The Aliens of Ancient Rome

This is a micro-review of Harald Voetmann’s 2010 novel Awake, beautifully translated from the Danish (but not till 2021) by Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen.

Awake is short … but regardless, I almost gave up on it because it was so … disgusting in places! For the strong of stomach, here’s an example:

A fat, ruddy savage stomps around in the sand in the costume of the goddess Diana with an amber wig and a woman’s breast stitched onto the left side of his saffron tunic. He slices open the belly of a pregnant sow with a spear. She’s howling and trying to flee. The contents flop out and trail after her in the sand, and yes, I can make out the young; a tiny bloody squirming clump that will be alive a few more moments.

But I’m glad I persisted, because it might be the most convincing and evocative rendering of an ancient society (in all its alien-ness and sometimes disgusting-ness) that I have ever come across.

This novel (historically based) is told in several “voices”: Pliny the Elder, who among much else, wrote the Naturalis Historia (perhaps the first encylopedia ever written); Pliny the Younger, also an author, and the Elder’s nephew and adopted son; and a slave called Diocles. An additional voice consists of passages from the Naturalis Historia itself.

Both Plinys are associated with the volcanic disaster that buried Pompeii in 79 CE. The Elder perished attempting to rescue a friend and his family. The Younger wrote two letters to the historian Tacitus, describing the eruption.

There’s a long review of Awake in the New York Review of Books, 11/2/23. (This is one example of my finding out about books via the NYRB)

If you end up enjoying Awake, you’ll be pleased to know that it’s the first of a trilogy. The second volume (also recently translated) is called Sublunar. As for the third (presumably still only in Danish) … I haven’t tracked this down as of this writing. Voetmann still seems a bit under the radar, I mean he doesn’t even have an (English) Wikipedia article yet!

Reading Evangeline out loud, in Canada

For quite a few years now, reading aloud with other people has been a pleasurable — as well as educational — part of my life. Every week, I join several other folks over Zoom, to take turns reading some classic literary work to each other. [If you would like to join us, look for the “Shakespeare Night” sessions in the Meetup group called “Hack Manhattan”. Note that, despite our group’s title, we read many things in addition to Shakespeare.]

Another manifestation of this, is the tradition my wife and I have of reading aloud on long car trips. Sometimes we just choose a book for its general interest (e.g. Huckleberry Finn). But last year, when we planned a driving trip through parts of Atlantic Canada, my reading choice was more “targeted”.

Reading througn my guidebook in advance, I noticed a text box entitled “Acadian Deportation”. Until recent years, I was never much interested in history, so I had not been aware of this terrible part of Canada’s past. The Acadians were descendants of French settlers.  In what has been described as an ethnic cleansing, many of them were forcibly deported from Canada, by the British, during the mid-18th century,  About 11,500 Acadians were expelled; of these, around one-third died from disease and drowning. (In perhaps the only ray of light in this situation, Spain — which controlled Louisiana at the time — invited some of the Acadians to settle there, where they became known as Cajuns.)

My travel guide also mentioned that the US poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote an epic poem about the Acadian expulsion called Evangeline (1847). This rang a vague bell in my head, but I have to admit that my main association with Longfellow, until then, was a bearded gentleman in the “Authors” card game that I played when I was a kid.  (And oh yes, didn’t he write that Hiawatha, with its strange drumbeat rhythms?  So familiar in one way, yet probably never read by me.)

Nevertheless, I decided to put Evangeline into my iPhone, so that on our (often long) drives in Canada, my spouse and I could read through this work aloud. (In practice, since — long guilty story short — my wife turned out to be “the” driver, I was the one to actually do the reading.)

It turned out that Evangeline is really a long poem, and we didn’t actually finish the reading process till returning, some weeks later, from a visit to our daughter and granddaughter in Connecticut. Evangeline turned out not to be not the easiest thing in the world for me to take in. There is undeniablty a sentimentality, and a religiosity, that strike me as old-fashioned.

But there were several substantial pluses for me. I learned that the form of Evangeline is a real tour de force. It is the most familiar — and perhaps the most successful — example of “dactylic hexameter” in English. Longfellow used as his model the line structure of Greek and Roman classical poetry … which certainly does not come naturally to the English language!  He writes using six three-syllable “feet” per line, first syllable accented (would have been “long” in classical times), with a two-part foot sometimes taking the place of a three-part foot. Here is an example from the beginning of the poem … an accent mark has been placed after the first syllable of each foot:

THIS’ is the for’est prime’val. The mur’muring pi’nes and the hem’locks,
Bear’ded with moss’, and in’ garments green’, indistinct’ in the twi’light,
Stand’ like Dru’ids of eld’, with voi’ces sad’ and prophet’ic,
Stand’ like harp’ers hoar’, with beards’ that rest’ on their bos’oms.
Loud’ from its rock’y caverns, the deep’-voiced neigh’boring o’cean
Speaks’, and in acc’ents discon’solate an’swers the wail’ of the for’est.

The Acadian tragedy is told through the particular example of a (fictional) couple, Evangeline and Gabriel, who are separated by the expulsion, and who search for each other through the course of the poem. (I will not “spoil” the story by revealing the ending!)

Evangeline, through its popularity, has over the years raised public consciousness of the plight of the Acadians. It did the same for my wife and myself; not just through the poem alone, but by means of the extra reading and discussion that it encouraged. I still cannot quite accept Evangeline in the totally comfortable way that I’m able to do with much other classic literature. But I think that I’ve expanded my literary horizons by immersing myself in it.

Although we didn’t make it there on our trip, here is a photo of the Grand-Pré National Historic Site, in Nova Scotia.  Grand-Pré was the site of the first Acadian expulsions, and, in the poem, the village where Evangeline and Gabriel lived.  Below we see the memorial church, and a statue of Evangeline:

Later this year, my wife and I are planning an RV drive from Seattle, Washington to Anchorage, Alaska. Granted, we’re only driving one way, but even without side trips to Banff etc, we are talking about 2,260 miles here. I’m already thinking about what appropriate reading aloud we could do. Certainly, Robert Service and Jack London come to mind.  Any other ideas?

 

Son of the Ancient Mariner

I think there is now some new display there. But as of mid-November, the steps leading out of NYC’s Union Square subway station, onto 14th Street, had quite a literary cast:

I especially noted the name of Mary Wollstonecraft, since I had been reading her Frankenstein at that time. Her full name is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, since she married the famous poet Percy Shelley. I will call her Mary Shelley (or abbreviate it as MS), since that’s what Wikipedia does, and also because it is shorter.  🙂

There seems to be no contemporary portrait of the young MS. Here is Reginald Easton’s “idealized portrait”, made after MS’s death:

You will note that Edgar Allan Poe’s name appears just above Mary Shelley’s. That is appropriate, since Poe, who of course wrote similarly chilling tales, came after MS chronologically. Poe was only 9 years old when Frankenstein came out in 1818. MS, herself, was just 20 years old at the time … having begun the book as a teenager of 18. (How many novels of such significance were written by authors who were that young?)

(Now, in retrospect, I think the name on the steps — since there is no “Shelley” — might well have been that of MS’s mother (confusingly, also Mary Wollstonecraft), an early feminist, who like her daughter was a writer (1759-1787)).

Though I don’t think I made a conscious connection, I happened to pick up Frankenstein a bit before Halloween. It turned out to be a book with rich rewards for me. I happen to think it’s a great novel, in its own right. But it also resonated with a number of literary experiences I’ve had over the years …

To begin with, Frankenstein is (you might be surprised to hear) an epistolary novel … at least in its formal construction (which, to be sure, you might forget about in the midst of the action). The outermost “frame” is a series of letters from Captain Walton (who is exploring northern waters) to his sister. Within that is Dr. Frankenstein’s narrative. And within that is the narrative of the Creature that Frankenstein has made.

Some of the earliest famous English novels, e.g. Richardson’s Clarissa (1749) were in epistolary form. (See my Clarissa review elsewhere on this site, dripping with guilt for my never having truly finished this monstrously long work.) The shell-like technique of narrative-within-narrative was later used by Emily Brontë in her masterpiece Wuthering Heights (1847).  (I wonder if she was inspired by the structure of Frankenstein?)

More specifically, MS drew, for her novel, on her European journeys. She travelled on the Rhine River, and obviously heard about the nearby Frankenstein Castle, where the alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel (1673-1734) claimed to have created the “elixir of life”.

She also visited Geneva, Switzerland … this area furnished the setting for much of the book.

On the science front, MS was aware of the discovery by Luigi Galvani, in 1780, that a dead frog’s leg will twich when stimulated by an electrical spark. This “galvanism” was “new and astonishing” to Dr. Frankenstein, and evidently helped him in making his Creature. (But note, movie fans: there are no flying sparks — or even laboratory scenes — in the original book, which, though having much action, is perhaps more a “novel of ideas” than you might imagine.)

What hit home the most to me (probably due to my recent reading) is the influence of literary Romanticism on Frankenstein. The word “Romanticism” perhaps evokes tales of “romance” in the sense of love stories … but I think this really misses the mark. Part of literary Romanticism is “Gothic” horror fiction, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) typically given as the pioneering work.

A very explicit homage to literary Romanticism in Frankenstein comes from its debt to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous narrative poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Early in the novel, in Capt. Walton’s second letter to his sister, he writes:

I am going to unexplored regions, to “the land of mist and snow,” but I shall kill no albatross; therefore do not be alarmed for my safety or if I should come back to you as worn and woeful as the “Ancient Mariner.” You will smile at my allusion, but I will disclose a secret. I have often attributed my attachment to, my passionate enthusiasm for, the dangerous mysteries of ocean to that production of the most imaginative of modern poets.

Here is an appropriately frozen illustration (by Gustave Doré) from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

Mariner was first published in a collection called Lyrical Ballads (1798), which included poems by Coleridge and William Wordsworth.  Lyrical Ballads is now considered the real start of the English Romantic movement in literature. (Note that — modestly — the authors’ names are not given on the title page nor anywhere else in the book. Perhaps MS was influenced by this modest gesture, in not including her name on Frankenstein’s title page, of the first edition?)

Also in Lyrical Ballads is Wordsworth’s poem “Tintern Abbey”, of which this excerpt is quoted in Frankenstein:

… The sounding cataract
Haunted him like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to him
An appetite; a feeling, and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrow’d from the eye.

(The “him” was originally “me” in both places above, but Dr. Frankenstein makes this change to honor his friend Clerval, who had met a sad fate …)

We see here the love of nature, unmediated by thought. Lyrical Ballads also celebrates the interest and worth of plain rural folk … a theme echoed in Frankenstein, where the Creature starts his wanderings over the earth by staying at a farmhouse with country people. (Staying, that is, until his physical ugliness horrifies and alienates the family.)

But Frankenstein also has literary roots that go back much farther into the past. In an episode of the novel that seems more symbolic than literally plausible, the Creature, as he walks through the forest, finds a briefcase containing three books: Milton’s Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch’s Lives, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Much later on, he (repenting) will compare himself to Milton’s Lucifer:

When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.

And note the Paradise Lost quotation on the title page.

I am not sure of the relevance of the Plutarch (help, anybody?) … but Werther (1774), by the 24-year-old Goethe, is a “Sturm und Drang” novel that was influential for the future Romantic movement.

Going even farther back, there is Dante’s Inferno, where Satan, in the deepest level of Hell, is eternally trapped in ice … here pictured in another Doré illustration:

MS is surely invoking this tradition, by setting the North Pole as the place where the Creature, at the end of the story, is drawn.

Finally, we enter the realm of mythology. The subtitle of Frankenstein is “The Modern Prometheus”. Prometheus, defying the other gods, steals fire from them, to give to humanity. Like Prometheus, Dr. Frankenstein meets a dire fate, for venturing to bring to mankind a tool that it should not have: the means to create life from inanimate material.

Perhaps not too far off, I will visit (or revisit) some of the many adaptations of Frankenstein, notably the cinematic treatments (of which Wikipedia says there are 73, including the famous 1931 Boris Karloff version). I will be surprised if any of these retellings are as thought-provoking, or as resonant with literary history as the original novel. For now, I will leave you with my favorite quotation from Frankenstein — a novel which, bereft of actual lightning bolts as it may be, still crackles aplenty with its own kind of energy:

“You are my creator, but I am your master: obey!”

Novel History

Maybe my case is not that unusual?  But when I was in school (thru high school), I believe that I only took history classes when I had to. I don’t think I really got any pleasure out of them. I recall paging through review books, to get the lowdown on main events, so that I would do respectably on the tests. In English, at least I recall one teacher (in junior high) who kind of gave off sparks, and got me interested. But in history, nary a one do I remember.

In college, as you might guess, I was not inspired to take any history classes at all. But since then, I now realize I’ve creepingly worked my way into an interest in — and a reading acquaintance — with history. I still, even now, don’t think of my self as “reading history”. (I am, rather, a novel addict.) But here (roughly chronologically) are some ways in which I’ve managed to learn a bit about the past, with interest …

Books on the history of certain major technological advancements. I’m especially thinking of David McCullough. I know I’ve read his The Great Bridge, and The Path Between the Seas, about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal, respectively. I’ve also read books by others on the creation of the transcontinental railroad, and the first trans-Atlantic telephone cables. (The latter being Voice Across the Sea, by Arthur C. Clarke, who this time is not writing science fiction.)

What one might call “popular history”. I’m thinking right now of the writers Barbara Tuchman (e.g. The Guns of August, on the start of World War I) and Collins-Lapierre (Freedom at Midnight, about the Indian independence movement).

Various readings about the history of mathematics. I’m especially interested in the work of Archimedes, who figured out such matters as the area between a parabola and a straight line, with methods that can be hard to understand today, but which were in some ways as powerful as calculus, which didn’t emerge until almost 2,000 years later.

The New York Review of Books is my favorite periodical.  (Yes, even including the New York Times.)  I have been recently catching up on several months of past issues.  (I used to allot this journal to my subway reading, but for obvious reasons that option was not a good one during the past year.)  Here, from the April 5, 2018 issue, is an example of their coverage of books of history: one about George Washington’s relationship with Native Americans.  (Spoiler: “[Washington] was the only prominent founder to invest his enormous prestige in a just solution to America’s Native American dilemma”.)

 

Unconventional views of history. I’m particularly thinking of David Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which presents events not from the “winner’s” perspective — the way one usually gets history — but from the point of view of those downtrodden over the centuries: Native Americans, Blacks, women …

Podcasts. My favorite podcast is the ongoing History of the English Language.  This non-trivial endeavor began in 2016, and now comprises 146 hour-long episodes, not to mention “bonus episodes” (for Patreon contributors), stand-alone audiobooks, etc. The creator/narrator, Kevin Stroud,  takes the broad view, demonstrating how developments in the English language cannot be understood without investigating political, economic,and social developments. True to my affinity for “non-standard” history, Mr. Stroud does not even have a degree in linguistics! He is only driven by curiosity, dedication … and an obvious love for his subject.

I have just recently come upon Mike Duncan’s podcast, The History of Rome. Begun in 2007, this project was completed in 2012, after 179 episodes running a total of 73 hours. I hope my interest in this will hold … in that case I have a lot of enjoyable listening ahead of me.

Heather Cox Richardson is an historian. On her Facebook page (and also, some days after their Facebook appearance, posted to YouTube) she makes two one-hour videos every week. Tuesday is devoted to current political events in USA. On Thursdays she speaks about topics in American history, particularly as they relate to our present situation.

Recent example of HCR’s video talks:  On March 11, 2021, a fascinating discussion of how the Republican and Democratic parties have essentially reversed roles policy-wise, since the time of Lincoln (who, as you possibly might find surprising , was a Republican).

HCR is one of the only people, for whom I would say that their videos are more interesting to me than their prose output. (I normally avoid informational videos as much as I can, since — despite YouTube, for example, allowing one to speed them up — I get impatient, and would usually much rather scan through a written document, pausing where I want/need to pick up information.)

My last category, books about history by writers who are primarily novelists, consists (at least so far) of only one book: Son of the Morning Star, by Evan Connell. I read this some years ago, and it has managed to “haunt” me, so that I just gave it another read recently (an unusual event, since I’m typically eager to go on to the next book). I believe that it is quite unusual for a novelist to write a history book. (Note that I am not talking about an “historical novel” here, but rather bona-fide historical non-fiction.)

The special quality of this book starts, for me, with its title. This is the story of George Armstrong Custer, known especially of course for his “Last Stand” at the Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876). Custer was, after his death and the loss of all his men in that battle, originally greatly admired, as a tragic fallen hero. But as Connell says, nowadays his “stock sells for nothing”.  Nevertheless, Connell chooses to name his book so as to cast a romantic kind of glow upon him. (“Son of the Morning Star” was a name conferred upon Custer by the Arikara Indians, apparently from the appearance of Venus at dawn, during a battle in which Custer figured.)

Connell, while I believe sticking to facts, nevertheless takes liberties with his narration that conventional historians would normally not allow themselves to do. He dwells on apparently minor figures for pages at a time, just because he finds them interesting. (As do I.) He digresses to discuss Native American artistic practices:

A gunshot was represented by fan-shaped lines diverging from the muzzle, just as European artists tried to represent a shot, except that this symbol might appear without the gun — indicating that a shot had been fired at a certain time or place. Similarly, a club or a bow or a whip might be shown in contact with an enemy although the owner might be some distance away, meaning that this weapon did at one time strike the foe.
They had no concept of perspective and almost never attempted to foreshorten. In a trail of hoofprints passing out of sight the farthest would be as large as the closest for the very good reason that whether a horse is close to you or far away his hoofprints will be the same size.

Connell pauses to muse on the images that we have of Frederick Benteen, an officer in command of a battalion at Little Bighorn:

In not a single photograph does he look formidable, not even very military. He appears placid, gentle, benevolent, with feminine lips and prematurely white hair. Only after contemplating that orotund face for a while does one begin to perceive something rather less accommodating. Embedded in that fleshy face are the expressionless agate eyes of a killer. One might compare them to the eyes of John Wesley Hardin or Billy the Kid. Now, this sinister absence of expression could be nothing more than a result of myopia, a condition afflicting him after the Oklahoma winter campaign of 1868-9 when he lent his protective goggles to a regimental surgeon. Still, in Civil War photographs he has almost that same look.

Connell does not bind himself to the chronological narrative of the typical historian. For instance, he begins his book with the shock of the first revelation of the Little Bighorn battle to the outside world.  Initial assumptions had to be soon reversed:

… a party of at least sixty United States cavalrymen — or what resembled cavalry, proceeding by twos, with a guidon flying — rode into view. A second cavalry unit then merged with the first and Lt. Roe understood that they were hostile Indians dressed in Army clothing.

About this time Lt. Bradley returned from the other side of the river to say that the dark objects on the hillside thought to be buffalo skins were, in fact, dead horses. What had been mistaken for skinned buffalo carcasses were the naked bodies of Custer’s men. Bradley had counted 197 dead soldiers.

I would be grateful to find out about other works of history, written by authors who normally are novelists. At least up to now, history books by conventional historians just do not seem to do it for me …

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WELL —  now that I have put all my sources for historical information down in one place — maybe I have been able to compensate just a bit, for neglecting the normal, formal history book?

How the novelist helped his heroine

In May, 2018 my wife and I were on vacation in Spain. We took an easy side-trip to Gibraltar, to spend the day. I (momentarily) mastered my acrophobia to take a cable-car to the top of the storied Rock, which had great views … along with the famous monkey residents (barbary macaques).

Descended from the Top of the Rock, I also encountered the to-be-expected tourist items, but the inevitable fish-and-chips, accompanied with John Smith’s Ale, were really not so hard to endure. 🙂 There was also the iconic Veddy British “pillar box”:

Being the literary character that I am, I recalled the famous (in certain circles) linkage to one of my very fave novelists, Anthony Trollope.  Trollope’s day job was with the Post Office.  In 1854 he recommended that pillar boxes be installed in the Channel Islands.  They were the first mailboxes in Britain.  By the next year they had spread to London.  No longer need one make a trek to the post office to mail a letter.

I recently finished Trollope’s novel The Duke’s Children (1880).  (I have now concluded my traversal of his “Palliser” novels.) 

One of the plot threads concerns Lady Mary, the Duke’s daughter, who is in love with a gentleman — Frank Tregear by name — whose station in life, the Duke feels, is beneath her.  He has forbidden the couple to see each other.  Lady Mary is, at one point, staying with the Countess, Lady Cantrip, who has been charged by the Duke with the challenging task of keeping an eye on her, where her romantic life is concerned.  

Though she knows the practice would be frowned upon, Mary has not actually promised not to write to Tregear.  When he writes to her, she can not resist replying.  And, in Chapter XXIV:

The next morning Lady Mary showed [Lady Cantrip] a copy of the reply which she had already sent to her lover.

Dear Frank,
You may be quite sure that I shall never give you up. I will not write more at present because papa does not wish me to do so. I shall show papa your letter and my answer.
Your own most affectionate
Mary.

“Has it gone?” asked the Countess.
“I put it myself into the pillar letter-box.” Then Lady Cantrip felt that she had to deal with a very self-willed young lady indeed.

So … if Trollope had not (in so-called “real life”) advocated for the pillar-box, who knows what might — or might not — have happened?  Would Mary have been able to navigate her way to the actual brick-and-mortar post office, unescorted as she would likely have had to be?  Who knows?  They do say “Amor vincit omnia” … but isn’t it nice that the Trollope with the day job was able to give Mary a helping hand?

A toe of the elephant

Intrepid readers of this blog may recall that some years back, I wrote a review of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.  I was very impressed.  If I may quote myself:

I ended up thinking this was one of the most worthwhile novels I’d ever read … and perhaps the most intellectually challenging, to boot.

I just recently finished my second Mann — Doctor Faustus.  (I mainly used the Lowe-Porter English translation, but often consulted the German original.  See my blog post “Dual language e-reader” for details on how I do this.)  This work likewise made a deep impression on me.  Most memorably, since I’m a classical musician, I was very struck with Mann’s knowledge in this area … in some respects perhaps exceeding even mine.  🙂  (Since Adrian Leverkühn, Mann’s protagonist, is a composer, there is ample opportunity for musical discussions.)  I actually can’t think of any other novel which is so intelligent in its treatment of classical music.  In my reading notes, I jotted down a list of music-related passages which I intend to follow up on …

And then (as in The Magic Mountain) there is the parade of philosophical ideas.  And various literary references.  Since I feel overwhelmed when I think of even summarizing all of this, I will discourse upon only one toe of the elephant at hand.  I hope you will not feel too much like one of the famous blind men in the tale … but you do know how you can go about remedying that situation.  🙂

The hero-composer Leverkühn is, we see, at one point occupied by the project of setting, for marionette theatre (!), a selection of stories from Gesta Romanorum.  (In one of the novel’s correspondences with reality, the orchestration for this piece matches that of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat.) Of course you can get details in the Wikipedia article on Gesta, but to summarize, this work (hitherto unknown to me) was a collection of stories, in Latin, compiled in about the year 1300.  (The title, Deeds of the Romans, is misleading, since only some of the tales originate in classical Rome.)  Surmised to have been put together by a clergy-person as a manual for preachers, it is ostensibly produced for moral instruction.    Gesta was a best-seller in its time.  Very shortly, below, you will get an idea of why …

Mann includes in Chapter 31 of Doctor Faustus, Tale XXVIII of the Gesta, which I will reproduce below as he renders it (in my Lowe-Porter translation).  This story especially caught my attention, since I am currently in a reading (out loud) group that is wending its way through Giovanni Boccaccio’s own collection of tales, The Decameron (ca. 1353).  As Mann suggests, Boccaccio very likely found inspiration for some of his often-raunchy stories in the piously-framed Gesta.

If you intend to read the following narrative aloud, please remove youngsters, and those with delicate sensibilities, from the room before proceeding further!  You have been warned …

There is for instance the fundamentally unmoral fable, anticipating the Decameron, “of the godless guile of old women,” wherein an accomplice of guilty passion, under a mask of sanctity succeeds in persuading a noble and even exceptionally decent and honourable wife, while her confiding husband is gone on a journey, that she is sinfully minded to a youth who is consumed with desire for her. The witch makes her little bitch [dog!] fast for two days, and then gives it bread spread with mustard to eat, which causes the little animal to shed copious tears. Then she takes it to the virtuous lady, who receives her respectfully, since everybody supposes she is a saint. But when the lady looks at the weeping little bitch and asks in surprise what causes its tears, the old woman behaves as though she would rather not answer. When pressed to speak, she confesses that this little dog is actually her own all-too-chaste daughter, who by reason of the unbending denial of her favour to a young man on fire for her had driven him to his death; and now, in punishment therefor, she has been turned into this shape and of course constantly weeps tears of despair over her doggish estate. Telling these deliberate lies, the procuress weeps too, but the lady is horrified at the thought of the similarity of her own case with that of the little dog and tells the old woman of the youth who suffers for her. Thereupon the woman puts it seriously before her what an irretrievable pity it would be if she too were to be turned into a little dog; and is then commissioned to fetch the groaning suitor that in God’s name he may cool his lust, so that the two at the instance of a godless trick celebrate the sweetest adultery.

Oh yes, one more tiny detail.  Mann just happens to omit the Moralizacio, the moral lesson that the Gesta places after the story proper (or shall we say the story improper?).  Evidently this is supposed to make everything just peachy …

My beloved, the knight [the husband] is Christ; the wife is the soul, to which God gave free will. It is invited to the feast of carnal pleasures, where a youth — that is, the vanity or the world — becomes enamoured of it. The old woman is the devil ; the dog, the hope of a long life, and the presumptuous belief of God’s clemency, which lead us to deceive and soothe the soul.

Of course Boccaccio spins his spicy Decameron tales with no such moral lessons to come in as the Deus Ex Machina at the end.  Which is why the Church tried to ban the work.  (It was too popular though, so a “corrected”, i.e. expurgated edition was created instead, which the Church tried to fob off on the populace at large.)

I now have learned that the Gesta Romanorum tales have echoed down through the centuries, not only influencing Boccaccio, but being re-presented in works of Chaucer and Shakespeare, to name only the two most world-class names.  Thanks to Herr Mann for this engrossing, thought-provoking novel, which among so much else, yields such rich pathways into the literary past!

 

What a Dame

As some of you may know, I’m a devoted reader of crime/mystery/detective books.  Among their authors, Agatha Christie stands, for me, not only tallest, but somehow in … a class by herself.  Of course the plots are devilish.  But along with that — and despite that — her narration just has the most natural quality, with Humour at every turn.   Before she was Agatha Christie, here is Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller …

My particular problem, however, is that … I have a MOST challenged memory, when it comes to keeping track of what is going on in a mystery book.  So, like all Christies, the first time I read Lord Edgware Dies, I was just totally at sea.

I have just finished reading it again, for the second time.  (Or perhaps the third?)  In a way, it was even more fun, because I remembered enough not to feel completely flummoxed, yet still was fuzzy on a good part of the goings on.

Oh, here is how the book looked upon its American introduction, in magazine installments Dickens-style.  Thirteen For Dinner (or for the book, Thirteen At Dinner) was the original American title.  M. Poirot is so proud of les moustaches!

A foreign experience

Red Sorghum is a rather long novel, at 359 pages.  Most of it is taken up with scenes of violence, much of the violence being rendered in graphic detail.  Reading it was not easy for me.  Yet, I found that the rewards far outweighed the difficulties.

Published in 1986, this is a multi-generational family chronicle that takes place in China, from the 1920’s to the 1970’s.  Much of the bloodshed arises from the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), during which the Japanese invaded China and perpertrated many atrocities.  Between 10 and 25 million Chinese civilians perished in this war.  As if that were not enough, violent confrontations also occur, in this novel, between rival Chinese groups.

But now to get to the side of the book that just didn’t let me give up on it.  To start, there is how the storytelling flows back and forth, non-chronologically.  A character might come to an unfortunate end, … but can happily come to life again later in the narrative, when we are at an earlier point in time.  In a way, memory triumphs over mortality.

Then there is the “inside” view of the Chinese mentality that we get from a Chinese novelist, writing about his own country.  The view there of an individual life (based on their huge population) seems rather different from the Western outlook:

The old man with the dark face and white beard shouted, “What are you crying for? This was a great victory! There are four hundred million of us Chinese. If we take on the Japs, one on one, how do you think their little country will fare? If one hundred million of us fought them to the death, they’d be wiped out, but there’d still be three hundred million of us. That makes us the victors, doesn’t it? Commander Yu , this was a crushing victory!”

“Old uncle, you’re just saying that to make me feel good.”

“No, Commander Yu, it really was a great victory. Give the order; tell us what to do. China may have nothing else, but it’s got plenty of people.”

Also … I had certainly heard of foot-binding before.  Even after reading this book, it still seems barbaric to me.  But now, like the books’s narrator, perhaps I have a slightly more nuanced view.  These women do have a special quality to their walk …

A yard in length, the cloth bindings were wound around all but the big toes until the bones cracked and the toes turned under. The pain was excruciating. My mother also had bound feet, and just seeing them saddened me so much that I felt compelled to shout: ‘Down with feudalism! Long live liberated feet!’ The results of Grandma’s suffering were two three-inch golden lotuses, and by the age of sixteen she had grown into a well-developed beauty. When she walked, swinging her arms freely, her body swayed like a willow in the wind.  [1]

And then (though not specific to the Chinese) there are the dogs!  There is a section many pages long, in which the behavior of a pack of dogs is chronicled in detail.  (Indeed, one of the book’s five parts is called “Dog Ways”.)  I will admit that what the dogs are actually engaged in is rather horrible.  (Think of the dead on a battlefield, and you will probably get the idea.)  But the writing is totally absorbing.  One feels (with due respect to the author) that an actual canine is narrating this section!  You may get a small idea from this excerpt:

One of the battles [for domination of the pack] occurred when a dog in Green’s brigade, an impudent male with thick lips, bulging eyes, and a coat of bluish fur, took liberties with a pretty spotted-faced female who was one of Red’s favourites. Infuriated, Red charged the motley male and knocked him into the river. After climbing out and shaking the water off his fur, Thick Lips launched into an angry tirade, which earned him the jeers of the other dogs.

Green barked loudly at Red to defend the honour of his brigade, but Red ignored him and knocked the motley cur back into the river. As he swam back to shore, his nostrils skimming the surface, he looked like a huge river rat. The spotted-faced female stood beside Red, wagging her tail.

Green barked contemptuously at Red, who returned the insult.

One must surely mention the sorghum, which one sees in the book’s title … and just about everywhere in the novel.

Mo Yan himself admits that he has been greatly influenced by William Faulkner.  Just as Faulkner has his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, so Mo Yan has his (semi-fictional) Northeast Gaomi Township.  The main activity there is growing sorghum, a grain used for food, and also to make “sorghum wine” — so called in the novel, but actually a distilled spirit called “baijiu”.

Making this “wine” is the occupation engaged in by the central family in the book.  But beyond that, sorghum is the central “leitmotif” of the novel.  It is constantly mentioned in all kinds of metaphorical constructions, … but somehow instead of being annoying, this reader (at least) felt it as a strong unifiying element that helps us gain distance from narrative that can be hard to assimilate, because it is so painful.  At the end of the book, we gain some understanding as to why the red sorghum was so much on the narrator’s mind:

The sorghum that looked like a sea of blood, whose praises I have sung over and over, has been drowned in a raging flood of revolution and no longer exists, replaced by short-stalked, thick-stemmed, broad-leafed plants covered by a white powder and topped by beards as long as dogs’ tails. High yield, with a bitter, astringent taste, it is the source of rampant constipation. With the exception of cadres above the rank of branch secretary, all the villagers’ faces are the colour of rusty iron.

More than just being itself, the red sorghum is symbolic of the glorious past.

Along with Faulkner, Mo Yan also claims Gabriel García Márquez as an influence; and indeed, Red Sorghum has been cited as an example of “magic realism”.  Events that in ordinary life would be unbearably painful are transmuted into richer, more complex things.  Example:  near the end of the book, a female character, evidently near death, appears to have gone berserk, mouthing abuse and cursing the family around her.  But it turns out that an evil spirit has taken possession of her body.  Finally, a Taoist has to be summoned from the village to exorcise the demon!

Red Sorghum was originally written in Chinese.  I read the able translation by Howard Goldblatt.  I don’t normally read translated books (having the purist position that it’s “like taking a shower with a raincoat on”), [2] but an experience like this shows me how much I might, generally, be missing …

Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012.  At the end of his Nobel lecture, he tells a story that I’d like to repeat here.  It has nothing to do with Red Sorghum!  I just like the story a lot:

Bear with me, please, for one last story, one my grandfather told me many years ago: A group of eight out-of-town bricklayers took refuge from a storm in a rundown temple. Thunder rumbled outside, sending fireballs their way. They even heard what sounded like dragon shrieks. The men were terrified, their faces ashen. “Among the eight of us,” one of them said, “is someone who must have offended the heavens with a terrible deed. The guilty person ought to volunteer to step outside to accept his punishment and spare the innocent from suffering.” Naturally, there were no volunteers. So one of the others came up with a proposal: “Since no one is willing to go outside, let’s all fling our straw hats toward the door. Whoever’s hat flies out through the temple door is the guilty party, and we’ll ask him to go out and accept his punishment.” So they flung their hats toward the door. Seven hats were blown back inside; one went out the door. They pressured the eighth man to go out and accept his punishment, and when he balked, they picked him up and flung him out the door. I’ll bet you all know how the story ends: They had no sooner flung him out the door than the temple collapsed around them.

NOTES

[1] Though foot binding was banned in 1912 by the new Republic of China government, the practice continued in some rural areas till about mid-century.

[2] “Poetry in translation is like taking a shower with a raincoat on.”  Though of course I am not talking about poetry here, this aphorism came to mind.  I encountered it in the 2016 movie Paterson.  I feel like it has been around longer, but cannot find an earlier source.

 

Victorian Secret

 

Well OK, not really a secret.  I just don’t like to read about books before reading them, due to my morbid fear of “spoilers”.  And Wilkie Collins has never been on my go-to list of Victorian novelists.  I might not have gotten to him at all, were it not for a scrawled note in the little notebook I always carry, to firm up my leaky memory.  I don’t remember who or what supplied me with this lead, but as the saying goes, I will forever be grateful.

As for what led me to this particular book of his:  I knew that The Woman in White and The Moonstone were his best-known novels.  And since (all things being equal) I like to read an author’s works in chronological order, I chose the earlier TWIW (1860).

After I had been reading TWIW for a time, I made the note

poster child of STICK W THE BK

In other words, I experienced that wonderful (well, to me) feeling of having input persistence, patience, and observation without much immediate reward … only to have that reward finally come, and in spades.

What put me off initially?  One thing was that very early on, we meet Professor Pesca, a good friend of the protagonist Walter Hartright.  Pesca, from Italy, is shown as an excessively enthusiastic fellow who excessively bubbles over, cheerfully mangling the English language as he goes along.  He recalls some of Walter Scott’s “sidekick” characters (probably speaking in some deep Scottish dialect) who are evidently inserted into the narrative to add “color” and “humor”.  As you may have surmised, I tend not to be too fond of these fellows.  (Though I am really a Scott partisan; see my review of Rob Roy.)  Anyway, as it turns out, I had to eventually revise my appraisal of Pesca … which is, I hope, enough said to tantalize but not to give anything away.

There are other aspects of TWIW that would perhaps also fall into the “old fashioned” category, and that put me off for a while.  There is a melodramatic cast to things, characters being either very good or … very much the other way.  The surroundings for a given scene are set up so as to enhance the story; for example, you can imagine what kind of events might transpire given this scene:

It is a still, sultry, moonless night. The stars are dull and few. The trees that shut out the view on all sides look dimly black and solid in the distance, like a great wall of rock. I hear the croaking of frogs, faint and far off, and the echoes of the great clock hum in the airless calm long after the strokes have ceased. I wonder how Blackwater Park will look in the daytime? I don’t altogether like it by night.

Now for the good news.  Or, as I noted succinctly at the time,

SPIN STRAW INTO GOLD

What was this gold I was now finding?  Firstly, a very unusual story.  TWIW is a murder mystery that’s … well, not quite a murder mystery.  (I don’t mean to confuse, just to tantalize without giving away the store.)  The freshness one feels reading this, might connect to Collins being a pioneer.  TWIW is regarded as one of the very first mystery (or detective) novels.  By anyone. (Note the “novel” qualification; Edgar Allan Poe had already penned “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841, but that was a short story.)  On top of that, TWIW is known as the first “sensation novel”.  I hadn’t been aware of this category, but it seems that sensation novels were big in Great Britain in the 1860’s and 1870’s.  Like everything, there is a Wikipedia article for this subject, and you could pursue it there, but I will just mention the keywords Secret, Crime, Romance, Melodrama, Gothic.  (But unlike gothic fiction, the story of the “sensation novel” is given more realism by being placed in a true-to-modern-life setting.)

So, TWIW is an early example of both the Mystery novel, and the Sensation novel.  And it is regarded as one of the best in each category.  It is noteworthy that pioneering works in a given genre can quite often emerge later as one of the greatest in their genre.  (Doesn’t this seem to fly in the face of common sense notions of things originating “rough”, and subsequently improving?)  The example that comes to my mind first is Don Quixote, one of the earliest novels, but also one that has been considered the greatest novel ever. [See, for example, the Guardian list, which incidentally places TWIW as #23.]

To come back now, to my own personal reactions to TWIW.  Two things stand out positively.  Firstly, Collins’ ingenious method of narration.  The story is initially related by Walter Hartright.  But when it becomes more appropriate for someone else — who was an eye-witness to the subsequent events — to tell the story, then that person becomes the narrator.  I was initially disappointed to see this, since I like to “bond” with a central character, so might be sorry to see him walk off stage; but Collins’ narration plan ends up working beautifully.  Not only does it give a great sense of verisimilitude, but it creates variety in a long novel that else might turn wearying.

Secondly, Collins writes with great skill.  Reading his prose can be a pleasure in its own right.   I should perhaps have noted several examples, but just recorded one, which seems very deft in its arrangement of words:

I am to ask a personal favour, for the first time in my life, and to ask it of the man of all others to whom I least desire to owe a serious obligation of any kind.

So … if you are ever hankering for a novel that’s “modern” in the sense of being a mystery story, but also one of the best products of another age, I hope you will give The Woman in White a try.  It is not a short read, but if you are at all like me, you will soon be expertly swept along by many successive voices, taking turns in relating a devilishly clever plot.

The map IS the territory

 

This past August, I was driving up, with my spouse, to Block Island for an extended weekend.  One has to take a ferry; one of the boat terminals is at Point Judith, R.I.  As usual, we were relying on our car’s GPS navigation system.  But luckily, I remembered to also bring that old standby, our road atlas.  Even though the GPS basically got us there fine (you’ll see later why I say “basically”), the Connecticut and Rhode Island maps in the atlas supplied all the “context”.  As we proceeded, I could see on the map what we were passing, arousing either memories of the old, or curiosity about the new.

To perform the rather egotistical act of quoting myself:  “A navigation system gets you where you want to go.  But it doesn’t tell you where you are.”

Recently, in the book world, I ran across a parallel to this.  I retrieved from my shelf a volume I had dipped into, maybe back in the 1980’s when it came out:

Written by a professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago, the Eater’s Guide is a tutorial on the subset of the written Chinese language one has to know, in order to read the menu in a Chinese restaurant.  (It is common knowledge that the English part of a Chinese menu typically does not present the full range of culinary offerings.)

McCawley begins by explaining that most Chinese characters are not pictorial, but rather composed of two parts: the RADICAL which shows the general area of the character’s meaning, and the PHONETIC which rhymes with the word the character represents.  Much of the book is composed of a glossary, which ingeniously does not rely on scholarly knowledge, but is usable by the beginner.  The pages below, for example, show some of the phonetic half-characters that could go with the four-stroke radical meaning “tree”:

In the last several weeks, I’ve been studying this book rather seriously (finding it a good companion to subway trips).  I have been diligent about doing McCawley’s exercises, which ensure that one has not just an abstract notion, but actual skill in tracking down words in his glossary:

This was indeed work, but it brought the reward not just of useful ability, but also of  general learning.  Plus some delightful discoveries.  In finding the character that means “home”, I was suddenly presented with the Chinese name of one of my favorite dishes (though at least in my Queens, NYC neighborhood it appears in a vegetarian incarnation):

And, I thought it was fun to discover that “chop suey” originates in a Chinese character that means “miscellaneous”:

OK … the scene shifts to a subway trip when I was NOT perusing McCawley’s book, but talking to a friend about it.  Not greatly to my surprise, she noted that “there is an app for that”.  I’m not sure if this is the one she meant, but here is one called Waygo:

This seems to me, to be the GPS of the Chinese-menu world.  To be fair, I have not tried Waygo yet.  If it turns out that it does not just give facile translations, but delves into the linguistic intricacies that are so interesting to me, I will eat my words (so to speak) and update this blog entry accordingly.  But my strong suspicion is that you will get a result that is quick — and (darn it!) probably very practical — but one without any of the alluring context and background.

Now, I’d like to extend this discussion into a much broader arena.  I’m linking below to a recent article in the New York Review of Books.  It’s a review of a 2017 book called Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy.

Born to Be Free _ by BM Friedman

The authors (Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght) advocate a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans.  (Note that this is not a “minimum wage”, but income that you would get whether you held a job or not.)  Why?  Because the rise of artificial intelligence and robotics will dictate that many workers will need only minimal skills to do their jobs.  (An example already widely current: since taxi drivers use — here we are again — GPS, they don’t need to know anything about a city’s geography.)  All these now-unskilled workers will not be able to command a liveable income from their job alone.  As Benjamin M. Friedman puts it in his review:

Only convinced futurists envision FedEx and UPS vans racing around the nation’s cities anytime soon with no human inside. But in the future, what will the human on board be doing? Most likely, not driving the van but running packages up to people’s doorsteps and then pushing a picture icon on a touch screen to confirm that deliveries have been completed — not so different from what the cashier at a McDonald’s now does. For just this reason, the wages those no-longer-drivers receive also won’t be much different from McDonald’s wages.

If I may come full circle here, and return to my trip to Block Island …

We had to get to Point Judith.  We were coming up on Route 1, and our GPS, as I recall,  left us in some doubt as to where to turn off toward the coast.  With my map in hand, it was easy to see that we should not head towards Jerusalem (necessitating a swim across the inlet), but rather go a bit “too far” and double back, on Route 108, towards Galilee.  (We are  very Biblical here, no?)  The map freed us from  our GPS blinders, and gave us (literally) that “extra dimension”.  We got to our Block Island ferry in time!