The Whole Five Feet

Volume 11

The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin had been developing his theory of evolution for more than a decade when he received a letter outlining the same theory from the naturalist A.R. Wallace. In response, Darwin published The Origin of Species earlier than he had intended. As a result, it is filled with lines like, To treat this subject properly, a long catalogue of dry facts ought to be given; but these I reserve for a future work.  Or, In my future work this subject will be treated, as it well deserves, at greater length.  At times, the book feels like a kind of Borgesian gloss on another, unwritten work.

The difference being that, for Borges, the exercise would have lasted eight pages. In the Harvard Classics edition, The Origin of Species spans 553 pages. And I can state unequivocally that over the past week I looked at every one of them. However, I'm not sure that I could fairly say that I read them all.

Don't misunderstand: there is much to admire about Darwin's writing. He structures his argument elegantly, and goes to great lengths to anticipate and respond to objections. (The complexity of the human eye is often cited by advocates of creationism and intelligent design as fatal to evolutionary theory, so I was interested to find that Darwin himself had addressed this concern.) But precisely because its argument is so lucidly outlined and so extensively argued, The Origin of Species, more than any other book I've read in the past months, fairly demands to be skimmed. The book is chockful of sentences like this one:

Mr. Wollaston has discovered the remarkable fact that 200 beetles, out of the 550 species (but more are now known) inhabiting Madeira, are so far deficient in wings that they cannot fly; and that, of the twenty-nine endemic genera, no less than twenty-three have all their species in this condition!

Granted, the exclamation mark provides some comic relief. But even now I could hardly keep from skimming long enough to transcribe this line. Which is not to say that such facts aren't useful to Darwin's argument, or that they wouldn't be of interest to the fellow naturalist who were the book's presumed audience. But they are of limited value to the generalist reader of the Classics. And then there is the fact that Darwin's theories have been significantly modified over the past 150 years. Darwin was handicapped, for example, by a dearth of knowledge about the process through which characteristics are inherited. One of the key assumptions behind the Classics is that it is always useful to strip away the secondary material and go back to the source. But I found myself, this week, wondering whether I wouldn't be better off reading Daniel Dennett or Stephen Jay Gould or some other modern day writer, who could tell me how evolultionary theory had, itself, evolved.

--CRB, March 25, 2007

Volume 12

Lives by Plutarch

Plutarch was a Greek, born in the early days of the Roman Empire (during the reign of Claudius), and his Parallel Lives of Famous Greeks and Romans compare famous Greek statesmen and soldiers with their Roman equivalents. Through them, he managed to cover most of the history of Greece and Rome up to his own lifetime. But Plutarch was a philosopher and moralist before he was a historian, and his Lives were written with explicitly didactic ends. As far as I can tell, the main lesson to be gained is that being a famous Greek or Roman statesman or soldier is likely to get you exiled at some point, and probably also murdered. There is a great deal of political intrigue here, and much of it is fascinating; there's good reason that the Lives have been used as dramatic source material by Shakespeare and HBO.

But as with many modern biographies, there are occasionally times when detail bogs things down. From the chapter on Demosthenes:

 

But after Philip, being now grown high and puffed up with his good success at Amphissa, on a sudden surprised Elatea and possessed himself of Phocis, and the Athenians were in a great consternation, none durst venture to rise up to speak, no one knew what to say, all were at a loss, and the whole assembly in silence and perplexity, in this extremity of affairs, Demosthenes was the only man who appeared, his counsel to them being alliance with the Thebans. And having in other ways encouraged the people, and, as his manner was, raised their spirits up with hopes, he, with some others, was sent ambassador to Thebes.

Imagine, a few millennia from now, someone reading several pages about whether Karl Rove will appear before Congress openly and under oath, or privately and without a transcript. Or worse, imagine sitting through the last few Star Wars movies. This gives you some idea how tedious the minutiae here sometimes becomes.

But these moments are exceptions.  Most of the time, the Lives are wonderful fun, especially once we get to Cicero, Caesar and Antony. Of course, I was familiar with the stories here, not just from Mr. Osborne's 5th-grade history class and Shakespeare's plays, but from reading Cicero's letters just a few weeks ago. But it is strangely thrilling to read a story one has heard so many times before, knowing that, for the first time, you are reading the version from which all the others are drawn. Even more thrilling is to read the odd details that have been conveniently left out of the subsequent drafts:

When he came to the river Rubicon, which parts Gaul within the Alps from the rest of Italy, his thoughts began to work, now he was just entering upon the danger, and he wavered much in his mind, when he considered the greatness of the enterprise into which he was throwing himself. He checked his course, and ordered a halt, while he revolved with himself, and often changed his opinion one way and the other, without speaking a word. [...] At last, in a sort of passion, casting aside calculation, and abandoning himself to what might come, and using the proverb frequently in their mouths who enter upon dangerous and bold attempts, "The die is cast," with these words he took the river. Once over, he used all expedition possible, and before it was day reached Ariminum, and took it. It is said that the night before he passed the river, he had an impious dream, that he was unnaturally familiar with his own mother.

I remember the part about the die being cast, but I'm not sure Mr. Osborne told me about that dream.

--CRB, April 1, 2007

Volume 13

The Aeneid by Vergil

When I told my sister, who was a Classics major in college, that I had arrived at the Aeneid, she joked that the Iliad and the Odyssey was a lot of reading for one week. It has long been remarked that Vergil's great Latin epic combines the two Homeric epics in one. The poem's first half -- the first six of twelve books -- recount Aeneas' wanderings after the fall of Troy, culminating in his arrival in Italy. These travels correspond overtly with Odysseus' wanderings after the fall of Troy, culminating in his arrival in Ithaca. The Aeneid's second six books are an Iliad-like war poem.

At first glance, it seems natural that a Roman epic poet would take his lead from the great founding texts of the epic tradition, and yet the choice suggests a profound difference between ancient culture and our own. After all, Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome, was on the losing side of the Trojan war. He was a peer of Hector, whose death at the hands of Achilles represents the climax of the Iliad. Odysseus left Troy to head home after victory. For Aeneas, Troy was home, and he left it as an exile. And so it's curious, I think, that Vergil would use the Homeric forms, the forms that the Greeks perfected to celebrate their great victory at Troy, in order to tell Aeneas' story. Keep in mind that Vergil, unlike Homer, is a fixed historical figure, about whom we know a fair amount. He lived in the early days of the Roman Empire -- the days about which I read last week in Plutarch -- and he was a friend to Augustus. He wrote the Aeneid, in part, to glorify Rome and justify the Julian line. The events he recounts happened -- to the extent that they happened at all -- 1000 - 1500 years before the work was written. What does it mean that Vergil chose to glorify Roman achievement by putting it into Greek terms?

I was thinking of this question when I read the following passage, from Book 7 (i.e., early in the "Iliad half" of the poem):

Then two twin brothers from fair Tibur came,
(Which from their brother Tiburs took the name,)
Fierce Coras and Catillus, void of fear:
Arm'd Argive horse they led, and in the front appear.
Like cloud-born Centaurs, from the mountain's height
With rapid course descending to the fight;
They rush along; the rattling woods give way;
The branches bend before their sweepy sway.
Nor was Praeneste's founder wanting there,
Whom fame reports the son of Mulciber:
Found in the fire, and foster'd in the plains,
A shepherd and a king at once he reigns,
And leads to Turnus' aid his country swains.

This is an unremarkable passage, except that Turnus is Aeneas' rival, and the men described are the ones who will do battle against Troy. One is reminded again of the Iliad, where the vanquished Hector is perhaps the noblest of all the characters. Bravery, a sense of duty: these are central components of nobility -- of the notion of "the good" -- in Greek and Roman ethics. If the very willingness to fight is one of the chief criteria for goodness, then the two opposing sides in a battle must almost by definition both be "good." (Sidebar: in this scheme -- which I've cribbed mostly from Nietzsche -- "good" is contrasted with "bad," i.e. cowardly or weak; in the later, Judeo-Christian scheme, "good" takes on characteristics almost indistinguishable from the Greco-Roman "bad," which has been displaced by the notion of "evil.") It is for this reason that one can celebrate one's enemies. For this same reason, one can use the poetic mode of the Greeks to celebrate the Trojans they vanquished.

So what? Here's what: with the view of life as a battle between fundamentally good opponents who are duty-bound to conflicting ends comes the tragic view that good must sometimes be defeated; with the view of life as a battle between good and evil opponents comes the necessity of demonizing the opposition, and also the belief that good is fated to win. With this last can also come an overambitious desire to spread one's goodness. In the Aeneid, and in its Homeric predecessors, battle is entered into with extreme reluctance. It is only in a world where the inevitable outcome of battle is the vanquishing of evil that one goes looking for a fight.

I'll stop here, in part because I've never been a fan of arguments for the contemporary "relevance" of classical literature. The greatest of these works are great because of what they tell us about humanity in general, not because of anything they might tell us about our current misadventures. But the Aeneid invites one to indulge in these anachronistic readings, because it is an act of anachronistic interpretation itself.

--CRB, April 7, 2007

Volume 14

Don Quixote, Part 1 by Miguel Cervantes

A middle-aged man, the owner of a lean stallion and a bit of land in a small country village, spends his free time reading bad romance novels. He becomes so obsessed that he neglects his household duties to spend whole days and nights on these books, until, through his little sleep and much reading, he dried up his brains in such sort as he lost wholly his judgement. He comes to believe himself a character in one of these novels -- a knight-errant -- and he attempts to live out the adventures he's found on the page. As he does, reality continually collides with the fanciful notions in his books.

Don Quixote is what you might call a high-concept comedy-of-situation.  Think Three's Company or Bosom Buddies. Like any good sit-com, Cervantes' novel is linear and episodic in structure; it can go on for as long as the Nielsens look good. Rather than building one on the next, each episode ends more or less where it begins. (Nabokov suggested that Cervantes might well have written Don Quixote, Part II, without a copy of Part I on hand.) It has memorable characters who don't evolve much over time, so we can tune out for a while and always come back to the same old Don and Sancho we know and love. But there is a cruelty, too, which marks the story as a bit edgy and modern.  Larry David's Sienfeld mantra -- No hugging, no learning -- applies quite well.

Inevitably, Don Quixote jumps the shark after a while -- in this case, somewhere around the third section of Part I -- and it stays off the tracks for almost two hundred pages. (The book makes a remarkable recovery in Part II, which -- for reasons deeper than limitations of space, I suspect -- is not included here.)

So why does Don Quixote still fascinate after 400 years, when we've already forgotten Family Matters? The first and best answer is that middle-aged man, Alonso Quixada (or perhaps it's Quesada, or maybe Quixana): the self-styled Don Quixote de la Mancha. He is a man who does terrible things -- he frees criminals; he subjects friends and strangers to beatings -- with the purest of motives. As such, he is a type all too familiar to us, one whom we can never be quite sure whether to pity or admire. We tell ourselves he is merely an idealist, and yet we know that he is truly a madman, that until he comes to terms with reality, he can only cause pain. Occasionally, his madness is punctured by moments of sharp clarity, but it is in these very moments that he believes himself enchanted. Quixote is one of few literary characters who transcend the works that give them life. (Ironically, it may be that the novel's very structural slackness is part of what allows this to be so.)

The second obvious reason for Don Quixote's continued interest is its place in literary history as (arguably) the first modern novel. And yet historical precedence can hardly account for the book's cultural prominence. It wouldn't matter nearly so much if it didn't already contain so much of what would come to define the genre it helped to create. With the Knight of the Mournful Countenance, Cervantes found an ideal means for exploring the tension between illusion and reality, between the epic narratives we tell ourselves and the often less-inspiring facts on the ground. A case can be made -- in fact, I'm about to make it -- that this tension represents the major theme of the novelistic tradition.

For example, the great works of the 19th century -- the novel's watershed -- are simply lousy with quixotic dreamers. Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary are the daughters of Quixote, each of them brought to tragic ends by the romance novels they read and their false ideas about love. All of Tess's problems begin when her father, John Durbeyfield, begins to fancy himself Sir John D'Urbervilles.  George Eliot introduces Middlemarch with a brief summary of the life of Saint Theresa, concluding, Many Theresas have been born who found themselves no epic life... We are meant to understand that Dorothea Brooke is one such Theresa -- as are Lydgate and Casaubon in their own ways. And then there are Stendhal's anti-heroes, who are perhaps closest to Quixote in the pain the cause others through their romantic ideals.

In each of these cases, the collision of legend and truth creates the moral choices that may be said to be the real subject of these novels. But the collision itself comes more and more into the foreground as the novel evolves in the 20th century. The battle between the epic and the mundane is made explicit when Joyce transports the Odyssey to Dublin in Ulysses.  The difference between books and life -- and the difficulty of capturing the latter within the former -- drive Proust's Search.

Which brings us to another point.  To say that Don Quixote -- and the novel generally -- engages thematically with the conflict of illusion and reality is to say that the novel has been, from its beginnings, a self-conscious form. Cervantes plays reflexively with literary forms in ways we tend to think of as new, even though they have been part of the novel's DNA from its conception. Little wonder we aren't yet through with it: Don Quixoteis not just the first modern novel, but the first post-modern one. And one day, when we theorists lay out the dominant features of the post-post-modern novel (or whatever the hell they decide to call it), a little attention will likely prove that these features too can be found in these pages. And if it happens, as some suggest it will, that high-end serialized t.v. shows like The Sopranos and The Wire become the novels of the 21st century?  Well -- Cervantes got there first, too.

-- CRB, April 16, 2007

Volume 15

The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan

There was a time when John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress was the second most popular book in the English language.  The most popular was then, as now, the Bible, of which Pilgrim's Progress serves as a kind of gloss. The book's first part tells the story of a pilgrim named Christian who sets out from the City of Destruction towards heaven. He passes through the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair; he is helped along by friends like Faithful and Hope and he is hindered by the likes of Envy and Superstition. The book's second part recounts a similar journey made by Christian's wife, Christiana.  What interests me most about Pilgrim's Progress as a religious allegory is how utterly unconvincing it is.

I don't mean this entirely as an insult.

Here are the opening lines of Pilgrim's Progress:

As I walk'd through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a Dream. I dreamed, and behold I saw a Man cloathed with Rags, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a Book in his hand, and a great Burden upon his back. I looked, and saw him open the Book, and read therein; and as he read, he wept and trembled; and not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying What shall I do?

Now here are the opening lines of Don Quixote, written sixty years earlier:

There lived not long since, in a certain village of the Mancha, the name whereof I purposely omit, a gentleman of their calling that use to pile up in their halls old lances, halberds, morions, and such other armours and weapons. He was, besides, master of an ancient target, a lean stallion, and a swift greyhound. His pot consisted daily of somewhat more beef than mutton: a gallimaufry each night, collops and eggs on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and now and then a lean pigeon on Sundays, did consume three parts of his rents; the rest and remnant thereof was spent on a jerkin of fine puce, a pair of velvet hose, with pantofles of the same for the holy-days, and one suit of the finest vesture; for therewithal he honoured and set out his person on the workdays.

The difference between the two books is the difference between a certain village of the Mancha and a certain place.

From the very first sentence, Cervantes fixes his story in place and time. Having done so, he creates certain expectations of versimilitude, to which he attends by describing the possessions in his character's house. A gesture towards the habitual -- His pot consisted daily... -- establishes that this man, like any real man, carries with him a history largely unknown to us (just as his village has a name, even though we don't know it).

Bunyan's man has a house, but it isn't filled with old lances or anything else, because it's only a word, like the Book in his hand and the Burden on his back. The Man has no history; his life begins in the moment we find him with his book and his burden, wondering what to do. In truth, he is less a man than a dilemma.

A few lines on, Cervantes gives us his character's name: Some affirm that his surname was Quixada, or Quesada (for in this there is some variance among the authors that write his life), although it may be gathered, by very probable conjectures, that he was called Quixana.

Such ambiguity would be impossible for Bunyan.  When he names his character Christian, when he names Christian's city the City of Destruction, we know that they can have no other names. But they are so called because the book that the Man has opened has made him a Christian, has condemned his city to be destroyed; they could not have had these names before the book started. Similarly, Christian's wife is simply his wife throughout the book's first part, but the moment she goes on her own pilgrimage, she becomes Christiana.  Nothing has a name until it is given one, but once given each name is indisputable.

In the end, it might be simpler to say that the difference between Don Quixote and Pilgrim's Progress is the difference between There lived and I dreamed. By suggesting that his story really happened, Cervantes creates a standard of plausibilty for himself. In empirical terms, his book becomes falsifiable and thus, potentially, true. Not that we can go to the local records to find out if Quixote existed (Cervantes plays, in part, with this impulse when he withholds the village's name), but that we can compare his story to what we know of the world. His intended audience could even compare his story to what they knew of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century La Mancha. But no such standards apply to Pilgrim's Progress.  How does one falsify a dream?  In the end, the book doesn't fail to convince; it simply doesn't try.

Which is not to say that Bunyan's allegory has nothing to say, especially to those who are already convinced of its underlying truth. If you have ever found the secular world shallow or materialistic -- who hasn't? -- then you may be struck by his description of Vanity Fair:

At this Fair are all such Merchandize sold, as Houses, Lands, Trades, Places, Honours, Preferments, Titles, Countries, Kingdoms, Lusts, Pleasures, and Delights of all sorts, as Whores, Bawds, Wives, Husbands, Children, Masters, Servants, Lives, Blood, Bodies, Souls, Silver, Gold, Pearls, Precious Stones, and what not?

But if this aspect of the world had not already occurred to you, I can't see how this parade of abstractions would change that fact. Like most allegory, Pilgrim's Progress tends necessarily towards the universal, away from the specific. It can tell us about those things in ourselves that make us like everyone else. But it can tell us little about those things in others that are unlike us. It can't take us out of ourselves. It's like a kind of mnemonic to keep one in mind of Bunyan's evangelical brand of the Christian creed. But I can't see it actually converting anyone.

The Lives of Donne and Herbert by Izaak Walton

Izaak Walton describes George Herbert's life as:

A life so full of charity, humility, and all Christian virtues, that it deserves the eloquence of St. Chrysostom to commend and declare it: a life, that if it were related by a pen like his, there would then be no need for this age to look back into times past for the examples of primitive piety; for they might be all found in the life of George Herbert.

This reference to times past struck me especially because Walton's Lives bear an obvious debt to Plutarch's, especially the later Lives of Plutarch's contemporaries like Augustus and Cicero. Walton -- who is known mostly for The Compleat Angler -- knew both Donne and Herbert. He admired them, and he told their lives so that they might be emulated. As it happens, Donne had already considered what monument he might leave behind, which led to the strangest passage in the Lives. On his death-bed, he sent for an urn and a wooden board of about his own height.

These being got, then without delay a choice painter was got to be in readiness to draw his picture, which was taken as followeth. Several charcoal fires being first made in his large study, he brought with him into that place his winding-sheet in his hand, and having put off all his clothes, had this sheet put on him, and so tied with knots at his head and feet, and his hands so placed as dead bodies are usually fitted, to be shrouded and put into their coffin, or grave. Upon this urn he thus stood, with his eyes shut, and with so much of the sheet turned aside as might show his lean, pale, and deathlike face, which was purposely turned towards the east, from whence he expected the second coming of his and our Saviour Jesus.

Donne spent his remaining days contemplating this picture.  After his death, it was given to his executor, who caused him to be thus carved in one entire piece of white marble. The monument was placed at St. Paul's. Thirty years later, it survived the Great Fire of London, and it stands in St. Paul's still.

Of course, this is not the only monument John Donne left behind, and he is remembered today not mostly for the qualities Walton hoped to preserve. Walton does at least take some time to note of the great Dean that, "The recreations of his youth were poetry."

--CRB, April 25, 2007

Volume 16

Stories from the Thousand and One Nights

The stories in the Book of the Thousand and One Nights first came to Europe early in the 18th century, in Antoine Galland's French translation. Translations into the other European languages followed quickly. The book had a huge influence on 19th century writers like Nerval and Flaubert, who each travelled to Egypt and came back with stories infused with opium and hashish smoke, many of which betrayed odd resemblances to these five hundred year old tales. To the extent that we still see the East as a land of Sultans and Genies, it is because of this book. Edward Said and others have argued persuasively that exoticized Orientalism -- the Western view of the Near East as a romantically backward place -- has served the political ends of Western imperialism. Especially given the current state of East-West relations, it bears noting that this selection from the 1,001 Nights --this wonder-book of the mysterious east, as the volume's introduction calls it -- is one of only three volumes of the Classics devoted to non-Western texts. (The others are the religious works in Volumes 44 and 45, most of which have been wholly assimilated by Judeo-Christian Europe.)

And so we should allow upfront that these tales probably teach us less about the history of the Orient than about the history of Western misunderstanding of the Orient. Still, as Ernie McCracken would say, they sure are fun, though. This volume has been the most purely enjoyable of the Classics I've read so far. (It's also an easy choice for my second Ted-Should-Read-This pick.)

The book's framing story, as most readers will know, involve a jealous Shah who marries a series of virgins only to kill each one after a single night. Finally, he marries Scheherazade (transliterated as Shahrazad), the daughter of his Wezir. She entertains him on their wedding night by telling a story, which she leaves unfinished so that he must let her live in order to hear the end of it. The next night, she finishes the first story, but begins another, which she in turn leaves unfinished. And so on, for 1,001 nights, by which point the Shah decides to let her live.

Scheherazade extends her stories in part through a series of nesting device. A typical example, included in this selection, is the Story of the Humpback. The story goes like this: a tailor and his wife are playing drunkenly with a hunchback who chokes on a chicken bone. Believing they have caused the hunchback's death, the couple takes him to a Jewish doctor, who comes in turn to believe that he is responsible for the hunchback's death. The doctor brings the hunchback to the house of his neighbor, a Christian broker, who also comes to believe he is responsible for the death. Eventually, all three parties are brought to the Sultan by his steward and sentenced to be beheaded. So far, so good. But each party attempts to win clemency from the Sultan by telling his own story. We are then given a series of nested stories: The Story of the Sultan's Steward; The Story of the Christian Broker; the Story of the Jewish Physician; the Story of the Tailor. The last of these includes a further layer of nesting stories involving a barber and his brothers. After the tailor has finished his story, the sultan summons the barber to verify the story, and the barber removes the chicken bone from the hunchback's throat, restoring him to life.

The theme of characters who attempt to put off or avoid an execution by means of telling stories is pervasive throughout the Nights -- beginning, of course, with Scheherazade herself. Taken together, the Nights seem to propose a kind of human will to narrative as the ultimate sign of vitality in the face of impending doom. In the past few generations, the Nights have been taken up by metafictionists like John Barth, who seem more interested in this formal aspect than in any romantic notion of sultans and harems. In fact, reading the 1,001 Nights, with its proliferation of narratives, I was reminded above all of authors like Pynchon or Rushdie or David Foster Wallace, novelists whom James Wood has termed hysterical realists.  Storytelling has become a kind of grammar in these novels, Wood argued; it is how they structure and drive themselves on.  The primary characteristic of such novels, Wood went on, is a pursuit of vitality at all costs.  The term hysterical realism is both catchy and apt enough to have become a common shorthand even for those who admire this kind of fiction (which I do, with certain qualifications). But if one had to go looking for another name for these tendencies in contemporary fiction, I might suggest the Scheherazade School: these are novels written as if under a sentence of death from which only stories can save them.

--CRB, April 29, 2007

Volume 17

Fables by Aesop

Although they're grouped together in this volume as Folklore and Fable, the fables attributed to Aesop, the folk-tales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and the tales of Hans Christian Andersen are widely divergent forms. Aesop's fables -- whose origin and development are as tangled as that of the Arabian Nights in the previous volume -- are extremely compact, and their meanings fairly easy to parse. In many cases, in fact, the meaning is made explicit at the end of the work. The Man and the Wood is a typical example:

A man came into a Wood one day with an axe in his hand, and begged all the Trees to give him a small branch which he wanted for a particular purpose. The Trees were good-natured and gave him one of their branches. What did the Man do but fix it into the axe head, and soon set to work cutting down tree after tree. Then the Trees saw how foolish they had been in giving their enemy the means of destroying themselves.

This isn't even a parable so much as a figure, a metaphor that might as easily be absorbed into a larger argument as stand alone. One can easily see a modern politician using this paragraph verbatim in a speech about, say, civil liberties and the war on terror. In fact, one of these fables -- the Belly and the Members, about the other organs rebelling because the belly got all the food, only to find that he had been feeding them in turn -- showed up earlier in the Classics, in a speech by Cicero about misguided resentment towards the Roman senate.

We use these Fables now more or less as they've always been used, as simple, direct metaphors.  Some of Andersen's tales -- The Ugly Duckling, The Emperor's New Clothes -- have obvious lessons, but they are above all wonderful stories with literary value quite separate from their didactic content. On the other hand, when you speaks of someone being a wolf in sheep's clothing, you have in those four words the entirety of that fable's content.

Household Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

The very name of the Brother's Grimm -- with its archaic transposition of noun and adjective, the too-perfect resonance of the family name -- suggest men as old and mysterious as the tales they collected. So it's worth reminding readers that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were 19th century German philologists and librarians. Their efforts to preserve traditional German tales call to mind both modern students of mythology like Jung and Joseph Campbell and musicologists like Harry Smith who worked to preserve American folk traditions. The point being that they were well educated men seeking to preserve a tradition of which they were in some ways already no longer a part. As soon as an inherited tale gets written down, codified, it becomes something different. the very need to preserve these tales in this way suggests that the oral tradition in which they grew was fading away.

Regardless, we must all recognize how successful the brothers were as preservationists. These tales remain central to our common culture. Who doesn't know about Rapunzel's letting down her long hair to let her lover climb up to her? Or Hansel and Gretel and the trail of breadcrumbs that helped them home? Or Snow White's stepmother being forced to dance in red hot shoes until she dies?

 

Well, maybe not that last one. Let's try again. There's always Cinderella. Who could forget the way the birds who came to rest on the hazel tree that has granted all of Cinderella's wishes come back in the end to peck out her step-sisters' eyes?

Okay, so it seems we don't know these tales as well as we thought.

(Right about here it seems more or less obligatory to provide a lament on the Disneyfication of these stories. And such a lament would be sincere. These tales are far stranger, darker, more interesting than the cartoons that now overshadow them. It is a great shame in many ways that we can no longer read about the seven dwarves, for example, without thinking of names like Sleepy and Dopey. Or that we think that Cinderella had a fairy godmother, when the story of a hazel branch planted at her mother's grave and watered by her tears is so much more beautiful. But of course, these tales didn't belong to the Grimms, and they certainly evolved in the years before the brothers recorded them. What is sad is that they seem now to have stopped evolving: the ersatz version has somehow become definitive. At any rate, this line of argument ought to lead us back where we belong, with the work itself.)

The most striking difference between these tales as they read on the page and these tales as I knew them as a child is how terrifying the former are. I don't mean birds pecking out the eyes Cinderella's sisters, or Snow White's step mother's dancing until she drops dead (which, after all, are part of the happy endings of their respective tales). I mean the constant, grinding threat of starvation and economic hardship. Hansel and Gretel, for example, are sent out into the woods because their family can't afford to feed them. In these stories, the dream of meeting and marrying a prince represents more than a Freudian family romance of returning to your real life. Marrying up is often a matter of life and death. In this way, these tales sometime strangely reminded me of Jane Austin's novels, where courtship is a matter of both romance and avoiding the poorhouse. I realize only as I write this that Austen's novels are another case where the economic terror has been sanded away in modern cinematic versions, leaving only the anodyne romance behind.

Tales by Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen is a different case than the Grimm brothers. While Andersen was influenced by traditional folk-tales, he was a writer, not a compiler, and these fairy tales were only a small portion of his total literary output. That these tales were the original work of a writer who lived around the same time as Tolstoy and Flaubert makes it all the more remarkable that many of them -- The Emperor's New Clothes, The Ugly Duckling -- have as much cultural currency as Aesop's tortoise and hare or the Grimms' Rumpelstiltskin. But despite their inclusion with these other works, Andersen's stories seem to me very much modern literary efforts. Andersen practiced the tale, as a literary genre, in much the way his compatriot Isak Dinesen did a century later. (I'm sure there is more to made of the fact that the greatest Danish writers of the 19th and 20th centuries both mastered this particular form, but I'm not the one to make it.)

Whether for good or for ill, I've never seen Disney's Little Mermaid movie. Nor, before this week, had I ever read the tale -- translated here as The Little Sea-Maid -- on which the movie is based. I had long been told, however, that Andersen's sea-maid dies at the end of his tale, and that the movie's happy ending is one of the many travesties such adaptations commit against their sources. But I wasn't at all prepared for the moment in the original when the sea-maid turns to foam. It is the kind of moment, I think, that can't be passed down orally and transcribed by an anthropologist, that rather can only be created bya single man or woman of literary genius:

Now the sun rose up out of the sea. The rays fell mild and warm upon the cold sea-foam, and the little Sea-maid felt nothing of death. She saw the bright sun, and over her head sailed hundreds of glorious ethereal beings--she could see them through the white sails of the ship and the red clouds of the sky; their speech was melody, but of such a spiritual kind that no human ear could hear it, just as no human eye could see them; without wings they floated through the air. The little Sea-maid found that she had a frame like these, and was rising more and more out of the foam.

Whither am I going? she asked; and her voice sounded like that of other beings, so spiritual, that no earthly music could be compared to it.

To the daughters of the air! replied the others. A sea-maid has no immortal soul, and can never gain one, except she win the love of a mortal. Her eternal existence depends upon the power of another. The daughters of the air have likewise no immortal soul, but they can make themselves one through good deeds. We fly to the hot countries, where the close, pestilent air kills men, and there we bring coolness. We disperse the fragrance of the flowers through the air, and spread refreshment and health. After we have striven for three hundred years to accomplish all the good we can bring about, we receive an immortal soul, and take part in the eternal happiness of men. You, poor little Sea-maid, have striven with your whole heart after the goal we pursue; you have suffered and endured; you have by good works raised yourself to the world of spirits, and can gain an immortal soul after three hundred years.

And the little Sea-maid lifted her glorified eyes toward God�s sun, and for the first time she felt them fill with tears. On the ship there was again life and noise. She saw the Prince and his bride searching for her; then they looked mournfully at the pearly foam, as if they knew that she had thrown herself into the waves. Invisible, she kissed the forehead of the bride, fanned the Prince, and mounted with the other children of the air on the rosy cloud which floated through the ether. After three hundred years we shall thus float into Paradise!

--CRB, May 17, 2007

Volume 18

All for Love by John Dryden

Like the Folklore and Fable of last week's volume, the Modern English Drama collected in volume eighteen actually represents a great diversity of work. The plays range almost two centuries, from the Restoration to the Romantic era. There are comedies and tragedies, prose dramas and verse, and some seem written more for the page than the stage.

Of the authors represented, only Dryden has appeared earlier in the Classics -- as the translator of the Aeneid. Both that translation and his play All For Love include lengthy prefaces, and it may be that Dryden is more impressive as a critic -- even of his own work -- than as an artist. The preface to All For Love makes a fitting opening to this survey of post-Elizabethan drama, because it states directly the problem all these writers face:

In my style, I have professed to imitate the divine Shakespeare; which that I might perform more freely, I have disencumbered myself from rhyme. Not that I condemn my former way, but that this is more proper to my present purpose. I hope I need not to explain myself, that I have not copied my author servilely: Words and phrases must of necessity receive a change in succeeding ages; but it is almost a miracle that much of his language remains so pure; and that he who began dramatic poetry amongst us, untaught by any, and as Ben Jonson tells us, without learning, should by the force of his own genius perform so much, that in a manner he has left no praise for any who come after him.

I have yet to make sense of the order of the Classics, which feature Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans in the 46th and 47th volumes, but includes Dryden here in volume 18. Nonetheless, reading through the Classics in the way that I have encourages one to see certain works within the context of the literary traditions from which they emerged. Dryden himself demands such consideration with his choice of material in All For Love:

The death of Antony and Cleopatra is a subject which has been treated by the greatest wits of our nation, after Shakespeare; and by all so variously, that their example has given me the confidence to try myself in this bow of Ulysses amongst the crowd of suitors, and, withal, to take my own measures, in aiming at the mark. I doubt not but the same motive has prevailed with all of us in this attempt; I mean the excellency of the moral: For the chief persons represented were famous patterns of unlawful love; and their end accordingly was unfortunate.

This is a sly rhetorical move: is it really the the excellency of the moral that motivates, or the chance to take one's own measures? Of course, the answer may be a bit of both. The question, then, becomes -- where does he measure? In this case, I'm still not sure. Dryden was a master of the heroic couplet (into which he translated the Aeneid), but here he writes in blank verse, and the result is often quite fine. Here is Antony's general, Ventidius, rousing him to battle:

No; 'tis you dream; you sleep away your hours
In desperate sloth, miscalled philosophy.
Up, up, for honour's sake; twelve legions wait you,
And long to call you chief: By painful journeys
I led them, patient both of heat and hunger,
Down form the Parthian marches to the Nile.
'Twill do you good to see their sunburnt faces,
Their scarred cheeks, and chopt hands: there's virtue in them.
They'll sell those mangled limbs at dearer rates
Than you trim bands can buy.

Still, I was occasionally bored by this play, as I never am by Shakespeare, and at no point was I moved in the way I am each time I read the last act of Lear or Othello. It's an unfair comparison, of course, even if Dryden asks for it.

The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith

The two plays that follow Dryden's in this volume are written in unmetered prose, which gives them a less anxious place within the dramatic tradition. They also happen to be comedies, thought farce is perhaps the better term.  The day I spent earlier this week reading The School for Scandal and She Stoops to Conquer was one of the most enjoyable in recent memory. As with any good farce, there is lots of rather silly word play. Mistaken identity abounds. The plot is advanced through subterfuge and, where necessary, bald coincidence, until the end, when the guy gets the girl. And it's all a lot of fun. I'm tempted just to leave it at that, but I will say that these plays also reminded me that sometimes an author chooses his subject not for taking measure but for giving pleasure.

The Cenci by Percy Bysshe Shelley

A Blot in the Scutcheon by Robert Browning

Manfred by Lord Byron

The volume ends with plays by three Romantic poets.  Two of the three -- Shelley's The Cenci and Byron's Manfred -- weren't really intended for performance.  The Cenci reads less like a closet drama than Manfred does, but Shelley must have known that it's subject matter -- the plot centers on an act of incestous rape -- would keep it off the stage. Both plays are best read as long Romantic poems. Manfred bears resemblances to Faust (which comes in the next volume), in its treatment of a man who seeks superhuman, alchemical knowledge and ultimately comes to pay for this desire. Both plays have the dark, gothic feel that makes Byron's and Shelley's brand of Romanticism so appealing (to me, at least).

Browning, on the other hand, wrote his plays with the stage in mind, and A Blot in the Scutcheon is a wonderful dramatic tragedy. I don't know if it's much performed these days, but it ought to be. I wrote earlier that Dryden's play didn't move me in the way that tragedy sometimes can. But I didn't fully realize this until a few days later, when I found myself crying as I read the last few lines of Browning's play.

--CRB, May 24, 2007

Volume 19

Faust, Part I by J.W. von Goethe

Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe

I was still in my first month of reading the Classics when I came to Milton's Paradise Regained, in which the Devil tempts Jesus in the desert with the prospect of worldly knowledge, particularly the knowledge of the Gentiles (i.e., the Greeks). He who receives Light from above, Jesus replies, No other doctrine needs. This rebuff comes in the poem's last book, and it represents an undoing, in part, of Adam and Eve's decision to eat from the tree of knowledge. But it also represents a Protestant reaction to Renaissance humanism, with its worship of secular, especially pre-Christian, knowledge. Milton is expressing the long-standing notion that a quest for too much worldy knowledge is not only sinful, but blasphemous, that such a quest ultimately demands allegiance to the devil. Naturally, the idea struck me as I embarked on my own quest for humanist knowledge. Since then, this trope has reoccured a few times in the Classics -- most recently in Byron's closet drama, Manfred, from last week's volume. But it finds its purest modern expression in the Faust legend, which in turn finds its greatest form in Goethe's poem.

There appears to be a historical model for Faust, as there were for many of Goethe's poems. In this case, the model was a German philosopher and alchemist, Dr. Faust, who died mysteriously in 1540. Faust seems like a fairly emblematic Northern Renaissance figure, and so it's unsurprising that his reputation darkened during the Reformation. It's said that Martin Luther himself was among the first to suggest that Faust had entered a pact with Mephistophiles. At any rate, by 1587 a life of Faust had been published, which used him as a cautionary tale.

Goethe came to the Faust legend by way of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, which is included here. Goethe deepened the story considerably along the way, in part by adding the character of Gretchen. (Incidentally, it's terribly unfair to Marlowe that the one play he wrote that isn't used as a lens to study the greatest English poet of all time is used instead as a lens to study the greatest German poet of all time. Sorry, Chris; at least people are still reading the plays.)

Here is Goethe's Faust as the poem begins:

I have, alas! Philosophy,
Medicine, Jurisprudence too,
And to my cost Theology,
With ardent labour, studied through.
And here I stand, with all my lore,
Poor fool, no wiser than before.

Philosophy, medicine, jurisprudence, theology: a fair start at listing the topics of the Harvard Classics. Now, here is Faust a short time later:

Hearken! The end I aim at is not joy;
I crave excitement, agonizing bliss,
Enamour'd hatred, quickening vexation.
Purg'd from the love of knowledge, my vocation,
The scope of all my powers henceforth be this,
To bare my breast to every pang,--to know
In my heart's core all human weal and woe,
To grasp in thought the lofty and the deep,
Men's various fortunes on my breast to heap,
And thus to theirs dilate my individual mind,
And share at length with them the shipwreck of mankind.

Goethe is suggesting a distinction that dates back at least as far as Socrates, between knowledge and wisdom. The former involves a set of facts compiled through study, while the latter is acquired with greater difficulty -- even years of study can leave one no wiser than before. Wisdom consists of insights into the human condition, and it comes only through experience. (It is the experience of wisdom, rather than the acquisition of knowledge, that Socrates attempts to convey through the dialectic method.) This distinction is nowhere present in Marlowe's version; it's a wrinkle original to Goethe, who greatly complicates the meaning of what Faust does. The kind of wisdom Faust is talking about is not unlike Milton's Light from above, and it is in exchange for this wisdom that Faust trades his soul to Mephistophiles.

In Goethe's telling, Mephistophiles answers Faust's desire for experience by taking him first to a tavern, then to a witches' lair, and finally to meet Margaret (Gretchen). As I said, Gretchen is another aspect of the Faust story that originates with Goethe. Her downfall comprises the true tragedy of Faust, Part I. Another lesson then: knowledge, wisdom -- what most of us want in the end is just to get the girl.

Egmont (full text) & Hermann and Dorothea (full text) by J.W. von Goethe

Egmont and Hermann and Dorothea are two of Goethe's other long narrative works.  Egmont is a historical tragedy in five acts reminscent of much of the English drama I've read in the Classics so far. The character of Count Egmont -- a brilliant man who nonetheless fails to see the limits of his power over others; an idealist who fall in part for his refusal to play the pragmatists' game -- is a figure worthy of Shakespeare or, for that matter, the Greeks. And the royal intrigue on which the play centers is entertaining enough. In the end, the work lacks the deep power of Faust, though so does just about everything else in the history of literature.

Of all Goethe's work that I have read -- that is, the contents of this volume plus The Sorrows of Young Werther -- Hermann and Dorothea is the only one where things turn out well for all involved.  If Faust is an obvious influence on darker Romantic works like Byron's Manfred, Hermann and Dorothea has clearly influenced the more idyllic side of the tradition. Dorothea is a peasant girl who has been displaced along with her family and many others by the French Revolution. Hermann is the son of the wealthy innkeeper in the town to which they arrive. While passing out clothes to the refugees, Hermann meets and falls in love with Dorothea. The usual hurdles intrude -- Hermann's father doesn't want him marrying below his station; Hermann himself is too shy to approach Dorothea; the refugees will soon be leaving town again, so time is running short. Of course, we know that this time boy gets girl, even without diabolic intervention. In the meantime, the plot is mostly an excuse for a series of set pieces, first in the Inn and then in the refugee camp, during which colorful characters are paraded on and off stage. The whole thing is a good amount of fun. There is even a case of mistaken identity (mistaken intentions might be more accurate) that briefly raises the proceedings to the level of a farce like She Stoops to Conquer.

--CRB, June 7, 2007

Volume 20

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

The Divine Comedy marked my fourth trip to the underworld so far this year.  The first came by way of Aristophanes' The Frogs, the second through Milton's Paradise Lost, the third through Virgil's Aeneid. (I've taken the works in the order they appear in the Classics, though of course Milton lived well after the others.) Dante famously chose Virgil as his guide through hell, in part because Virgil had already sent Italy's founding father there. In doing so, Dante acknowledges the place of his work within both the trip-to-the-underworld and the epic-national-poem traditions. But as I read the Comedy in its entirety this week -- I had seen Hell and Purgatory before (to use the Anglicized titles of this translation), but this was my first trip to Paradise -- I saw the poem as inaugurating another tradition, one that happens to be close to my heart.

I have always been an especial fan of a particular brand of Modernist novel, the artistic bildungsroman.  The most famous examples of the genre -- and my two favorites -- are Proust's In Search of Lost Time and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Such novels are often largely autobiographical; in some cases, as in Proust, the protaganist even shares the author's name. They tend to focus on the early part of their protaganists' lives, as they struggle to establish their identities both as artists and as human beings. As the books go on, their protaganists' sense of artistic failure grows more acute. Finally, these books tend to close with their protaganists completing or preparing to complete works much like the novels themselves. Sometimes the connection between the fictional work and the actual work is less direct, as when To the Lighthouse ends with the completion of Lily Briscoe's portrait of the Ramsey family.  Sometimes, as at the end of the Search, we are left to imagine that the two works are identical. There is also a sort of ironic sub-set to this genre, in which the protaganist is never quite able to complete his task (I'm thinking most especially of Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities, though John Crowley's AEgypt cycle is a wonderful recent example).

Needless to say, The Divine Comedy doesn't conform precisely to all the standards of this genre.  For starters, Dante's pilgrim has already reached the midway of this our mortal life by the time the poem begins. But the choice of Virgil as guide, coupled with the famous scene in which a series of other poets are introduced in Limbo, strongly suggests that a theme of poetic development is being mapped on to the more obvious theme of religious redemption. We are encouraged to think of the pilgrim as a stand-in for the poet -- he is expressly a contemporary Florentine -- but it isn't until the thirtieth canto of Purgatory that Beatrice arrives to call the pilgrim by name:

  "Dante! weep not that Virgil leaves thee; nay,
Weep thou not yet: behoves thee feel the edge
Of other sword; and thou shalt weep for that."
  As to the prow or stern, some admiral
Paces the deck, inspiriting his crew,
When 'mid the sail-yards all hands ply aloof;
Thus, on the left side of the car, I saw
(Turning me at the sound of mine own name,
Which here I am compell�d to register)
The virgin station'd, who before appear'd
Veil'd in that festive shower angelical.

Why is he compelled at this moment to register his name? Dante stands at the cusp between Purgatory and Heaven. He has been forced to leave the un-baptized Virgil behind. Many poets can create portraits of Hell, but only a Christian poet can do the same for heaven. If Dante is to take his place as the great poet of the Christian era, as the baptized Virgil, he must now announce himself. Throughout Paradise (which, as I've said, was the one part I'd not read before), there is an increasing sense that Dante is being led on this pilgrimage not just for his own salvation but so that he might write about it. The making of the poem becomes the story of the poem, in the fashion of the Modernist works I've described above. In the seventeenth canto, Dante's ancestor Cacciaguido tells him:

The cry thou raisest,
Shall, as the wind doth, smite the proudest summits;
Which is of honour no light argument.
For this, there only have been shown to thee,
Throughout these orbs, the mountain, and the deep,
Spirits, whom fame hath note of. For the mind
Of him, who hears, is loth to acquiesce
And fix its faith, unless the instance brought
Be palpable, and proof apparent urge.

I don't think it's a coincidence that Dante struggles much more in this section to make things palpable.  Some moments in Hell -- e.g., the damned feeding on the brains of the damned -- are famous for their vividness.  But at a certain point in Paradise the beatified figures all become no more than bright lights, unseeable with human eyes. As he is finally brought into the presence of the trinity, Dante ends the poem with an expression of inadequacy about his ability to capture what he's seen with words: O speech!/How feeble and how faint art thou, to give/Conception birth.

The conclusion that the very limits of words may be the most important thing about them -- an idea we tend to think of as particularly modern, as born from Nietzsche and Freud or Wittgenstein and Godel; an idea that greatly troubled both Joyce and Proust -- is just another point to which Virgil and Beatrice led Dante long before our time.

-- CRB, June 19, 2007