Vividly Vague, Part 3

Ephemeral Words and Thoughts

A long time I read a series of essays on the difference between rumour and gossip, and then used that distinction to ease students into the history of the novel in England and elsewhere in western Europe during the seventeenth century.  The distinction remains valid for the most part but needs some further refinements, as well as the need to consider more carefully—as I had started to do back then, in accord with what seemed critical trends—the relationship between journals as newspapers, private daily notations, and Puritan records of spiritual development.  Now I will consider some of the aspects of these old considerations in regard to the history of mentalities, psychohistory and biography.

To begin with, rumour and gossip are two forms of relatively indeterminate, non-authorized forms of knowledge and the modes of communicating such information.  At heart, rumour refers to a buzzing noise, such as insects make in their hives, and is close to what we might mean by static, or at least those of who grew up listening to radio rather than watching television, and who had to spend a certain amount of time twirling dials and playing with aerials before being able to understand what was said by speakers at the other end of the broadcast.  In metaphorical terms, a rumour was a series of buzzing noises heard out on the street or in some crowded coffee house or similar public space.  People passed on what they heard or thought they heard and usually could never be quite sure where the original source was or what authority lay behind the information.  The news that was thus given by word-of-mouth or written in private, informal letters was felt to be incomplete and inaccurate, but worthy of attention as it dealt with public or other important political or commercial matters. 

Related to rumour but not at all identical to it, gossip had another means of communication and conveyed a different kind of information.  In its etymology, the gossip was a person, a social role undertaken by neighbours and friends on behalf of families, to be godfathers and godmothers of newly-born infants.  The duty accepted was to look after the spiritual and social well-being of this little boy or girl, first, by ensuring that its parents did their duty in having it baptized and so entered into the body of the Church and the community of Christians, properly educated in a formal and informal manner, and thus brought up in a healthy and moral environment.  Godparents or gossips thus consulted with one another and passed on information that had to do with the private lives of people who they were not related to by family ties.  In ideal terms, only these gossips were privileged to breach the boundaries between public and private, to speak of intimate relationships and moral transgressions that might threaten the spiritual development of the child.  Should one or other of the parents become incapacitated or die, it was the role of the gossip moreover to take-over the care and upbringing of the child through to the end of its minority.  Again this required stepping into the normally private life of a family to which one did not belong.  By extension, and thus gaining a negative value, gossip became the name for both the discussion of other people’s private lives by those who had no business doing so and for the use of this intimate knowledge to hurt the reputations of the parties involved.  The transgressions here could be of little importance, mere trivia which it was no body’s business at all to make public, or of greater significance with the breaching of privacy a way of harming reputations, social status and political reputations.  Like rumour, gossip was not an authorized transmission of information, and usually involved misunderstandings, incomplete facts, and hurtful judgments of character.  

Once those parameters of ephemeral words and thoughts are set forth like that, it should be evident that such are not only the essence of our everyday life, waking and asleep, insofar as such fleeting discourses are not controlled by and regularly verified against criteria of truthfulness within the confines of rhetoric, that is, language shaped according to rational standards. Modern genres of history philosophy and literature (“belles-lettres”) therefore seek to imitate both the mechanisms and the content of rumour and gossip; that, indeed, is their primary fiction. 

This it is which made the prose narratives of the early modern period “novel”, which distinguished the private, personal, intimate discourses of recorded annotations known as journals and diaries, and which characterized the forms of semi- and not-so-official “news” disseminated in newspapers so urgently other than royal proclamations, ecclesiastical pronouncements, and legal decisions published by courts of law, power and spiritual authority: these discourses were distributed before actions were completed, rhetorical closures applied and authorized interpretations decided upon.  Such fleeting reports were by definition incomplete, fragmentary, uncoordinated, highly subjective, c0ontstantly therefore subject to revision, correction and substitution: extra bulletins appeared as often as the press would allow for clarification.  It was important to know so much the authorized truth-value of each “story”, but where it emanated from, who was the source or likely source—a reporter, spectator, witness in the field, close to or in the midst of the action itself—thus creating a sense of immediacy through vivid physical details, exact words spoken by participants and persons affected, and the correspondent’s sense of “being there.”  

Once a sufficient period of time and a critical distance from the action had been created, there could be established a sense of objectivity, and when the action eventuated into a formal rhetorical genre—comedy, tragedy, pastoral or whatever—its meaning could be determined and its implications discussed.  Instead of news, one had history. Instead of being in the moment, one stood outside and beyond the dynamic of confusion, and everything fell into its proper place sub species æternitatis: under the all-seeing and all-understanding of eternity and its institutional guardians. Thus God was in His heaven and all was right with the world.

As the modern world took shape and religions were in the process of being reformed, believers, who could no longer believe implicitly in the dogmas of the church, had to find a way to coordinate their own private, erratic—incomplete, fragmentary, misunderstood—experiences with those of traditional received truth.  They would therefore keep a running record, from day to day, of what they did, how they felt, and what they were anxious about; this jumble of sensations, cries of despair, and record of anxieties would accumulate over months and years, generating a lengthy sequence of textualized reality, life transformed into words and sentences.  At certain points in a person’s life, when the world seemed to be in crisis, when the sense of reality seemed to be at a tipping point, the private consciousness of the person making this journal or diary of day-to-day experiences in the process of happening would read his or her journal and would discover, wonderful to tell, patterns of significance, recurring signs, repetitions on specific dates of similar events and encounters, emergent rhythms of the divine working in what at the time only seemed to be random, meaningless and frightening facts.  At the time of death, when others would read the newly reshaped text of the person’s life, they would see the finger of God marking and assigning meaning to the narrative.  

But outside of that religious domination, the free-flowing and therefore “natural” sequence of events that constitute a life gave a new kind of shapeless shape to the individual and his or her place in the world of chaotic experiences.  Novelists would imagine themselves in the consciousness—and then, the unconsciousness—of women, children, criminals, vagabonds, madfolk, anyone whose careers were not already always encompassed by rhetorical logic and therefore belonging to history, even personal history, the contours of biography and autobiography.  The concerns of women, children, criminals, vagabonds and madfolk was picaresque, like the ex-soldiers of Spain in the seventeenth century released from duty in the Low Countries to wend their own way home, forced to live on the road, to travel like criminals from place to place, experience to experience, on their own wits, always in a state of exception—outlaws, cast-aways, cast-offs, wandering through the flotsam and jetsam of history.  While formal picaresque tales—the stories of these pike bearers and their female counterparts, the picaras—are recounted in old age by the survivors, who reflect on their lives as in a dream-world of trivial wonders and lucky escapes, they see the world as a cynical place where all ideals are sham, all values are subject to market forces, and all degrees of society equalized by stupidity, ignorance, illness and mendacity; the ordinary lives of private persons, outside the bright lights of history and public service, focus on what was once the most private, non-rhetorical and least meaningful of experiences—the body, its urges and pains, its need for food, sexual gratification  and love, the importance of food and money and domesticity, the processes of maternity and dying, all in a matrix of unknowing and confusion.  The modern person wanders from one inexplicable and meaningless episode to the next, gradually gaining an understanding and a resignation to the absence of shape, determination and significance, accepting death as a release into oblivion.  

As more and more readers grow up through reading extremely lengthy novels of this sort, books of five hundred, a thousand or more pages, and hence of anti-social focus away from the outside world on to the internal spaces of imagination and individuality, the modern self lives out its own destiny without the determinants of rhetoric and history.  Autobiography and then biography model themselves on such novels, such fictional journals and diaries, such attempts to textualized the world and discover patterns that are purely eccentric and unique to each individual.  

When we read such textualized lives, then, we participate in the buzzing of rumour and the flow of gossip.  Eventually, too, what we want from history is something other than rhetorical constructions, vivid patterns of imposed order and meaning, individuals and small communities shaped by public events—the history of great figures in world-significant actions—but the private, intimate, insignificant natural history of desires and fears.  

Vividly Vague, Part 2

The Phantasmagoria

Shortly after Verdi’s Aïda opened in Naples in 1872, Carlo Caputo, a correspondent for the Venetian newspaper La Scena reported to his readers:

For the last few days we have been living a life which has long since seemed a thing of the past in Naples.  It was a delight, an ecstasy, something like a scene from the Arabian Nights, an emanation, an intoxicating harmony, which, issuing from the throats of singers, from the depths of the orchestra, from the scenery and decoration, from the perfection of the ensemble, and above all from the gigantic work of the composer, found an echo of their notes in each fibre of thousands of spectators, and from thousands of others who crowded round the entrances of the theatre, in which they could not find room, and which spread like electricity, even giving rise at least to that phantasmagoric demonstration,. By means of which they wished to honour Verdi. From the doors of San Carlo to that of his residence at the Hotel Crocelle.[1]

And on and on goes Caputo’s description of the vast throng and its enthusiasm.  This is a wonderful account of nineteenth-century Neopolitan love of music, especially of opera.  It reminds me of the times when as a boy in Brooklyn in the late 1940s my mother told me to take in or pick up shoes from the Italian cobbler around the corner, and whose little dark shop was filled with music, especially of grand opera—Verdi, Rossini, Puccini…  I would  listen and the shoemaker would sometimes explain or more usually just express his wonder and admiration of the music, the singers, and the performances he imagined in his mind, whether from memory or not.

But everything in this description from 1872 culminates in that one word phantasmagoric so out of tune with our own world that my computer’s spell-check keeps warning me in red highlight that it must be wrong.  The machine is a little happier with an f rather than a ph, but only because I have used the word so often in my books about Alfred Dreyfus and the way he and his wife felt that their suffering and frustration made them seem to be living in a phantasmagoria (in French fantasmagorie). 

But this is a strange word for us today, and even if we tried to compare what happened in Naples in the aftermath of the first performances of Aïda with the razzle-dazzle, pyrotechnic electronic son et lumière shows that pass for rock concerts these days (so I am told and occasionally glimpsed on the television news), phantasmagoria is too old a word to be appropriate either for the spectacle itself or the reactions of the crowds.  For Caputo, too, the reactions of the people on the street seemed unusual, a thing of the past, a recrudescence of something her had heard of from his parents or grandparents, the joy of l’ancienne régime, its total giving of itself to music and the other arts of the theatre.

If we use the word at all these days—sometimes I think I am the only who does, and I search for tis usage in everything I read—it is basically a metaphor, more dead than alive, meant to convey something that is slightly grotesque and frightening, a hodgepodge of colours, sounds, and crowd-feeling.   At its etymological core, naturally, lies the phantasm, the fantastic, the phantom and the fantasy (or fantasia).  Since we have dropped the old distinction between fancy and wit, or fantasy and imagination, it is hard to catch the archaic senses of the root: the glowing, glowering, glaring light from another realm, the ghostly, ghastly shadow world beyond or below this one, the unreal which seems more real than the tangible, logical, natural experiences of our normal lives.  There is therefore something sentimental and comic in its use, as in The Phantom of the Opera, which is definitely not what Verdi or his audiences were concerned about. Though the moans and groans of the fated, dying, soon-to-be spectral lovers buried in the tomb in the fourth act of Aïda will soon be.

As a technical term, phantasmagoria refers to a kind of late eighteenth-century performance involving sound and light, darkened spaces, eerie atmosphere, images of dead persons from history projected from a magic lantern on smoky clouds in crowded spaces.  Combining many sensations, the phenomenon seems to lead right up to the grand’eloquence and pomposity of Wagnerian productions at Bayreuth, and to the idealized Gesammeltkunstwerk of the Middle European styles at the opening of the twentieth century, or its nightmarish realization in the torch-lit processions and rallies of the Nazi regime in the 1930s.[2]

How do we deal with these kind of spectacular, mythical events that happen, not so much in the fiction or the imagination of great authors, but in the world of historical reality—as manifestation of collective trance-like projections from deep inside the shared unconsciousness of peoples?  By using texts that are already old-fashioned or antique, that is, where the language, points of references, tones and objects described have passed into the unfamiliar—but not so far back as to be lost in the mists of time and can only be approached as rhetorical exercises—we start to find ourselves almost grasping our own ways of seeing, thinking, remembering and imagining from outside of ourselves.  Take the figure that Balzac uses of “the mental lorgnette” Le Peau de Chagrin (1831), somewhat awkwardly translated as The Wild Ass’s Skin in 1906.  A lorgnette is not a common word nor a familiar object, though its usual referent is still around as a pair of “opera glasses” held on a single stem.  The name derives from the old French term for squinting or peering intently.  The character in the novel who uses the term means to describe a fashionable experience among those who attend public spectacles:

This way of using the mental lorgnette is the secret of conversation nowadays, and the whole art of the complete courtier.[3]

The purpose of such a metaphorical instrument is to quickly size-up the company you are in, interpret their words and gestures accordingly, and react with an advantageous word and deed of your own.  Conversation is the oil that allows society to roll along smoothly.  The “secret,” however, is to be smarter and more perceptive than others, so as to catch their motivations and unconscious purposes.  While we still have “conversations” these days, they are more apt to be something other than polite negotiations between refined people—courtiers, whether they are actually members of an aristocratic or royal society or not; but rather something far more vague that has replaced the familiar terms of barely a generation ago, such as discussion, argument, debate or discourse.  Somehow, too, “conversation” has become a near synonym of “narrative”, which has leaped from being a way of telling a story through a sequence of events that are arranged from cause to effect, into being an agenda or secret agenda, a propagandistic rationale for some outrageous political claim.  Moreover, since we are pointing out the way once simple, ordinary expressions have turned archaic or passed over into strange modern locutions, note how “complete” in Balzac’s passage means “perfect” and “typical”.  As for “mental,” that takes another leap into the darkness of our own abysmal distinction from the near-past of the early nineteenth-century, a time before modern psychology and psychoanalysis, when “unconscious” meant either a straightforward loss of waking awareness or a distracted wandering of attention: certainly not a virtually autonomous alternative to the conscious ego awareness where we know ourselves—and know this self only as the tip of an iceberg of repressed and suppressed thoughts and feelings.  Like “moral,” “mental” has less to do with the workings of the mind or the brain, than with the psychology we call—or once was called—“depth psychology.”     

        

Yet in the early nineteenth century when Balzac was writing, there was already a deep stirring of interest in—and awareness of—parts of our mind that did not belong to consciousness, not under the control of our will, and yet somehow essentially if not definitively part of our real self.  Hence, a little earlier in The Wild Ass’s Skin, the narrator reports the following:

I looked around, and saw the countess hidden in the shadow at the back of her box in the first tier.  My look did not waver; my eyes saw her at once with incredible clearness; my soul hovered about her life like an insect above its flower.  How had my senses received this warning?  There is something in these inward tremors that shallow people find astonishing, but the phenomena of our inner consciousness are produced as simple as those of external vision; so I was not surprised, but much vexed.  My studies of our mental faculties, so little understood, helped me at any rate to find in my own excitement some living proofs of my theories.[4]

The young man, engaged in composing a treatise on the power of the will—so typical of the post-Revolutionary period—comes close to framing his ideas in terms we can understand.  The setting in a playhouse, with its artificial lights focused on the stage, its tiers of boxes where the elite sit and observe the play and each other, is also the traditional rhetorical figure of “all the world’s a stage,” a theatre of moral observation.  The narrator’s “look” becomes both what his ordinary senses perceive through “external vision” and at the same time what his trained sensitivity or sensibility can register from “the phenomena of our inner consciousness.” 

On the one hand, what Balzac describes in his novel is not an experience we are unfamiliar with—men and women in a theatre jockeying for positions of influence over one another, trying to read the intentions that are manifest in their gestures and tones of voice, just as an audience they try to interpret the play as more than just the playwright’s words spoken on stage; so that the whole performance at the theatre, mixing in the play as a dramatic fiction and the social intercourse among the spectators, creates a lively and multi-layered historical event—the kind that can spill out of the theatre and into the streets, as we see in how Neapolitans get caught up in the festival celebration of Verdi’s opera and find their enthusiasm mutually rewarding, bonding their sense of national identity, at the very time when in Italy a national state is being consolidated out of so many small city-states, colonial enclaves, and ancient conglomerations.  On the other hand, the theatre of the mind and the social world depicted in The Wild Ass’s Skin seethes with new individuality, self-consciousness and insecure boundaries between individual and individual, individual and increasingly porous class-relationships, and individual and the various aspects of self that once were clear, traditional and legal—the public displays of act and word, the private disguising and manœuvering for sexual and financial advantage, the promptings of physical anxieties, desires, fears and indeterminate longings. 

If we were asked to describe an analogous situation and collection of people on the make, could we, in the first instance, imagine such an event?  It would take a lot of special pleading to realize the diverse class, race, age, gender and other constituent elements coming into close proximity and then trying to interact in such ways as to protect, enhance, neutralize, and influence one another.  Mostly, we no longer think of ourselves as equal to the performances we play in public or in more intimate scenes: even putting aside the absence in the very near past of all the instantaneous digital means of communication that have replaced the games that once were the essence of social interactions, the charades, the posturing, the ingratiating and threatening signals sent out, and the hence the need to constantly be on the alert of danger and opportunity. 

For us, an “anecdotic history” falls flat in its superficiality, and we find the passions depicted on the stage of opera almost inscrutable because of its sentimentality, grandiose declamations, seemingly insincere and impossible idealism, though we may still—or some of us, at least, in some kind of way that would have shocked the men and women prancing through the streets of Naples in 1872 or jostled one another in the overheated stalls and boxes of Balzac’s fictionalized Parisian theatre in 1831.  These experiences to us seem like a phantasmagoria—all smoke and mirrors, noise and confusion, make-believe scariness and the madness of our own souls set adrift from the jargon-ridden superficialities of modern life.

---

[1] Cited in Arthur Pougin, Verdi: An Anecdotic History of the Life and Works, trans. from French by James E. Matthew (London: H. Grevel & Co., 1887) Note 1, pp.  218-219.

[2] Norman Simms,  “The Phantasmagoria of Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism” Mentalities/Mentalités 24:2 (2010) 52-64

[3] Honoré de Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin, trans. Ellen Marriage (London: E.P. Dent, 1906) p. 146.

[4] Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin, p. 114.

Vividly Vague, Part 1

Situating Yourself in the Past of the Present

In 2003 Louis Menand wrote an essay for The New Yorker magazine called “The Historical Romance” about Edmond Wilson’s 1940 study of the rise of Communism in Russia called To the Finland Station. In this essay, Menand says some very interesting things about historical scholarship and the writing of fiction, or rather, because these ideas are more important, about the relationship between the way we come to know and remember the past, and the way we learn to imagine and create vivid images of the past, especially the past we did not experience first-hand for ourselves. Thus he says:

When you undertake historical research, two truths that sounded banal come to seem profound.  The first in that your knowledge of the past … comes entirely from written documents..  You are entirely cut off by a wall of print from the life you have set out to represent…

Rather than access to anything directly observable or audible from the past, these written fragments are “ merely the bits that have floated to the surface.” Banal indeed, if that were true.  Not all documents—and he does mention or allude to private letters, journal entries, conversations recorded in contemporary newspapers—are flat, superficial statements.  In fact, even the most official and therefore supposedly toneless reports are not as flat and dull as Menand seems to think.  Like any kind of writing, they have a style, they have a voice, and they have a range of implications which can be interpreted, that is, given a voice, a tone, a living context of human intentions and emotions.  Once, long ago, I theorized that any statement has to be set in a series of contexts of what is actually said and how within a range of possibilities of other things—other words, other images, other metaphorical language—that could have been said; as well as a range of things that could not be said, either because they were forbidden, deemed unpleasant, or embarrassing for one reason or another or because they seemed outrageous, impossible and dangerous to say or because the individuals and culture no loner—or not yet—had the words, images and concepts to articulate what the outsider (that is, us, in our own here and now) sees and hears going on.

The second point Menand makes is that when the historian starts to find more and more details about some historical incident, what at first seems to provide substantiation—and flavour and feelings—to the past, soon the plethora of details overwhelm certainty.  Each new detail actually becomes random, fragmented, and contradictory.  Finally, in this dredging operation (as he calls it), it is not so much new layers of understanding that turn up, but rather a big confusing soup.  The writer, however, calls a stop to the operation when he or she thinks he’s got it right: when the detail that pulls everything together finally comes along, the one you can use as the touchstone, lynchpin or capstone.  As such, this special relic of the past—word or image—helps you decide what is or is not relevant, how to fit together the pieces to complete the puzzle, or to hold your own argument together.  The trouble is, the New Yorker essay indicates, is that this “find” may be purely subjective, and may, even further, be a misreading or a blatant misperception.  What makes sense for the historian long after the facts he or she is attempting to grasp and make articulate for others may just be wrong because the limits of what was possible to see, think or imagine long ago were in different places and we cannot, no matter how hard we try, see out beyond our own horizons of reality and reasonableness: at the very best, perhaps, we can mark out the points when our target went under the radar or where there is some inexplicable deformation in the coherence we started to make out.

I once said—in fact, several times in my books—that the history of mentalities is the history of what it is possible to see in relation to what could not or cannot any longer be perceived, or heard, or felt, or imagined, or put into words and pictures, or even thought about as impossible to think about.  It lies in the tensions between possibilities, probabilities, and supposedly rational, natural or commonsense events. 

Menand points out, too, that for ourselves in our own wish to speak or remember or describe who we are—what we do, mean, hope for or fear in life—often find ourselves unable to make articulate statements (those words at the tip of the tongue that never quite come), say or draw or perform something at the moment that seems clear and true but which not only others find incomprehensible or take away the wrong sense from, but also seem false and hollow when we reflect upon them later—a moment later or a year or a whole lifetime away.

This does not mean that history is impossible because there is no truth at all, as the post-modernists proclaim? And all you have are positionalities, precious little verities specific to different races, genders, age-groups and so on?  Not quite.  You just have to work hard to interpret, analyse and reconfigure all the fragments, and hold in abeyance the grand conclusions. Is that all?  Absolutely not.  The goal is neither simplistic explanations nor retreat into chaos and bewilderment. 

As I have explained before in many essays and in my books, the process is a long one: submersion in the art and culture of the period—read novels, look at pictures, examine artefacts; get as many diaries, journals, collections of letters, memoires and other documents as possible.  But also try copying out texts by hand (or on a keyboard), watching where one stumbles, substitutes words, skips lines; and when in other languages, attempting translations, comparing with various renderings into English or French or whatever, to see how key terms form themselves into stumbling-blocks.  

Better yet: watch where the most simple, familiar, ordinary words—those we think we know perfectly without having to think about them—don’t match up with our expectations, how they veer off into side-lanes, hide in the shadows, or disappear altogether.  I have faced whole paragraphs which defy translation: in a sense—my own commonsense and grounding in what I take to be normal, natural and logical  has nothing to grasp, and the whole passage slides away into static or silence.  The individual words make some sense, but groups of two or more seem like filler, stuffing, nonsense.  This happens not just with our own contemporary jargon and nonce words—negotiate, practice, reference (as a verb) whose supposed originals are vastly different in tone, register, and allusiveness—but, again, with what we assume to be the plain everyday language of things and feelings.  Little colloquial expressions and virtually dead metaphors don’t match up between a work from a hundred years ago and now-a-days.  Something vital has shifted in the point of reference, the grounding in substance, the angle of perspective.  

Textas and Attitudes, Part 8

Authors, Translators, Editors: Who’s Who?

There are two rather strange anecdotes from the late nineteenth century which put in question the nature of authorship, creative and scholarly, yet at the same time highlight the importance of approaching books from a perspective that does not necessarily begin with the so-called inviolable text.  One concerns the relationship between the French novelist Colette and her first husband Willy, the other Pierre Louys and his putative translation of the Songs of Bilitis.

We always assume there is a clear distinction between an author and those who may be called in to edit the work for publication, that though there are some grey areas, to be sure, when ghost-writers and assistants become involved, still the work of literature, for whatever it’s worth, belongs to the person named as author.  When Henry Gauthier-Villars, known as Willy, comes on the scene, everything goes haywire.  Here is a man who finagled, manipulated and obscured the playing field, so that dozens of writers were each persuaded or coerced into putting down on paper little ideas he asked them to polish up, and then sending one todbit to another for further working and so on almost ad infinitum, ended up with a full novel which he then published under his own name.  Each of the participants in this grand charade assumed that he had only done a small, almost insignificant task to help out a friend—almost no payments were made to Willy’s collaborators—and only many years later did they begin to suspect they had been, individually and collectively bamboozled.  

With his young, sweet innocent bride Colette—and this was her surname that she came to be known by, or sometimes Colette Willy—he suggested that she write down her memories of childhood in the country.  He kept locked away, supplied her with plenty of pencils and notebooks, which she dutifully filled over several years.  Willy glanced through them, hemmed and hawed, said they were interesting, asked her to go on, and then at some point saw them into print and out into the public under his name: these were the Claudine novels, known by their main character, whose fictional memoirs they purported to be.  Not until her husband left her for another woman—or actually, when he moved her out and advised her to become a music hall performer—did Gabrielle Colette realize what had happened and, more to the point, that she had talent as an author in her own right.  Michelle Sarde expounds upon this situation at length in her Colette: Free and Fettered (1978), and Colette gives her version of the business in her late autobiographical L’Etoile Vesper (1946). 

So here we are.  At what point does collaboration, editing and organization turn into a mass deception, a crime of plagiarism, a scandal of intellectual deception?  If Willy’s concocted works were of any lasting value, the implications could have been worse.  Colette eventually had the early “Willy-Claudine” books reprinted under her own name—and even went on to write more on her own.  In a sense, the whole bizarre affaire can be seen as a literary joke, with Willy finally becoming the fall guy, the one remembered for his tricks, rather than the various collaborators he duped and his wife who was thus trained and inspired by the tasks he set for her and became one of France’s most important writers of the early twentieth century.  Nevertheless, think of the aesthetic and ethical principles at stake.

Louys’ case is more intriguing and deep in implications.  It is not just that he published his own poems under the ruse that they were translations of a made-up ancient Greek poet, an associate of Lesbia, a trick he never hid from his fellow poets and which was transparent to real classical scholars, but that he added a spoof critical apparatus of introductions, notes and learned authorities that purported to integrate Bilitis both into the context of ancient literature and into the nineteenth-century debates on whether or not Lesbia was, as we think of her, a homosexual writer and the French school of thought promoted or that she was straight and an exemplar of the heterosexual, virile version of classical literature the Germans needed to bolster their own aggressive nationalism. 

Anyone with aesthetic sensibilities could have seen that Louys’s translations were filled with sensuous ideas, images and terms that belonged to fin de siècle decadence, especially the rise of lesbian writings, but the general public could be hoodwinked into believing that Bilitis was an actual female over of the famous Lesbia, and so feel that his or her modern sensibilities were similar to those of the ancient world.  Some German critics were tricked and then angry to discover the deception, taking what Louys did as an act of French perfidy against their puffed-up pretensions of classical scholarship and their nation’s pride in being heirs to ancient Greek masculinity.  

So what to us today may be watched as a good literary joke with little or no political implications may also be taken as an example of the way literature can be manipulated to serve cultural rivalries, to undermine the egotism of scholars—those who think, as many did, since I am a great expert in the ancient world who knows it all, if some new poet suddenly appears in print, then surely I already knew it—and to poke fun at the whole critical game of one-up-man-ship that lies not too far below the surface of scholarly objectivity and literary science. 

To who read The Songs of Bilitis today is to feel that these poems read like what we expect ancient literature to sound like and to enjoy twice-over the knowledge that what Louys wrote is not quite right but what is exotic and titillating to think might have or should have been.  It also piques our trust in scholarship, translation and contemporary taste itself, our own supposedly more modern views actually shaped by late nineteenth-century attitudes towards sexuality, sensuality and poetry.  We can enjoy the imitation of footnotes and introductions and at the same time laugh at ourselves for giving too much respect and trust to the editors of classical texts in translation who provide us non-experts with the illusion that we actually know what is going on.

Texts and Attitudes, Part 7

 The Pleasures and Wisdom of Reading

On an Australian quiz show recently, a young man in his late twenties was asked to name the title written by Cervantes out of four choices: Paradise Lost, The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote and Gone With The Wind.  The contestant hesitated, obviously unfamiliar with the author or any of the titles.  He then guessed: Paradise Lost.  Well, he lost.  No big deal.  However, have we bred a generation of intelligent young people who have no idea of their own cultural heritage?  It’s not people who don’t know about obscure musical groups, baseball teams, the location of sporting facilities in a given city, or the winners of movie Oscars thirty or forty years ago?  Most of the questions asked on such programmes, as in newspaper quizzes, are trivial, requiring random knowledge, or at best some familiarity with popular and ephemeral culture.  But not to recognize Cervantes as the author of Don Quixote or to confound him with John Milton, or Dante, that is something else indeed.

There is one way to know which books to read, since everyone starts off as a beginner, naïve and with a tabula rasa.  If you don’t have parents to guide you and educated teachers to present you with a graduated syllabus of titles to take you grade by grade into the circle of civilized literacy, then you have to become sensitive to what you see and hear around you.  Listen for the clues: the allusions couched in explicit analogies (“They were howling like Macbeth’s witches around the cauldron of mystery”), the implicit references (“Don’t go jousting with windmills, buddy” or “Get thee to a nunnery, sweety pie”), or even more embedded names and expressions.  Notice when two or more authors you enjoy start to quote the same passages in other novels, plays, poems or essays, or mention the names of writers they keep coming back to for inspiration.  When you go back to those sources, see if you can recognize how they (a) remind you of more recent books, (b) seem to comment on ancient or archaic types of people and events, and (c) signal their pre-texts and under-texts in the titles they give to the piece or chapters, the lines they cite as mottoes or epilogues, the contrasts they make to ideas, images and codes they wish to be seen and heard set against.

As you work your way through the vast piles of literature created and easily available—that is, even before you start to seek out the rare and the obscure, the out-of-print and the censored titles—you will become aware of which authors and books are constantly in touch with one another and which have quickly slipped into the silence of obscurity.  Some, that is, keep in mutual contact, keep echoing back and forth through time and place, so that more recent authors keep the long-dead books alive and vibrating with relevance, and the more ancient poems, stories and speculations provide depth and allusive expansion to the newer texts.  Others, however, by lacking these connections, drop out of sight and out of hearing as soon as their immediate purposes are gone.  Many best-sellers—not all, by any means—become popular because they use the language, concepts and discourses of the moment, help many people focus, articulate and make decisions about things in their lives that otherwise seem to vague and complicated; but they lack resonance, and in a very years, if you dare to read them, you find they sound hollow and rickety, for whatever grounding they once seemed to have in reality is now eroded and washed away in the tide of history.

It is not only that reading in this way so as to have flashing lights and reverberating echoes enhancing the books you read, one’s mind making associations, following clues and enjoying the symphony of experiences, but that each new book you read—or re-read because one takes great pleasure both in going back to the primary sources and discovering new authors and titles who are engaged in the same process of mutual enlightenment—helps you understand yourself and your place in the world.

This knowledge goes way beyond random guesses in a quiz show.  This knowledge is what wisdom is based on.  Where knowledge consists of the identifications, recognitions and creative connectivities we keep making as we read, recollect and discuss our readings, wisdom comes to the fore as we learn to understand the patterns created, to make judgments and decisions in everything we do, and to put aside or at least into perspective everything else that does not form a part of the world of intellect and imagination we have discovered.

Other Glimpses of the past

Musical Memories

The first and one of only three grand operas I have ever seen and heard on stage was Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida performed in the Brooklyn Academy of Music sometime in the mid-1950s.  And what do I remember of it?  Not much, to be sure.  Only one scene perhaps, or even less: the great triumphant procession when the hero comes home after defeating the Ethiopian enemy, with what seemed like hundreds of singers, several elephants, and a very strange on-stage orchestra, or rather, a small group of trumpet players who were probably hired as extra that morning from the musicians’ union line-up.  One of the trumpeters was very tall and lanky, the other short and pudgy, a sort of Laurel and Hardy or Abbot and Costello duo.  It was not a choice to instil a great deal of seriousness in the audience, or that part of the assembly which consisted of me and some friends.  The two musicians giggled and gossiped all the time they were on stage, except when they had to play on their horns. I can’t recall anything else.

As a trumpeter myself, in high school I tried to be in all the band and orchestra activities possible.  The trick used at high school was to make playing in the concert band contingent on showing up in the spots band on Saturdays.  The orchestra was separate.  But still, to have to go see the football team in various schools around the city, what a bother.  The one consolation was that it was not a marching band.  Instead, we had to sit on benches near the playing field, play various pieces before and after the games, and especially the school anthem whenever “our tem” scored a point.  I had no idea about football itself and hardly watched the games in progress, spending the time not in short little marches we kept in a small booklet tucked into the holder screwed to the top of the trumpet by either reading a book or gossiping to my fellow musicians.  The whole point seemed to be to make a lot of noise at certain moments, not to entertain an audience. 

To me, let me say, when I was asked to join the local theatre orchestra, the opportunity as both to be part of the entertainment and to be entertained.  In other words, while my trumpet teacher invited me to sit next him as one of the second or third trumpets in the orchestra when they put on big Broadway style musicals, like Guys and Dolls or South Pacific, there was not a great deal of interest or pleasure in just playing um-peh-um-peh-um-peh on syncopation or long notes under the elaborate melodic line of the singers on stage or the occasional solo by one of the main musicians, but there was multiple enjoyment in watching and listening to the musical play being performed right up close, watching the way the director and the dancers, singers and others worked out their moves during rehearsals, and also observing the reactions of the audience seated in the semi-darkened theatre on the several nights when the drama was acted. But if there was not much pleasure in the second and third trumpet parts, that doesn’t mean there was a total lack of pleasure and interest in realizing oneself to be part of large production, making harmonies work, and helping to give the beat to the dancers and singers.  Often, too, I could dream that the audience was pleased with me, and I would sing the songs along the main players, and dance with the dancers as I counted the beats between by little outbursts of umpeh two three four umpeh two three four umpeh-peh-peh breath peehhh!  

Two Glimpses of Reality

No.1,  O Lorde!

When the local kiwi girl singer—she’s only seventeen—called Lorde started to win all the prizes ever, I asked my wife if this kid had more than one song, as it seemed to me there was only one rather tuneless piece aired every time her name was mentioned.  

“Oh, yes, of course,” said my wife.  

“Well,” I nodded knowingly, “there is always another song on the other side of the record, isn’t there?”

When the laughter quietened down a little, I was made to understand that nobody makes, let alone listens to, records any more, not 78s, 45s or 33 and 1/3s, and that pop music was strictly on DVDs and videos, downloaded (whatever that means) and played on ipads, smartphones and other things I had never heard of.

“Where have you been for the last fifty years?” they said. 

This wasn't my wife speaking now.  It was the voices in my head that admonish me for my virtually total disconnection with the real world.  Their admonishments, however, since they are made up by myself, are probably more ironically teasing than serious accusations of some unforgivable crime against humanity.

“Fifty years?” I reply.  “Much longer than that.  Did I ever tell you about the time I went to hear Alan Freed at the Brooklyn Paramount in 1953 or 1854 for the first rock n’ roll show ever and got a free record of Greasie Spoon at the door, and how I—?”

“Yes many times,” my inner voices replied, somewhat exasperated. “We know very well your pride in being an old grouch, a curmudgeon and a pompous ass.”

“But did I tell you about the day I told my students in the university that I have had no connections with any popular music since—?” I started to say.

As usual, even as they ganged up on me, which is, naturally what I wanted, they groaned, and let me go on with my stories.  Meanwhile my wife got on with whatever it is she usually does as such times.

“Not to bore you,” my usual spiel began, “but there was a time when…” and so on and so forth, as the tired record spun itself round and round in my head.

By the time I was finished and chuckling contentedly to myself, they had all gone away, except my wife who, pretending to listen, got on with her own wood-carving or painting, occasionally muttering something which I took to be interest and approval. 

“Very nice, dear,” she said.  “Do you want to do the cooking this evening?”

It was the kind of question that signaled the need for penance in regard to another long session of meaningless babble and the requirement that I prepare our evening meal while my wife put away her tools and washed up. 

No. 2, Of Cuspidors, Chamber Pots and Ashtrays

The next morning, as soon as I had completed most of my ablutions, I turned on the television to watch the latest news from the Ukraine and the invasion of the Crimean Peninsula.

“This,” I said to my wife, who walked out with her hair uncombed and her face in a frazzle, “is more frightening than anything else.”

“What is?” she asked, searching for some hairbrush to clear away the tangle before her eyes.

“Well, you know,” I said, “how all the recent wars have required jungle fatigues and desert camouflage.”

She mumbled something I took to be an agreement, though that would certainly have been a surprise.

“But now.  Look at them,” I said pointing at the unmarked Russian troops standing in front of various naval and airbases.  “This is a winter war.  It looks familiar.  It is like armies I knew when I was growing up.”

“And?” my wife asked, somewhat interested, though probably more concerned about finding her way into the kitchen to begin making breakfast.

“Yes, well, that’s why I only like to watch black and white movies from the 1930s and 1940s.  They show the world as it was and should be.  Today—“ I made a noise mid-way between ffehh! and blehh!—“nothing looks real.  The whole world has become make-believe.”

I could hear banging of cupboard doors, clanking of pots and pans, and the swish of water squirting into a kettle.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” I shouted in the direction of the noise.

“Oh, but I always do.  You’ve been telling me that since before we were married.”

“And it’s  still true,” I said emphatically.  

“You want a world where they still have chamber pots in hotel rooms, cuspidors in the lounge, and ashtrays in all other places.”

“Don’t think that is funny,” I answered.  

There was silence, so I went on: 

“I would feel much happier with a dial telephone, you know.  And a real typewriter with ribbons.  That, my little chickadee,” I said, “ is real, natural and true.”

“Of course, it is my dear,” she answered.  “Do you want eggs or cereal today?”

Almost completed--a life and a poem.

In minds where we depend on each synapse

To bring us secret messages needed to survive

It is a lugubrious matter when the five

Senses begin to prevaricate—our organs flail, each caps

The flow of animal spirits, leaving flaps

Of tissue in the hollow crevices: a hive

Of bees unguarded when the swarm has flown;

The shadows of the queen, her princes and dive

Into the darkness of their own sterility long grown

Into a universe of silence, all semen sown.

Thus eternal turpitude, relaxed and faded,

Like thoughtlessness when the idea of death has jaded.