 129)

This sounds so much like Whitman, if Whitman had written about garbage.  Ammons wrote a book-length poem about garbage – Garbage (1993) – that I now see is a kind of sequel to Sphere, which continues:

                                    I want to be the shambles,
the dump, the hills of gook the bulldozer shoves, so gulls
in carrion-gatherings can fan my smouldering, so in the

laciest flake of rust I can witness my consequence and time:
I want to be named the area where charlatan rationality comes
to warp…

Now there’s a line to make Nicanor Parra or Knut Hamsun nod.

“[T]he best kind of poetry,” Ammons writes in Garbage, is “the kind that seeking resolution // and an easing out of tension still out-tenses the / intensifiers,” and I guess that is the kind he wrote often enough.

*  See the Paris Review interview from 1996 which is full of insights and good humor.

I've hated at times the self-conscious POEM: - A. R. Ammons types up some antipoetry - the reason I write so much is that I can’t do anything else:

For months, I have been rummaging around in recent American poetry – Amy Clampitt, Rita Dove, Peter Cole – without writing much about it.  After, or during, all of that eminently Victorian poetry I had been reading Swinburne and The Ring and the Book and The Earthly Paradise – I needed a break.  I needed to recalibrate the sensors.

For various reasons I kept returning to the poems of A. R. Ammons, an old favorite of mine, and I since May I have read ten of his books.  Only a couple of days ago did I realize that Ammons was a kind of antipoet.  He shares with Nicanor Parra:  a mix of high and low language, stabs at big philosophical issues and retreats to ordinary life, deep suspicion of Romantic poetical rhetoric which they both regard as artificial, self-deprecating humor, and constant messing around with poetic form.  Both were descendants of Walt Whitman.  Ammons mixed in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams – all of the Americans with Ws in their name I guess.  Ammons was a genuine nature poet – that’s a difference from Parra.

That he called collections The Really Short Poems (1991) and Selected Longer Poems (1980) gives an idea of his blunt formal experimentation.  Poetry had become radically free, so it was time to re-impose some limits.  My favorite is the time he stuck a roll of adding machine tape in his typewriter and wrote a diary-in-verse on it until the tape ran out.  That’s Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965):

6 Dec:

today I
decided to write
a long
   thin
   poem
          employing certain
classical considerations:  (p. 1)
[snip]
it was natural for
me (in the House &
              Garden store one
night a couple weeks
ago) to contemplate
     this roll of
adding-machine tape, so
narrow, long,
unbroken, and to penetrate
     into some
     fool use for it:  (pp. 2-3)

Man, this is going to be a long post.  The book is 205 pages, all just this tape-constrained column running down the middle of the pages.  As long as Ammons stays on the tape, he can do whatever he wants, whether or not he can think of anything to do.  An Ammon signature, by the way, which appeared at this time and lasted to the end was replacing periods with colons.  The lines no longer seem separate but rather chained together. 

     I’ve hated at times the
self-conscious POEM:
     I’ve wanted to bend
     more, burrowing
with flexible path
into the common life
     & commonplace:  (144)
[snip]
poetry has
one subject, impermanence,
which it presents
with as much permanence as
possible:  (145)

Whether that is true or not, Ammons at this point begins typing up the weather (“thank it’s agonna snow / some: / don’t keer if it do:”), as he does when he seems unsure of himself, before switching to the childhood memory of a cherry tree in May:

how can these
pictures stay
in my head:
      how, after lying 30
yrs in darkness, can
they be brought up,
looked at, and
resubstantiated?
    what we don’t
    know’s a scare:
    & comfort:  (148)

Maybe I should focus more on nature, the many birds in the poem:

two bald iggles
     been sighted out
     there:
     tell me:
     can you beat that?
     I looked for any but
couldn’t find some:  (188-9)

But I keep returning to the method, to the tape, because it is so much fun watching Ammons fight with it:

the reason I write so much
is
that I can’t do anything
else:
poem must be now
close to 40 feet long: I
can’t get it out
to write letters or
postcards or anything:
     well
     if
     it
     must
     be
     onward
     to
     the
     end,
     let’s
     get
     there
     in
     a
     hurry: or
is that cheating?  (58-9)

One could also take that as a philosophical question.

Who made this mishmash? - Nicanor Parra says one thing for another

I have to write about some of the Nicanor Parra antipoems that I read, however theoretically in Spanish, just to remind myself that I did it.  Much of Poemas y Antipoemas is available in English translation, but not quite all of it.

The book has three sections, all with good, odd, punchy, quotable poems.  The “Self-portrait (Autorretrato),” just as an example from part II, a schoolteacher’s lament (Parra was a math teacher, and later a physics professor).  He has ruined his health:

Para ganar un pan imperdonable
Duro como la cara del burgués
Y con sabor y con olor a sangre.
***
To earn an unforgivable bread,
Hard like the face of the bourgeois
And with the taste and smell of blood.  (tr. me)

His nose is ruined “by the lime of the degrading chalk,” his ideals “brutalized by the singsong / of the five hundred hours a week.”

The Nicanor Parra site must have a revised version of the poem.  No ruined nose but rather a line about a pair of shoes; “sabor” and “olor” are reversed.  Heck if I know.  Check the PDF of the first edition if you don’t believe me.  Hey, maybe Parra excluded entire poems in later editions; thus their absence from the website.

The third section takes a turn, though.  These, I thought, were the antipoems.  The first poem in the section is a “Warning to the Reader.”  “The doctors of the law say this book shouldn't see light,” “My poetry may very well lead nowhere.”  Parra promises to “bury my quills in the heads of my readers!”  This is David Unger’s translation.

The next poem is “Rompecabezas,” “Puzzles” or more literally “headbreakers,” although Parra’s anitpoems are antipuzzles:

¿Para qué son estos estómagos?
¿Quién hizo esta mezcolanza?
…
Yo digo una cosa por otra.
***
For what are these stomachs?
Who made this mishmash?  (tr. me)
…
I say one thing for another.

If there is an elaborate word puzzle buried in this poem, I’ll never find it.  But there is no way any puzzle created by Nicanor Parra has a solution.  That would destroy my anti-faith in him.  In “Solo de Piano,” Parra reassures me:

Since we do not even have the consolation of a chaos
In the garden that yawns and fills with air,
A puzzle that we must solve before our death  (tr. William Carlos Williams!)

The antipoems, for all their jokiness, feel as autobiographical as that self-portrait .  From “Words to Tomás Lago,” a Chilean poet and champion of folk art:

Vinieros también esas conferencias desorganizadas
Ese polvo mortal de la Feria del Libro,
Vinieron, Tomás, esas elecciones angustiosas,
Esas ilusiones y esas alucianaciones.
***
There come those disorganized conferences
That deathly dust of the Book Fair,
There come, Tomás, those heartbreaking choices,
Those illusions and those hallucinations.  (tr. me)

Even antipoets have to go to book fairs, how sad.  Oh, that’s the next line.

How sad all this was!
How sad! but how happy at the time!

Think back on old times, the poet urges his friend,

Porque es justo pensar
Y porque es útil creer que pensamos.
***
Because it is right to think
And because it is useful to believe that we think.  (tr. me)

That collection of Alexander Vvedensky I read last summer was titled An Invitation for Me To Think, which would have been a good title for a Parra collection.  The great puzzle is that of existence – who made this mishmash – the solution is to think, to record our poems on rocks, to laugh with the antipoets.

But no: life doesn’t make sense - Nicanor Parra's greatest antipoem

Richard of Caravana de Recuerdos wanted people to read the poems and antipoems of Chilean physicist and antipoet Nicanor Parra.  We both read Parra’s Poemas y Antipoemas (1954).  Ricardo read a shiny new edition with an introduction and notes.  I read a battered old PDF of the first edition.  For some reason Parra has moved into English in selected poem editions – Rise of In Lieu of a Field Guide read a couple of those, including the one I read a couple years ago.  But I wanted the original book this time.

The Individual’s Soliloquy

I am the Individual.
First I lived by a rock.
(There I recorded some figures).

This is the beginning of the last of the Antipoemas.  The (anti)poem is a history of mankind.  Man’s first act worth noting is the creation of art.

The mindless translation is mine.  Allen Ginsberg loved this poem and performed it frequently.  He and Lawrence Ferlinghetti have an outstanding translation.  Their parenthetical line is “(I scratched some figures on it)” which is better, less formal, more evocative of the scene.  El diccionario also has, for the verb “grabar”, “engrave” (too technical), “incise,” “cut”- awfully close to “scratched.”  Although there is something to be said for “recorded.”  The Paleolithic art, the soliloquy, the antipoems – what are they but a record that he is the Individual.  The Spanish reader gets all the meanings at once.

The verb “grabar” is used throughout the poem, so the translator’s choice is going to do a lot of work.

The first line (“Yo soy el Individuo”) is repeated, too, eighteen more times, 15% of the entire poem.  Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti drop the capital “I” which again is more normal, less strident.  It is amusing that the Beats softened Parra a bit.  Maybe the capital was too authoritarian.

I then took a stone I found in the river
And began working on it,
Polishing it up,
I made it a part of my life.
But it's a long story.
I chopped some trees to sail on
Looking for fish,
Looking for lots of things,
(I'm the individual.)
Till I began getting bored again.  (tr. Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti)

The Individual is restless.  He invents or discovers things – fire and religion at this point, watches and sewing machines later.  His boredom at this point leads to philosophy and monotheism, I think.

Storms get boring,
Thunder, lightning,
I'm the individual.
O.K.
I began thinking a little bit,
Stupid questions came into my head,
Doubletalk.  (tr. G. & F.)

Parra’s line is “Falsas problemas,” but “Doubletalk” is perfect.  Books, cities, languages are created.  I began to wonder, by the end of the poem, if the Individual was not just man but also God.  After all this progress, a mystical glimpse “behind the curtains (Detrás de unas cortinas)” leads the Individual to wonder:

Better maybe that I return to that valley,
To that rock that served as my home,
And start recording anew,
To record backwards
The world upside down.
But no: life doesn’t make sense.  (tr. Amateur Reader)

Now that is the definition of an antipoem.

Nicanor Parra turned 100 in September.

What earthly joy remains free from bitterness? - Theodor Fontane's Irretrievable

The marriage of Count and Countess Holk has turned sour.  The children are old enough to go to boarding school; building the new beachfront mansion was a useful distraction, but it is now complete; the Countess has grown increasing judgmental, rigid, and a bit morbid, while the Count is too shallow to repair the damage himself.

That’s how Fontane’s Irretrievable (aka Beyond Recall, 1891) begins.  Early in the book, when the point of view hops around among several characters, I guessed that the Countess would be the focus, since she is the more interesting person.  When the Count is summoned to his official duties in Copenhagen, as gentleman-in-waiting to a Princess, I thought this was a device to get him out of the way, but no, the point of view now stays with Count Holk, moving to the big city where temptations await.

As Madame Bovary made clear, this kind of limited perspective technique is adept at finding the depth in shallow people.

The novel at this point becomes a detailed, even methodical, account of the steps by which the Count is led, or allows himself to be led, or leads himself, into a sexual affair with one of his colleagues.  Because of some bad luck, and because Holk is a fool, the consequences of the affair are sadder than he had expected.

It occurs to me that Irretrievable is something of a workplace comedy, where the “employment” is assisting and entertaining the elderly aunt of the Danish king.

They all met daily, alternating between the left- and the right-hand towers, and just as the company was always the same, so the entertainment, too, always took the same form, being limited to play-readings, poetry recitals, and charades.  (188)

Easy but dull.

Only near the end of the novel did I understand that the wife’s story had also been present through the book, like a soft cello playing behind the brighter instruments.  I use a musical analogy because the key moment of the novel is her strong response to a song early in the book, back in Chapter 4.

The music was already open on the piano, the lights were on, and they both began.  But what they had feared happened: voice and accompaniment failed to keep pace and they both burst out laughing, half embarrassed.  However, they started again at once and Elizabeth’s high, clear voice, still almost that of a child, rang through the two rooms.  Everyone listened in silence.  The countess seemed particularly moved and at the end of the last verse, she rose from her chair and went over to the piano.  Then, picking up the song still lying open on the music-rest, without saying a word to anyone, she left the room.  (28)

That last action is the secret chord that does not resolve for over 200 pages.  Much of the subtle art of the novel is in this story, the wife’s, the story that is not told.  The lyrics of the song are included, of course, just like in a Theodor Storm novella, even repeated several times.  Delicate things, Douglas Parmée shoves the English into footnotes.  “Peace is surely the best of all earthly happiness, what earthly joy remains free from bitterness?” (46).

No one writes like that nowadays. Nowadays one writes much worse. - Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, and Samuel Beckett read Theodor Fontane

Three examples of Fontane’s influence or perhaps just presence, one predictable, another unusual, and the third hard to believe.

Thomas Mann must have grown up almost immersed in Fontane’s fiction.  Fontane is a rare case – he worked as a journalist, but did not turn to fiction until late, not publishing his first novel until he was almost sixty, and writing a string of masterpieces in his seventies.  Mann, who was a wonder kid whose publications began when he was, I believe, 18, would have been a teen in northern Germany when all of these radical new northern German novels were appearing.

Mann was always appreciative of Fontane.  “If I may be permitted the personal confession: no writer of past or present stirs in me that kind of sympathy and gratitude, that immediate, instinctive delight, that reflex gaiety, warmth, and satisfaction, which I feel reading any of his verse, any line of his letters, any scrap of dialogue.”

I found that in Phillip Lopate’s Irretrievable Afterword, p. 260; it is from the 1910 essay “The Old Fontane.”  Mann is a writer of many modes, most of them not especially evocative of Fontane, but it is hard to imagine Buddenbrooks (1901) without Fontane’s example.  The first part of the first scene is pure Fontane.  Little Tony Buddenbrooks is on her grandfather’s lap reciting her newly-memorized catechism; the grandfather gently mocks not her but the innovations recently introduced into it.  The grandfather is brought to life by this one little gesture based on a social change that a modern reader may not even be able to detect any more.

I have not read Günter Grass’s 1995 novel Too Far Afield.  I am not sure I could read it well.  It is about history and German unification, but it is also about Theodor Fontane, and not only about him but to some large degree composed of Fontane quotations.  Like a novelistic collage.  Good luck finding an English-language reviewer who was able to detect any of this.  The title, Ein weites Feld, is from a phrase Old Briest says repeatedly – in fact they are the last words of Effi Briest – a hugely famous quotation that not only means nothing to English-language readers but is not even recognizable to someone who has read Fontane in translation, since the two translations I know do not translate Briest’s words as “too far afield.”  Impossible.

The unlikely Fontane fan is Samuel Beckett.  I will quote extensively from Beckett’s Polish translator and collaborator, Antoni Libera:

Beckett arrived with his typical punctuality, at twelve on the dot, not a second later.  To a meeting that wasn't connected with any creative plans or projects he usually came "empty-handed", as he liked to put it.  This time he was holding a small book, which turned out to be an old, very well-thumbed copy of Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane.

Beckett's close friends and those who are experts on his work will know that it was one of his favourite novels, which he often went back to and which he also referred to in his writing.  "Let us hasten home", says Mr Rooney to his old wife in the radio-play All That Fall, "and sit before the fire. We shall draw the blinds. You will read to me. I think Effi is going to commit adultery with the Major."  And in Krapp's Last Tape, as he's making his recording, old Krapp muses: "Effi... Could have been happy with her, up there on the Baltic, and the pines, and the dunes" - because the action of the novel takes place near Stettin - a city which now, as Szczecin, belongs to Poland.

All of that is accurate, except for some reason in Krapp’s Last Tape the name is spelled “Effie”: “Scalded the eyes out of me reading Effie again, a page a day, with tears again”  (p. 25 of the Grove Weidenfeld edition).  Back to Libera and Beckett:

I plucked up the courage to ask the vital question:

"Why do you like that novel so much?"

There was a long pause before I got an answer.

"I used to dream of writing something like it.  And I still have a bit of that dream left.  But I never did.  I never did write it..."  He broke off.

"You never did write it?" I brazenly tried to drag the words out of him.

Another wan smile, and then, unfolding his hands, he said:

"For... I was born too late.  No one writes like that nowadays.  Nowadays one writes much worse."  He glanced at me and added jokingly:  "But don't worry.  The world is changing.  Perhaps you'll manage it."

Beckett seems to have actually lived in a Beckett play.  A page a day would be a strange way to read Effi Briest.  Still, what good company for reading Fontane.

Why Fontane can be slow going - more ramblin'

When my old book club read Effi Briest – this was ages ago – several readers found the late 19th century Prussian setting and the German names and titles to be an obstacle.  Or perhaps more of a kind of friction, a thickening of the prose that was no longer present for these experienced readers of novels about Paris or London or St. Petersburg, which they had visited so often in fiction.

The friction was rough enough in Irretrievable that it slowed me down, though I had assumed I would be comfortable enough.  The setting is not even in Prussia, but mostly behind the scenes of the Danish court – the monarchical court, not the legal one – in Copenhagen, and occasionally in rural Schleswig, which at the time of the novel was Danish, but would be Prussian soon enough.  Note how I have snuck in another Scandinavian novel in German disguise.

There were times when I had to slow down quite a bit, either to puzzle out some mysterious reference or to file it away for later.  I mean, the functionings of the Danish court!  How helpful to have such easy access to good internet maps.

Fontane’s method contributes to the difficulty.  Characters are created from minute accumulations of detail, including pages of subdued scenes and trivial dialogue  – “social chatter” is what the editor of the NYRB Classics edition calls it (259).  Within every scene, there will be something in the chatter that is either deeply revealing about one or more characters, or will when mixed with something later becomes meaningful.  The effect is artful and subtle, but a cost of the method is that some of the chatter is merely that, deliberately shallow and sometimes even close to meaningless.

On top of this, as is common with novels of manners, there is little action of the melodramatic, plot-moving sort, but rather a great deal of ordinary motion, characters assembling for meals or taking walks.  Irretrievable is particularly slow, or daring, in this regard, with the first moment of action, the first point in which a reader can be clear what the novel is about, occurring on page 201 of 256.  In fact, two dramatic events occur at that same point, one genuinely melodramatic, a “damsel in distress” moment, as if Fontane wants to awaken the reader who has been lulled into a nap, or who did not notice that the first, character-driven dramatic event occurred in the white space between chapters.

As French as Fontane’s novels feel in some ways, and as concerned as they are with sex and adultery, Prussian standards of what could be directly expressed in print were much more Victorian than Parisian.  Given Fontane’s style, though, I doubt more permissive publishing would have changed much.

We are not so far, in Fontane, from basing an entire novel on a woman planning a party.  I do not think of Mrs. Dalloway as a novel where nothing happens; nor is that the case in Fontane novels, as the duel in Effi Briest or the climax of Schach von Wuthenow (1882) make clear enough.

Look at that title – English readers without a semester of German will have no idea how to pronounce it or what it is even supposed to mean.  It’s just a person's name.  The novella has been translated with the fake but less intimidating title of A Man of Honor.  Its story goes like this: romance, indiscretion, domestic stuff, domestic stuff, domestic stuff, OMG WHAT JUST HAPPENED HOW HORRIBLE, ironic ending.  That was from memory, so perhaps I did not count the instances of “domestic stuff” properly, and my whole point is that whatever delaying devices Fontane uses, I vividly remember where the story ends up.

I think Fontane is a terrific writer, but for some kinds of good readers he will be a real test of patience.  That’s what I took 600 words to say.

I really did think I was going to get to Samuel Beckett today.  How that was going to work – anyway, tomorrow, Mann, Grass, Beckett; more social chatter.

Why Theodor Fontane is good - no quotes, no examples, no nothin' - a ramble

Maybe ten years ago I read a number of the short novels of Theodor Fontane, the German novelist with confusingly French name,* and I reread his masterpiece Effi Briest (1894), still pre-blog.  In Germany he is, or at least used to be, much assigned to youngsters, which ought to make him hated, but my understanding is that a number of his characters are among the most beloved in German fiction, like Jo March or Jane Eyre in English.

Fontane’s greatest skill was creating lifelike or rounded or “real” characters, really wonderful characters.  He used techniques borrowed from French literature.  He brought Flaubert into German literature, much like Eça de Queirós was doing in Portuguese literature at the same time, with similarly vivid results, although he has none of Eça’s satirical savagery.

Great, lifelike characters had not been the strength of German literature in the 19th century.  Characters were flat or perhaps a better word is abstract, social and physical settings idealized, plots episodic.  German-language fiction was full of uncanny effects, whether as outright fantasy or the unsettling weirdness of Adalbert Stifter, who I would suggest as the extreme end of what I am describing.  I suppose it is not surprising that to the extent German literature seeped into English, the effect was mostly seen in fantasy literature.  A well-rounded character would be out of place in a Poe story, and might even destroy the effect.

Fontane is a realist in a Kantian sense.  Stifter, Hoffmann, Goethe – idealists.  As if this is any help.  Aside from the German setting, Fontane kept in touch with two distinctive aspects of German literature: first, he liked to include uncanny touches amidst the so-called realism; second, he made use of songs and poems within the novel, a device that is socially accurate but also connects his fiction to that of Theodor Storm and many others.

The novel I just read, Irretrievable (1891) makes especially poignant use of a couple of songs.  What more effective way to reach for a sense of beauty than to mesh the action with a poem?  Or what cheaper way?  But in this case, effective, so poignant, so sad.

Fontane firmly joins the European mainstream in his interest in stories about adultery and marriage.  He does not have a hint of the censoriousness that some readers find in, say, Tolstoy.  Well, even I find it in Tolstoy.  You pick a better example.  Fontane first, writes with some distance, and second, shows great sympathy for human weakness.  Any reader of, say, Effi Briest, who thinks that Fontane has picked a “position” on adultery will be surprised when he tries a different book.

Fontane ought to be read much more widely than he is.  A lot of readers would love him.  Tomorrow, though: the case against, or at least a sympathetic glance at those other readers.  Anything to avoid writing about the book itself (as with this very post).

*  No silent vowels in German.  The last “e” is a schwa.  Fon-TAH-nuh.  A French name made German.

Praxis would destroy many of my fantasies - Paul Scheerbart invents perpetual motion machines

Event: German Literature Month, hosted by Lizzie’s Literary Life and Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat.

Book: The Perpetual Motion Machine by Paul Scheerbart (1910).

Scheerbart describes his various attempts to invent a perpetual motion machine, a “perpet.”

You have to imagine that you are actually in the box K, that this is a kind of vehicle, and the source of power is the effect of gravity on the weight L, which turns the giant wheels in such a way to launch the whole thing forward, with poor terrified me trapped in the dangling K-car.  The whole concept is based on an imaginative misunderstanding of gravity.

All through the month of March 1908 I wrote astral novellas, which took place on asteroids where the force of gravity is weaker than on earth.  (32)

Scheerbart calls his creations not inventions but “stories.”  The book is a memoir, but also a novel that the author enacted in order to create the book, and also a parable about imaginative creation.  The potential of a story leads to a reconfiguration of society:

It’s somewhat tiring and trying, to picture this kind of building activity; a couple thousand utopian novels could be written on this subject alone. (27)

The thought of a thousand utopian novels is what I find trying, and thus it is a relief to have Scheerbart imagine them for me.

This was without a doubt one of the most beautiful periods of my life; I had completely forgotten the Earth.  I was doing very badly in terms of finances, but I didn’t care.  I constantly argued with my wife, telling her that our dire straits themselves were a sign that something better was coming our way.  Yet I was never quite able to win her over to this point of view.  All the same I was so happy – as one can only be when constructing and working out the implications of new worlds…  (36-40, ellipses in original)

I believe the irony is clear enough in this passage to demonstrate the tone of the book.  It does not matter that the “stories” do not work.  No, it is better:

These are naturally only fantasies.  Actual reality is always completely different and destroys a good many fantasies.  And so I must honestly confess that I really don’t wish very strongly for the perpetuum to becomes practically usable.  Praxis would destroy many of my fantasies.  This I know with certainty.  (81)

As a glutton, I was dismayed to learn on p. 59 that Scheerbart is one of the people who dislikes eating: “It’s always been deplorable that we can’t just derive our sustenance from air.”  A page of scifi Schopenhauer follows, as the transcendence of earthly things leads us to our more authentic “astral existence.”  The gravity Scheerbart wants to escape is that of the material world, of the imperfectly functioning mechanism of life.

Recommended to anyone who does not mind some abstraction in her science fiction, or mechanical diagrams in his novel of ideas.

Andrew Joron is the translator, Wakefield Press the publisher.  More Scheerbart at seraillon and at Writers No One Reads.

There are even places where people believe they can attain salvation through cowbells! - mysteries in Mysteries

No, I don’t know what that means.  It’s in Chapter 13 of Knut Hamsun’s Mysteries.

At Vapour Trails, Séamus has written about the mysteries of Mysteries.  The religious mysteries, mostly Christian, perhaps something else.  The next novel, Pan, is the pagan one.  I was surprised, this time though, how much religious language there was in Hunger, and there is far more in Mysteries.  The deliberate link of the two main women in the novel, Dagny and Martha, with Mary (Magdalena) and Martha  –  Séamus has completely convinced me about that.  And about how the Midget works as an alternative Christ figure to the crazy protagonist Nagel.

Séamus puts the novel in the tradition of the crisis of faith that was engaging so many writers at the end of the 19th century and would scoop up countless more.  Religious belief, shaken by all of the social and scientific changes of the time, wither had to be rebuilt (Dostoevsky’s solution) or replaced with a less satisfying alternative – science or philosophy or art.  Less satisfying for many people, at least, including Knut Hamsun who pushed his characters to extremes of behavior and irrationality to challenge, however futilely, the rational forces that were destroying something essential around them.

Hamsun was hardly alone here.  Another of my favorite lines:

“You mentioned Ibsen,” Nagel continued, in the same state of agitation, though no one had mentioned the name. (Ch. 13)

This is the one place where I truly identified with Nagel.

My experience has been that people who search for meaning usually find it somewhere.  Pykk has read far more Hamsun books than I have, so he is able to move the story along into his later writing.  Where others see religion, Pykk writes, “I, thinking about Hamsun some more, I see houses,” as Hamsun eventually replaces his homeless, restless wanderers, present in all three of these early novels but also in Hamsun’s books of the next twenty years, with a belief in place and soil that will cause trouble for him when the Nazis pick up the idea along many other much worse ideas that an elderly Hamsun could not see, flattered and blinded as he was by the German interest in this one particular idea of his.

Mysteries was the only one of these three novels in which I could glimpse Hamsun’s future political problems.  The third person narrator and the stronger role of characters living a community, contrasted to this wild outsider, made the proto-fascist aspect of Nagel’s irrationalism easier to see, especially in the Nietzsche an twaddle about “great men” in his last long stream of consciousness rant in Chapter 17.  not that the novel itself is fascist – if anything, the opposite – but I can see how a writer on this path could, with some historical bad luck, make a terrible wrong turn.  And similarly, I can see how László Krasznahorkai could make such fruitful use of Mysteries in his 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance, which is explicitly about the fascist impulse in our attraction to the irrational.

The Vapour Trails and Pykk posts are both typically insightful – thanks!  Séamus gives a nod to Nagel’s story-telling, which would make for a good post of its own.  Just for example, the long story in Chapter 10 where the narrator pees his pants because he doesn’t want his date to know he needs to visit a bathroom, or the genuinely frightening ghost story in Chapter 11.  Someone else should write that one.

when I get on the subject of my cowbells, I get carried away - Hamsun gets carried away

The key place where Hamsun updates Dostoevsky is in Chapter 7, where the oddball outsider Nagel is at a party arguing about Gladstone.  The British Prime Minister, that Gladstone.  I am not entirely sure why this is the context.  Hamsun loathed England and everything about it, and though this would get him in big trouble forty years later, I do not understand it here.  But it is Dostoevsky I am after, Hamsun’s improvement on Dostoevsky:

“He is a tenacious fighter for good causes, daily assumes personal responsibility for justice, truth, and God.  How could he possibly fail?  Two and two is four, truth has conquered, glory be to God!  Now Gladstone can go beyond two and two.  I have heard him claim, in a budget debate, that seventeen times twenty-three is three hundred ninety-one, and he came off with a smashing, enormous victory…  I stood there checking his arithmetic – three hundred ninety-one – and it was correct, yet I turned it over and over in my mind, saying to myself: Wait a minute.  Seventeen times twenty-three is three hundred ninety-seven!  I knew very well that it was ninety-one, but against all logic I decided on ninety-seven, just to oppose this man, this man who made it his business to be in the right.”  (Ch. 7, ellipses mine)

As Dostoevsky’s Underground Man said, “I agree that two times two makes four is a splendid thing, but if we’re going to lavish praise, then two times two makes five is sometimes also a very charming little thing.”  And given that, imagine the insouciant piquancy of 17 x 23 = 397.

Dostoevsky was at this point arguing directly with Nikolay Chernyshevsky, making Mysteries a direct descendant of Chernyshevsky, which is amusing.

Nagel has “a burning need to preserve my conviction of what is right” even when he is “unquestionably” wrong.  How can Hamsun’s characters be of such interest if they are merely insane?  They are fictionally embodied protests against the Enlightenment.  The idea that is so shocking and destructive is that the wrong answer, wrong decision, even wrong moral act is in some psychological way necessary.  Hamsun is after Dostoevsky one of the great early depicters of the kind of irrationalism that is going to preoccupy so many later writers.

The distance created by the third person allows Mysteries to offer a counter-argument, an implicit defense of rationalism tempered by compassion and community.  Nagel is saved from self-destruction at one point, for example, by what I take to be the kind action of the weakest citizen of the town.    My guess is that, given the ambiguities of the novel, Hamsun is recognizing the power and importance of the irrational without endorsing it.  But who knows.

Nagel himself has an oddly quantitative bent.  Another favorite bit from Mysteries:

“Have I told you about my cowbells? Well, I see you don’t know anything about me.  I’m an agronomist, of course, but I have other interests as well.  Thus far I’ve collected two hundred and sixty-seven cowbells.  I began ten years ago and now, I’m happy to say, I have a very fine collection.”  (Ch. 15)

Although, to pick a single line, this earlier mention of the cowbells, used as a kind of pickup line – he later proposes to the woman he is addressing – can’t be beat:

“But to get back to the point – when I get on the subject of my cowbells, I get carried away.”  (Ch. 9)

We can all get behind that kind of irrationalism.  What else am I doing here?

Tonight I made a fool of myself and shocked everyone by my eccentric behavior - Hamsun steals from Dostoevsky

Everyone who reads Hunger compares it to Dostoevsky.  I did it, too.  The voice of the narrator makes him feel like a cousin of a Dostoevsky character, of Raskolnikov or the Underground Man.  The religious and philosophical base is quite different, with Friedrich Nietzsche replacing the Orthodox church.  Boy does that sound glib.  It’s not so far off, though.

Mysteries does not feel so much like Dostoevsky.  Rather it openly rips off Dostoevsky, repeatedly.  Two examples today and one tomorrow.  I’ll bet there are more I missed.

Chapter 8 is the only one with a title: “White Nights.”  That is also the title of a Dostoevskynovella from 1849.  In Hamsun’s novel, weirdo Nagel wanders around in the woods with beautiful Dagny.  He tells her strange stories and falls in love with her.  She is not entirely unresponsive, but they will have to just be friends.  In the Dostoevsky story, replace “the woods” with “St. Petersburg.”  Both stories, the chapter and the novella, successfully represent an ecstatic state caused by some combination of the possibility of romantic love and the strange northern summer night.

I will interrupt myself to note that this chapter begins with the best paragraph in the entire novel:

It was a beautiful night.  The few people who were still on the streets looked gay and animated.  In the cemetery a man was pushing a wheelbarrow and singing to himself, despite the hour.  Everything was so still that his voice was the only sound to be heard.  The town lay sprawled below the doctor’s house like a strange, monstrous insect, flat on its belly with its tentacles stretched out in all directions.  Here and there it would extend a leg or draw in a feeler, as now down on the fjord, where a small steamer glided along seemingly without a sound, leaving a black furrow behind it.

The insect is part of the best single sentence.  Kinda changes the mood a little.  The word “strange” has appeared several times in this post already.

Just as blatant is Hamsun’s parody of The Idiot.  Nagel is a parody of the Christ-like Prince Myshkin, who desires to do good put somehow destroys whatever he gets near.  A major difference is that Nagel is also a devil figure.  He constantly flips from charity to chaos, friend to bully, without warning.  He is manipulative where Myshkin is guileless – but at times he seems to want to be guileless.

The place to see Nagel as Myshkin most clearly is in Chapter 6, when he crashes a party and tells a bizarre and outrageous story of a dream that climaxes with a brutal beating.  Prince Myshkin’s story ends with an execution, so Hamsun has toned it down a bit.  Oddly, in both cases the inappropriate stories end up impressing a woman who would have been better off ignoring at all.

“Tonight I made a fool of myself and shocked everyone by my eccentric behavior in order to get you into a kinder frame of mind so that you would listen to me when I tried to explain.  I succeeded, you listened to me and you understood.”  (Ch. 6)

Mysteries can also be described as a story about a stalker.  Someone who knew more about the subject could write a good piece about that.

If only I were done with Dostoevsky, but I will save the last example for tomorrow.

I’ve never heard of anything so insane! - let's get the Knut Hamsun Mysteries readalong moving

What am I waiting for?  Here it is, the Knut Hamsun Mysteries readalong event, where a number of thrill-seeking readers enjoy one of the all-time craziest novels of the 19th century.

The way this usually works is that I kick things off with a light, superficial post, and then link to the subsequent, better, writing by other readers.  The only difference this time is that Jean at Howling Frog Books has already put up a clean summary of the 1892 novel, calling it “a mystery all the way through.”  I was ready to argue with that judgment, until I thought about the novel’s final page.  No, Jean’s right.  Maybe we can work out what kind of mystery it is.  Not a police procedural, not a cat mystery, not a locked-room mystery.

Jean read the most recent translation by Sverre Lyngstad, now a Penguin Classic; I read the 1971 Gerry Bothmer version; Pykk showed me a quote from the 1926 Arthur G. Chater translation that was so different in tone from what I read that it could be from a different novel.  I make no judgment about which is best.

In the Penguin edition, an important secondary character is named Miniman, while in Bothmer he is The Midget.  There is not just a vocabulary difference here, but rather an interpretive one, because as far as I can tell the character names The Midget is not actually a midget, and is not even unusually short in anything but self-confidence.  He has picked up the diminutive nickname as part of the degrading abuse to which he is subjected.  So one translator picks a word that we have but is not quite right, while the other goes for an invented word.

Maybe an abused Midget who is not really a midget gives an idea about the peculiarities of this novel.

The story is in the “stranger comes to town” category.  Nagel is a chaos seed, or wants to be one.  He descends on a little Norwegian town with the intent of disrupting it somehow.  He is insane: a pathological liar, a depressive, perhaps a sociopath.  He is something of a devil figure, in that he tries to corrupt the weakest members of the community.  Also something of a Christ figure in a very strange way.  Well, not Christ exactly, but rather a Christ-like Dostoevsky character, which is not the same thing.  That I want to save for tomorrow.

Reading Hunger, published two years earlier, I wonder how crazy the narrator is really supposed to be.  He spends the novel reduced to an extreme state of desperation, so he is hard to judge.  In Pan, published two years after Mysteries, the narrator is pretty clearly insane at certain points in the novel, although there is some question about other times.  Both novels are written in the first person, in retrospect, which by itself is a source of ambiguity.

The main character of Mysteries is a close copy of those other two, and since the novel is in the third person, the filter is removed.  The question is not is he crazy but how crazy?  The device of the outside disembodied floating narrator allows distance and eventually certainty.  The occasional moves into free associative stream of consciousness rants only emphasize the similarity of the three characters.

I was really wondering why Hamsun bothered to use the third person in Mysteries.  The answer is that he needed it for the last page, a bit of ambiguity-multiplying technical outrageousness that had me laughing.  Maybe I should stop writing about the last page.  There is plenty more to keep me busy.

The title quotation is near the end of Chapter 11.

It may be hard on the reader - an inspirational quote from Kyle Gann

First, a reminder: next week we will implement readalong blogging procedures for Knut Hamsun’s Mysteries and Nicanor Parra’s Poemas y Antipoemas. Still plenty of time to read either, or both.  The Hamsun novel is by the far the crazier of the two, but the Parra is fun, too:

The author will not answer for any problems his writings may raise:
It may be hard on the reader
But he'll have to accept this from here on in.

(click Anthology, then “Warning to the Reader”)

Now, an inspirational quotation.

Kyle Gann is one of the great critics of what he calls post-classical music, works grounded in one way or another in the classical or Romantic tradition yet distant enough that most supposed fans of classical music hate them, composers like Alvin Lucier.  I have learned so much from Gann, who now is a composition teacher at Bard and thus reserves his criticism for his PostClassic blog, or for books.  His forthcoming book on Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata could make an appearance on Wuthering Expectations.

The quote.  Gann is, in the oldest professorial tradition, complaining about his students.  I’ll skip all that.  I want this part:

No one has ever called me un-opinionated, but when I was 18, I was going to be damned before I would admit that there was a piece of modern music in existence that I couldn’t understand.  I’d listen to the same record a dozen times in a row until the piece started to make sense to me.  I wasn’t committed to liking everything I heard, but I was going to understand every single piece well enough to understand why somebody liked it, even if I didn’t, and I was going to be able to articulate why, of all the complex and opaque pieces ever written, I’d decided I didn’t like this one.  I withheld judgments for years, decades, until I felt I had done sufficient analysis to come to an opinion.

Impassioned Appreciationism.  Of course I admire Gann because he flatters by prejudices.  The last line is challenging, though.  I certainly jump to conclusions too quickly.  Sure, we can do both things at once – judge and withhold judgment.  I am impressed, though, by anyone willing to say “I don’t know” or “I don’t get it – not yet.”

In my own experience, whenever I have put in the kind of work Gann describes I invariably end up liking, or appreciating, or let’s say no longer disliking the piece in question.  I have not just studied the text but extended my sympathy to those who genuinely liked it.  It usually turns out that they were to some degree right.  Why else do I read so much criticism?  Show me what you see.  Maybe then I will see it, too.

it just wasn’t as I’d imagined it, and so the pleasure wasn’t that great ––– Strindberg, big and small

There is a minor character in A Dream Play, the Billposter – you know, like theatrical posters – who is the first happy person the goddess meets on earth.  “beside him is a fishing net with a green handle” – what could that mean?

DAUGHTER.  You all complain, at least with your eyes and voices.

BILLPOSTER.  I don’t complain that much… not now that I’ve got my net and a green fishing chest!

DAUGHTER.  And that makes you happy?

BILLPOSTER.  Oh yes, so happy, so… it was my childhood dream and it’s all come true, even though I am fifty now, of course…

DAUGHTER.  Fifty years for a fishing net and chest…

BILLPOSTER.  A green chest, a green one…  (186)

All of those crazy ellipses are in the original.  The only thing I omitted was an asterisk by the translator explaining that “green” might possibly be symbolic.  This bit is not much in itself, but the follow-up is excellent.

OFFICER.  It’s the Billposter, with his net…  How was the fishing?  Good?

BILLPOSTER.  Oh yes!  The summer was warm and rather long… the net was pretty good, but not quite as I’d imagined it!

[snip some stuff with the Officer and his girl trouble]

DAUGHTER.  What was wrong with the net?

BILLPOSTER.  Wrong?  Well, there wasn’t anything wrong, not really… it just wasn’t as I’d imagined it, and so the pleasure wasn’t that great.

DAUGHTER.  Just how had you imagined it?

BILLPOSTER.  How? ––– I can’t really say…

DAUGHTER.  Let me tell you! ––– You had imagined it a little differently!  Green, yes, but not that green!

BILLPOSTER.  You do know, don’t you!  (191-2, S. went a little crazy with the !, didn’t he?)

The Billposter is not a character of any depth.  This is it; you’ve seen it all.  Yet Strindberg has given him an outstandingly human moment in the play, and one that contrasts with all of the passion and agony of most of the rest of A Dream Play, a moment worthy of Pascal.

But perhaps I just recognize myself in it.  Many others, too.  So often in the dream plays, I just recognize Strindberg, who is awfully interesting whether as a creative artist or a clinical case study.  The central characters can be close to blanks, because they are needed to experience all of the successive steps of the dream journey and to express the Big Ideas of Strindberg, as when the Daughter jerks the play to a halt to deliver a lecture on Buddhism:

DAUGHTER.  In the dawn of time before the sun shone, Brahma, the divine primal force, allowed Maya, the world mother, to seduce him, so that he might multiply himself.  [etc.]  The world , life, and mankind, are therefore only phantoms, an illusion, a dream image –––

POET.  My dream!

DAUGHTER.  A true dream! ––– [more Brahma]  But this yearning for suffering conflicts with the desire for pleasure, or Love…  do you understand what Love is yet, a supreme joy coupled to the most profound suffering, sweetest when it is most bitter?  (243)

This is the tiresome Strindberg of the Age of Aquarius, crowding out his minor characters and original imagery for someone else’s predigested mix of Schopenhauer and Eastern religion.  Pedro Calderón de la Barca spends his play working hard to earn the claim that life is a dream.  Strindberg assumes it from the beginning and then treats it as a revelation, as if I had not been following along.

But this is the risk of Strindberg’s later technique, of his originality.  A scene that surprises with its audacity is followed by, or mixed with, received twaddle; images that have lost some of their shock only because they have been stolen by so many films are accompanied by Strindberg’s own thefts from across two thousand years of theater.

the scene is dull and says nothing, but cannot be excluded ––– Bergman directs A Dream Play

Ingmar Bergman devotes a chapter of The Magic Lantern to A Dream Play (1901).  “In 1986, I was to direct Strindberg’s A Dream Play for the fourth time, a decision that seemed good” (35), even though the three earlier attempts had “come to grief” or “turned out poor” or “been ruined” (36).  But this time, despite the small stage, pregnant lead actress (the great Lena Olin), and heartbroken stage designer, Bergman tries again, as certain kinds of artists do.

I wanted the audience to experience the stench of the backyard of the Advocate’s office, the cold beauty  of Fagervik’s  summer countryside in snow, the sulphorous mist and glint of hell in Skamsund and the magnificent flowers round the Rising Castle, the old theatre behind the theatre corridor.  (36)

Hang on, I want to return to that stage designer.

The designer’s lips trembled and he looked at me with his slightly protruding eyes.  ‘I want her to come back,’ he whispered.  I did not embark on a cure of souls and persisted, but a few weeks later, he broke down and said that he couldn’t cope, after which he packed his bags and returned to Gothenburg, where he hoisted sail and went to sea with a new lover.  (36)

Someday a Swedish director will make a film based on this chapter.

In A Dream Play Indra’s Daughter (an Indian deity) descends to earth to experience humanity.  The first thing she see is that Rising Castle, a flower-like structure steadily growing out of a pile of manure, the primary sex-and-dirt image in this play.

DAUGHTER:  Tell me, Father, why do flowers grow out of dirt?

GLAZIER [piously].  Because they don’t like the dirt, so they hasten up into the light, to flower and die. (181, pages from the OUP edition)

This is not Strindberg’s answer.  The goddess plunges into the muck, experiencing love, marriage, poverty, and so on, accompanied by a number of Strindbergish figures, until she reasserts her godhood and brings the play to a close in a Prospero-like manner, in verse, even.

DAUGHTER.
Our parting is at hand, the end approaches;
Farewell you child of man, you dreamer,
You poet who understands best how to live;
Hovering on wings above the earth,
You dive at times into the mire
To graze against it, not fasten in it!  (246)

Bergman worries over scene after scene.  “[T]he unhappy coal-heavers are a taxing affair.”  In the Fingal’s Cave scene characters “declaim beautiful and worthless verses about each other, the vilest and the most lovely side by side” (39).  That scene climaxes in a shipwreck and a vision of Christ walking on the water; it involves one of the strangest mixes of tone I have ever seen, equal to the most baffling parts of Goethe’s Faust. 

The rising waves threaten to drown them in the cave.

DAUGHTER.  If only I were sure it is a ship…

POET.  To tell you the truth…  I don’t think it is a ship... it is a two-storied house, with trees outside… and… a telephone tower…  A tower reaching up into the skies…  It is the modern Tower of Babel, sending its wires up there – to communicate with those above…

DAUGHTER.  Child, human thoughts need no metal wires to transmit themselves; ––– The prayers of the devout make their way through every world…  That is certainly no Tower of Babel, for if you would storm heaven, then storm it with your prayers.  (234-5, ellipses all Strindberg’s)

Have I just copied out a chunk of Swedenborg, updated for the age of telephony?  The characters at this point pop back out in the theater to witness the satirical argument of the Deans – “The following scene in the theatre corridor is dull and says nothing, but cannot be excluded” (Bergman, 40).

Of course the production is a failure, as was, on a smaller scale my reading of the play.  “So much effort, pain, anxiety, tedium, hope, all to no avail” (51).  This was Bergman’s last try, with this play, not with Strindberg.  Not mine, though, not yet.

Strindberg becomes part of the great pancake - To Damascus - Life used to be just a great nonsense.

STRANGER:  I’ll soon believe nothing is impossible.  This is the worst I have ever known.

MOTHER:  Oh no.  There's worse possible.  Just you wait.

That beautiful sentiment is from Act II, Scene 5 of To Damascus I  (1898).  These are the most perfectly Strindbergian lines I found in all of Strindberg.  Why did Samuel Beckett even bother (because Beckett is funnier).  This play is Strindberg’s return to drama, practically to writing, after several years of spiritual, artistic, sexual, you name it crisis.  It is not his return to theater, since the play is unplayable, not that that has ever stopped a theater director.

Two great artistic benefits came out of Strindberg’s crisis.  First, he abandoned his misogyny, finding the female within himself and turning his attention to integrating the male and female principle, etc., etc., not a good idea but as bad ideas go much less painful to read and I think more imaginatively fruitful than Woman-as-Enemy.  Some of this he picked up from alchemy, some from Swedenborg, some perhaps from his second wife.

Then second, he invented the dream play, or his version of it.  Strindberg acknowledged The Tempest and Life Is a Dream as precedents, directing attention away from his great debt to Goethe’s Faust and his enemy Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.  I love all of these plays.  None of the three To Damascus plays rank with them, although A Dream Play (1901) might.

As the title suggests, To Damascus is a conversion narrative, with a Strindberg-like Stranger who as the Saul who becomes Paul.  He is subjected to a series of trials and torments on his way from this world into the next, from doubt to belief. 

STRANGER:  Yes.  I’ve been noticing everything lately.  Not just things and incidents, forms and colours – now I see thoughts and what things signify.  Life used to be just a great nonsense.  Now it has a meaning, and I see a purpose in it where before I only saw a game of chance.  (To Damascus I, Act I, Sc. 1)

Since the play has just begun, the Stranger is only in the preparatory stage of conversion.  There are three plays (the first two written in 1898, the last in 1901) not because Strindberg had planned a trilogy but because he doubted that he had really gotten the Stranger across the divide.  It is as if there are always more tests.  Strindberg was likely right about that.

The form is completely free, limited only by the convention the scene.  Sets float around, light and sound replace action, and characters all have allegorical labels.  Dream logic prevails, supposedly.  I have doubts.    The results are passages like this one, perhaps my favorite in all the Strindberg I read:

DOCTOR:  He’s lost already, like a broken egg.  Now he’ll be whipped into a froth, and atomized, and become part of the great pancake.  All right, then.  Go to hell.  [To the OTHERS.]  Howl, victims!  Howl! [The GUESTS howl.]  (To Damascus II, Act IV, Sc. 1)

No point in giving any context; context will only damage the sublimity of the great pancake.

For the To Damascus plays I have switched to the Michael Meyer translation in The Plays of Strindberg, Volume II, Vintage.