This little novel waited a few years for me without any complaint. I read Welty's The Golden Apples previously, I was spurred on by this ancestral relThis little novel waited a few years for me without any complaint. I read Welty's The Golden Apples previously, I was spurred on by this ancestral relation of sorts of the author's Miss Eckhart in June Recital to a more satisfied descendant in Alice Munro's Dance of the Happy Shades. And I adored those stories for their generosity and for Welty's delicate treatment of character, story, and myth.
The Optimist’s Daughter remembers that temperament and generosity, but autobiography replaces myth. There's less of a natural and dewy texture, something more of cut flowers and smooth timber. There's the same almost comic action and an inclusion somehow of everyone and everything. But there's also that refusal to give over human oddity to the grotesque.
Where The Golden Apples ranged over many characters and stories, Welty’s final novel favours the view of one woman. Laurel, the widowed daughter of Judge McKelva of Mount Salus, travels from Chicago to see her father in New Orleans, where he’s having eye surgery on a detached retina. There, she’s confronted by the judge and his young (younger than Laurel) second wife Fay. The two women are thrown together when circumstances force a return to Mount Salus. And Laurel, coming back to her family home and to the memory of both her parents, encounters friends, death and a different understanding of the relationship between her parents and herself.
I can imagine a reader beginning this one and not knowing what to make of it. The character of Fay, in particular, is easy to read melodramatically. And it’s even easier to read that melodrama into the novel itself. But Welty balances character and prose very carefully, and she refuses to abandon the carnival of people to irony and judgment. There are moments of insight, where the storied memory and meditation burst and you gain a recognition of something that’s not in the sentences themselves. A kind of overloading until clarity. Welty just continually (and thankfully) produces a realism that’s comedic rather than tragic, even where it’s poignant. And, in the kind of realisation of Chekhov, she secures that rare realism that never fully gives up its secrets. It’s an object that always hides some of itself away from perception. Or a concept that's never fully captured by words....more
As firmly cemented clam-shells Fall apart in autumn, So I must take to the road again, Farewell, my friends.
In The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and
As firmly cemented clam-shells Fall apart in autumn, So I must take to the road again, Farewell, my friends.
In The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and in these other travel sketches that precede it, Bashō the poet sets out from his home, on foot, in 17th Century Edo Japan. Carrying only necessities, and with occasional companions, he goes not to adventure or to holiday. Travelling in his time and place in this way is not a leisurely excursion; it’s by most accounts precarious. But his example is religious. His mood is reflective.
What follows, what he records of his travels, is in gentle prose and haiku. He covers miles in a sentence and short moments in extended poetry. He writes of nature, of the peculiar and the minute and of the familiar seen new and the grand sweep of the large. There’s shade and rain, breeze and moss, he visits shrines and inns, he crosses rivers and enters towns. and he meets friends and strangers and watches and listens. There’s gentle sunshine and mythology, there’s history and the brightness of the moon.
It’s an unusual kind of journey to follow. There’s no tension, there isn’t suspense. You want to know more, and you look for a culmination of what you read. But it’s because this quietness and this slow trek feels like the texture of wisdom. And it is. It’s a journey up a gentle slope: you stop to for the colours of the grass and the glimmer of dew on the leaves, and you listen to the birds overhead and distant, and you let the cold wind penetrate to your skeleton - getting to the top of the hill isn't the goal, it's just the end.
I’d recommend this to anyone who can read slowly and let a sense of place wash over them. You can read it straight and let your interior paint it or, as I did, read it in detail and with assistance. I even had my phone beside me to look up every shrine, every mountain and river, and even flowers and trees. Just let me give this one six stars. I don’t need it for any others, just this one. ...more
Gonna be honest, I hesitated a bit about finally picking up Beowulf. I had the right impression of a compressed epic, of Old English alliterative versGonna be honest, I hesitated a bit about finally picking up Beowulf. I had the right impression of a compressed epic, of Old English alliterative verse, a story set in the twilight of a mythic and wandering age, and of a verse style spaced and weighted -almost stationary- by kennings and other devices. Those are good and interesting things, I look for those things. But I also knew it was a student text for many people, and I typically wonder in cases like this if a text’s magic will have been tapped and absorbed into a culture I’m already a part of; I want a novelty when I read, I guess. Heroic stories with the shape and texture of folk tales can dry up. And Beowulf has had a complicated history.
The story is simple enough. A monster named Grendel lays siege to Heorot, a mead-hall presided over by the Danish king, Hrothgar. The poem’s hero (a Geatish warrior), Beowulf, arrives and slays Grendel. But Grendel’s Mother seeks revenge and Beowulf must slay her, too. Returning home across the sea, he presides over a period of peace before a dragon attacks the lands of his kingdom. And here the elderly Beowulf takes up the battle mantle against his final foe. Simple enough, it’s the story of a hero warrior facing his trials and it’s a song of his victories. But not quite.
A voice of a hopeless people comes through in the ending, a woman’s voice: it sounds remarkably like the cry of The Trojan Women. The dragon is wyrm-like and breathes fire, possibly the original instance in English literature of the fire drake. There’s a contrast between the aging Hrothgar with a sigh in his breast and the youthful Beowulf roaming over golden lands in his armour. The voice of the poem is archaic not in a way true to the poet’s language but as a style. There are many features like these. Many things that stop you to think and appreciate. What I’m getting at is, it’s in the details where Beowulf turns out for me. There is action, but it comes in way that oral poetry has of placing it within, moving back and forth through time, recalling names and first bringing it close and then distancing it. Like a lot of great written art, it's good at death and also struggles with and against it. Even the heroic themes are fatalistic.
The poem's strangely distant, its names are ones you won’t know, it’s concerned with figures its audience knew and we don’t. But it’s also very close. And I didn’t expect that....more
Inferno has been on my personal bookshelf for years. Probably a decade or longer. I picked it up when I couldn’t find many of the “classics� at my locInferno has been on my personal bookshelf for years. Probably a decade or longer. I picked it up when I couldn’t find many of the “classics� at my local bookstore. I think I just wanted everything I could get into my own store of books for when I needed them. And, a few quick glances at the opening pages aside, I’ve never picked it up to read it. Dante has never felt crucial in the moment. I’ve been stuck in different times.
Then I heard a song. A song by a French non-binary person. Sung in Italian. And featuring an American woman. A queer song.
The Vita Nuova is Dante’s sequence of love poems about Beatrice, collected into a kind of autobiographical book. The poems are at times lofty, at others pathetic, visual and real and also imaginative and allegorical. His images are red and magenta and fiery colours, all mixed into dark blue night and stars. The Beatrice of the poems begins as an object of romantic passion and transforms over time into a kind of embodiment or symbol of love and, finally, into something the poems can’t contain.
But the poems aren’t alone. They’re situated in a personal prose narrative about Dante’s first and subsequent meetings with the woman that inspired them, from childhood all the way up to and beyond her death. And the book is written for other poets, on the nature of poetry: he doesn’t just situate the poems in his personal history, but also takes them apart for his reader. And, at times, the formalisms of the period fall away and the form itself lets the personal through.
They’re good poems. They’re striking. They’re youthful. They move. But the bit of the book that’s stuck in me after I put it down is a moment in prose right at the end of the narrative. Dante has a vision. And decides to put away this form of poem and work, and the memory of Beatrice, until he can serve her in verse more worthily. It’s an allusion to his future work. The Divine Comedy. It’s a kind of cliffhanger. Literature’s greatest cliffhanger....more
Sometimes called the world’s first novel. Written at the height of the Heian period in 11th century Japan by a noblewoman and lady-in-waiting, MurasakSometimes called the world’s first novel. Written at the height of the Heian period in 11th century Japan by a noblewoman and lady-in-waiting, Murasaki Shikibu. Her personal name is unknown, but ‘Shikibu� would’ve been a specific title and it’s thought ‘Murasaki� was bestowed on her affectionately after the novel’s heroine. The original Genji manuscript no longer exists; it was written in an archaic and poetic style unique to the time, possibly in chapter-by-chapter installments that were delivered to aristocratic women.
Hikaru Genji, ‘The Shining Prince� or ‘Shining Genji,� is the son of Emperor Kiritsubo and the Kiritsubo Consort. When he’s 3 years old his mother dies and his father hears of, and later marries, a former princess of the preceding emperor. Her name is Fujitsubo. Because the boy has no support from the maternal side of his family at court (and due also to a prediction by a Korean fortuneteller of catastrophe should Hikaru be placed on the throne), the emperor makes him a ‘Genji,� removing him from the line of succession and demoting him to the status of commoner. Genji and Fujitsubo eventually fall in love, while Genji also marries the lady Aoi. But disappointed with the forbidden nature of the romance with Fujitsubo, and the coldness of his marriage to Aoi, he embarks on a number of love affairs. The novel is concerned with his passionate nature and subsequent relationships, his shifting political fortunes and ambitions, life at imperial court, and especially with the girls and women themselves who enter into his life.
It’s a tricky question of interpretation and classification, I guess, whether Genji is the world’s first novel. What’s unique to the book though is not just its novel qualities but its psychology. It’s strangely and almost unsettlingly modern. Reading older literature, you expect the familiar style of narration. You expect the distance from interiority, and for feelings and thoughts to enter into the narrative only as passing devices. But ұᾱ’s style and very theme is its emotion and awareness. It’s not even the kind of heroic and formal personality of an epic, but something more confessional and yet somehow amoral. And it seeps out. Shikibu suffuses moments of spectacle and nature and quiet with a keen and sorrowful attentiveness to life and its transience.
The episodic structure means that chapters often centre around an important moment or image: a conversation between young men about women on a rainy night, the abduction of a young girl, a haunting by an unknown spirit, a spectacle and performance at court, a storm by the seaside. Chapters seem almost self-contained. Like singular stories involving familiar people. And yet the novel moves. Stories continue outside of their chapters and people are born and die. Old stories are resolved years later. And the whole tale has a remarkable consistency. It’s why, I think, it has the quality of a book that can be read and reread throughout your life. It's has the unbending quality of a world.
And while the novel centres on Genji and his tale for much of its length, it’s the women of the story and their different stories and histories and mostly tragic fortunes that seem to linger in the cultural consciousness. They’re everywhere trying to survive the historical moment and the whims of men. But the narrative voice, in another of its modern turns, almost wholly lacks moral judgment. This is a story. About beautiful, shining Genji. Until it isn’t.
It’s just immediately one of my favourite books. If its size seems daunting, try the abridged as I did. Or just try experiencing a few short chapters. But really experience them. Let yourself live in it a little....more
Before I had the inclination to read the history plays, long before, I knew Henry V by reputation for its oratory. Its voice, or so much of it as I haBefore I had the inclination to read the history plays, long before, I knew Henry V by reputation for its oratory. Its voice, or so much of it as I had heard, was pure, almost simple and clear in its swirling and uplifting patriotism. It was stripped of its history for me, of its performance and scholarly culture, and looked like a dark but glimmering art object. But this is Shakespeare, whose work is never so pure and simple that it gets “without residue into the clear�.
Henry V is concerned with Henry’s expedition to France and, ultimately, the battle and subsequent English victory at Agincourt. After the death of his father Henry IV, the young king has matured from the undisciplined character he was in earlier plays in the tetralogy. However, parts of the play bring into question whether Hal was ever such a person or, incredulously, how he could’ve become what he is. But the text seems to answer this subtly and suitably: Henry’s strength as a ruler lies in his oratory and statesmanship.
The oratory of the outer play and its architecture, though, is what makes the play problematic and interesting. The chorus that prepares the stage and frames the action in first modest and then heroic terms, is frequently undercut in the stern and vital imagery of its project, both by the reality of the play’s action and its king’s behaviour. For its good and its complexity, and its ability to fold in upon itself and bring the pure into contact with the real, oratory is thankfully the blood and sinew of Henry V....more
‘Ladies, I know as well as you do that the theme I have prescribed is a delicate one to handle; but I am not to be deterred by your objections, for I
‘Ladies, I know as well as you do that the theme I have prescribed is a delicate one to handle; but I am not to be deterred by your objections, for I believe that the times we live in permit all subjects to be freely discussed, provided that men and women take care to do no wrong. Are you not aware that because of the chaos of the present age, the judges have deserted the courts, the laws of God and man are in abeyance, and everyone is given ample licence to preserve his life as best he may?�.
In 1348, as the Black Death ravages Europe and their native Florence, 7 young women and 3 young men leave with servants and retainers to seek refuge in the idyllic Italian countryside. Once there, they pass the fortnight with songs, dancing, and exploring. And, as is key, they tell stories. A story a day from each of the young people present, so that by fortnight's end 100 stories are told. They range from bawdy love stories and short witticisms to swashbuckling adventures and tragic tales. And their recurrent themes and textures, their earthy (almost irreligious) values and imaginative excesses, weave together a fabric quite unlike any other in European literature.
The tales are drawn from a broad array of sources. There are clear debts to Dante owed in places. There are tales drawn from ancient and far off sources, some reworked both in their detail and moral, and entered into something new. There are tales such as Peronella and the tub lifted from other famous works (The Golden Ass by Apuleius). But other of the tales are created and worked whole cloth from Boccaccio's own imagination. Similarly, while the structure of the frame story finds antecedents in works like The Panchatantra, its particular form is finally down to the writer's own artistry and skill.
I just loved its abundance. It opens with a famous and detailed description of the plague and the dark and havoc it occasioned, but shifts into the softer and melodic mode of its narrators and their quiet country artifice of flowers and sweet foods, fountains and merriment. And then, at last, it enters into the heavily coincidental and earthier world of its tales. There are reminders of the plague in the spaces around the tales, there are also meditations on the break down of customs and norms that it's brought. There are rare intrusions from the mundane world into the idyllic one. There's the musicality and wittiness of Boccaccio's prose even in translation. But, most of all and vividly, there's the almost absurd entertainment and variety of the tales themselves. Stinging criticisms of the Church, the bewildering shifts from feminist to anti-feminist sentiment, the apologies and the defenses of prose narrative, these are all interesting particulars. For me though, the thematic interplay of Fortune, Love and Intelligence, recurring through the tales almost as characters in their own right, is where The Decameron is at its most readable and marvelous....more
Henry IV Part Two is altogether a darker and more anti-climactic play than is Part One. The promise of a true and brave Prince Hal fulfilled at the BaHenry IV Part Two is altogether a darker and more anti-climactic play than is Part One. The promise of a true and brave Prince Hal fulfilled at the Battle of Shrewsbury is undone and remade, but against a backdrop of characters more weary and aged and a rebellion that is never quite becoming. Playing in dual stories that hardly meet, Falstaff and the comic characters are all but severed from the Prince; but even the once playful Lord of Misrule has lost something vital, is working against a black approach and faltering.
There's humour and poetry, songs and oratory. There's elegy. But, whether by its form or by its whole endeavor, Part Two most powerfully and yet in ways understated suggests a less hopeful view of English history and never quite consoles or revives the high and playful hopes of Part One....more
At the end of Richard II, the newly crowned King Henry planned a crusade to the Holy Land. But in Henry IV, Part One such notions are stalled by broilAt the end of Richard II, the newly crowned King Henry planned a crusade to the Holy Land. But in Henry IV, Part One such notions are stalled by broils at the Scottish and Welsh borders. Meanwhile, in pubs and brothels and with his band of fellow troublemakers, the King's young son Prince Hal leads a life of misadventure and mischief. But with the realm unsettled, and the King's reign threatened by old allies turned new rebels, the young Prince must rise rise to the occasion.
Henry IV, Part One touches on themes of political force and subversion. Henry's reign, bought by force, must always it seems be defended by force. But the play doesn't exhaust its energies in political philosophy and meditations on authority. Like with its mix of poetry and prose, it interrupts seriousness with play and humour as Shakespeare does best....more
Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm off from an anointed king; The breath of worldly men cannot depose The deputy elected by the Lo
Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm off from an anointed king; The breath of worldly men cannot depose The deputy elected by the Lord: For every man that Bolingbroke hath press'd To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown, God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay A glorious angel: then, if angels fight, Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right.
Shakespeare's histories never held the fascination for me that did his tragedies or his comedies. I entrusted them to that ever shrinking mental space where all those books of dry and important tales and ideas go to live. Works like Richard II and Henry V were for the future time when I would 'do' more Shakespeare. But lines from the latter found their way in and the Henriad began to glow for me. Shit!
Richard II begins with the eponymous ruler's attempt to arbitrate a dispute between Thomas Mowbray and Henry Bolingbroke. The two opposing parties are for trial by combat. The pomp and ceremony begins. The fighters prepare and are at the ready. But at that very last moment, the king interrupts. And in moments emblematic of his rule, betraying his arbitrariness, his indecisiveness and his God-given despotism, he sentences both men to banishment. Out of these decisions and those that follow comes a storm of rebellion. It sweeps up Richard and his divinely anointed right.
Reading Richard II, you're aware just how the lines must sing in performance. And you see in the spaces between words and lines how different a Richard can be. The play is about his identity and the changes it undergoes as the seemingly divine cedes to the force of the human, but the theme in larger part and that that makes its musics move is grief. The women of the play, the servants, the gardeners, they all meditate and linger on grief. Even in comedic break late in the play, grief is the movement.
There are glimpses of other episodes from history. There are poetic allusions to thorns and gardens that, to any modern reader, will point to the War of the Roses. There are love speeches that hurt your heart. But what strikes you hardest is how whole the play feels. Thematically, structurally, and even poetically, and against our knowledge that it begins Shakespeare's Henriad, it feels finished and perfected. Like a paradigmatic piece of written art....more
Before I had read any Tolstoy, years before I got through early chapters of War and Peace and put it down, I knew Anna Karenina as one of those truly Before I had read any Tolstoy, years before I got through early chapters of War and Peace and put it down, I knew Anna Karenina as one of those truly important realist novels. People studied and extolled it. I’d heard it mentioned in the same breath as George Eliot’s Middlemarch. It found its way into scholarly introductions in my other Penguin Classics. Writers who were important to me, like Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch, commented on Tolstoy’s realism and the grown-upness of his fiction. But I didn’t feel a desire to read it. It didn’t draw me to it the way a good book will do. I knew the story, knew its reputation for having two narrative centres running concurrently, knew of its size; why would I read it? When I can barely get through a bit of shorter fiction without good breaks these days, why pick up one of the great literary bricks? I guess I came back to realism and, for once, I felt I could handle the weight.
It was terrific, of course. Tolstoy’s realism feels immediate, both intellectually and sensually. He describes, he intrudes, and he disappears. He has that sense of narrative appropriateness, knows when in the rhythm of the drama is required the shallowness of the general and the depth of the particular. But, and I think this is part of what makes it a remarkable novel, Anna Karenina is also un-Tolstoyan. Because Tolstoy does disappear, the polemical intrusions he’s known for (especially in the second part of the Epilogue in War and Peace) don’t seem able to constrain what the novel is and can do. You feel it in places, variously, as Anna’s very concentrated character takes over the narrative. And you feel it perhaps most acutely in that ending to Part Seven: the stream-of-consciousness, the train, the muzhik working over the iron, and the candle.
What about those two centres? It’s not just a novel about Anna and Vronsky, after all. It’s also about Levin and Kitty. I remember it came up years ago in an old encyclopedia, in the first detailed description I’d read of the book. That these two romances ran concurrently, the passion of the former overpowering the dryness of latter. Tolstoy does seem unsure when writing Kitty. As if, in earlier to midway chapters especially, he didn’t quite know what to do with her. As if he lacked a positive vision of a young woman outside of marriage. But Levin’s story is crucial to what the novel is doing. His meditations on death, indeed the narrative and philosophical discourses generally, that in Anna’s story appear somehow in the spaces in between words rather than the words themselves, are for Levin very real and immediate symptoms of his search for meaning. In some ways, Levin is didactic so Anna can be lyrical. But that's just part of Tolstoy’s architecture. The supports of character, scene, situation, place, that hide lines invisible....more
The Vinland Sagas comprise The Saga of the Greenlanders and Eirik the Red’s Saga. These are prose narratives written in the 13th century without assocThe Vinland Sagas comprise The Saga of the Greenlanders and Eirik the Red’s Saga. These are prose narratives written in the 13th century without associated author names but based on, and thus bearing a complex relation to, oral histories passed down from centuries earlier. The two sagas are part of a larger body of such literature known as The Sagas of Icelanders, but they’re collected together in this instance because of their shared subject matter and narrative overlap. The introductory text suggests that we can reasonably date the main action of the Vinland as “beginning in 999 and continuing until about 1006-1011� (depending on which saga is preferred). And while it was earlier or initially supposed that one saga was based upon the other, scholarly effort has overturned this and suggested that they were written independently around the same time.
The sagas tell of the first known sighting, exploration, and settlement of the North American continent by Europeans. These explorers also encountered, traded and warred with, the indigenous peoples there. The Saga of the Greenlanders begins with Bjarni Hejolfsson attempting to sail from Iceland to Greenland and, through poor navigation, sighting unknown lands to the west. Leif Eiriksson, son of Eirik the Red, later voyages out to and explores these lands. And the other of Eirik’s children (and also Thorfinn Karlsefni) venture later on their own expeditions and are met with varying fortunes in attempts to find and settle in Leif’s “Vinland� (meaning “Wineland� and named for the sighting of grapevines upon Leif Eiriksson’s arrival there). Eirik the Red’s Saga then takes up this history with a more obvious nod to Christianity and its themes and given over especially to the attempt by Karlsefni.
The sagas themselves will probably seem dry to a few modern readers. They tell of individuals and lineages. People pass in and out of focus as needed. The authors record their details more often with blunt than poetic force. And the two sagas add up to just fifty pages when combined. But there’s a lot here. The texts have their own voices and perspectives and you’ll notice it most when they range over the same narrative territory and events. (The Saga of the Greenlanders is the better saga and I don’t give a damn what you say!) Their shared and also occasionally inconsistent details also offer vital clues to their mysteries. But they’re not merely topographical and geographical aides in the search for the places they name nor just lost histories of exploration. They're also testaments to Icelandic literature and its vast history and shape. And nestled within the sagas are the seeds of stories and characters that even in sparse form enlarge and resonate across time. None are probably more memorable than the two most notable women of the sagas, Gudrid (wife of Leif’s younger brother Thorstein) and Freydis (Leif’s half-sister) - two very different portraits that bear the narrative scars of Christian triumphalism and yet still pulse below the words.
We don’t know the precise location of the Vinland from the sagas. The archaeological evidence of Norse exploration consists in the settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland and the evidence of other movements housed there. While at one time there was a claim that this was the site of Vinland, that changed with later scholarship and the revision of the relationship between the two sagas from that of hierarchy to complement. Further study of the site at L’Anse aux Meadows also apparently suggests it was a winter outpost used for stockpiling rather than the sort of settlement described in the sagas (though there is also mention of such a site in the Vinland that could well be this one). There were also attempts to locate Vinland as far down as New England and New York. But later research has tended to confine exploration to Newfoundland, the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, and Nova Scotia....more
It’s the snowy mid-winter of Christmastime in Camelot. The ladies and men of the court are carousing and rejoicing in their exchanges of kisses and giIt’s the snowy mid-winter of Christmastime in Camelot. The ladies and men of the court are carousing and rejoicing in their exchanges of kisses and gifts. With the change of the calendar on New Year’s Day, and the doubling of courses at the top table, King Arthur requests from his guests to hear a story of marvel before starting the feast. As if in answer, a great and strange green figure appears in his hall: a massive knight all in green armour and attire, with green hair and beard, sitting atop a green steed and armed with a great green axe ornamented with gold. Amid his play and taunts to Arthur and his knights, he lays down the terms of a deal: he’ll receive a single blow on this day from one who is willing, but in exchange he’ll return the blow in a year and a day. Arthur, at first, steps up to deal the blow himself. But, interrupting on behalf of the King’s honour, in steps the chivalrous Sir Gawain, and with words to Arthur and one swift blow decapitates the Green Knight. And here, without faltering or falling, the headless knight picks up his head. And that head speaks; it reiterates the terms of the agreement and bids Gawain seek out the Green Chapel when the times comes. With that oddness done, the headless knight rides off. And Arthur and Gawain, and indeed the queen and the whole court, are left to marvel at what has taken place. Soon the dread of the deal becomes apparent and Sir Gawain sets out northerly and solitary on his venture, to find the Green Chapel and meet his foe and to honour the deal and be struck his blow. What follows is a remarkable tale of magic and adventure, chivalry, romance, and faith.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a long poem written in Middle English and dated roughly to the late period of the fourteenth century. Its author is known alternatively as the Pearl Poet and the Gawain Poet, because the single manuscript by which the poem is known and survived is shared with several other poems, including the long dream narrative poem (itself of some substantial acclaim) Pearl. And there is reasonable evidence through analysis of the shared dialect of these poems, situated as North West Midland, and the shared formal structures and skill with these structures, that they are from the same poet.
The original poem is written in alliterative verse and is often considered of a piece with the alliterative revival as it’s theorised to have taken place in English poetry and of note in this time and region � “revival�, because it was a form common to or dominant in Old English poetry. Now, the alliterative verse form in Sir Gawain is quite famous not only for its adherence to this structure and tradition but also for its looseness and its dissents from it, and perhaps best so for the author’s technique of ending stanzas with the work's characteristic “bob and wheel�. In this technique, a short line of sometimes two syllables (the bob) proceeds from the longer alliterative part of the stanza and is then proceeded by a four-line rhyming quatrain (the wheel) that tidily ends the stanza.
Though the author of Gawain is thought to have been contemporaneous with Chaucer, the history of the latter’s work is one of saturation or continued presence throughout the subsequent generations of English literature, whereas the former's comes down to us perhaps by an accident of survival and has a new history of less than 200 years. There have been various translations over that time, including a notable but now somewhat flowery and archaic version from Tolkien, a vivid example from Armitage, a highly skilled and equally vivid attempt by Borroff, and also the modernised translation I have in my hands by O’Donoghue. This late edition of the text is admirable: it attempts to draw on the poem’s energy and form. But it’s also worth noting that it gives up substantial parts of that form, such as the alliteration and the full alliterative and rhyming effect of the bob and wheel, to achieve this. And so, while it gives a closer glimpse of the original poem by way of its sprint and its directness and voice, it concedes some of the poem's most famous and respected ornaments to its cost.
Gawain is a great tale and the richest excursion into, and evocation of, Arthurian legend and romance that I’ve read. It’s closer to modern sensibilities of readership than you might think a Middle English poem has a right to be. Its frank sexual politics and almost outright homoeroticism in its approximation of homosociality make it sharp to modern interpretive efforts. Its narrative variety and strengths, its ironic and characteristic Gawain poet voice and delight in descriptive details, also make it just a terrific gift to a reader. There are stanzas about the sensual qualities of a knight dressing and being attired, of lively courts feasting and carousing, of an adventurer in his own wilderness of feats and isolation; there are vicious hunts and kills, there are slaughters and whole passages about butchering; and there are the touchstones of romance put into the service of a tale that somehow seems more than a chivalrous romance. Several devices of the time (the beheading game, the seduction, the exchange of winnings, and the tradition of romance) are woven together into one ornate structure. And they turn the poem into something that at first glance is just a paradigmatic and traditional form of these, but that somehow becomes a resolution of all of them into each other.
It’s a terrific story put into beautiful form. And it’s an excellent piece of English literature....more
I feel almost ridiculous reviewing The Symposium. This is The Symposium. This is Plato’s Symposium. Let’s see if I can say anything worthwhile here. BI feel almost ridiculous reviewing The Symposium. This is The Symposium. This is Plato’s Symposium. Let’s see if I can say anything worthwhile here. Breath, do not hold.
In The Symposium, a group of Athenian intellectuals at a small but lively drinking party discourse on Love (or Eros). One by one, each speaker offers a kind of encomium or eulogy in praise. One after another finds fault with the account that went before, and is also indebted to and variously builds upon it with their own. Some speeches are more memorable than others. Probably none more so than Aristophanes’s gendered creation myth and Socrates’s complex centrepiece on love as an ascent or journey toward its ideal Form.
Reading Plato now, in this century, situated historically as a liberal individual, against a backdrop of often textually stark or subversive contemporary philosophy and spurred on by my own interest in work done under that banner on gender, sex, sexuality, morals, religion and a host of other topics, what strikes and has a peculiar pull on me in reading The Symposium are its details. Instead of a structured philosophical essay, we have The Symposium in its artistic and stylised form. Speakers pass into and out of view. The outside world intrudes and politicises. Words put into the mouths of others distance us from Plato himself. Speeches on love turn out to be as much about gender and sexual difference, inmost instinct and desire. At a gathering of male intellectuals, the voice of a woman mystic intrudes by way of device and discourses not just on love but on the role of the philosopher as the lover of wisdom.
I think it’s in seeing how these details are enlarged over decades and centuries by devoted scholarship and historical study that they get this pull and take on this extra life. It’s in seeing Plato, against a recurrent and exclusionary preference for Aristotle, come into his own again that I can appreciate The Symposium as a cornerstone of a particular vision of Western civilisation....more
For me, Simone Weil has been prefiguratively an outside voice of Christian mysticism, and of an alternative platonism that finds its natural tone in IFor me, Simone Weil has been prefiguratively an outside voice of Christian mysticism, and of an alternative platonism that finds its natural tone in Iris Murdoch. So, it was in a bewildered mode that I realised I'd completely overlooked her essay on Homer and the concept of force at work in The Iliad.
Weil reads the Homeric epic as exhibiting force not merely understood as a power of violence but as transformational. That is, force transforms living humans into matter. "The force that kills is summary and crude. How much more varied in operation, how much more stunning in effect is that other sort of force, that which does not kill, or rather does not kill just yet. It will kill for a certainty, or it will kill perhaps, or it may merely hang over the being it can kill in an instant; in all cases, it changes the human being into stone." Weil continues, translating Homeric lines herself and without the customary of context and place, with a strangely particular generalised reading of key and inessential scenes of the poem against her immanent treatment of force; first, in its immediate violence and then onward through enslavement and loss and into its physiological inherence in persons.
For Weil, force not only transforms its patient but also its agent. Its proponent is, to borrow one of Weil's concepts used and summarised elsewhere, an object of gravity. It's propelled by necessity of the relation of force. Against this, or perhaps within it, and redeeming of the poem is grace. Homer does not revel in the triumph of the victors. Rather, the mood throughout the poem is one of loss. The victors are in turn victims caught up in the machinery (or gravity) of force, certain to be victims in their turn. And it's in Homeric impartiality, not found in the Romans or the Hebrews that Weil finds, "All who escape the empire of force in their innermost being and in their relations with their fellow men are loved, but loved in grief at the threat of constantly impending destruction. Such is the spirit of the only true epic that the West possesses."...more
This is a lovely and concise introduction to classic Greek, Roman and Norse mythology. It ranges over creation, major and minor stories from the varioThis is a lovely and concise introduction to classic Greek, Roman and Norse mythology. It ranges over creation, major and minor stories from the various pantheons, and those lineages that come down to us from classical tragedy. While a study this broad can typically be faulted for glossing over detail, Hamilton stays often to shine up the tales and narrate and shape them.
There's a historian's respect for the way tales are preserved and received here; the author faults and praises the writers of the period for their ways as keepers of words. Ovid, that favourite of Shakespeare, receives the worst of the criticism. Having studied Virgil in more detail than I have Homer, I was inclined to find fault with her lack of enthusiasm there, but Hamilton has her own good reasons for favouring the Greeks and she does them a special justice.
The book ends with a short and glowing study of the Norse myths and a thankfulness in the authorial voice that these stories have remained to us, alive, brought along the winding path of time....more
Despite the advent of fresh and enthused scholarship, the ease with which the width of Verne's diversity is narrowed by benevolent prejudice will probDespite the advent of fresh and enthused scholarship, the ease with which the width of Verne's diversity is narrowed by benevolent prejudice will probably continue. Yet, even as a voice of mere adventure, some of his best powers are at work audibly. His wonders have the red tooth and claw of H. G. Wells; his characters, attendant animals as they are to this sense, close around a humanistic heat that is not at odds with it but finally volcanic....more
"She'll come; she'll go. She'll lay belief on you, Skin sweet with musky oil - The lady from another grinning soul.""She'll come; she'll go. She'll lay belief on you, Skin sweet with musky oil - The lady from another grinning soul."...more
On first being drawn into an expansive world of a new author I generally have for a portal that author's best known, best loved and/or first book. In On first being drawn into an expansive world of a new author I generally have for a portal that author's best known, best loved and/or first book. In some cases, and owing to particular circumstances, I might start off on a minor work, willfully transport myself for lack of adequate device, and one-by-one build up my traveling by dimensions; however, by rule of habit a book of literary criticism by an author of fiction is a late point of encampment on a typical excursion. As much as I own to such a convention, I would also make a point to convene on bucking conventions based off of an inner or a social duty.
So, with Eudora Welty I took a different path by first beginning her On Writing and part way through it diverging into her little abode of symbolism, A Worn Path. Having diverged, the trip ahead is planned. I have an idea of what to expect, so many landmarks will not come as surprising as they would or might to an unadvised traveler, but as much must come with this prior expectation the happy fortune to have them exceeded.
Prior to On Writing, I knew of Eudora Welty as a prize-winning author, whose Southern embodiment and human landscape is visible in the rural work of Alice Munro, but it was a nice discovery that found Welty also preceding Munro in temperament and attention as well as she does in subject and the importance of place.
A writer has perhaps picked this up cursorily for practical tips on writing, but an education at that level is not to be located here. That said, there are lessons to be taken carefully and particularly that, I think, are more important - lessons for which Welty is ideal as a teacher. Her writing contains every kind of vibrancy and colour, so that a traveler who takes her up as their guidebook must inevitably and swiftly become seasoned....more
Our familiar Virgil tempers the grandeur of the epic with loss, and strikes ambiguous moods in the midst of war glory; but, the lesser known Virgil flOur familiar Virgil tempers the grandeur of the epic with loss, and strikes ambiguous moods in the midst of war glory; but, the lesser known Virgil floods the senses with a rustic imagination drunk on the colourful singing of country air through mountains and over streams. Here the world turns over, like a grave person all wrapped up in earth, and the furniture of the universe weeps with joy for one special child to be seated.
True to his peculiar habits of adopting striking contrasts and raising them as natural siblings, Arcadia is temporary and present few times through this poetic life. For under the romantic ground of transformed nature lies a familiar world of political realism and untrammeled power. If Virgil had chosen otherwise than to transfigure, the Eclogues might not have been as lasting as they have been through all proceeding time....more
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