Oxford University Press's Blog, page 946
May 11, 2013
H. P. Lovecraft and the Northern Gothic Tongue
There is a very specific language of Gothic and horror literature that has its roots buried deep in the history of English: doom has been around since Old English; dread carries over from Middle English; eerie, that sense of vague superstitious uneasiness, enters Middle English through Scottish. The adjectives are harsh and guttural: moons are always gibbous, the trees eldritch. Rather famously, Sigmund Freud begins his essay on ‘The Uncanny’ by exploring for several pages the etymology of the German term unheimlich (literally the ‘unhomely’, but cleverly translated using the ancient Scots word ‘uncanny’). Freud rests his entire argument about this elusive, uneasy emotion which is often said to be typical of Gothic fiction on the strange instability of this word. Heimlich and unheimlich are not always opposites, but can come to mean the same thing. What is the most alien, weird, and foreign – the uncanny – produces its effect precisely because it erupts in the most domestic, familiar, and ‘canny’ spaces of the home.
A name to be remembered
It is no surprise that the Gothic, a literature that emerged from the heart of northern Protestant Europe in the eighteenth century, uses an insistently harsh and ancient Northern tongue for its disordered and fantastical imaginings of murky deeds in the Dark Ages centuries before Enlightenment. The Gothic avoids the erudition of suspicious southern Latin sophisticates for a harsher Anglo-Saxon tongue. And if we still associate the modern Gothic with this language of the north it is largely down to the influence of one writer: H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). In the 1920s and 30s Lovecraft wrote pulp horror fictions about men undone by nasty tentacled gods in the backwoods of New England or at the ends of Earth amongst the savage races of Pacific islands or the keening penguins of the Antarctic. Horrible things slithered and slimed, invading human bodies and threatening all human values. He published in amateur journals with tiny print runs and then in pulp magazines like Weird Tales and Astounding Science Fiction. He published only one novella in book form during his life, yet his influence on modern horror has been huge. There is no Stephen King without Lovecraft, no Ridley Scott Alien series, no body-horror, no X Files, no Guillermo del Toro films. Thousands of writers continue to use Lovecraft’s cosmogony of alien gods. He has influenced contemporary philosophy, Goth and Black Metal music, Japanese manga, and there are even religions that worship Lovecraft’s fictional god ‘Cthulhu’.
‘Weird literature’ and Lovecraft’s style
Lovecraft was responsible for fixing down a particular form of ‘weird literature’, a mode of writing slithering somewhere queasily between Gothic and science fiction. ‘Weird’, of course, is another ancient Northern word, found in Saxon, Old German, and Old English. In 2003, young genre writers like China Miéville were associated with a movement christened ‘The New Weird’, further attesting to Lovecraft’s continuing influence into the new century.
The most striking thing about Lovecraft’s prose is his extraordinary, mannered style. His stories are often static mood pieces, building their effect through dense descriptive passages that achieve an almost hypnotic rhythm. He over-eggs every description with tottering towers of adjectives, breaking every decorous rule of ‘good writing’. Adjectives move in packs, flanked by italics and exclamation marks that tell rather than show. He always exhaustively describes what is repeatedly said to be indescribable. He wrote passages like this, from his most famous tale, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’:
That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-like imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membranous wings … It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway… The Thing cannot be described – there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.
The risk of such a style is that it always teeters on collapse, tipping over to become funny rather than frightening. There are many readers who find Lovecraft inept and comical, and this style is certainly very easy to parody. Rather disarmingly, though, Lovecraft tended to agree, berating his own style and failures in letters to friends. He abandoned writing for a long time after the initial rejection of At the Mountains of Madness, feeling there was no point in continuing. But there is a kind of logic to his stylistic awkwardness – it’s as if he needs to make language clatter and break open in order to get at the weird effect. The weird, I always think, is a pulp sublime that slithers out of the carcase of Lovecraft’s broken sentences.
Lovecraft on language and race
Lovecraft was rigorous in imagining his aliens – why would the English language be able to express absolute otherness? His god ‘Cthulhu’ is named with the barest approximation of the horrible sound his debased and savage followers utter. There is even a ritual chant that Lovecraft’s narrator transcribes: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn (which means, obviously, ‘In the house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming’). Yet even this alien language perhaps distantly echoes the hard consonantal sounds and alliterative rhythms of Old English.
There is a darker reason for Lovecraft’s heavy investment in the old languages of the Gothic. Lovecraft was a deeply reactionary man, the last representative of two decaying New England families, deeply afraid of the whirlwind of change in modern America. He lived two years in New York in the 1920s, the huge influx of immigrants terrifying him and feeding his fantasies of invasion and dethronement. He feared that those of Nordic origin (the descendants of the first American white settlers, the Puritans of the Mayflower escaping Popish decadence in Europe) were being threatened by an influx of the Asiatic and other lesser races. He approvingly quoted from the very popular racist books of Madison Grant, who published works with titles like The Passing of the Great Race. It was after Lovecraft escaped from New York in 1926 and returned to Providence in Rhode Island that he wrote his greatest horror masterpieces. ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ is explicitly about the degenerate world of Brooklyn’s port district (then the largest port in the world), but soon these fantasies of racial in-breeding were transfigured into a register of cosmic threat.
For Lovecraft, the Gothic was deeply tied to questions of inheritance, race and language. He spoke explicitly of the Gothic as a literature of the Nordic tribes, best written by those heralding from the Goths and the Teutons. ‘Wherever the mystic Northern blood was strongest, the atmosphere of the popular tales became most intense,’ he wrote in his essay ‘The Supernatural Horror in Literature’. He spoke of his favourite Gothic authors Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany and Arthur Machen as possessing ‘a purely Teutonick quality’ in which ‘you ought to find plain evidences of Nordick superiority; and derive therefrom a proper appreciation of your natural as distinguisht from your adopted race-stock.’ Language is never neutral, and in Lovecraft’s extraordinary fiction it is always a question of race and identity, produced in an era of great anxiety about the alleged ‘race suicide’ of the Western world in the aftermath of the Great War.
Always tread carefully: Cthulhu waits dreaming.
This article originally appeared on the OxfordWords blog.
Roger Luckhurst is Professor of Modern Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. An expert on science fiction and Gothic literature, he is the author of The Invention of Telepathy, Science Fiction, The Trauma Question, and The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy. He is the editor of H. P. Lovecraft’s Classic Horror Stories published by OUP in May 2013.
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May 10, 2013
Oral history and hearing loss
When perusing the internet for innovations in the oral history discipline, I generally seek out new voices, intuitive platforms and streamless presentations. Embarrassingly, I rarely consider the basics of oral history collection and production, the act of sharing someone’s story with a wider audience. That is one of several reasons I so enjoyed Brad Rakerd’s contribution to Oral History Review issue on Oral History in the Digital Age, “On Making Oral Histories More Accessible to Persons with Hearing Loss.” In his piece, Rakerd discusses the obstacles people with hearing loss or other limitations on speech understanding face when engaging with oral history, and offers several recommendations to allow scholars to make their material more accessible. Mad with the power of the OUPblog post, I contacted Rakerd to prod him for more information.
What is your relationship with Oral History in the Digital Age?
I am one of the developers and editors of the Oral History in the Digital Age website, and have contributed two tutorials on speech audio to its essay collection. I also worked on the IMLS Field Work Survey and, of course, I wrote my article for the Oral History Review as an outgrowth of the OHDA project. I have very high regard for the work that oral historians do and it has been a great pleasure to be able to contribute in these ways.
And how did you become interested in hearing loss?
I am trained as a speech and hearing scientist, and when I conducted my dissertation research and other early career studies of speech perception, I worked exclusively with listeners who had normal hearing. It was only later, after I joined my current department — the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders at Michigan State — that I had the opportunity to learn about hearing loss and its consequences. I did so through conversations with my very supportive audiology colleagues, and later, through a series of research collaborations with them as well.
When did you first think about your work in relation to oral history?
I first learned about oral histories when a former student of mine introduced me to the MATRIX folks here at Michigan State. It was our discussions about best practices for digitizing oral history collections and improving the audio quality of future oral history recordings that ultimately led to my participation in the OHDA project. Those discussions also prompted my thinking about ways to make oral histories more accessible to persons who have hearing loss.
Which lead to your article in the current issue of the Oral History Review?
Yes. Something about oral histories that has stood out to me from the start is that they must be listened to at great length and with great care if they are to be fully appreciated. Listening in this way can be a challenge for anyone. But the challenge can become especially great if the listener has a hearing loss or other limitation on speech understanding. Therefore, the purpose of my article is to recommend some steps that oral historians can take to ease some of this added difficulty.
There are recommendations for capturing and delivering oral history recordings in ways that can make the audio more accessible to anyone who has a hearing loss and who may use either hearing aids or cochlear implants. And there are recommendations for using video and other technologies to supplement the audio in ways that should make it easier to understand. One example of the latter is to make a video of an interviewee available for viewing in synchrony with the audio so that a listener can have access to lip reading cues. Another example is to allow the pace of an oral history presentation to be adjustable so that it can match the information processing preference of an individual listener.
Between this conversation and your article, you’ve provided a lot for us to mull over. Anything else you would like people to consider when working with oral histories?
There is one point about speech that I would make to everyone who works with oral histories, one that applies equally to those of us that work with speech in the lab: It is almost guaranteed that you are a poor judge of the degree of challenge that your own speech recordings will present to first-time listeners. This is true because you have heard those recordings many times over and, in the process, have become deeply knowledgeable about their content and about the speaking characteristics of your interviewee(s). As a consequence, the speech will almost certainly sound more intelligible to you than it does to anyone else. You might therefore think about working out a “buddy system” with some fellow oral historians, one where you serve as a fresh listener and critic regarding the challenges posed by their recordings, and they do the same for yours.
While Brad’s article focuses on making oral history more accessible to those with hearing loss or other speech comprehension obstacles, this last response demonstrates how working through seemingly “niche” issues can actually benefit the practice as a whole. Now, who needs a buddy?
Brad Rakerd is a professor in the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders at Michigan State University. His speech research focuses on perceptual processing issues, often as they relate to hearing loss. His article “On Making Oral Histories More Accessible to Persons with Hearing Loss” in the latest issue of Oral History Review is available to read for free for a limited time.
Caitlin Tyler-Richards is the editorial/media assistant at the Oral History Review. When not sharing profound witticisms at @OralHistReview, Caitlin pursues a PhD in African History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research revolves around the intersection of West African history, literature and identity construction, as well as a fledgling interest in digital humanities.
The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview, like them on Facebook, or follow the latest OUPblog posts to preview, learn, connect, discover, and study oral history.
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Image credit: What? Closeup for hand on ear. Image by zwolafasola, iStockphoto.
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Ten things you need to learn about heart failure
A diagnosis of heart failure can be overwhelming. Here are ten things you can learn to cope with this condition.
(1) Learn how the heart and heart failure works. This series of informative animations can take you on a journey through heart failure and its management.
(2) Learn to navigate an enormous amount of information. You’ll receive advice from cardiologists, nurses, and GPs — not to mention family, friends, and everyone who wants to help.
(3) Learn about the causes, symptoms, and developmentof heart failure.
(4) Learn the warning signs of heart failure, their level of severity, and who to consult and when.
(5) Learn to adjust your lifestyle to get the most out of life when you have heart failure. This condition will have an impact on every aspect of your life including travel, work, and relationships.
(6) Learn to work with your doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals. They help patients understand what is wrong: take patients through their medicines, introduce them to the people they need to work with, and describe heart failure clinics. Ask for tools, such as medicine charts or a symptoms and events diary, to help you stay oragnized.
(7) Learn your treatment options and what to ask your doctor. You’ll feel more reassured.
(8) Learn how this will affect your caretakers, who face many problems including depression. They need as much support as you.
(9) Learn how other patients overcome their difficulties. You can gain knowledge from their experiences.
(10) Learn to network with other people who have heart failure. Meeting fellow sufferers can help you feel less alone and more able to cope.
Professor Kenneth Dickstein is the creator and full-time enthusiast of the patient centred website Heart Failure Matters! Designed to meet a global educational need by helping patients understand their complex medical condition, it is available in in English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch and Russian (with the translation to Arabic happening this year).
The European Journal of Heart Failure, edited by Professor Dirk van Veldhuisen, is the International Journal of the European Society of Cardiology dedicated to the advancement of knowledge in the field of heart failure.
Oxford University Press is supporting Heart Failure Awareness Day with resources from across the press. Read our previous blog posts: “The five big lifestyle changes for heart health” ; “Why do we have a Heart Failure Awareness Day?” ; “Seven things you never knew about heart failure” ; and “More malignant than cancer?”
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Image credit: Male anatomy of human organs in x-ray view. Image by janulla, iStockphoto.
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Jekyll and Hyde: thoughts from Creation Theatre’s director
We are delighted that this year Oxford World’s Classics will be partnering with Oxford theatre company Creation Theatre for their new production of Jekyll and Hyde, which is taking place at another Oxford institution — Blackwell’s Bookshop — from 8 June-6 July 2013. To celebrate our partnership, we asked the production’s Director, Caroline Devlin, for her thoughts on Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
When did you first read Jekyll & Hyde?
Well, being Scottish I was brought up with an innate respect for Robert Louis Stevenson, but really fell in love with his books when I was about 17; Kidnapped and Catriona were my first reads. I was becoming really attracted to the romantic and gothic novels — The Mysteries of Udolpho for example — and so turned to Jekyll and Hyde feeling pretty confident of what to expect. It left me shocked. Being a novella it has the ability to really absorb you but with an economy of style and a necessity to get to the essence of the action that leaves you feeling slightly stunned. You are thoroughly immersed in the world and then spat out feeling dazed and, without sounding too melodramatic, grief-struck. I went straight back to the start and read it all again, desperate to re-visit the people and places, and seek to understand more of the hows and whys of Jekyll’s downfall.
Do you think gothic fiction translates naturally to stage adaptations?
There are definitely elements of gothic writing which lend themselves to a theatrical context; strong characterisations and the hugely atmospheric settings for a start. There is always a latent sense of danger too, whether that is danger from an outside source, or an inner conflict within our hero or heroine leading them into nail-biting situations. The fact that Jekyll and Hyde is a gripping thriller, full of suspense, certainly helps to keep an audience on the edge of their seats.
Do you think it is possible to be completely good or evil? Is it as simple as Jekyll is the hero and Hyde is the villain?
No — is the simple answer! Stevenson puts man’s evil nature centre stage (excuse the pun) and not only that, he makes it flesh; gives that evil a face, a name, and even feelings. It is Hyde who weeps in fear of the gallows in his last few days, Poole the butler even feels pity, so is Stevenson asking us to feel pity for a murderer and abuser? It is a complex interpretation of the baser elements of man’s character — shocking even now. In making Jekyll such a flawed hero, Stevenson forces the reader to question the pillars of society. The letters after Jekyll’s name signal him as a man of the highest achievement and learning in British society and if those at the top can court their evil nature, encourage it, and let it loose on society, then whom can we trust? Stevenson digs deep into the most pressing fears of Victorian Britain and strips it of the facade of gentility. In many ways Jekyll is the villain for giving Hyde life and then shielding his deeds, Hyde is just being Hyde.
What do you think is Stevenson’s conclusion on the concept of good and evil?
Well I reckon Stevenson was a canny Scot and knew that a book too overtly controversial would end up banned and he wanted a bestseller. Of course there is the moral at the end, that man trying to play God and dabbling with evil can only lead to doom and great unhappiness. But he raises so many questions within the book that it is impossible to suggest where his sympathies lay. It would take a thesis to break down these arguments fully but I would tentatively suggest that Stevenson was trying to raise the lid on repressed feelings in a society where people cannot be self-expressed leading to internalisation, festering desires, and therefore greater moral depravity. Early on in Jekyll’s confession he states that his desire to be respected amongst his peers led him to hide his true nature; in essence and quite by accident he became innately a liar and a fraud in all his relations. Stevenson lays the blame at the feet of a society rigid in its conformity. I think it’s a call for change and a call to re-evaluate the nature of man and desire.
What are your thoughts on the physical representation of Hyde written by Stevenson, and how will it be portrayed in your adaptation?
Well, it is a tricky one as there have been so many interpretations of the story over the years. Particularly successful are the film adaptations as the outward transformation is a make-up artist’s and designer’s dream. But I think the challenge in production is to capture the inner essence of Hyde. Stevenson mentions physical traits such as ‘troglodytic’ and ‘deformed’ — although no-one can say quite what the physical deformity is — but what is more important to Stevenson is the feeling Hyde evokes in people. It is almost as if buried deep in our human nature we can sense evil, like a dog can smell fear. Also, Hyde walks the streets of London, he takes hansom-cabs, goes to the bank. (In today’s banking establishments one could argue he would fit right in!) The point is he is not so physically repugnant that he can’t function on a day-to day basis. Utterson summarises that it is the ‘radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through and transfigures its clay continent’ — so not too much of a challenge for the actor!
The novel is very descriptive of the Victorian era. How is this incorporated in your adaptation?
It is a brave picture of London that Stevenson paints: brave in that it is very unflattering. It is an isolated, overcrowded, seedy heart of the Empire; the great and the good living cheek-by-jowl with the lowest of the low. It is a dangerous London where a young man can lose himself in the dead of night; absently wandering abandoned streets. It is also a London that is a playground for Hyde to act out all his debased, violent impulses and as Jekyll describes, ‘Pleasures which…soon began to turn towards the monstrous’. So it is that dangerous London, a London that undercuts the Victorian image of middle-class pleasantry that I want to evoke. In a way London becomes a metaphor for Jekyll’s problem, how he wants to appear, and how he really is.
Creation Theatre’s new production of Jekyll and Hyde will be held in Blackwell’s Bookshop from 8 June-6 July 2013.
Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet, and traveler. The Oxford World’s Classics edition of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales is edited by Roger Luckhurst, Senior Lecturer in English, Birkbeck College, University of London. Stevenson’s short novel, published in 1886, became an instant classic. It was a Gothic horror that originated in a feverish nightmare, whose hallucinatory setting in the murky back streets of London gripped a nation mesmerized by crime and violence.
For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter and Facebook.
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Image credit: Official poster for ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ provided by Creation Theatre.
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What’s the secret of bacteria’s success?
By Sebastian Amyes
Bacteria have achieved many firsts; they were the first cellular life-forms on the planet, they are the primary biomass on the planet; they are the most prevalent cell type in and on the human body outnumbering our own cells; they are responsible for more human deaths than any other infectious agents; and, in some parts of the world, they are the premier cause of all deaths. How did these small, single-cell organisms, that are invisible to the naked eye become so successful? Essentially this has been through rapid evolution leading to adaptability. All living organisms evolve. The speed at which they can do this is dependent on the generation time; for humans this is about 25 years whereas for bacteria it is often measured in minutes, sometimes as little as 20 minutes. It is believed that 99% of the species that have lived on the planet are now extinct; this is often because their generation time was too long for the necessary evolutionary adjustments needed to survive changes in their environment. Every year yet more species of animals and plants become extinct because they have been too specialised to adapt.
The rapid division of bacteria means that they can adapt overnight to changes in their surroundings. A prime example has been the development of antibiotic resistance in clinical bacteria. It has often been reported that the US Surgeon General indicated in the 1960s that the discovery, first of penicillin, and then of the rest of antibiotics heralded the end of clinical bacterial infections. It is now common knowledge that such a view was fatally flawed. Simple mutations in key genes during cell division provided the bacteria with a means of escaping the action of the antibiotic (resistance). Once learned and part of the bacterial DNA, these genes could then be passed on to other bacteria by the process known as conjugation (bacterial sex) so that these new bacteria benefited from the resistance “learnt” in earlier bacteria. Seventy years ago, almost all clinical bacteria were sensitive to all antibiotics; now many bacteria are resistant to some, some bacteria are resistant to most, and a few bacteria are resistant to all antibiotics. Within one human lifetime, clinical bacteria have evolved the means of overcoming all the antibiotics we can produce.
electron micrograph of Vibrio cholerae
Witnessing this remarkable adaptive ability, it is hardly surprising that bacteria have been able to inhabit all parts of the planet, from hot springs to the Antarctic, from mountain tops to the bottom of the ocean. The demise of any species is often dependent on the loss of its food supply. Bacteria evolve so quickly that they can adapt to use different nutritional sources. They have evolved so that they can live off virtually any organic matter, they can even adapt to use crude oil. Like some insect populations, bacteria form colonies. Many bacterial colonies comprise one billion individual cells or more. Total eradication of that number of bacteria is difficult and often impossible. Unlike bees, ants, and wasps, for example, the survival of that colony is more egalitarian and is not dependent on a single individual, the queen. If there is a catastrophe, any one of the individual bacterial cells in a bacterial colony can go on to form a new colony if it can survive the eradication of the previous colony. When it has formed a new colony and the next threat comes, the same survival tactic is engaged.
Bacteria preceded mammals by nearly four billion years. It is almost certain that they will be predominant long after humans and other mammals are extinct. There have been suggestions that bacteria arrived on Earth on meteorites; this may be true but it is more likely that they evolved here. However, we have already sent our bacteria into space on satellites and these may, at some time, colonise other planets. Here on Earth, our own bacteria will continue to thrive. As we have unearthed the fossil record, we have classified different eras in geological time, which are often colloquially rephrased as epochs such as the “Age of the Dinosaurs” or the “Age of the Fish”. As they have always been the largest biomass, the truth is that from the Precambrian era, four billion years ago, the Earth has always been in the “Age of the Bacteria” and probably will be forever.
Sebastian Amyes is Professor of Microbial Chemotherapy at the University of Edinburgh. He has specialised on the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. He has published more than 500 papers on bacteria and written a number of books on the subject, including Bacteria: A Very Short Introduction.
The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.
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Image credit: electron micrograph of Vibrio cholerae [Public Domain] via Dartmouth College
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May 9, 2013
The real secret behind Gatsby
The Great Gatsby is one of the best-known American novels, but weirdly, and strangely reflective of Gatsby himself, one of the least understood. The much-awaited Baz Lurhmann version of The Great Gatsby opens in the United States tomorrow, and like Gatsby himself — as a new trailer reminds us — the novel is “guarding secrets.”
In the course of the novel, and no doubt the new film version, we find out what Gatsby is hiding: not only his criminal bootlegging, but also his family name, Gatz, and his poor, ethnic-American roots, which in the end exclude him from the upper-class Anglo-American social circles he hoped to enter. We understand his frustrated American dream, and we understand too why he felt the need to fabricate for himself the pedigree of a patrician family with the Anglo-sounding surname Gatsby.
We’ve all been taught the novel is about the disappearing American dream, but that’s only part of the story, the postwar part. The other part, the “back story” set during World War I, is about the American dream suddenly and dramatically on the rise: how Gatsby, this “Nobody from Nowhere,” as Daisy’s husband Tom calls him, gets to meet Anglo-American princess Daisy on equal terms, so she can fall in love with him. Tom will be “damned” if he sees how Gatsby “got within a mile of [Daisy] unless [he] brought groceries to the back door.”
Of course, what got Gatsby in the front door of her house during the war was his officer status: “he went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor.” The novel makes clear how the war gave Gatsby a new social status when it made him an officer. He crossed the “indiscernible barbed wire” between classes when he put on the “invisible cloak of his uniform.”
What the novel doesn’t answer is how Gatsby, a poor farm boy from North Dakota and apparently a German-American to boot, got to be an officer in the US Army when Germany was the enemy. The novel definitely “guards secrets” on this point. Did Gatsby fool the army the way he fools most of the people in the novel about himself, with his polished manner, his false name, and his invented family background? The novel’s narrator Nick Carraway naturally comes to doubt Gatsby’s account of a military commission that was supposed to have been issued out of a made-up upper-class background.
Then how does Gatsby make officer? The novel gives two hints on the subject, which most critics have ignored and most readers, informed by the criticism, read right past. In fact, as a college professor, I’ve taught many students who think they remember the novel pretty well from high school but have forgotten that Gatsby was even a soldier.
Nick eventually corrects Gatsby’s romantic saga of his promotion in the American Army, from lieutenant to major at the front as a result of his combat heroics, and notes, “He was a captain before he went to the front.” That’s the first hint. The second is that Fitzgerald put Gatsby at Camp Taylor though it was at Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama that he met his future wife Zelda — for many critics, the obvious inspiration for Daisy.
Photograph of F. Scott Fitzgerald c. 1921, appearing in “The World’s Work” (June 1921 issue)
Take these tiny, seemingly meaningless hints to the library and the archive, and here’s what you discover. The World War I American army, which had to build an officers’ corps of 200,000 rapidly and almost from scratch, needed some quick methods for identifying men who might be officer material, and specifically those who might make good captains. It developed a couple of unprecedented programs to do so: a rating system for identifying captains, and an intelligence test that identified potential officers and superior officers. The even more radical move that the army made — shocking to privileged young men, such as Fitzgerald, who expected traditional class and ethnic discrimination — was not to exclude immigrants and ethnic Americans from consideration for officer. (Indeed, the army’s initial plan was to have no racial prejudice and to open up such promotions to blacks as well, but the government under pressure from Southern civilian officials nixed the original idea of a complete meritocracy.) The army designated four training camps at which to pioneer the intelligence tests in late 1917 and Camp Taylor was one of them.
Fitzgerald would have known about this because he was at Camp Taylor in 1917, which is when, in the novel, he has Gatsby pass through. Someone like Gatsby — that is, someone born in America and a high-school graduate in an era when the average white man completed less than seven years of schooling — would have aced the intelligence tests, which, as we know, tested for education and cultural literacy, not native intelligence.
The other thing to know about Camp Taylor is that there were a large number of men of German descent there; by end of the war, they numbered nearly 1500. There is no doubt that the American army, though it was fighting Germany, had plenty of German-American officers. A French soldier reported with shock in 1917: “You could not imagine a more extraordinary gathering than this american [sic] army, there is a bit of everything, Greeks, Italians, Turks, Indians, Spanish, also a sizable number of boches [Germans]. Truthfully, almost half of the officers have German origins.”
Why would Fitzgerald have cared about how Gatsby made captain — and more to the point — why would he have been secretive about this information? Here it helps to know that Fitzgerald was frustrated in his own military ambitions and his army record was an embarrassment to him. Though he made it into officer training by taking an entrance exam open to college students, he never got sent to Europe, and captain was precisely the rank he desired and had fantasies about, but never achieved. He stalled at first lieutenant, the rank below. And this was at a charged wartime moment when masculinity was being equated with combat service and army rank. To make matters worse for him, he watched men who he considered his social inferiors make that rank of captain and pass him by.
It is unlikely that Fitzgerald imagined Gatsby making it into officers’ training on the basis of fabrications because fabrications were irrelevant to the army’s personnel processes. One of the reasons the army liked the intelligence tests so much, flawed though they were, was because they got around the problem of relying on soldiers’ possibly false accounts of their own education and skills. As the wartime Committee on Psychology put it in a memorandum, they eliminated “the danger of charletans” (sic).
In short, the particular American mobilization for the World War I, with its new and very particular methods for selecting officers meant that a nobody like Gatsby could be chosen for officer training and specifically promoted to captain while still at camp. The novel reflects this moment — the moment Gatsby wants to recover, in his desperate effort to “repeat the past.”
It also reflects the backlash of the WASP establishment against upstart “war heroes” like Gatsby after the war. And, unfamiliar with obscure US Army history and taking our current world of meritocratic promotion for granted, that’s all that strikes us about the novel.
Will the new movie reveal Gatsby’s secret? Probably not. But I was happy at least to see that one of the official trailers put emphasis on the mystery of Gatsby’s rise as well as his soldiering in World War I.
Keith Gandal is the author of the 2010 Oxford paperback, The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization. He is currently working on a comic memoir on the subject of researching Fitzgerald and the other Lost Generation writers, titled Moments of Clarity, Years of Delusion: A Scholarly Detective Story.
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Image credit: Images one and three from The Great Gatsby movie copyright Warner Brothers Entertainment. Used for purposes of illustration. Image two from The World’s Work (The World’s Work (June 1921), p. 192) Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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Visions of Wagner
Few composers embrace such a span of disciplines — musicological, philosophical, historical, political, philological — as Richard Wagner. To what extent does the wide-ranging, comprehensive nature of Wagner’s works militate against a true understanding of them? How close are we, in his bicentenary year, to an understanding that does them justice? The following illustrations from The Sorcerer of Bayreuth: Richard Wagner, his Work and his World demonstrate the variety of perspectives on Wagner, from outdated stereotypes to new reappraisals.
Postcard showing the Red and White Lion
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In which Wagner was born on 22 May 1813. Ironically the house was situated in the Jewish Quarter of the city. (Collection Tom Phillips)
Christoph Marthaler’s Bayreuth production of Tristan und Isolde (2005)
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Emphasised the characters' chronic dysfunctionality, each occupying his or her own physical and emotional space. © Bayreuther Festpiele/Enrico Nawrath
A postcard showing Tannhäuser’s face
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Composed of the minstrel himself, Venus and her roseate attendants. (Collection Tom Phillips)
Alberich’s theft of the gold (a scene from the Ring)
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By Franz Heigel, 1865 – 66. © Wittelsbacher Ausgleichsfonds, Munich
Brünnhilde on her rock refuses to give up the ring
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In spite of the pleading of her sister Valkyrie Waltraute. Drawing by Franz Stassen, c. 1910, © Private Collection, Munich
The Ride of the Valkyries
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By William T. Maud (1890). The trumpet is not authentic, but Wotan's two ravens, seen in the foreground, are.© Gavin Graham Gallery, London
Wagner holds court at Wahnfried.
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W. Beckmann's oil painting of 1882 imagines Cosima, Liszt and Wagner's disciple Hans von Wolzogen all appropriately enraptured by the Master's reading. © Richard Wagner Museum, Triebschen
Portrait of Wagner
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By Friedrich Pecht, a friend of the Paris years. The picture was painted c. 1864-65 for Ludwig II, whose bust is visible in the background, though a misunderstanding over the fee caused a political scandal. © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Viennese caricature
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By Karl Klic (1873), turning the tables on Wagner and his anti-Semitism. © Ernst Kreowski and Eduard Fuchs, Richard Wagner in der Karikatur, Berlin, 1907
One of a series of eight photographs of Wagner
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Taken by the photographers Elliot & Fry on 24 May 1877, during his English visit that year. © Photo Elliot and Fry
The sensual extravagance of the Magic Garden in Parsifal
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As conceived by Paul von Joukowsky and executed by the Brückner brothers (1882), © Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung Schloss Wahn, Cologne
‘Frou-Frou Wagner’
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From Der Floh, 24 June 1877. Caricature depicting Wagner acquiring pink satin by the yard and being shafted by the journalist Daniel Spitzer, who published the letters to his milliner. © Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien, Vienna
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Barry Millington is chief music critic for the London Evening Standard and the editor of The Wagner Journal. He has written and edited, or co-edited, seven books on Wagner, including The Sorcerer of Bayreuth: Richard Wagner, his Work and his World (2013), The Wagner Compendium (1992), The Ring of the Nibelung: A Companion (1993), and the New Grove Guide to Wagner and his Operas (2006). In addition to his writing, he has also acted as dramaturgical adviser to several international music festivals.
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The first jukebox musical
By Hal Gladfelder
The opening-night audience at John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera—first performed on 29 January 1728 at the Theatre Royal, Lincoln’s Inn Fields—can’t fully have known what sort of theatrical experience awaited them. The play’s title, for a start, must have struck them as nonsensical. What could a beggar have to do with an opera? To London audiences of the time, opera was a form of entertainment for the elite: prohibitively expensive to attend; composed and performed by foreign artists in a language, Italian, which few understood; musically and dramatically over-sophisticated and abstruse. Meanwhile, far from the heroic and mythic realms in which operas of the time were set, beggars belonged to the squalid realm of the modern city—especially, the megalopolis of London, with its poverty, violence, hubbub, and filth. To bring those realms together was absurd. Even Gay’s close friends Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and William Congreve were unsure what he was up to, and uneasy as to how this “odd thing” The Beggar’s Opera would be received.
As things turned out, they needn’t have worried: Gay’s odd, hybrid work was to prove the hit not just of the year but of the century, running for a record-breaking sixty-two performances in its first season, and revived countless times since, including performances by a troupe of child actors, “The Lilliputians,” in season two. What drew audiences may at first have been the mere novelty of the piece, its incongruous mix of elements from disparate pre-existing forms, which is reflected in the name of the genre Gay had invented: the ballad opera. As Gay conceived it, the ballad opera alternates spoken dialogue with songs set to familiar tunes, chiefly folk tunes or street ballads, but also songs stolen or parodied from other, current plays and operas. In formal terms, the ballad opera was the model for all those later works that combined spoken and sung elements: the German Singspiel, the Savoy operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, and the Broadway musical. But one of Gay’s cheekiest, and most commercially astute, moves was to use melodies his audience already knew and loved. Doing so not only saved him the expense of hiring a new composer but allowed playgoers the pleasures of the familiar. The music offset the harshness of the play’s satirical equation of high and low life, whereby the underworld of thieves and whores is just a mirror image of the elite world of politicians and courtiers, both of them run according to a system of mercenary betrayal. Building his story around some of the most popular tunes of the day, Gay created not only the first musical but the first jukebox musical: precursor, unlikely as it may seem, to such theatrical hits as Mamma Mia! and Jersey Boys, and such television and film works as Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven and the Gene Kelly-Stanley Donen classic, Singin’ in the Rain, all of which reused songs that were already well known in other contexts.
A scene from The Beggar’s Opera painted by William Hogarth [public domain]
The crucial difference between these later works and The Beggar’s Opera, however, is that Gay wrote new words to all the old tunes, and so radically transformed them. To take one example, in a key scene late in the play, when the criminal anti-hero, Macheath, is waiting to be hanged, Gay gives him a song set to the minor-key (or Dorian-mode) Tudor ballad “Greensleeves,” first noted in 1580. In its most familiar version, the song begins, “Alas, my love, you do me wrong,” and the chorus stays with the theme of love: “Greensleeves was all my joy, / Greensleeves was my delight: / Greensleeves was my heart of gold, / And who but Lady Greensleeves.” Macheath turns this ancient air into a vehicle of political critique, singing, to the tune of the chorus, “But Gold from Law can take out the Sting; / And if rich Men like us were to swing, / ’Twould thin the Land, such Numbers to string / Upon Tyburn Tree!” The original “heart of gold” becomes the gold coin that allows the rich to buy their way out of legal trouble, so that none but the poor swing from the gallows (the “tree”) at Tyburn. Singing one of the old familiar English melodies, Macheath offers a bitter reflection on the corrupt state of contemporary society, one which still rings true in 2013.In such moments of cynicism and disquiet, The Beggar’s Opera exhibits affinities not only with the satire of Gay’s cronies Pope and Swift, but with the seeming misanthropic darkness of such later musicals as Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera (unsurprising, as this is an update of Gay’s work to reflect the social conditions of 1920s Berlin) and Stephen Sondheim’s bloody horror show Sweeney Todd. Sondheim’s musical might seem an extreme case of late twentieth-century angst, with its homicidal mayhem and cannibalism, and its vision of London as a hellish city of night. As he puts it in one number, “There’s a hole in the world / Like a great black pit / And the vermin of the world / Inhabit it, / And its morals aren’t worth / What a pig could spit, / And it goes by the name of London.” But these darker elements were already vividly present in The Beggar’s Opera, set in the shadow of Newgate Prison. Gay, too, sees cannibalistic predation as integral to modern urban life: in the words of Lockit, Newgate’s jailor, “Lions, Wolves, and Vulturs don’t live together in Herds, Droves or Flocks. —Of all Animals of Prey, Man is the only sociable one. Every one of us preys upon his Neighbour, and yet we herd together.” But it is not all darkness: in both plays, humor and especially music are sources of pleasure, by turns touching and exuberant. Sondheim has called Sweeney Todd a “love letter to London,” and Gay could have said the same of The Beggar’s Opera, with its comic vitality and anarchic spirit of fun.
Hal Gladfelder is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester. His books include Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Beyond the Law (2001) and Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland (2012), as well as the Broadview edition of Cleland’s Memoirs of a Coxcomb (2005) and the Oxford World’s Classics edition of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and Polly (2013).
For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter and Facebook.
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Image credit: A scene from The Beggar’s Opera, by William Hogarth [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
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May 8, 2013
Panning for etymological gold: “aloof”
It may not be too widely known how hard it is to discover the origin of even “easy” words. Most people realize that the beginning of language is lost and that, although we can sometimes reconstruct an earlier stage of a word, we usually stop when it comes to explaining why a given combination of sounds is endowed with the meaning known to us. Moo poses no problems (sound imitation); neither does diesel (a proper name). Outside those two spheres, everything is “riddled with riddles.” Today I want to tell a story of how the “easy” origin of the adverb aloof was discovered. The sought-after etymology looks almost self-explanatory, but such is the first impression.
At present, aloof is used only in its figurative sense (we stay aloof, remain aloof, and so forth; hence aloofness), but it arose as a nautical term. This fact remained hidden for a long time. Stephen Skinner, the author of the second etymological dictionary of English (1671; the first was published by John Minsheu in 1617) thought that aloof meant “all off.” It was a relatively new word at his time: the OED has no examples of aloof predating 1535. Skinner’s solution appeared tempting to those who did not care too much about phonetic niceties. In aloof, the vowel is long, while in off it is and has always been short. Obviously, in 1671 no one would have been bothered by such a detail. Being aloof does more or less mean being “all off,” and that equation satisfied people for two centuries. I found it even in an 1870 book, where it was given without discussion as fact. The great Samuel Johnson copied most of his etymologies from Skinner, and the popularity of his dictionary (1755) guaranteed the longevity of the all off derivation.
However, the search for the true descent of aloof did not stop there. It occurred to some people that aloof was perhaps an alteration of a-loft. In 1864 Webster’s original etymologies underwent a drastic revision by C. A. F. Mahn, a German philologist, who, as one of our correspondents assured me, had never made it to America (I had suspected the truth but could find almost nothing on him) and worked, to use the modern cliché, “from home.” His contribution was important, and many absurd suggestions Noah Webster had launched disappeared from the dictionary. But, of course, who could single-handedly rewrite the etymologies of a whole language, especially considering that comparative linguistics was just then coming into its own and that not a single reliable dictionary of English word origins had yet been written! At least Mahn, though a Romance scholar, was a native German and therefore had sufficient familiarity with the achievements of the young science. But in the entry aloof even he vacillated between all off and aloft. Aloft has the already familiar fatal flaw: its root vowel is short. Also, we would like to know what happened to final t.
I have no way of finding out who nowadays reads The North British Review (abbreviated below as NBR). In the nineteenth century, “Reviews” of this type flooded both England and the United States. Many of them became deservedly famous. Sometimes they contained only long critiques of various books, but sometimes they also published essays, poetry, and fiction. One of the contributors to NBR was George Webbe Dasent, a brilliant translator of Icelandic sagas and Norwegian folktales. He knew both languages very well (he also felt comfortable in their grammar, as his manual testifies) and believed that being proficient in a language made him qualified for solving etymological puzzles. In this he was mistaken. Most “Reviews” published everything anonymously, but some contributors later brought out their collected works in book form, and that is how it is occasionally possible to ascertain their authorship. Dasent’s two volume set Jest and Earnest (1873) is excellent reading. His review of Latham’s revision of Johnson’s dictionary (and it is this review that I excerpted for my database) is there. I am used to the vituperative style of the epoch gone by, but Dasent was not only sarcastic, trenchant, and arrogant: he was unbearable. He never doubted that he possessed a key to the ultimate truth. Etymologists’ specialization may have a negative influence on their preferences. The number of deluded people who descry Hebrew, Arabic, or Slavic roots everywhere is not negligible. Someone who has an intimate knowledge of Irish tends to trace hundreds of words to Celtic. Familiarity with Icelandic makes one oversensitive to Scandinavian. This is what happened to Dasent, in whose opinion, aloof was a borrowing of Icel. á hlaupi, literally, “on the run” (the verb hlaupa is akin to Engl. leap). Now, in the earliest examples, as they appear in the OED, aloof signifies an order to the steersman to go to windward, so that “on the run” does not look too good a match for it.
Windward ho!
Dasent wanted to cut rather than disentangle the knot, but etymology, to quote an old lexicographer, is a work of difficulty and delicacy. The puzzle was solved by Skeat in the first edition of his dictionary (1882). Many of the solutions he offered in that work proved wrong, and Skeat, aware of his deficiencies, kept revising them, but this etymology has remained intact. Already in 1857 aloof was explained as the word for keeping one’s luff in the act of sailing to the wind, the luff being a contrivance for altering a ship’s course. Very many nautical terms reached English from Dutch. (A respectable English sailing term almost has to look Dutch. That is why schooner, which is not from Dutch, has the letter h after sc.) The same holds for aloof. Its etymon is Dutch te loef. English substituted on for te, and on loof became aloof, just as aboard, despite the many vicissitudes through which this word went, developed from on board.
Does the denouement look like an anticlimax? I don’t think so. To be sure, the etymology of aloof is almost in plain view, but it took people more than two hundred years to see the picture in its true light. Aloof may have come not from Dutch but from Danish, because the phrase had international currency (for example, it was also used by French sailors), but the Dutch source is more likely. Some dictionaries keep saying that aloof is a word of unknown origin. This verdict should be dismissed as unjustifiably harsh. No doubt, it is better to be safe than sorry. Yet, in this case there is nothing to be sorry about. Could aloof experience the influence of aloft (a suggestion made by many)? Such possibilities can never be excluded. Similar words of this type are sometimes called paronyms. The closer any given two words sound, the greater the possibility they will interact. As far as I can judge, aloft and aloof have little in common. From an etymological point of view, loft, a borrowing of Scandinavian lopt, means “air,” as German Luft still does.
The episode related above (a typical just so story, but with a much greater degree of verisimilitude than the story of the elephant’s trunk) shows that panning for etymological gold, even when the gold does not lie too deep, is hard but that some efforts pay off. And this is all there is to my tale, as Chesterton might have said and perhaps even said somewhere.
Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”
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Image credit: Sailing ship by Ivan Aivazovsky. Public domain via Wikipaintings.
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The five big lifestyle changes for heart health
Today’s problem for the health-conscious person is information overload; new health studies pour out daily from newspapers, radio stations, and television networks. Just how true are the studies? How compelling are the facts they claim? After reading countless scientific articles, listening to hundreds of international experts, and keeping an ear open when patients tell me about their experiences, I’ve identified the only five lifestyle changes with compelling evidence behind them. Taken together, these steps provide about 80% protection from heart attacks, as well as stroke and cancer, and this message comes from three major studies organized by the Harvard Medical School and published in highly rated journals.
(1) Unfortunately, the image of smoking as ‘sexy’, which was promoted for years in the USA and elsewhere, still lingers; young women remain the group least likely to give up smoking. But giving up smoking (or not starting in the first place) it essential. It confers just over one-third of the lifestyle benefits associated with healthy living.
(2) “Exercise is the elixir of life,” says Richard Verrier, from the Harvard School of Public Health. You need at least thirty minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise daily — ideally every day, but five days per week will do. How much effort should you put into it? A simple criterion: you should be sweating by the end of it.
(3) We know that the Western diet (with its high intake of fat, sugars, and calories) damages the arterial endothelium and promotes obesity, diabetes, and heart attacks. There are several validated, health promoting diets which counteract this, including the Prudent diet (which emphasises a high intake of vegetables, fruit, legumes, whole grains, fish and poultry), the DASH BP-reducing diet (similar, but with the addition of salt restriction; ideal for the many people with hypertension) and the Healthy Eating diet (again similar, but using a numerical index to score components). The Mediterranean diet may be the best of all of these, being immortalised by the declaration that it now belongs to the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Europe. Furthermore, in April 2013 in probably the largest and longest diet study ever undertaken, five years of the Mediterranean diet with high olive oil and nuts reduced heart attacks, strokes and (of note) total mortality in 7447 persons , all versus a standard low fat diet.
(4) Consistent studies show that fat around the middle — abdominal fat — is closely linked to increased heart disease and diabetes. Therefore a health body weight, indicated by a body mass index (BMI) of 25 or below, is vital for keeping the heart healthy. Fat tissue is not only cosmetically undesirable, but produces a variety of hormones, each of which is capable of adverse effects. For example, release of these hormones from fat tissue into the blood can trigger a series of chemical changes that eventually produce more fat. In brief, fat produces fat.
(5) Moderate alcohol, the fifth protective factor (and part of the Mediterranean diet) is a two-faced friend. A little helps, but more than that harms substantially. The ‘red wine’ hypothesis, which states that the beverage has benefits extending beyond its alcohol content, may also have some truth in it; deep red grape juice has the same effect of inhibiting blood clots, but only in higher doses. A fine Pinot Noir — the author’s favourite — may therefore be safely considered as one of the ‘big five’, but only in small doses.
Lionel Opie qualified as a medical doctor at the University of Cape Town, before winning a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University where he trained in heart research and later worked with leaders of thought at Harvard University. After the world’s first heart transplant in Cape Town, he was invited back to South Africa to develop heart research at Groote Schuur Hospital, where he still works. His book Living Better, Living Longer guides the reader through this morass of information with the message that just five key steps taken now will promote long-term health benefits for heart and mind and give protection from future heart disease and brain deterioration.
Oxford University Press is supporting Heart Failure Awareness Day with resources from across the press.
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Image credit: Rustic Italian Dinner with red wine olives and salad. Photo by edoneil, iStockphoto.
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