To be honest, judging by what little is extant, and what little of that little I have actually read, the eleventh century was not a highpoint of EuropTo be honest, judging by what little is extant, and what little of that little I have actually read, the eleventh century was not a highpoint of European literature. Ruodlieb may have been one of the best Latin poems of the time. It is hard to tell, because it is mostly lost; some twenty-one fragments have been discovered, used as binding material for later books, and even these have much of the text cut away or illegible. They are parts of two manuscripts; one is full of changes and corrections and was probably the author’s rough draft; the other, only two fragments from another library, are from a more finished copy. The poem is usually considered to have been left unfinished. What we make of it is very dependent on how the editors arrange the surviving leaves and “complete� the cut away lines.
The edition I read from Open Library is the first critical edition edited by Friedrich Seiler, with a 200-page introduction and notes in German, and a glossary of the more unusual words or meanings, published in 1882; after I finished it, in looking for some details on the Internet, I discovered that there is a freely downloadable recent edition (Edwin H. Zeydel, ed., Ruodlieb, The Earliest Courtly Novel (after 1050), 1959) with an introduction and translation into English. This would have been quite useful to me; although the language of the poem is simpler than most other surviving poetry of the eleventh century, it is a much more difficult sort of Latin than the tenth-century works I read last year (e.g. the Waltharius and the works of Hrotsvitha). I will probably read at least the introduction to Zeydel’s version; skimming through the text and translation, it seems that his guesses as to the missing words are often quite different from Seiler’s.
The author of the poem is unknown; Seiler disposed of some earlier guesses, and modern scholars haven’t made any progress since. It is probable that he was a monk at the abbey of Tegernsee, where the manuscript may have remained, although even this is not absolutely certain. The first editors (including Jacob Grimm) dated the poem (rough draft) to the late tenth century, Seiler to around 1030, and Zeydel and most recent scholars to sometime after 1050. The finished fragments were probably recopied about ten years after it was written.
The subtitles to both editions call it the first romance or courtly novel; actually, it combines features of both epic and romance. Seiler’s introduction gives analogues/possible sources for much of the material, but the anonymous author has combined and expanded his sources in a very original way, and also includes much realistic description based on the actual life of his time, including peasant life which is seldom included in any kind of mediaeval literature, which makes it a very important document independently of its literary value. In any case it is a precursor of the romance form which arose in the twelfth century in the vernacular languages, although it may not have actually been known or had any influence on them (it was written in Germany and the earliest romances of the next century are in Old French, and no existing source mentions or quotes it.)
The plot as far as we can figure it out begins with the hero Ruodlieb, unappreciated in his own country and with many enemies, setting out for a neighboring kingdom (called “Africa�, although it is obviously based on Bavaria) to try his luck. He is hired as a hunter and warrior and becomes a favorite of the king. There is a war between the “major� king and a neighboring “minor� king, which ends with a reconciliation and gift-giving, based according to Seiler on an actual event in 1023.
He then receives a letter, which he gets a cleric to read to him; the cleric makes out the gist of the letter (a realistic detail, the laity is completely illiterate and the clergy reads with some difficulty.) The letter is from his mother, and reports that his enemies are all dead or mutilated and it is safe for him to return. He takes his leave of the king, who gives him the choice of a material reward for his long service or good advice. He chooses the advice and the king takes him aside and gives him twelve precepts. The remainder of the poem is presumably based on his following or not following each of the twelve precepts, although only four or five are illustrated in the surviving fragments.
He makes his way home after some adventures, and then starts on a new adventure to find a wife. This is the point at which the poem breaks off....more
“Traditional wisdom holds the wheel to be one of mankind’s cleverest inventions, and the camel to be one of God’s clumsiest . . .�
Richard W. Bulliet, “Traditional wisdom holds the wheel to be one of mankind’s cleverest inventions, and the camel to be one of God’s clumsiest . . .�
Richard W. Bulliet, a historian of the Islamic period, sets out in this book to resolve a paradox that most people aren’t even aware of: after thousands of years using the wheel, sometime in the fourth or fifth century (in any case, well before the rise of Islam) wheeled vehicles entirely disappear from North Africa to the border of India, not to return until the incursions of Western imperialism in the nineteenth century (and not fully until the invention of the truck.)
The first chapter of the book documents this claim and offers a solution: the use of the camel as a pack animal was just economically more advantageous than any possible animal-drawn vehicle of the time, in any area where the camel was widely available and suitable to the climate. The remainder of the book explores related questions: why were wheeled vehicles replaced when they were, rather than much earlier or much later; why was the replacement so total, rather than wheeled vehicles and camels coexisting for different purposes; why did replacement not take place in India and Central Asia, in the range of the Bactrian (two-humped) camel, etc.
In the course of discussing these questions, Bulliet gives a fairly comprehensive account of the first domestication of the dromedary (one-humped) camel in Southern Arabia, the evolution of various types of saddles, the use of camel caravans in the incense trade, the spread of the camel north into Northern Arabia, Northern Africa, Mesopotamia and Iran, the relations between the nomads and settled areas in different times and places, the differences between the dromedary and the Bactrian camel, the effects of the rise and spread of Islam on camel distribution, and many other topics.
He explicitly insists that the cultural attitudes, religious and otherwise, towards camels and wheeled vehicles were derived from the material, economic realities rather than the other way around. One of the most interesting chapters details the differences in city planning between wheeled and non-wheeled societies. ...more
After finishing Bibby’s Looking for Dilmun last week, as always when I read an older book of archaeology or any other science in which progress is stiAfter finishing Bibby’s Looking for Dilmun last week, as always when I read an older book of archaeology or any other science in which progress is still being made, I wondered what new discoveries had been made in the fifty years since it was written. When I saw the title of this book, I naturally thought it would be a book about the archaeology of Bahrain thirty years farther along, but that’s not exactly what it is. It is actually the annotated illustrations of an exhibit which was held in London in 2000 of artifacts from the National Museum in Bahrain. Nevertheless, it is a very good book and the introductions and captions do give some idea of what has been found since the time of the Danish expeditions.
The first thing to note is just that there is a National Museum in Bahrain, and a Directorate of Antiquities, both developments that Bibby was hoping for at the time of the first expedition. As far as the archaeology goes, in the eighties and nineties there were a series of new expeditions, especially by the French, which further excavated the settlement which Bibby and Glob had begun to dig in the sixties; they also excavated a smaller settlement called Saar. Archaeologists from Bahrain itself have done much work in the necropoleis. There have also been additional excavations in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and other parts of the mainland, which have given the work in Bahrain more context.
The book consists mainly in over 360 color photographs of artifacts, many half or full page, as well as other photographs and maps, compared to a handful of black and white photos and line drawings in the Bibby book (which was actually quite good for a 1960s era paperback); I would recommend reading the two together, Bibby for the account of the excavation and this book for the illustrations and some updated information....more
The Road to Ubar is a complete contrast to the previous book [Bibby’s Looking for Dilmun which I read last week]. Nicholas Clapp is not an archaeologiThe Road to Ubar is a complete contrast to the previous book [Bibby’s Looking for Dilmun which I read last week]. Nicholas Clapp is not an archaeologist, but a documentary filmmaker; his wife, Kay, is a probation officer. After a trip to Muscat, they were looking for an excuse to return to Arabia, and fixed on the idea of looking for the legendary lost city of Ubar. After some research (mostly in ancient and mediaeval sources, including the Thousand Nights and a Night), Clapp concluded(mainly through wishful thinking) that Ubar (or Wabar), the Quranic Irem, and Claudius Ptolemy’s Omanum Emporium referred to the same place, somewhere in the Rub� al Khali (the Arabian desert or “Empty Quarter�). He recruited a team of other explorers, including polar adventurer Sir Ranulf Fiennes, a JPL satellite expert, Ron Blom, and a few others. The self-image of most of the team was not as archaeologists but as explorer-adventurers in the tradition of Wendell Phillips, Lawrence of Arabia, and Bertram Thomas, whose adventures in Arabia were one of his main “sources�. They managed to get funding and permission from the Sultan to explore for the lost city. They also recruited one real archaeologist, Juris Zarins.
The first third of the book is taken up with myths, legends, fiction and even records of his own daydreams, as well as searching radar maps from the shuttle Challenger and various satellites, and of course the quest for funding and so forth. The second third is about the actual expedition in 1990. They spent a few days looking for Ubar in the desert, gave up after finding nothing and returned to the oasis and modern town of Shisur. While there, Zarins noticed that the fifteenth-century fort there, on the rim of a large sinkhole, seemed to have been re-built on top of an older fort. Immediately, Clapp decided that they had after all “found� Ubar.
He gives four reasons for the identification, although he never seems to have doubted it. First, location. It was in the right place. Except of course that it wasn’t; the legends all put Ubar where they originally looked for it, deep in the heart of the Rub� al Khalit. Shisur is just outside the Rub� al Khalit. Secondly, it was the right age. This was before the excavation had even been dated (and we’re never told exactly how it was dated, as opposed to the detailed accounts of pottery and so forth in Bibby’s book.), while the legends of course don’t date Ubar or Irem at all. Thirdly, it had the right “characteristics�; Irem is described as “many-columned� and the Shisur ruins had many towers (he tells us that the word translated as “columned� could actually refer to any tall structure.) Of course, the legends also claim that Ubar and Irem were cities full of gold and precious stones and all the paraphernalia of fantasy, nothing of which was ever found at Shisur; in fact it turned out not even to be a city as the word is usually understood. Finally, it was spectacularly destroyed by falling into the sinkhole, which agrees with one of the many accounts of Ubar’s destruction (it sank into the sands).
Zarins began excavating the north rim of the sinkhole and found a wall with several towers. He and some of his students would return for four seasons of digging. The story of the excavations was the only more or less worthwhile part of the book; it takes up at most about thirty pages. What they actually found was a fortified oasis, a watering-hole for frankincense-bearing camel caravans before entering the desert route north toward Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. As it turns out (and the book never mentions) it was one of several such stations along the incense route. Certainly, it was worth excavating, but not a really important site, without the hype about Ubar. Another thing the book never happens to tell us (but is easy to discover in about five minutes of Internet research) is that Zarins himself, the only actual archaeologist of the group and the one who did the actual excavation, does not consider it to be Ubar. This to me is particularly significant, since Zarins’s own reputation would be much higher as the excavator of legendary Ubar than as the excavator of a fortified water-hole.
In the third part, Clapp gives us a highly speculative and in places actually fictional narrative of what he considers the history of “Ubar�. In all, the subtitle, "finding the Atlantis of the sands" (and Fiennes also wrote a book about the expedition called The Atlantis of the Sands, claiming credit for the whole expedition) seems to be unconsciously ironic; like Atlantis, Ubar is probably a completely legendary place, which attracts over-imaginative people to "search" for it.
As I said above, the only part of this I would consider worth reading is the thirty pages or so about the actual excavation, and even that only because there is so little popular writing on Arabian archaeology....more
Geoffrey Bibby was a British-born archaeologist who led a series of Danish expeditions into the Persian Gulf and the coastal regions of the Arabian Pe
Geoffrey Bibby was a British-born archaeologist who led a series of Danish expeditions into the Persian Gulf and the coastal regions of the Arabian Peninsula. This book is an excellent introduction to the archaeology of the region. It is well-written, neither too difficult nor too “popular�, and is careful to separate the facts of the excavations from the historical theories derived from them. It has some description of popular interest about the conditions of the excavations, combined with the archaeological detail of the seals and pottery which date the various layers (by analogy with similar seals and pottery from Mesopotamia), without becoming too technical. The book was written at the same time as the official publication of the archaeology, and probably incorporates as much as possible in a book for the general reader. I think Bibby has managed to strike a good balance.
The first of the expeditions from the University of Aarhus was begun in 1953 to investigate burial mounds on the island of Bahrein, which there is good evidence to identify as part of the “Land of Dilmun� which is mentioned in Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, both in literary tablets as the mythological home of the first humans and of Ziasudra/Utnapishtum, the original version of Noah, and later in many commercial documents as a major trading partner of the Mesopotamian civilization.
A series of expeditions from then up to the time of writing (1968, though a few sentences were added in press in 1969) discovered a city site with seven layers. City I, the earliest level, was dated from the early Sumerian period around 2800 down to around 2300 BCE (i.e. from the legendary time of Gilgamesh down to the time of Sargon of Akkad), with the grave mounds beginning probably from about the middle of that period; City II, apparently continuous with City I, went from that time down to around 1800 (the time of Hammurabi), and a temple of the god Inzak (probably identical with the Sumerian Enki) in the same area dates from that time. After a period of abandonment, the site is occupied again by City III, shown by the pottery to be contemporary with the Kassite period in Babylonia. After another, uncertain but probably longer hiatus, City IV is occupied during the Assyrian period in the eighth century; another hiatus and City V is occupied from about 500 to maybe 200, and there are more grave mounds. Cities VI and VII are basically Islamic and Portuguese forts.
In addition to the work on Bahrain, later years of expeditions extended our knowledge of the “Dilmun� culture north to the island of Falaika off the coast of Kuwait (and another Greek period city, which was identified by inscriptions as the city of Ithakos known from classical writers), while another culture, possibly ancient “Makan� was discovered in Abu Dabu farther south. There were also stone age flints discovered in Qatar, and at the very end of the last expedition mentioned, they discovered Ubaid culture artifacts as well as “Dilmun� culture contemporary with the oldest level in Bahrain at Tahut on the Arabian coast.
There is far too much information in this book to summarize in a brief review. I particularly liked the caution with which Bibby titled the book “looking for Dilmun� rather than “finding Dilmun�; despite the evidence that the finds on Bahrain and Falaika are almost certainly the land of Dilmun he refuses to be more certain than the evidence warrants....more
After reading the first volume, this was an extreme disappointment. Whereas that gave us a concrete description of truth in art based on specific traiAfter reading the first volume, this was an extreme disappointment. Whereas that gave us a concrete description of truth in art based on specific traits of specific paintings, presented in straightforward if sometimes overly poetic and enthusiastic language, this book is completely abstract and written in a very affected language, trying to imitate Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, which is at times almost as incomprehensible in language as it is in content.
Ostensibly, this second volume is a continuation of the first volume; that was divided into two parts, Part I being a general introduction and Part II being on Truth. This volume is Part III, On Beauty, and is divided into two sections. The first section is called the Theoretic Faculty (from the Greek “theoria� meaning mental observation) and is a very schematic theological theory of beauty, itself divided into Typical Beauty (by “typical� he means what mediaeval theologians called “typological�), which considers different aspects of beauty as “types� of the “attributes� of God (infinity, unity, comprehensiveness, justice, etc.), and Vital Beauty, or the appropriateness of things to their supposed “functions�. There is almost nothing concrete here, and he basically suggests (though not in so many words) that no one can be a great artist, or even understand great art, without being an evangelical Protestant.
The second section is a philosophical disquisition on the “faculty� of Imagination. This section is also fairly abstract, but it has somewhat more examples, and ends with a chapter on “exaggeration.�
While the first volume is concerned mainly with landscape painting, this volume deals also with the human figure. Instead of Turner, the examples, to the extant that there is anything concrete at all, are taken from what he refers to as the “religious school� of early Renaissance Italian painting and the Venetian school � the place of Turner is taken by his new enthusiasm, Tintoretto � and he sees the decline from Beauty as beginning with the later works of Raphael.
As with the first one, he later repudiated this volume and at one point resolved publically never to allow it to be reprinted, though he later changed his mind about this and decided that the content was mainly right even if the style was embarrassing. Nevertheless, this kind of Romantic religious theorizing, which really seemed largely nonsense to me, apparently appealed to the early Victorians; the book was an influence not only on later criticism but on artists as well, particularly the English school which called itself the “Pre-Raphaelites.�
The editors of this edition included other material relevant to the volume in a series of Appendices, including an early partial first draft; apparently he would have gone into more depth on the Beauty of Colour, and included a chapter on the Sublime, but the main difference seems to be that it was written in normal English prose. I think the book would have been better if he had just finished with that draft instead of imitating Hooker.
In any event, he waited another ten years before continuing with the third volume, writing other things (most importantly the three volumes of The Stones of Venice), and I will follow his example and read The Stones of Venice before coming back (if I do) to the third, fourth and fifth volumes of Modern Painters....more
Preparing to read Maryse DzԻé’s La Migration des Coeurs, a retelling of Wuthering Heights, I decided to re-familiarize myself with Emily Bronte’s claPreparing to read Maryse DzԻé’s La Migration des Coeurs, a retelling of Wuthering Heights, I decided to re-familiarize myself with Emily Bronte’s classic novel, which I hadn’t read for a half-century. I remembered little about it except for the basic plot, and I am sure back then I didn’t really understand it at anything beyond a simple plot level; certainly I had not read enough other English novels from that time period to realize how different Wuthering Heights actually was. In fact, I don’t think I really liked the book, as far as I can recall. This time around, with a lot more experience, I got somewhat more out of it, especially aided by the critical articles in the back (it was a Norton Critical edition) and this book of critical articles. If it still doesn’t impress me as much as her sister’s Jane Eyre, it is certainly better than, say, anything by Charles Dickens.
With a book that most people have read, either in High School English or in college, there isn’t much point in summarizing the plot, and I’m not enough of a literary expert to give an original interpretation, so I will limit myself to commenting on it by way of the critical material. Between the two books, and taking account of three duplicated articles, there were twenty-five articles. Given that both books were published in the early sixties, there were happily no examples of post-modernist literary theory jargon; most of the articles were helpful, although there were a few that seemed to miss the point of the book entirely.
The three articles that were in both books were C.P. Sanger’s 1926 article on “The Structure of Wuthering Heights�, which worked out the chronology of the events, Carl Woodrings’s “The Narrators of Wuthering Heights�, and one of the two best articles, John K. Matthison’s “Nelly Dean and the Power of Wuthering Heights�, which dared to describe Nelly Dean as a negative character and unreliable narrator, who by her own narrative is constantly lying, spying, and betraying both the children and her employers � my own impression of the book. He makes the good point that our constant disagreement with the narrator forces the reader to actively think about the novel rather than simply reading for the story. Another article went even further: James Hafley’s “The Villain of Wuthering Heights�, which argues that Nelly Dean is actually the Iago of the novel; I think that is a bit too extreme � there are many villains in the book, but Nellie is certainly one of the worst.
The article that I agreed with most (in other words, the one which came closest to my own experience reading the novel), however, was Arnold Kettle’s “Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights (1847)�, a chapter from a two-volume book, An Introduction to the English Novel. Kettle argues that the characters of Heathcliff and Catherine are not some sort of abstract symbols of “storm� and “calm� or “Nature� and “civilization�, or (just) passionately in love in some romantic sense, but are united in a common rebellion against the class-bound conventions of the other characters; that Catherine’s marriage with Edgar is not only a betrayal of her love for Heathcliff but more importantly a betrayal of their common values for the values they had been in unity against. This seems to me to make the most coherent sense out of the whole novel.
There were articles on all the major and minor characters, with one exception: Mr. Earnshaw; which I thought was a curious exception, since he is the “protagonist� of the novel in the literal sense � the character whose decisions initiate the entire action of the book....more
[Review of the 1st ed. of the Norton Critical ed.; there are at least five different editions, with different critical material.]
Preparing to read Mar[Review of the 1st ed. of the Norton Critical ed.; there are at least five different editions, with different critical material.]
Preparing to read Maryse DzԻé’s La Migration des Coeurs, a retelling of Wuthering Heights, I decided to re-familiarize myself with Emily Bronte’s classic novel, which I hadn’t read for a half-century. I remembered little about it except for the basic plot, and I am sure back then I didn’t really understand it at anything beyond a simple plot level; certainly I had not read enough other English novels from that time period to realize how different Wuthering Heights actually was. In fact, I don’t think I really liked the book, as far as I can recall. This time around, with a lot more experience, I got somewhat more out of it, especially aided by the critical articles in the back (it was a Norton Critical edition) and another book of critical articles. If it still doesn’t impress me as much as her sister’s Jane Eyre, it is certainly better than, say, anything by Charles Dickens.
With a book that most people have read, either in High School English or in college, there isn’t much point in summarizing the plot, and I’m not enough of a literary expert to give an original interpretation, so I will limit myself to commenting on it by way of the critical material. Between the two books, and taking account of three duplicated articles, there were twenty-five articles. Given that both books were published in the early sixties, there were happily no examples of post-modernist literary theory jargon; most of the articles were helpful, although there were a few that seemed to miss the point of the book entirely.
The three articles that were in both books were C.P. Sanger’s 1926 article on “The Structure of Wuthering Heights�, which worked out the chronology of the events, Carl Woodrings’s “The Narrators of Wuthering Heights�, and one of the two best articles, John K. Matthison’s “Nelly Dean and the Power of Wuthering Heights�, which dared to describe Nelly Dean as a negative character and unreliable narrator, who by her own narrative is constantly lying, spying, and betraying both the children and her employers � my own impression of the book. He makes the good point that our constant disagreement with the narrator forces the reader to actively think about the novel rather than simply reading for the story.
There were articles on all the major and minor characters, with one exception: Mr. Earnshaw; which I thought was a curious exception, since he is the “protagonist� of the novel in the literal sense � the character whose decisions initiate the entire action of the book....more
DzԻé’sLa migration des coeurs is an “homage� (in the words of the author; the publisher’s description calls it a “free variation�) to Wuthering HeighDzԻé’sLa migration des coeurs is an “homage� (in the words of the author; the publisher’s description calls it a “free variation�) to Wuthering Heights, set on the island of Guadeloupe just before1900 � the explosion of the Maine in Havana Harbor takes place as Rayzé (Creole for “heath�) is returning to L’Engoulvent (Wuthering Heights) � so about a hundred years later than Bronte’s novel, which is set in northern England around 1800.
When I first read Wuthering Heights, some fifty years ago, I read it very superficially, just as a story. When I re-read it last month, I realized that it actually had much more depth, although I admit it is not one of my favorite classic novels. DzԻé’s novel copies the superficial aspects and leaves out the depth and the mystery. On the other hand, it adds a very different social and political content.
In Wuthering Heights, there are two mysteries connected with Heathcliff: his origins, and the period when he leaves the Heights and returns wealthy. La migration des coeurs, in contrast, begins with the missing period, with Rayzé in Cuba, making his fortune in a Chinese laundry business and trying to become a Santeria sorcerer, thus showing an interest in ghosts before the death of Catherine. (We are told later that Rayzé and Catherine’s favorite place as children was the local cemetery.) There is a particular historical setting: the deaths of José Marti and Antonio Maceo are mentioned, and people are speculating about the reason why the Maine is in the harbor. I thought that perhaps the Spanish American War would play a role in the book, but it never returns to it. To be honest, I was already put off from the novel by these first two chapters. In the third chapter, Rayzé leaves his Cuban mistress and decides to return to Guadeloupe to “get revenge�, although we have no idea for what and the decision just seems as arbitrary to the reader as to his mistress. In fact, much in the novel is not really motivated, relying on the reader’s memory of the older book to accept that things happen the way they do.
On the boat back to Guadeloupe, he encounters by chance coincidence Nellie Raboteuse, fired, as we later learn, by Aimeric de Linsseuil (the Edgar Linton of Bronte’s book) and now working for a poor family elsewhere, and a fellow-passenger asks her who he is. She then launches into the beginning of the story of Wuthering Heights. Her account basically follows the earlier novel, but with differences, some trivial but others major.
While in Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff’s origin is mysterious � his appearance leads to the surmise that he may be a gypsy, but in any case he is something exotic to late eighteenth-century England � in La migration des coeurs, he is described as “a Black or half-Indian�, which is hardly exotic in Guadeloupe, where they are the majority of the population. This is the basic difference between the two novels; where in Wuthering Heights, the conflict is a clash of values between the rebellious Heathcliff and Cathy and the affluent upper-class Lintons, in La migration des coeurs it is recast as essentially racial, between the Black/Indian Rayzé and the de Linsseuil é (whites), with the mulatta Catherine torn between them in terms of ethnic rather than moral identity. The relationship of Heathcliff to Catherine, which is the center of the older novel, is far less important in this book; essentially it is just treated as a sort of background, and mainly for its racial aspect. While Heathcliff is always present in the older novel, either in fact or in the minds of the other characters, Rayzé tends to disappear from the narration for long stretches.
From then on, many of the events very loosely follow Wuthering Heights, but the characters of all the persons involved are totally different. While in the older book, Mr. Earnshaw is a gentleman farmer from an old family, although at a lower social level than the Lintons, who is concerned to educate his family and Heathcliff, in DzԻé’s novel Hubert Gaigneur (French for “earner�) is a coarse mulatto parvenu who is essentially held in contempt by his neighbors, and who, hating education, does not give either Catherine or Heathcliff any education at all. It is Justin (Hindley), an intelligent, forward-thinking intellectual, who after his father’s death (in a horseback accident) insists on giving the “savage� Catherine a proper education (from a live-in nun.) He also repairs L’Engoulvent and turns it from an impoverished sugar plantation into a prosperous model of multi-crop agriculture, with an Indian workforce specially imported from Calcutta. But not to worry; in the next chapter he is the unintelligent drunkard and wastrel of the original novel.
Among other differences, the personalities of Justin-Marie (who should be equivalent to Hareton) and Aymeric/Rayzé II (who should be equivalent to Linton) are exactly reversed. I won’t go into detail about the later developments, to avoid spoilers.
While the original novel is unified by the device of Nellie as narrator (relayed by Lockwood), Condé shifts between dozens of narrators, and often the narration strays from the supposed narrator into an anonymous third-person voice, which causes the book to basically fall apart into confusing and seemingly unrelated episodes with uncertain chronology. (This technique could have worked in the historical novel aspects, if it had been better done, as it is in many of DzԻé’s novels, but not in the Wuthering Heights plot.) The narrative voice is not consistent even within particular narrators; for example, Justin speaking to Rayzé about Catherine’s marriage (and incidentally telling us at length all about his past and what he thought and felt about everything, which Bronte lets us work out ourselves from the action and dialogue) goes on and on with poetic description of scenery and weather, and anachronistic sociological commentary, totally out of character, but then Condé seems to recollect that it is being spoken by Justin and suddenly we get a barrage of slang, Creole phrases, and foul language (with what I particularly dislike, words replaced by ellipsis marks).
Later on, Rayzé (who, like the original Heathcliff, is supposed to be reserved about anything concerning himself) meets two complete strangers and immediately tells them his entire life-story in detail, from his relationship to Catherine to his studies in Santeria. Of course, he is actually telling the reader. The book is full of this kind of inconsistency of tone and level, and of obvious anachronisms (would Nellie, who has certainly in rural Guadeloupe never seen a “horseless carriage�, really have described someone as “leaving in fourth gear�?)
About two-fifths of the way through the book, Rayzé, for no apparent reason (apart from the needs of the plot), decides to take his family away from L’Engoulvent to one of the larger cities, and the book takes a political turn. The political situation is not shown through the plot, but rather we get out-of-character monologues by various minor characters telling us about the racial history and current conditions on the island. In most cases there is no obvious occasion or audience for these monologues within the novel; they are just addressed to the reader. The actual events as they enter the story of Rayzé and the Linsseuils are unclear and the politics are confused and more superficially dealt with than in her other novels.
My most general impression is that Condé is trying to combine two different sorts of novel within the same book, the homage to Wuthering Heights and a historical novel about Guadeloupe in the period after the abolition of slavery, and perhaps for that reason neither is done well; the two aspects do not coalesce into any coherent whole.
I almost DNF’d this several times, but having liked many of DzԻé’s novels I persisted, hoping it would improve. It does have some good moments, especially in the second half which completely diverges from Wuthering Heights, and largely abandons the political plot as well, but on the whole it is far below her usual standards. ...more
King Stakh’s Wild Hunt is a 1964 novel translated from Belarusian; it was the second book from Belarus for the World Literature group I am in on GoodrKing Stakh’s Wild Hunt is a 1964 novel translated from Belarusian; it was the second book from Belarus for the World Literature group I am in on ŷ. I downloaded the pdf for free from a site called Knihi-online.com. (The link to the pdf download was labeled in Belarusian (I think), but I took a chance and the pdf turned out to be in English.)
The novel is set in 1888, when Belarus was part of the Russian Empire; when the novel was written, it was a republic within the Soviet Union. The book contains much patriotic praise and description of the countryside, and much about the oppression of the peasantry and the decadence of the nobility not long after the formal abolition of serfdom. It is narrated by the protagonist, Andrei Belaretsky, long after the events, at the age of ninety-six. In 1888, he was a young but already noted ethnographer traveling to a wild part of the country to collect folklore, who finds that an ancient legend has seemingly returned to life.
The legend is the “Wild Hunt� of King Stakh. The “Wild Hunt� is a common theme of folklore throughout Central and Eastern Europe; the Belorussian version associates it with an early fifteenth-century rebellion against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by a nobleman called “King Stakh�, who is betrayed by Roman Yanovsky, the ancestor of the current owner of the castle where Belaretsky finds himself. Although I believe the “King Stakh� version existed before Karatkevich, I have not been able to find any evidence of a historical King Stakh.
The novel begins in a Romantic style with Belaretsky making his way through a quagmire in a thickly forested region during a wild storm. After a near disaster to his carriage, he finds himself in front of an ancient, almost ruined castle, which turns out to be owned by an seventeen-year-old girl named Nadzeya Yanovsky. Initially, he sees her as much older and very strange, but later he realizes that she is just a girl who is terrified; but of what? He learns that the castle is visited by three supernatural characters, the “Little Green Man�, the “Blue Lady�, and most terrifying of all, the “Wild Hunt.� All three are supposed to be omens of death; the legend of the “Wild Hunt� is that it is lead by the ghost of King Stakh, who has vowed to destroy all Roman’s descendants to the eleventh generation. Nadzeya of course turns out to be the eleventh generation and the last of the Yanovskys, and she is convinced she will die around he eighteenth birthday.
After reading so many novels about the horrors humans inflict on each other, a mere supernatural horror story seemed less disturbing; in fact, the novel turns out after a few chapters not to be a horror story at all, but a detective story as the skeptical Belaretsky, aided by a young revolutionary who is in love with Nadeya and a peasant leader, determines to solve the mystery of the supposed apparitions. This novel, while not the most significant thing I’ve read lately, is undoubtedly one of the most enjoyable, and despite one or two elements of tragedy, it even has a happy ending....more
In 1736, the seventeen-year-old John Ruskin wrote an angry letter to the editor of Blackwood’s Magazine, protesting a negative review of some of J.M.WIn 1736, the seventeen-year-old John Ruskin wrote an angry letter to the editor of Blackwood’s Magazine, protesting a negative review of some of J.M.W. Turner’s paintings. (Ruskin seems to have been obsessed with Turner’s paintings since he began copying his works when he was thirteen.) It was never sent (it’s included as an appendix to this edition of the book), but over the next seven years Ruskin expanded it into this more than six-hundred page treatise (not counting the editorial matter in the present edition) on “truth in art�, first published anonymously in 1743. It was revised several times; the edition I read from 1903 reprints the last edition supervised by Ruskin (1872), but gives the earlier version texts in footnotes or endnotes to the relevant chapters. Over time, he also added four more volumes.
Written between the ages of seventeen and twenty four, the first edition had all the strengths and all the faults of youth; on the one hand, a freshness and passionate enthusiasm for his subject matter, on the other a tendency to stridency of polemic and dogmatism in his own opinions. Given its origins, it has a near-hagiographic admiration for Turner and is somewhat unfair to everyone else. Subsequent editions toned down the faults somewhat, but Ruskin later more or less repudiated it as it stands and intended to rewrite it completely, which he never did.
The book is very organized; it is divided into Parts, which are subdivided into Sections, which are divided into Chapters, which are divided into numbered subheadings. Part I, Of General Principles, summarizes his theory of art; it is of course entirely representationalist, and actually limited almost entirely (at least in this first volume) to landscape painting. At times, it is obviously a kind of dialogue with the last book I read, Reynold’s Discourses on Art. (Ruskin later as a Professor lectured on the Discourses.)The first chapter is an introduction explaining his reasons for writing it; the second chapter is a very general account of his theory; the third through seventh chapters describe the hierarchy of “ideas� which he considers can be expressed in art: “Of Ideas of Power�, which are essentially the technical merits of execution, and which he considers the least important, although necessary, aspect of art; “Of Ideas of Imitation�, that is “mere imitation� or “illusion or deception� which he considers a lower form of art, and does not treat further except incidentally in contrasting it with the higher idea of truth; “Of Ideas of Truth�, that is imitation of the true nature of the subject, which is still not the highest goal of art, and which will occupy the rest of this first volume; “Of Ideas of Beauty�, which is higher; and “Of Ideas of Relation�, the highest goal, which is essentially the message the artist is intending to express by his painting. These last two ideas are left for later volumes. Section II goes in more depth into Ideas of Power, explaining the major “excellencies� to be looked for in an artist’s technical accomplishment considered without reference to the higher ideas.
Part II is titled “Of Truth�, and makes up most of the volume. Section I consists of two general chapters, four chapters giving a hierarchy of types of truth and which of them he considers more or less important, and a long final chapter applying his theories to specific painters, and explaining why they are all inferior to Turner in all respects. I should mention here his peculiar use of the terms “the ancients� and “the old masters�, by both of which he means neither the art of Classical Antiquity nor the Renaissance masters, but only the landscape painters of the seventeenth century, such as Claude, Nicholas and Gaston Poussin, and his particular bête noir, Salvator Rosa; by “the Moderns� he means the contemporary English landscape artists of the early nineteenth century, and he is always thinking particularly of Turner. Section II is entitled “Of General Truths� and contains chapters on Truth in Tones, in Colour, of Chiaroscuro, and two on Truth in Space (how to suggest distance); all of these have bad examples from the “ancients� and good examples from the “moderns�, mainly of course from Turner.
Section III is about the Truth of Sky, i.e. how to paint clouds (five chapters); Section IV is about the Truth of Earth, or how to paint mountains and hills, and rocks (four chapters); Section V is about the Truth of Water, or how to paint lakes, rivers, waterfalls, and the sea (three chapters); Section VI has one chapter about the Truth of Vegetation, essentially about how to paint trees and foliage, and two chapters of conclusions (one on the Truth of Turner and one on the criticism of art).
In addition to Ruskin’s text, the book I read has a long introduction, copious notes, and an Appendix containing various letters and other texts relevant to the volume.
This was Ruskin’s earliest and most popular work. It is an extremely interesting study, which should be read by anyone interested in the representational art (especially landscape painting) of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, or in the philosophy of art. I plan to continue reading Ruskin chronologically, with volume two, the three volumes of The Stones of Venice, and then the last three volumes of this....more
Sir Joshua Reynolds was the first President of the Royal Academy, and these fifteen discourses were delivered to the students of the Academy at the anSir Joshua Reynolds was the first President of the Royal Academy, and these fifteen discourses were delivered to the students of the Academy at the annual prize-giving ceremonies, between 1769 and 1790. The discourses are mostly about the studies which Reynolds recommends to students, but it also contains a certain theory of the nature of art and criticisms of the artists he recommends or does not recommend for imitation. They were influential in turning the attention of British artists from the Flemish and Dutch schools to the painters of the Italian Renaissance, particularly Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. Most importantly, they are a last protest of the Enlightenment against the rise of Romanticism, which began earlier in art than in literature or music. Since my temperament has always been more toward the Enlightenment than towards Romanticism, I found much in the discourses that I could agree with, although they also show some of the negative aspects which the Romantics were trying to correct. This is definitely a book that anyone interested in the arts should read....more
Last month I read Anderson’s Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, of which this is a continuation. It is considered one of the best modern Marxist suLast month I read Anderson’s Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, of which this is a continuation. It is considered one of the best modern Marxist surveys of the period, giving an economic explanation of the historical developments. The book takes us from the crisis of the feudal mode of production and describes the rise of the absolutist states which followed it. Like the previous book, it begins with a general survey and then examines each of the major countries, divided into Western and Eastern Europe, and emphasizes the differences in the history as well as the similarities. There is also a chapter on the “House of Islam�, primarily the Ottoman Empire. I learned a lot from this. The book ends with two “Notes�, one on Japanese feudalism and how it was both similar and different from feudalism in the West, and one, the longest single chapter in the book, on the concept of “the Asiatic mode of production�, which he argues should be abandoned. This is from a theoretical point of view the most interesting part of the book; it also contains a fairly detailed comparison of the Islamic countries with Imperial China.
I would recommend both volumes to anyone with an interest in history....more
Danser sur les braises is a collection of prose poems, dedicated to and partly addressed to her mother, written over the nine months following her deaDanser sur les braises is a collection of prose poems, dedicated to and partly addressed to her mother, written over the nine months following her death. It is concerned mainly with the relationships of the generations. Six décennies is a shorter group of poems in free verse, which could be considered a meditation on aging. As usual, I find it difficult to review contemporary poetry. ...more
Alindarka’s Children is the first reading from Belarus in the World Literature group I am in on ŷ. It is probably significant that the only BeAlindarka’s Children is the first reading from Belarus in the World Literature group I am in on ŷ. It is probably significant that the only Belarusian author I had read previously (Svetlana Alexievich) wrote in Russian (although of course I read her in translation) and mainly about Russian or Soviet events. Bacharevič on the other hand is a Belarusian nationalist, writing in Belarusian. The theme of Alindarka’s Children is Belarusian resistance to Russification, especially in language. This is the one thing I can say about it with certainty. Maybe.
The author’s technique is to begin with mysterious events which are only explained later, sometimes much later, so almost everything I can say about it will be “spoilers� to some extent (be warned). My review will probably also be confusing to anyone who hasn’t read it. That’s just the kind of book it is.
It is a very difficult novel to try to classify. First of all, I’m not sure whether to call it magical realism or an out-and-out fantasy. The setting is hard to pin down; a few references suggest the Stalinist era, but mostly it seems to be in the period under current pro-Putin president Aleksandr Lukashenko, or perhaps in a near future, or a close alternative reality that exaggerates the (very real) tendencies of both toward Russification. The multiple story lines and constant reversals of chronology are high modernism, but there is also a postmodernist intertextuality run rampant.
The paranormal brother Avi, who arose spontaneously from a lump of magical clay derived indirectly from a Jewish magician, seems to be a reference to the myths of the golem. “Avi� is short for “Aviator�, but perhaps the nickname, being a Jewish name, is a reference to his origin; except that it is not in the original, where he has a different name, which only sounds like the Belarusian word for pilot. The two children’s wanderings in the forest are full of references to the fairy tales of the Town Musicians of Bremen and Hansel and Gretel, but Avi’s finding of the corpse with the pocket-knife could be an allusion to another story of children without adults, The Lord of the Flies. The title is a reference to the poem “Things Will Be Bad� by the nineteenth-century Belarusian poet Francišak Bahuševič, whose central character is Alindarka. There are quotations from the poem throughout the novel.
The English translation � perhaps it would be more accurate to say adaptation � adds to the complexity. The original book is written in a combination of Belarusian and Russian (in fact mostly in Belarusian, with occasional Russian passages); the translator translates Russian (and actually most of the Belarusian) to English and some of the Belarusian to Scots, so there is in addition to the Belarusian nationalism a layer of Scottish nationalism as well, making the book a discussion of linguistic nationalism in general. The protagonist, the “Faither� of the two children Alicia and Avi, although he shares the antisemitism of the uneducated, has an admiration bordering on adoration for “the Jew�, Eliezer Yitzhak Perlman (later Eliezer Ben-Yehuda), who revived Hebrew, then a dead language, and whose daughter became the first native speaker of Hebrew since the third century BCE; he even has his portrait on the wall of his apartment. Alicia (originally named “Sia�, supposedly for an ancient Egyptian goddess � but this was not her name in the original Belarusian novel either) was likewise raised as a native speaker of “the Leid�, Belarusian or Scots. Russian/English is referred to in contrast as the “Lingo�. This is the starting point, but not the beginning, of the whole novel. Throughout the book there are quotations from Scots poetry, especially Robert Burns, probably substituted for Belarusian poetry in the original, which counterpoint the events of the narrative. Scots words in the text are footnoted and there is a glossary in the back, but neither include the poetry, which is occasionally very opaque.
The plotline of the novel is that Faither and Alicia lived for several years more or less in hiding, to ensure that she grew up speaking the Leid with as little influence of the Lingo as possible. Eventually, thanks to an overzealous teacher who is a psychologist (perhaps more what we would call a guidance counselor), Alicia is taken away from her father along with her “brother� Avi, who suddenly appears for the first time while she is being seized. They are put into a kind of linguistic re-education camp. The origins of the Camp and its Doctor form one of the other story lines. The endnotes tell us that his thoughts are slightly modified from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The novel begins with them in the Camp. Faither, together with his girl friend, Kenzie (another, less important story line), rescues the children from the Camp, but they escape from them (suggesting that perhaps Alicia wasn’t thoroughly in accord with Faither’s plans for her life) and disappear into the forest. They are using an old atlas to try to go to Bremen to become musicians. The main plotline follows their adventures wandering in the forest, based largely on fairy tales. This alternates with the other storylines, which are largely in flashbacks and provide some backstory.
The last chapter explains much, and there is a surprise ending; but it is ambiguous. Is it a happy ending, or the worst ending possible? The reader has to decide.
This is a very difficult novel, but difficult in a way that is fun to read. It has a fairy-tale, dreamlike logic that isn’t always coherent if you try to analyze it. I’m not sure the decision to use Scots in the English version was a good idea; most readers in Belarus would understand both Belarusian and Russian without any difficulty, but for an English reader the Scots is much more difficult to follow (even for me, and I have read some Scots poetry and have some background in linguistics), and the result is that the book is obscure in a different and less literary, less intended way, and that unsympathetic characters are easier to understand than the protagonists. I saw in one internet review that the French translator considered a similar approach using Breton or Provençal but ultimately decided against it, just using different levels of the language.
In any case, I did enjoy the novel and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys experimental fiction with a political point. ...more
Sometime around the end of 1362, just after Machaut finished the previous poem (La Fonteinne amoureuse), he was approached through a friend by a youngSometime around the end of 1362, just after Machaut finished the previous poem (La Fonteinne amoureuse), he was approached through a friend by a young noblewoman, evidently also a developing poet and singer, whom the nineteenth-century editor, Paulin Paris, first identified as Peronnelle d’Armentières, proposing that they exchange poems and love-letters. We should understand this in the context of the literary motif of “courtly love�, where a poet represents himself as being passionately in love with an unapproachable “dame�, generally of a higher social class, who inspires his poetry. The difference in this work is that it is two-sided, with the lady responding with her own letters and poetry. The letters and poems are included within a verse narrative by Guillaume. It was essentially a literary game; Machaut was in his sixties, while Peronelle was “between 15 and 20.� Undoubtedly, both were flattered by the situation, he by the adulation of a charming young woman and she by the attentions of a man who was already one of the most famous poets and musicians in France, if not all of Europe. Unfortunately, the editor in his introduction and extensive notes takes the relationship far too seriously, comparing it to Bettina von Arnheim’s infatuation with Goethe. The fourteenth century was not the Romantic early nineteenth century! He suggests that their “relationship� was broken off by Peronelle’s impending marriage (we actually know very little about her.) Now, it is certainly plausible that such a game might be considered awkward in a married woman; it is even more plausible that the duties of a married woman would leave her little time for literary games; and it is most plausible of all that the literary collaboration was never intended to be of a longer duration than the composition of what is already a very long book (more than twice the length of La Fonteinne amoureuse.)
This was apparently the work of Machaut’s which was most popular among his contemporaries, who would have understood the convention, and for long after his death, until the Renaissance made all mediaeval literature unfashionable. It was widely influential on other works, including Chaucer’s Book of the Duchesse. I think it is much less to the taste of the modern reader than La Fonteinne amoureuse; in fact to be honest I found it very long-winded, repetitious and frankly boring in many places. When there is a hiatus in Peronelle’s letters, he fills in the poetry with dreams and mythological stories which tend to be rather confused. The editor, convinced that this is a “real time� correspondence, tries to explain away discrepancies between the dates of the letters and the actual events they mention; actually, if we understand that this is a fictional correspondence, it is perfectly understandable that two letters exchanged a week or two apart might be supposed to have come after a break of several months, since these long absences are an important part of the plot. The writing of the book seems to have lasted about a year....more
I read this in a Middle French edition (Machaut is writing at the beginning of the Middle French period, which conventionally begins in 1339) which I I read this in a Middle French edition (Machaut is writing at the beginning of the Middle French period, which conventionally begins in 1339) which I downloaded long ago in the early days of the Internet; I haven’t been able to find any versions on ŷ which do not include translations and other material, but I assume my version, if it were formatted as a normal book with normal fonts, together with some other short poems I found elsewhere, would come to about 200 pages.
Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300-1377) is best known as a musician and composer, one of the originators of the Ars Nova, but he was also a major poet. La Fontaine amoureuse is one of the best fourteenth-century poems I have read, other than Chaucer (whom he apparently influenced.) In fact, in reading it I was often reminded of Chaucer. The poem begins with a complaint of a knight who is forced to leave his love to go overseas and fight (presumably in a crusade.) The long conceit of Morpheus as a messenger between him and his love is very original compared to much of the formula love poetry of the time. The second half of the poem (the fountain and the vision of Venus) is more conventional, but very good poetry if I can judge....more
This is an example of what I usually think of as a nineteenth-century genre, the “Life and Letters�. The editors are Mary’s granddaughter Barbara StraThis is an example of what I usually think of as a nineteenth-century genre, the “Life and Letters�. The editors are Mary’s granddaughter Barbara Strachey, about seventy when this was written, and who possessed most of the letters and diaries of her grandmother, and Jayne Samuels, whose husband Ernest wrote the biography of Bernard Berenson that I read last month.
Unlike the two biographies I read of her husband, this contained almost nothing about the Berensons� views of art, and so to be honest it was somewhat of a waste of time for me, since that was what I was interested in. Instead, it is a witty but gossipy book about her love affairs, her husband’s love affairs, their dysfunctional relationship and many quarrels, and the various celebrities, friends, enemies and “frenemies� who occupied their time and attention at their villa. It did present an overview of the relationships among the English and American émigré non-academic intellectual mileux of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but again without much about their ideas....more
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