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July 653. Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun [1958] 105 pages
One of the plays I will be seeing performed at the Utah Shakespeare Festival later this month, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun is a classic of Black American literature, and of American literature. Written at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, when its focus was still largely on ending Jim Crow in the South, she exposes the racism of segregated housing, anti-Black violence and poverty in Chicago.
The characters of the play, a Black working-class family living in the ghetto of South Chicago (and the play is about class as well as race, critical of the Black (petty) bourgeoisie as represented by Beneatha's ex-boyfriend George Murchison and his rich — for a Black man — father), are at the same time both realistic, rounded characters and also represent various approaches to Black liberation, from the "Black capitalism" which Walter tries and fails to achieve, to the Pan-Africanism of Beneatha and her Nigerian boyfriend Assagai, the pragmatism and resignation of Ruth and the dream of Mama Lena to have a house of her own, even if it means exposing them to the violence of the whites. The play has both humor and tragedy.
The version I read was published in 1961, shortly after the play was first performed, and I understand that some material was omitted which later editions restore. Nevertheless it is a powerful play which I am excited to see performed.
54. Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders [1722] 356 pagesThe next eighteenth-century novel in my project to fill in my gaps, Defoe's Moll Flanders is, like his Robinson Crusoe, a novel of adventure, but it is also one of the first realistic novels of social criticism, showing how the failings of society produce anti-social characters like Moll. As with Robinson Crusoe, there is also a theme of propaganda for moving to the New World colonies, suggesting that they are an easy way of getting rich.
55. Articles on A Raisin in the Sun (10 articles downloaded from Academic Search Premier) 204 pagesBernstein, Robin, Inventing a fishbowl: White supremacy and the critical reception of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (Modern Drama, 42, 1, 1999) 12 pages — Describes the critical responses to the play and the way they try to eliminate or moderate various aspects of the play's criticism of white power relations.
Gordon, Michelle, "Somewhat Like War": The Aesthetics of Segregation, Black Liberation, and A Raisin in the Sun (African American Review, 42, 1, 2008) 13 pages — Describes the context of the play and Hansberry's life and politics.
Matthews, Kristin L., The Politics of "Home" in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (Modern Drama, 51, 4, 2008) 23 pages — Analyzes the politics of the play.
Saber, Yomna, Lorraine Hansberry: Defining the Line Between Integration and Assimilation (Women's Studies, 39, 5, 2010) 19 pages — Discusses the play in the context of other Black literature of the time. Distinguishes between integration, assimilation and accommodation.
Murray, William, The Roof of a Southern Home: A Reimagined and Usaable South in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (Mississippi Quarterly, 68, 1/2, 2015) 17 pages — Focuses on the character of Mama as a link with the history of Blacks in the South.
Thomas, Aaron C., Watching A Raisin in the Sun and Seeing Red (Modern Drama, 58, 4, 2015) 21 pages — Discusses the influence of the Communist Party on Hansberry and on Black literature of the 20's through the 50's. Worthwhile although somewhat too uncritical of the CP's politics in the Black movement.
Chapman, Erin D., Staging Gendered Radicalism at the Height of the US Cold War: A Raisin in the Sun and Lorraine Hansberry's Vision of Freedom (Gender & History, 29, 2, 2017) 22 pages — Discusses the radicalism of the play, with emphasis on feminism.
Orem, Sarah, Signifyin(g) When Vexed: Black Feminist Revision, Anger, and A Raisin in the Sun (Modern Drama, 60, 2, 2017) 23 pages — Focuses on the character of Beneatha and her various forms of anger; considers her as a doppelganger of Walter; discusses the play as a reworking of/signifying on the British theater genre of the "angry young man.
Kiser, Kelsey, The Domestic Sphere as Counter-Surveillance in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (Modern Drama, 63, 4, 2020) 20 pages — Somewhat confusing in its assumptions about the play.
Kennon, Raquel, "Africa Claiming Her Own": Unveiling Natural Hair and African Diasporic Identity in Lorraine Hansberry's Unabridged A Raisin in the Sun (Modern Drama, 64, 3, 2021) 26 pages — Discusses Beneatha's haircut and how it was handled in different drafts and performances of the play.
July 1156. Jane Austen, Emma [1815] 1061 pages
I will be seeing the musical based on this novel next week at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, which is why I am reading it somewhat out of order (my current reading project is still in the seventeenth century.) Before I retired as a librarian, I noticed that whenever anyway needed to read a "classic", whether for school or some book club, their first thought was always, "something by Jane Austen". I've never quite understood that preference. There is a whole industry devoted to writing prequels, sequels and retellings of her novels. Yet apart from Pride and Prejudice a very long time ago, I had never read any of her books before. My impression was that they were basically just literate romances with obligatory weddings at the end. I admit, there was much more to Emma than this, although it did focus on romance and ended with three weddings.
Essentially, this is the story of the "growing up" of a young woman, Emma Woodhouse. At the beginning, she seems rather unlikeable; a popular, somewhat spoiled upper-class girl who is very snobbish about class and very patronizing and manipulative about her "friends" and their personal relationships. She considers herself to be intellectually superior to the people around her (which she is) and to have a special insight into their emotional lives (which she doesn't.) She imposes her fantasies on another young woman, Harriet Smith, who is from a lower social stratum and whom she treats as a protegé. She uses her influence to break up Harriet's relationship with a neighboring farmer, Robert Martin, and manipulates her into falling for the vicar, Mr. Elton, whose character and intentions she totally fails to understand; later she imagines that Frank Churchill, a wealthy young man, is in love with her, but tries to make a match between him and Miss Smith. She is very unkind to two other young women in the village, Miss Jane Fairfax and her aunt Miss Bates.
Not to try to summarize the whole novel, eventually she learns from the disastrous results of her meddling (with the help of Mr. Knightley) and becomes more sensitive to and respectful of the feelings of those around her. The problems get straightened out and the novel ends with everyone getting married (except the unfortunate Miss Bates).
The novel is of course well-written, though a bit too discursive in the early nineteenth-century style; it has a good deal of humor and the lightly tragic aspects are all resolved in the traditional happy ending. I am interested to see how this thousand-page three-volume novel is compressed into a play with music.
57. Articles on Emma (12 articles downloaded from Academic Search Premier) 244 pagesKohn, Denise, Reading Emma as a Lesson on "Ladyhood": A Study in the Domestic Bildungsroman (Essays in Literature, 22, 1, 1995) 14 pages — Discusses the novel as a Bildungsroman of how Emma grows into a "lady". About the same way I understood the novel.
Minma, Shinobu, Self-Deception and Superiority Complex: Derangement of Hierarchy in Jane Austen's Emma (Eighteenth Century Fiction, 14,1, 2001) 17 pages — Discusses the novel from the social standpoint. Argues that much of the "snobbishness" of Emma is actually from a self-deception about her own motives, and relates her seeking of confirmation of her own primacy in the community to the fact that her family do not own land. Points out that Mrs. Elton (and I would add Mrs. Churchill) is a caricature of Emma, an example of what her tendencies of patronizing and meddling could become. I think the article confuses what Austen takes for granted (to use the jargon, the subtexts) with her purpose in writing the novel; and in its criticisms of Emma's character it ignores the way she changes during the novel. Nevertheless, an interesting article.
Miles, Robert, "A Fall in Bread": Speculation and the Real in Emma (Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 37, 1/2, 2003-2004) 20 pages — Situates the novel in the context of the economic problems following the end of the war with Napoleon. Discusses the use of economic terms in the novel, but goes a bit too far in seeing it as an allegory of Land and Capital.
Kramp, Michael, The Woman, the Gypsies, and England: Harriet Smith's National Role (College Literature, 31, 1, 2004) 22 pages — Overinterprets the brief incident of the Harriet's meeting with the Gypsies to argue that Harriet is a symbol of Whiteness and that the concern of the novel is with creating a White national English race; that Emma and Mr. Knightley are concerned with her marriage because White women have a duty to reproduce the race and so on. I suppose some people will see race everywhere, but this seems like a totally far-fetched interpretation of the book.
Gunn, Daniel P., Free Indirect Discourse and Narrative Authority in Emma (Narrative, 12, 1, 2004) 20 pages — A good discussion of how Austen uses Free Indirect Discourse in the novel. This was one of the things I was looking for as I had read that Austen was the first to use this technique, which is usually associated with the much later writings of Flaubert.
Hong, Mary, "A Great Talker upon Little Matters": Trivializing the Everyday in Emma (Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 38, 2/3. 2005) 19 pages — Discusses Miss Bates' conversations and Harriet's "treasures" as examples of trivial details which have an important bearing on the plot, in the context of theories about details and abstraction. Interesting but misses the point that they are intended to be comic.
Blackwell, Mark, Harriet's "Tooth Amiss" and Transplantation in Emma (Modern Philology, 103, 2, 2006) 24 pages — Discusses the use of teeth and dentistry in Austen's other novels and in early nineteenth-century England to explicate the meaning of Harriet's visit to the London dentist in Emma.
Merrett, Robert James, The Gentleman Farmer in "Emma": Agrarian Writing and Jane Austen's Cultural Idealism (University of Toronto Quarterly, 77, 2, 2008) 27 pages — Discusses Mr. Knightley and Robert Martin in the context of the contemporary debates about traditional and progressive farming methods.
White, Laura Mooneyham, Beyond the Romantic Gypsy: Narrative Disruptions and Ironies in Austen's "Emma" (Papers on Language & Literature, 44, 3, 2008) 23 pages — Discusses the significance of the gypsy episode for the novel. Has much information on how gypsies were portrayed in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century literature.
Barchas, Janine; Picherit, Speculations on Spectacles: Jane Austen's Eyeglasses, Mrs. Bates's Spectacles, and John Saunders in Emma (Modern Philology, 115, 1, 2017) 13 pages — Uses the mention of John Saunders (an actual oculist of the time) as a springboard to discuss Austen's own eyesight and its possible significance for her final illness.
Nayebpour, Karam, The Training Impact of Experience in Jane Austen's Emma (Brno Studies in English, 43, 2, 2017) 23 pages — A general summary and interpretation of the novel in terms of changes due to experience.
Tarpley, Joyce Kerr, Manhood and Happiness in Emma: Liberal Learning and Practicing the Language of Marriage (Renascence, 70, 1, 2018) 19 pages — Discusses the male characters of the novel. Very Christian.
July 1858. Maryse Condé, Ségou: La Terre en miettes [1985] 528 pages [Kindle, in French]
Ségou: La terre en miettes is the sequel to Ségou: Les murailles de terre, which I read and reviewed here several years ago. At that time, this book was out of print and not available as an e-book, but when I recently noticed that it was now available I bought it and added it to my reading list. The previous novel ends (in 1856?) with a battle between the Bambaras of Ségou and the extremist Islamic forces of the Toucouleur El-Hadj Omar. This sequel begins a few years later; El-Hadj Omar has conquered much of the Empire of Ségou, but not the city itself. Meanwhile, the French presence on the coast looms in the background, but is not as yet central. Though even longer than the first book, this is better constructed; it concentrates on a smaller number of central characters which makes it easier to understand. As in the first novel, the central characters are all members of the fictional Bambara Traoré family, now from the third and fourth generations, while most of the other important characters are historical. It is helpful but not absolutely necessary to have read the first book, as most of the back references are explained in the text.
About the first half of the book is concerned with three "brothers" (first cousins), Mohammed, who has returned from the war missing a leg, and considers himself on a mission for Islam; Ahmed Dousika, who is a supporter of the old religion; and Olubunmi who is ambivalent about whether to support El-Hadj Omar as a bulwark against the French or the French as a way of defeating El-Hadj Omar. All change their original positions in the course of the book. Mohammed's wives, especially his first wife Awa, also play a significant role. This narrative is continued through the fall of Ségou to Omar (1861) and the death of Mohammed and his "brothers", to the defeat of El-Hadj Omar himself by the army of Tombouctou (1864). The novel then switches to a second plot, almost a separate novel within the novel, with Samuel the son of Eucaristus, who lives farther to the South and soon migrates to Jamaica. There he immediately falls in with Paul Bogle (just before the Morant Bay rebellion in 1865), whom I remembered from my readings a while back in Jamaican literature (and from the Bob Marley song.) He visits his mother's Maroon relatives and is very disillusioned, as she has presented them as resistance fighters against the Whites but he finds them as the Whites most loyal servants (sort of as if a descendant of the Cossacks had been raised on stories of Stenka Razin and then visited his ancestral family under Czar Nicholas II). The novel then abandons him considering his further actions (it never returns to this part of the plot), and resumes the original story in Africa, where the conflict with the French has moved to the center of events, as they play off the more radical Islamist Toucouleurs and the Bambara against each other to expand their own influence inland. The major characters in this part are Mohommed's youngest son, Omar, his wife, Kadija, and Olubunmi's son, Dieudonné.
The resistance of Omar as "Mahdi" to the French is the one place where the fiction intrudes into the historical events. The French in the last two chapters restore the Bambara chief to rule as their puppet in Ségou (1884), over a much truncated territory. It is hardly a spoiler to say that the novel ends with the former empire of the Bambaras incorporated into the French colonies of Mali and Sénégal. Taking both volumes together, Ségou presents about a century of a history which is very different from both the Western myth of a static, traditionalist Africa of illiterate savages living in small villages without any real history, and the PanAfricanist myth of a single precolonial African culture. Despite the faults of construction, I would recommend this to anyone interested in African history.
July 1959. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year [1722; Norton crit.ed., 1992] 361 pages
I'm not sure I would call this blend of fiction and nonfiction properly speaking a novel, but I will refer to it as one; whatever it is, it is a very interesting book. It presents itself as an eyewitness account of the bubonic plague of 1665, from the papers of one H.F., a saddler who remains in London during the epidemic. The initials are probably referring to Defoe's uncle, Henry Foe. Defoe wrote the book simultaneously with another book on the plague, Due Preparations for the Plague, which is a nonfiction work discussing the actions which should be taken in the event of a return of the plague, which at the time was raging in Marseille; both may have been intended at least partially as propaganda for the unpopular Quarantine Act of 1721. The novel begins with a description of the beginnings of the plague in London, with excerpts from the weekly bills of mortality and the government's Orders, all of which make it seem to be what it claims, and much of the early criticism of the book regarded it as basically historical. Many of the incidents reported may well have been told Defoe by eyewitnesses, or taken from various written sources. But as the novel progresses, we see that the history of the plague is essentially intertwined with the personal and religious development of the narrator H.F. himself.
A major theme of the novel is the question whether the narrator was right or wrong in deciding to stay in the city, and what the ethical implications of the choice was. The longest episode, which H.F. reports from hearsay rather than his own knowledge, concerns three laid-off working-class Londoners who escape from the city into the countryside; although similar things may have happened, the story as Defoe tells it is a combination of the biblical account of the exodus and his own Robinson Crusoe. One of the most interesting things about the book is Defoe's emphasis on the fact that the plague and the measures taken to prevent its spread fell most heavily on the working class; he explains that the working poor unlike the rich were unable to leave their jobs in the city, and that once trade and manufacturing stopped there was total unemployment. He points out that the wealthier persons who remained in the city could stay at home and live on stored provisions, but the people who worked for a living had no way to buy and store food in advance and had to venture out to buy groceries every day, putting themselves and their families most at risk, until their money ran out entirely. This is the only novel I remember reading before the end of the nineteenth century which actually focuses on the problems of the working class rather than the "middle" class or the wealthy. One of the things I learned from the critical material (I read this in a Norton critical edition) was that among the things which put Defoe at odds with the government was his support of various strikes and workers' demonstrations.
The edition I read is divided about half and half between the novel itself and the critical articles; these are in turn divided between documents about the plague and other epidemics (especially AIDS; the book was of course written before COVID), and articles of actual criticism of the novel (some of which were useful, but given the date of the book there was far too much influence of Foucault's theories.) Reading the novel after the COVID epidemic, I could not help but notice the similarities: the fact first of all that the social disruptions caused by both plagues hit working people hardest; the way that people resisted measures designed to slow the spread of the disease in both cases, and relied on misinformation from quacks and charlatans (although at least in Defoe's time there were no nuts claiming the plague was a hoax); and the dilemma between self-preservation and humane behavior.
Aug. 2660. Mercè Rodoreda, The Time of the Doves [1962, Eng. tr. 1981] 207 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
One of the most influential modern novels in Catalan, La plaça del Diamant has been translated into English three times, as The Pigeon Girl (1967), The Time of the Doves (1981), which is the version I read from Open Library, and most recently In Diamond Square (2013). It has also been made into two plays and a film, and Harold Bloom includes it in his list of the Western Canon.
The narrative is told in the first person and in an almost stream-of-consciousness technique by Natalia, a resident of Barcelona, a rather ordinary young woman, literate but not an intellectual, who is at least at the beginning very passive, accepting the direction of other people with no initiative of her own. The novel begins with her going to a Festival dance in Diamond Square, rather against her will, at the insistence of her friend and co-worker Julieta. A young man, Quimet, asks her to dance, and although she doesn't feel like dancing and tells him she is engaged, she gives in. He nicknames her "La Colometa" ("little dove") and tells her he feels sorry for her fiancé — because she is going to marry him. Which, on the advice of another friend, Senyora Enriqueta, she does.
The account of their early marriage is thoroughly comic. He begins by telling her that she needs to be totally submissive to him, and like everything he likes, because if she doesn't it just means she hasn't understood properly. She accepts this without question. In another kind of novel, this could lead into a serious protest against female oppression, but in Rodoreda it is so over-the-top that it is really parody. When they find a dove with a broken wing and nurse it back to health, Quimet decides they can get rich by raising doves, and soon not just the dovecote on the roof but their entire apartment is filled with doves.
About half-way through the book, however, it turns tragic, as they are caught up in the events and privations of the revolution, the Civil War, and the victory of the Falangists, and the novel becomes a powerful description of the suffering of the ordinary working people of Catalonia.
It doesn't stop in that period, though; it continues into the more "normal" times after the war and concentrates more on the children and their later lives, and the novel becomes much more optimistic. Here is where I had a problem with it, because Spain, and Catalonia especially, was not normal under the Franco dictatorship; the novel says nothing about the lack of freedom and the national oppression, including the suppression of the Catalan language and culture. If one knew nothing about the author, one might think the novel was saying it didn't matter which side won as long as the war ended.
The book is worth reading not only for the content, but for the language which is sometimes close to poetry, very rich in striking images and metaphors.
Aug. 3161. Michael Drayton, Idea's Mirror [1594] 51 pages [Facsimile, Google Books]
62. Michael Drayton, Idea [1619] 75 pages [Online]
63. Michael Drayton, Nymphidia: The Court of Fairy [1627] 40 pages
I read these three books completely by accident; I read some excerpts in an anthology of seventeenth century verse I am reading (the oldest poet included), went online to find more information about him, and started reading them on my computer and kept going so that in about two or two-and-a-half hours I had read all three. Drayton is a bit earlier than my current reading project (which was at first intended to start with Blake, then with Dryden, then with Butler and I keep going farther and farther back rather than forward.) After reading them I went out to my garage/library to put away some newly acquired books and again purely by accident I stumbled on a short biography of Drayton, which I will probably read next week, since I doubt whether I will ever come back to Drayton in the future.
Born the year before Shakespeare, but living fifteen years longer, Drayton bridges the period between the Elizabethan era and the early seventeenth century. While somewhat of a minor figure, he is interesting. Idea's Mirror (1594) is a collection of about fifty sonnets supposedly written by a shepherd named Gorbo to his love, Idea. Idea (1619) is a revised version of the same work, although many of the earlier poems have dropped out and more have been added (the collection contains seventy-three poems); of the sonnets contained in both versions, most seemed to have been revised quite a bit. Although Drayton is considered a literary "conservative" continuing Elizabethan traditions into the new century, the differences do show a certain receptivity to seventeenth-century style.
Nymphidia: The Court of Fairy is a comic poem about fairies. Obviously influenced by A Midsummer Night's Dream, it features King Oberon and Puck, and although Titania is replaced by Queen Mab from Romeo and Juliet, their marriage hasn't improved. The fairies continue to shrink in size; much of the comedy is based on their smallness, with helmets made of cricket's heads, a coach made from a snail's shell, a hornet's sting as a sword and so forth. (Shakespeare's fairies are already very diminished relative to the mediaeval Auberon who was more like one of Tolkien's elves.) The poem was very popular throughout the seventeenth century and influenced much of the later fairy literature down to the Disney Peter Pan rip-offs.
These also gave me three more books in a month that would otherwise have been my worst reading month in at least fifteen years.
Sept. 764. Michael Drayton, Minor Poems of Michael Drayton chosen and edited by Cyril Brett [1593-1630, Brett ed. 1907] 209 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
As I continue to procrastinate finishing Lucretius, I read more of Drayton. Besides the sonnets from Idea, and Nymphidia, both of which I read separately last week (I subtracted fifty pages for what I previously read) this had his Odes and Elegies, the "Quest for Cynthia", "Shepherd's Sirena", The Muses Elizium and some shorter poems. An interesting poet; his earlier poems are hard to read, but his later work is worth reading.
65. "William Shakespeare", The History of Sir John Oldcastle, the good Lord Cobham [1599] 76 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
I read this play in a digitized facsimile of the 1734 edition, from Open Library; it attributes it to "Mr. William Shakespeare". Actually, as we know from Henslowe's records, it was a collaboration between Anthony Munday, Michael Drayton, Richard Hathwaye and Robert Wilson, with Drayton probably contributing the most, which is why I am reading it along with Drayton's poetry. It is a history play about Sir John Oldcastle, a Wycliffite martyr, although he is still alive at the end (there was apparently a second part, which if it was ever performed has not survived, and which would have gone on to his martyrdom.) It's hardly Shakespeare.
66. Joseph A. Berthelot, Michael Drayton [1967] 172 pages
A volume in the Twayne Authors series, this discusses Drayton's poetic works and how they developed over time, organized by genres. It points out that Drayton was, along with Spenser and Shakespeare, one of the few Elizabethan/Jacobean writers who never ceased to be read in the later seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and thus never needed to be "rediscovered" in the twentieth century.
67-68.Titus Lucretius Carus, De Rerum Natura, ed. H.A.J. Munro, 2 vv. [ca. 55 BCE] v. 1 (text), 296 pages [in Latin]; v. 2 (notes), 430 pages [Kindle, Open Library] De Rerum Natura has always been one of my favorite books, since I read it for the first time in the Rouse translation as a senior in high school more than fifty years ago (not for high school of course; no public school would dare to assign it without considerable censorship). This is my first time attempting it in the original. The edition I read, by H.A.J. Munro from the nineteenth century, is in two volumes; the first contains the text and critical notes, the second the explanatory notes — about a paragraph of notes for each line of the poem. There is also a third volume with a translation, which I was unable to find on Open Library, from which I borrowed the first two volumes. They do have some modern English translations available; I took out the 2008 verse translation by Ronald Melville to use as a "cheat", but it is not literal enough for that and also seems to misunderstand Lucretius on a number of points, so I would not recommend it. Since I read the two volumes together on my Kindle, I also read Gillespie and Hardie, edd., Cambridge Companion to Lucretius as my physical book for when the Kindle needs to recharge, which gives a more recent viewpoint than the century-and-a-half-year-old notes of Munro.
In the past, I was very impressed by the content of the poem, but reading it in translation I really didn't appreciate it as poetry; this time I am still impressed by his ideas, but very much more by his poetry.
In terms of content, he is the only surviving (more or less) complete source for the materialist tradition of ancient philosophy, which is otherwise represented only by some rather summary letters and a few fragments of Epicurus (most of which are included in the notes, as Lucretius is often giving a fairly close verse translation of his model.) Without this poem, we would be in the same position as we are with regard to Indian philosophy, where the materialist tradition has all but disappeared under the weight of idealist, religious thought. Leucippus, supposedly the first Atomist philosopher, we know nothing about, if he was even a real person. Democritus' voluminous works have all been lost apart from short testimonia; it appears that he was a genuine philosopher, if not what we would think of as a scientist, who was interested in explaining the world for its own sake. Epicurus seems to have taken the Democritean system and turned it into something of a dogmatic sect with himself as a sort of prophet; I remember once describing him in a paper (probably somewhat unfairly) as "the Ayn Rand of antiquity". To be just, the Stoics and other philosophers of the time do the same thing; philosophy after Plato and Aristotle ceases to be a single "conversation" and divides into separate sects, probably because the natural philosophies are bound up with the ethical positions and any serious disagreement with the central doctrines would seem to be a threat to the way of life they underpin. The Greek term for a philosophical school, αἵρεσῐς, literally means a separate opinion, equivalent to the Latin secta, which give us the English words heresy and sect. (Modern Marxist philosophy has a similar problem, with revisions to the theory seen as a threat to the revolutionary conclusions, hence the fear of "revisionism", but to discuss this would take me too far from Lucretius.)
This sectarian aspect is what has made me somewhat more ambivalent about the poem; it is especially obvious in his polemics against the Stoics — the worst example being at the end of the first book when he calls them "stupid" for thinking that people could live "upside down" on the other side of the Earth, which of course we do. (Epicurus and Lucretius admittedly do have a good reason for denying that everything is attracted to the center of the universe as other philosophers believed — if the universe is infinite as the Epicureans believed, there is no center; and as they also correctly pointed out, the void could offer no resistance to bodies passing through it or cause them to stop. No one at that time considered that things might be attracted to the center of bodies; Munro suggests that if Epicurus had been more willing to engage with the Stoics in dialogue rather than polemic, he might have discovered the idea of gravity long before Newton.) The dogmatic nature of Epicureanism also explains the anti-religious verses of the poem which I loved so much as a teenager; someone writing as a philosopher or scientist would just ignore religion as irrelevant, Lucretius' polemics are because Epicureanism, Stoicism, and religion were competing ethical dogmas rather than scientific theories. The Renaissance rediscovery of the poem was a major influence on the materialist, "corpuscular" views of the early modern scientists from Gassendi through Newton; Munro's notes quote passages from Newton's Optics which are paraphrased from Lucretius. The rapid development of the "corpuscular philosophy" into modern science after the Renaissance contrasts with the static nature of the doctrine from Epicurus on; there were many reasons for this, but certainly one was that the natural philosophy was separated from the Epicurean ethical teachings.
As a work of literature, De Rerum Natura is probably the best poem written in classical Latin; together with his acquaintance Catullus, he was the major influence on the poetry of Vergil and an influence on the style of Cicero as well (although in the case of Cicero, the influence may have been mutual), as Munro's notes document at length. Through Cicero and Vergil, he influenced all later Latin literature, and thus modern literature after the Renaissance.
The first book outlines the basic Epicurean physical doctrine of atoms and the void, and argues for the infinity of space and the infinite number of atoms. One of my favorite passages in the poem is his description of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, with language which is usually used for a wedding, ending with his exclamation, "What terrible things religion persuades men to do!"
The second book deals in more detail with the motion, forms and properties (or lack of properties) of the atoms. His view of the motion of the atoms seems somewhat inconsistent; he first says that they are always moving in all directions, which is what the atomists should have said, since if the universe is infinite there should be no special directions, but later follows the orthodox Epicurean view that they all travel in parallel lines at a constant speed because of their weight, thus assuming that the universe has an "up" and a "down". The problem of course is that they believed that motion (rather than changes of motion) needed an explanation, and that weight was an intrinsic property of matter which caused motion, not acceleration. (I remember reading an account of Aristotle's objections to atomism and particularly to the void, which called his argument that the atoms in the absence of resistance, i.e. in the void, would be travelling at infinite speed a non sequitur because there was no reason for him to think their motion would increase rather than be constant; but since for Democritus (and Epicurus, and Lucretius) they are falling by reason of weight he was perfectly right). Lucretius then introduces the famous Epicurean "swerve", which was the most significant difference between Epicurus and Democritus, to account for the fact that atoms can collide and form worlds and visible things. The Epicureans also used this spontaneous "swerve" to justify the idea of free will, somewhat as some modern philosophers (mis)use quantum indeterminacy, while Democritus was apparently a determinist. (Just as an aside, the comparison of Epicurus and Democritus was the subject of Karl Marx's doctoral dissertation.)
Lucretius "proves" the motion of the atoms by a comparison with motes in a sunbeam (much as modern physicists use Brownian motion in a liquid) and describes how atoms combine to form small bodies which combine to form larger bodies and so forth until they reach visible size. It would have been better had he used this idea more; one of the problems with Lucretius (and all the ancient atomists) is that they usually try to explain visible phenomena directly from the atoms, as he does with smell and taste. He gives a more or less correct explanation of why air and "fire" seem to move upwards, because they are forced up by the greater weight of the heavier matter pressing downward and displacing them, rather than as Aristotle and other philosophers believed because they had a natural upward motion. He also explains that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones through a medium such as air because of resistance, but that they fall at the same rate through the vacuum, which we generally learn in school was the discovery of Galileo.
He argues that the number of different shapes of atoms is finite, but that there are infinitely many atoms of each shape. His argument again seems somewhat inconsistent; he sometimes talks as if for example animals are all different because they are made from different kinds of atoms, while more often he takes the more sensible view that it is only their arrangements and motions which are different, using his favorite analogy of the same letters of the alphabet making different words and sentences. The arguments in this part of the book are less satisfying, in large part because as I noted above he tries to explain things from the shape of atoms themselves which would be better explained by the shapes and properties of intermediate particles (our molecules, etc.) On the other hand, it has some of the best poetry. Here he has one of the most poetic images of the poem, the description of the mother cow seeking her calf which has been sacrificed (another dig at religion?) Another great poetical passage is his description of the ceremonies of the Great Mother Earth, with the final verses which ironically deconstruct his own description.
He then turns to the properties of the atoms, mainly in a negative sense, trying to show that the atoms do not have the properties of the things they are made from, as colored things are not made from colored atoms and so forth. This seems to be an argument against the theories of Anaxagoras. He especially tries to show that atoms of sentient animals do not themselves have sense, but that the mind or soul emerges from their arrangements and motions in the body; the argument is somewhat obscure because we do not know what the theory was that he was arguing against — it sometimes seems to me as if he is arguing in advance against Leibniz's monads (which in fact were partially designed to reconcile Lucretian atomism with Christian Providence). However, the argument is also important to Lucretius in that it gives another proof that sentience cannot survive the death of the body. The book then turns briefly to another subject, the existence of multiple worlds, and ends with the forecast of the destruction of our own world into its constituent atoms.
Book three gives a general view of the nature of the mind (animus, translating the Greek ψυχη) and the spirits (animai), both made up for him as for Epicurus of very small (even for atoms) and round smooth bodies, which correspond in function to our central and peripheral nervous systems, respectively. After his argument that sensation is not in the atoms themselves but in their arrangements and motions, it is disconcerting to see him explaining the sentient mind from a particular kind of atom rather than from arrangements and structures. His positive descriptions in this book are less valuable because of this (although probably the best account available in antiquity); the real value of the book is in the negative arguments, which should have disposed permanently of the nonsense of an immortal soul.Book four continues with the mind and sensation, beginning with the theory that all material objects give off a material film, which travels through space to our eyes and causes vision. He continually compares these films in swiftness and other ways with the particles of light, but never draws the conclusion which seems so obvious to us that what we see is simply the reflection of light itself. Partly this may be because he is committed to the doctrines of Epicurus without any development of his own; but to be fair, before Newton discovered that white light is a blend of all colors, it made sense to think that color was in the thing itself and that it gave off films of color atoms (though it is hard to understand this if, as he argued in book two, the atoms themselves have no color.) His theory does make it a problem for him to explain why we cannot see in the dark; he speaks rather at random of "dark air" which blocks the films. He then explains mirrors, ending with a verse which could be taken as a statement of the law of reflection at equal angles. From there he proceeds to discuss optical illusions, maintaining that they are caused not by any failure of the eyes but by incorrect processing by the mind. Next, he argues against the Academic or Skeptical position that no knowledge is possible, and for the accuracy of the senses. He explains the other senses in similar ways, always deriving their properties directly from the properties of individual atoms rather than arrangements of atoms. He then turns to the most bizarre of the Epicurean doctrines, that there are images which are made of such small atoms that they affect the mind directly rather than through the senses; a sort of materialistic telepathy. He asserts that the combinations of these images result in the mind having images of centaurs, mermaids, people long dead and other non-existent things. He gives the mind itself no power of combining images; everything comes somehow "as-is" from external images. He sees that this theory has problems, and struggles to meet them, not all that successfully; I think this is another case where the Epicureans are constrained by the need to agree with everything Epicurus said, rather than try to come up with something better. He rather jumps around at this point; he gives an argument against final causes which is probably the best that could be done without a theory of natural selection; the apparent teleology of biology was always the Achilles heel of atheism before Darwin, which is why of all the scientific theories which contradict the Bible the fundamentalists have always rightly singled out the theory of natural selection as the main enemy of religion. The book ends with explanations of various problems of physiology, which, although often far from what we now believe to be true, are reasonable enough within his system; the problem is again that he treats them as dogmatic truths rather than hypotheses.
Book five is the longest of the six books. It begins with arguments for the "mortality" of our world, and in passing presents the Epicurean doctrine regarding the gods (which totally contradicts his whole system; after having many times used the argument that the lightest atoms are the easiest to dissolve and that nothing in the world is permanent, he then describes the gods and their "seats" as made from the lightest possible atoms, and considers them as immortal and unaffected by anything else in the universe.) He then turns to discussing the particular phenomena of the world, and here we see that Epicureanism was in many of its details less "scientific" than other tendencies at the time, particularly in astronomy; apparently they consider the Earth to be flat, when most educated people at the time realized that it was spherical, and Lucretius explicitly argues that the sun and moon are no larger than they appear to be, rejecting the scientific measurements of their actual sizes and distances made even before the time of Epicurus, which were quite accurate given the ancients' lack of precision instruments. Hence they miss what in the Renaissance became the major proof of the Epicurean doctrine of the infinite universe, namely the idea that the stars were suns. Another problem with his astronomy is that after giving the correct explanation of a phenomenon, or at least the best available at the time, he also gives one or more outdated or fantastical theories (such as that there is a new sun and moon every day) and, completely ignoring the arguments for and against, states dogmatically that there is no way to tell which is correct. This is another proof that his primary interest is not in finding the correct explanations for things but only in showing that some mechanical, non-religious explanation is possible, it doesn't really matter which. (He does seem to be more interested in physics for itself than Epicurus was, however.) The first half of book five was to me the least interesting in the poem, and I rather got bogged down and procrastinated.
The second half of the book, however, is quite interesting, when he takes up history and society. His account of the beginnings of life and humanity reads more like mythology than sober speculation, but was probably the best that could be done without a concept of evolution. He has a good discussion of the natural origins of language which he compares to the sounds made by other animals; this is a subject which is no better understood today. What is most impressive is that, unlike other philosophers and religious traditions which considered men to have been "created" with technology and kingship living in cities, he realizes that they were initially like animals, living by hunting and gathering, and had to slowly invent things like fire, clothing, agriculture and so forth. He argues that the first "kings" were just men pre-eminent for strength or intelligence who distributed land and cattle based on merit; that with the rise of wealth they began to favor the wealthy and were overthrown by the poor, resulting in the establishment of constitutions and laws. While not the clearest exposition of "class struggle", this was a first attempt at extending the materialist outlook to history, and was better than anything up to the time of Hobbes in the seventeenth century, who was himself part of the "Lucretian" circle around the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. (The duchess, Margaret Cavendish, wrote a popular science book based on Lucretius as modified by Copernicus and her own contemporary Galileo; she published it along with a utopian novel based on the same science, The Blazing World, which is often considered the first example of what would later become the genre of science fiction: another instance of Lucretius' influence on modern literature. I'm planning to read The Blazing World before the end of the year.) Next he launches into a digression about the origins of religious superstition, then resumes his catalogue of discoveries with the metals, and the history of weapons and methods of war. He has a long passage about experiments using lions and boars in warfare, which has many striking images, only to say he doesn't believe it and it should be referred to another world! He continues on with the discovery of agriculture (he understands that plants were domesticated from wild ancestors), weaving, and music, and ends with a peroration on the gradual improvement of technology over time which is one of the most "modern" passages in the poem.
In the sixth book, he discusses exceptional events such as thunderstorms, earthquakes, volcanos and other natural disasters, the rainbow, the magnet, and whatever other phenomena are frequently attributed to the actions of the gods. Although his explanations are nearly all wrong (the correct understanding is very recent and even now incomplete in many cases), they all fit in with his general scheme of atomism and are certainly an improvement on the wrath of gods. If only he had been writing when philosophy was a unified attempt to understand nature, they would have provided a good starting point. He ends the poem with a moving description of the plague at Athens taken from Thucycides but poetically augmented. This seems like an abrupt ending and modern scholars debate whether he intended to end there or whether the poem was unfinished at his early death.
To sum up, despite its faults the De Rerum Natura is the best expression of ancient scientific materialism, which emphasizes the lawfulness of nature, rejects final causes, and accepts nature as it is rather than as we think it ought to be. It is an important influence on both later antiquity and after its rediscovery on modern science and literature. Not a small achievement.
69. Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie, edd., The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius [2007] 365 pagesSimilar in format to the other Cambridge Companion books, this contained nineteen articles. The first six dealt with the poem itself, its relationship to Greek philosophy (Epicurus, of course, but also Empedocles, his Stoic rivals, etc.); the find of parts of the poem in the "library" at Herculaneum; its context in Roman politics of the time; its relation to previous poetry (Ennius); the structure and argument of the poem; and the style. Unusually for the series, the remainder of the nineteen articles are on its reception history: in later ancient literature (Cicero, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, etc.), in early modern science, in philosophy, in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, in early modern France, in England (four articles), in the Enlightenment, and in the twentieth century. I was amazed at how many great (and not-so-great) writers have been influenced by Lucretius. I won't try to summarize the book; I learned a great deal and added too many more books to my TBR list.
In my review of Lucretius poem, I mentioned that I once described Epicurus in a paper as "the Ayn Rand of antiquity"; I learned in this book that Santayana called him "the Herbert Spencer of antiquity", which I suppose amounts to the same thing.
Sept. 1770. Jack L. Chalker, Lilith: A Snake in the Grass [1981] 198 pages
Lilith is the first book in the science fiction tetralogy The Four Lords of the Diamond, which was recommended to me by my cousin Daniel. The four books are each set on one of the four planets of a solar system known for its discoverer as Warden's Diamond, which have strange properties which the science of the Confederacy, the human civilization which rules a third of the Galaxy, is unable to explain; once people have breathed the air of these planets, they are infected by the Warden organisms, an unusual form of microbial life, and are unable to live anywhere except on these four planets, which makes them the perfect prison worlds for the Confederacy's dissidents and criminals.
On Lilith, some humans are able to control the power of the microbes, creating a hierarchy of powerful individuals. If this sounds familiar, remember that the novel was published about four years after the first Star Wars movie. However, while in Star Wars the "force" is simply taken for granted as the premise for an escapist space opera, in Lilith the power of the Warden organisms is a problem which is being studied and the protagonist (and the reader) learn more about it as the novel progresses; this the kind of scientific "puzzle" science fiction which I enjoy much more than space opera. The microbes are hostile to any change, and destroy any technology, so the society is reduced to a pre-technological farming culture with a feudalistic social structure determined by the "power". There is a good deal of discussion of problems of social organization, again in contrast to the simplistic conflicts of Star Wars. The prison planet is a distorted mirror of the equally (but less obviously) totalitarian society of the Confederacy, which in turn mirrors a great deal of our real world societies.
The plot of the novel begins with the planting of a Confederacy agent on Lilith, to investigate whether the Lords of the Diamond are in touch with a supposed alien civilization, and the action is all seen through his perspective.
Despite the ideas and careful plotting of the novel, the actual writing is often awkward and stilted, with sentences that wander about and get lost, which may account for the fact that Chalker never reached the popular or critical acclaim of many other less-gifted science fiction writers of the seventies and eighties (according to his bio on Wikipedia he was nominated twice each for the Joseph Campbell and Hugo awards, but never won either, although he won some less well-known awards.) His most popular books were apparently the Well World series; I have most of them but never read them. I am looking forward to at least reading the other three books of this series.
Sept. 1971. Jack L. Chalker, Cerberus: A Wolf in the Fold [1982] 204 pages
Cerberus is the second book in The Four Lords of the Diamond series. It opens with a kidnapping, which like the break-in that opens the first book is just background. The next fifteen pages or so is the general background to the series, in case someone reads this book before the first one; it is almost word-for-word the same. Then the plot begins with the agent sent to Cerberus, and again the initial description is almost word-for-word the same as in the first book, for a better reason: it shows the same personality in the same situation reacting in exactly the same way, as one would expect. Through the rest of the book, we see the agent diverging more and more from his original self under the influence of Cerberus. The Warden organisms on this planet have a different effect, allowing minds to switch bodies. The "world-building" is very well done, and the writing seems much better than in Lilith. Rather than the feudalism on Lilith, the social system on Cerberus seems modeled on the National Socialist theory of "corporatism", with private ownership by "syndicates" closely controlled by the state. At the end, I have come up with some theories as to how the series will end; I'll see whether I am right or not.
Sept. 2072. Jack L. Chalker, Charon: A Dragon at the Gate [1982] 223 pages
Charon is the third book in The Four Lords of the Diamond series. Like the first two, it begins with a prologue which is only once referred to later, a brief summary of the general premise of the series, and a description of the awakening of the agent almost word-for-word the same as in the other books. Charon is the innermost planet of the Diamond, a hot world of rainforest and desert. It is also a planet of illusion. The plot raises more questions than it answers, setting us up for the last book. I should note that the writing in the second and third books is much better than in the first one.
74. Daniel Defoe, Roxana, the Fortunate Mistress [1724] 296 pagesRoxana or The Fortunate Mistress (the full original title is quite long, and really doesn't reflect the book) is the fourth and last of Defoe's major novels, all of which I have read over the past few months. Like the earlier Moll Flanders, it is narrated in the first person by a woman who rejects the conventions of eighteenth-century marriage and morality; Roxana is more conflicted, and hence more realistic, than Moll and the criticism is more radical. The novel is probably best known for the protagonist's arguments against marriage under British law as a form of slavery of the wife to the husband; although she immediate regards herself as immoral (and I think this is somewhat more than just a disguise for the censorship) her arguments are very well put and the replies of her would-be husband are obviously weak. Throughout the book she is independent and active, making herself wealthy and respected (although she does not respect herself, having internalized the same moral views that she rebels against). This conflict may represent a real ambivalence on the part of Defoe himself, but he certainly sees the injustices of the British marriage laws and the lack of protection for women's property with respect to their husbands. He also implicitly (as explicitly in Moll Flanders) criticizes the lack of legal provision for abandoned wives, widows and orphans.
Defoe represents an important stage in the development of the modern novel; where most earlier approaches to the novel were essentially just stories of adventure or romance, with Defoe the central characters actually develop and grow in the course of the adventures, which is considered a defining characteristic of the "novel"; this is why he is one of many candidates for the "first" novelist in English (and not just, as some have cynically suggested, because he was the first male novelist in what had been a mainly female domain for about a century before him.) Others of course see the "perfection" of the form later on in Richardson and Fielding. But wherever one puts the dividing line, Defoe's novels are good reading and a must read for those like me who have a fascination with origins and transformations.
Sept. 3075. Brian Fitzgerald, Daniel Defoe: A Study in Conflict [1955] 248 pages
This is a fairly good "interpretive" biography of Defoe, who unlike many authors actually had an interesting life apart from his writings. Born in 1660 to a Dissenting family (Fitzgerald uses the words Presbyterian and Puritan interchangeably for them, although I think those were two different denominations), he grew up under the Restoration, was intended to be a Presbyterian preacher but chose to go into trade instead, rebelled against James II, became a favorite of William III, and a political prisoner under Queen Anne, but later a friend and secret agent of Harley. He wrote hundreds of political and economic pamphlets, most anonymously. Fitzgerald calls him the first full-time journalist in England; he edited his own paper, The Review, for nine years and pioneered many of the features of the modern newspaper. He proposed many progressive ideas, including education for women. The novels, for which he is most famous, from Robinson Crusoe to Roxana, were written in a fifteen year period near the end of his life.
Fitzgerald's book gives a good account of the political and economic background of the times; I was surprised by the Marxist terminology in a book published in 1955 by the very conservative Henry Regnery publishers. He emphasizes the contradictions and conflicts in Defoe's life, particularly between his religious background and his personal life, many of which reflected the contradictions in the role of the English bourgeoisie when it was still progressive if no longer revolutionary. The discussion of the novels is briefer than I would have liked but does give a good idea of why he is important in the history of the novel.
Oct. 576. Miquel de Palol i Muntanyola, The Garden of Seven Twilights [1989, tr. 2023] 887 pages [Kindle]
A contemporary classic of Catalan literature, The Garden of Seven Twilights is a very complexly structured and allusive novel. It is the October book for the World Literature Group I am in on Goodreads — which doesn't exactly choose short or easy books.
There is an outer frame story in the form of a preface in which scholars from the far future discuss the work as a book surviving in several variant manuscripts from their remote past, and try to explain when it was written and when it was set; there is a large literature devoted to it, which is listed in a selected bibliography (the dates of the latest books put the outer frame story sometime in the thirtieth century) and the most probable view is that it was set during the First War of Entertainment (2025), and either dates from that time if it is a nonfiction account, or from some time later if it is fiction (or much later, based on a reference in one story to the destruction of Paris, although the editors discount that). The editors lean to the view that it is nonfiction, perhaps ultimately from wishful thinking (it would be a rare historical document) while to the reader, given the literary nature of it, it is obviously a work of fiction. This aspect reminded me of Boubacar Boris Diop's Le temps de Tamango, which had a similar premise — a book recovered in the far future — which also was considered nonfiction by the far future editors but seems to the reader to be a historical novel. Both Palol's and Diop's novels were published the same year so there is unlikely to be any influence either way (and the plots of the two books have nothing in common).
After the preface, we find ourselves in an inner frame story, which returns from time to time. It is modeled on The Decameron and its Renaissance imitators, with a group of wealthy and powerful individuals taking refuge from the war in a remote mountaintop mansion and amusing themselves by telling stories, arranged by "days". The frame story has a somewhat paranoid first person narrator, who is an outsider relative to the others and is constantly worrying about the possible hidden motives for their actions and for the stories they tell. Unlike The Decameron, however, the stories are nested as in the Thousand and One Nights or Jan Patocki's Manuscript Found in Saragossa, only more so — at one point they get nine layers deep, and even with the help of indications in the margins I couldn't remember who was telling what in the intermediate layers. It also occurs that the names in some of the stories are changed, and the people referred to are the same people as in other stories by other names, but with details changed. Unlike the Thousand and One Nights, the stories all intertwine. Because of that, and the many names that are important, this is a novel which makes heavy demands on the memory, difficult especially at my age. Even the narrator himself complains that he sometimes gets lost, and can't remember the details of the earlier stories later on, although it is difficult to make that fit with the premise that he is the narrator of the book.
The first story is obviously based on King Lear, with the character Mir for Lear (although, ironically, the word "mir" is also Russian for "peace"). One of the later stories is based on Hamlet, and the Hamlet character Harrison actually quotes one of Hamlet's best-known lines. The overall plot has similarities with The Lord of the Rings (the jewel as the ring of power) and the name of the Colum family, who try to steal back the jewel, is perhaps meant to resemble Gollum. One of the guests is named Randolph Carter, who is described as "a dreamer, from a long line of dreamers" and whose stories turn on dreams which are real in some strange way. I'm sure there are many other literary allusions which were less obvious, or at least I didn't get them, possibly from spy or detective fiction which I seldom read. (The "allusion" which seemed one of the most obvious — between the character of Alexis Cros and Patterson's Alex Cross — is purely coincidence, since when I looked it up the first book in that series wasn't written until 1997.)
The stories of the first two and a half days are all centered around the intrigues to control the Mir Bank, and about its later owners Alexis Cros and his daughter Lluisa. The second group of stories (the remainder of Day 2 and Day 3) is about a spy ship called the Googol. At the eighth level, it hooks up to the story of the Mir Bank again. The third group (Days 4-6) returns directly to the the story of the jewel.
As the guests come to realize that the stories contradict each other and some are obviously false, there is much postmodernist-sounding discussion of epistemology and the nature of stories and "reality". The discussions of the guests about philosophy, history and politics are very abstract and not particularly enlightening; they seem to be mainly playing with words and oppositions. Particularly at the end, the novel seems to dissolve into this sort of verbal labyrinth.
One thing which is really distracting is the large number of apparent typos on almost every page; not misspelled words, but omitted or duplicated words, unidiomatic or even ungrammatical sentences and so forth. Knowing that the translator, Adrian Nathan West, has won all sorts of awards as a translator, and never having seen any problems of that kind with other books from Dalkey Archive Press, I wondered whether the typos might have been a deliberate feature of the original novel, to give the impression of a manuscript tradition, as these sorts of errors are ubiquitous in ancient books that have been copied and recopied hundreds of times before they were ultimately printed. However, in that case I would have expected footnotes by the "editors" noting the corruptions and proposing emendations, and there was nothing like that in the book, so I suppose it just comes down to poor proofreading.
In the end, the reader is left wondering what kind of book he has just read. Is it a detective thriller, a science fiction or fantasy novel, a philosophical novel, a political novel or a collection of stories like The Decameron? The ultimate conspiracy theory, or a parody of conspiracy theories, or some sort of allegory? The ambiguity itself is the point, which marks it as a work of postmodernist fiction. It is a real tour-de-force, quite interesting, and I would have given it four stars — if it had been proofread.
Oct. 577. Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh, edd., Great Short Stories of the 20th Century by 12 Nobel Laureates [1983] 278 pages
I've read most of the recent Nobel Prize winners in literature — I started Jon Fosse last night — but there are many of the older ones I haven't read much or even anything by, so when I acquired this book last month as a library discard I put it on my list to fill in some gaps. It has one story by each of the English language winners up to the time it was compiled who wrote short stories, beginning with Rudyard Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King" and including William Butler Yeats' "The Crucifixion of the Outcast", George Bernard Shaw's "Don Giovanni Explains", Sinclair Lewis' "You Know How Women Are", John Galsworthy's "Salvation of a Forsyte", Pearl Buck's "The Lovers", William Faulkner's "Barn Burining", Bertrand Russell's "The Infra-Redioscope", two I had already read, Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and Faulkner's "The Leader of the People" (from The Red Pony), Saul Bellow's "The Gonzaga Manuscripts", and Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy" (actually translated from Yiddish, but the translation came out first.) As far as I can remember, I had never read anything previously by Yeats, Galsworthy, or Buck, and no fiction by Russell, so I filled in some holes in my reading. All of the stories were good, and very diverse in both style and subject.
Oct. 778. Jon Fosse, The Other Name (Septology I-II) [2019, Eng. tr. 2019] 336 pages [Kindle, Overdrive]
The first book I have read by this year's Nobel Prize winner in literature, The Other Name is the first two parts of a seven-part series called simply enough Septology. It is a stream-of-consciousness of a painter named Alse, mostly thinking about his past, art, and religion. (It reminded me somewhat of Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth, but since I read that more than fifty years ago I'm not sure if they were really similar or not.) There is also another character also named Alse, a friend whose stream-of-consciousness occasionally becomes part of the first Alse's. Each of these first two parts occupies a single day; the first part ends with Alse (the protagonist) falling asleep and the second part begins with him waking up and ends with him falling asleep the next night. There are other characters who seem also to be doubled. So far I'm really enjoying his style.
Oct. 979. Jon Fosse, I Is Another (Septology III-V) [2019, Eng. tr. 2020] 246 pages [Kindle, Overdrive]
The second installment of Septology, this continues the next two days after the first volume. More of both Alses' pasts are revealed; they are so similar in appearance, dress, and artistic style that everyone confuses them. We also learn more about the two Guros. As with most middle books of trilogies, there is not much to say about this one in particular.
Oct. 10
80. Jon Fosse, A New Name (Septology VI-VII) [2019, Eng. tr. 2021] 197 pages [Kindle, Overdrive]
The final installment of Septology, which ends the story of Alse and his doppelganger, and of the two Guros. It seems to join directly onto the previous part, but apparently there has been a gap of several weeks. To describe the whole septology, the two Alses tend to blend together in one stream-of-consciousness, and time seems to do strange things, with the present-day Alse seeing the past Alse in the present, and the past Alse apparently seeing the present Alse in the past, without either realizing it; or in other words the imagination becomes the reality and vice-versa. The major theme is a sort of religious mysticism, which I normally would not like, but it is done well and very non-dogmatically, and the parallels between art and religion, or perhaps a religious theory of art, or an aesthetic view of religion. In any case, an interesting book with an interesting style and very much about ideas.
Oct. 1181. Mike Ashley, ed., Dreams and Wonders: Stories from the Dawn of Modern Fantasy [2010] 268 pages
Dreams and Wonders is an anthology of fantasy from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It contains 23 selections, from Goethe to H.G. Wells; however many of them are excerpts from books, which I hate in an anthology, several were stories I had already read elsewhere and others are very short. There were eleven that I thought were worthwhile to me; I especially liked George MacDonald's "The Golden Key", Lucy Lane Clifford's "The Story of Willie and Fancy", Lafcadio Hearn's "The Fountain of Gold", Richard Garnett's "The Potion of Lao-Tsze", F. Anstey's "The Snowing Globe", A. Merritt's "Through the Dragon Glass", and Wells' "The Door in the Wall" (which was basically a re-telling of the first excerpt from Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit). Taken together, the stories in the book give a good overview of the beginnings of modern fantasy up to the time of Lord Dunsany and H.P. Lovecraft.
Oct. 1282. Lord Dunsany, Five Plays [1917] 116 pages
Five early plays in the fantasy tradition by Lord Dunsany: The Glittering Gate (1909), King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior (1911), The Gods of the Mountains (1911), The Golden Doom (1912) and The Lost Silk Hat (1913). A quick fun read.
Oct. 1483. Annie Ernaux, La Honte [1997] 133 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in French]
The fourth novel I have read by Ernaux, La Honte is similarly autobiographical, in this case narrating her experiences at the age of twelve in 1952. Although it begins well with a traumatic experience, much of the description of her parents and their socio-economic situation is more or less the same as in the other three novels. The description of her Catholic school and upbringing was somewhat interesting but I couldn't really relate to it as much as I did to the description of her teen rebellion in the earlier novels.
Oct. 1684. Annie Ernaux, "Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit" 116 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in French]
This was another autobiographical novel by Ernaux. If La Honte with its Catholic school descriptions didn't really resonate with me, this novel about taking care of her mother who had Alzheimer's was all too close. So much in the book was just like my experiences in my mother's last years.
One thing that really struck me was her description of the mail her mother was getting with headlines of "Is it Mme. Blanche Duschesne that will get the check for 25 million?" with a picture of the check with her name. My mother was getting these all the time from Publishers' Clearinghouse, and as her judgement declined she started subscribing to all sorts of "free" offers (which are only free for the first month); at one point she was getting two and three romance novels in the mail every month, at a point when she could no longer read books because she couldn't remember what happened a few pages before. Once I realized I had to cancel all these subscriptions and hide the stamps so she couldn't buy things by mail. I understand the anger of the narrator (i.e. Ernaux) at this sort of exploitation of seniors.
Another little thing that hit me was when she said her mother constantly reminisced about people long dead from her past and thought they had just left, but never mentioned her father; the same was true of my mother, I don't remember that she ever mentioned my father, to whom she was married for nearly fifty years, again from a few months after his death, but she was always being visited by her mother and father who had died decades earlier.
A very moving novel about the trauma and guilt survivors suffer from this tragic disease.
Oct. 3185. John Donne, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne [17th cent., Coffin ed. 1952] 594 pages
My fill-in-the gaps project is finally moving forward rather than backward. The title indicates what this book is; most importantly, it has all of his poetry. I enjoyed his "metaphysical" style, to use the usual label, although especially in the earlier poems his sentences get so convoluted that he sometimes loses sight of the syntax (and I lost sight of the meaning). (I had already read some of the most famous poems in various anthologies.) In any case, these are classics which influenced much of the poetry of the earlier seventeenth century (before Dryden, whom I hope to get to in the next three or four months) but were thereafter largely ignored until the early twentieth-century "revival".
As for the prose selections, there are a few complete works, including Ignatius His Conclave, a satire on the Jesuits which was humorous but would require more background knowledge than I have about some of the theologians he mentions (it doesn't wear as well as Pascal's Provincials), and all the Meditations from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (although the Expostulation and Prayer are only given for Meditation XIX). There is also a generous selection of his letters. Unfortunately, Coffin chose to give excerpts of many works, something I dislike in anthologies; I would have preferred to have one or two more works complete than excerpts of so many. This is also true of the sermons, where he gives short excerpts from dozens of sermons rather than any complete (although I have read three or four complete in the anthology of seventeenth-century prose and poetry which Coffin co-edited; in any case I am not all that interested in sermons.) Most of the prose is in the same style as the poetry, with many extended conceits.
Oct. 3186. H.P.Lovecraft, The Complete Tales of H.P. Lovecraft [ca. 1908-1935, Knickerbocker Classics ed. 2014] 1027 of 1565 pages [Kindle Unlimited]
Finishing up my reading of Lovecraft's horror tales from last October (my "Halloween book"), I skipped the things I read then, but it still follows my recent tendency to read longer books. The new things I read this month are better examples of his later horror science fiction, while those I read last year were mostly more in his earlier Dunsanian fantasy style. The longer tales included in this year's reading were his one novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. and the novellas The Dunwich Horror, The Whisperer in Darkness, At the Mountains of Madness (probably the best introduction to his unique personal mythology), and The Shadow Out of Time. The long story "Herbert West—Reanimator" is close to novella-length as well. Other highlights included "The Statement of Randolph Carter" and "The Call of Cthulhu". The one story which is not in the "weird" genre was his parody "Sweet Ermengarde".
Lovecraft is a must for anyone who enjoys "weird" fiction, although those with "woke" sensitivities should be warned that many of these stories are filled with ethnic slurs and referring to "mongrel" populations — directed as much if not more against non-"Nordic" whites than against Blacks.
Nov. 287. Annie Ernaux, Passion simple [1991] 77 pages
Just what the title implies, the story of a passionate love affair with a foreigner she refers to as A., probably autobiographical since there are brief mentions of it in her other novels. More of a long short story than a novel, as there are no other subjects or characters beyond the first person narrator and the lover she describes; actually there is no real story at all in the sense of events or action, just a description of her feelings during and after the affair.
Nov. 988. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, v.2 [1970, Eng. tr. 1976] 383 pages
The second volume of essays published under the title Structural Anthropology, fifteen years after the first volume (which I read last year) this includes some articles as old as the first volume as well as articles published in the interval between the two. It is divided into four parts. Part I, "Perspective Views", contains five articles on the history of anthropology as a discipline, ranging from Rousseau and Durkheim to the Bureau of American Ethnology. Part II, "Social Organization", contains two rather technical articles on method; these were difficult because they were largely responses to criticisms which I haven't read. Part III, "Mythology and Ritual", contains seven articles, one on the work of Vladimir Propp on folklore, and the rest analyzing various myths and rituals, which built on the arguments in the four volumes of Mythologiques. Part IV, "Humanism and the Humanities", contains four general articles on the nature and aims of anthropology and general considerations on culture and civilization; the last two were particularly interesting. I may not agree with Lévi-Strauss on many points but he always has valuable insights.
Nov. 1189. Victor Hugo, L'Homme qui rit [1869] 668 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in French]
L'Homme qui rit is a Romantic historical novel set in England during the reigns of James II, William and Mary, and Queen Anne. Written about seven years after the publication of Les Miserables (although that was written over a period of about seventeen years), this was much less successful both artistically and financially. Partly this may be because Hugo was better able to write about France in approximately his own time than about late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century England, and certainly in part because it was a novel with all the faults of Romanticism to excess published at a time when the literary fashion was turning to Realism, but, although it may seem like sacrilege to say this about a classic by a great author, if this had been a contemporary novel I would have said it badly needed a good editor. At nearly seven hundred pages of very small print in the edition I read (it would probably be well over a thousand pages of today's normal type size) there is far more explanatory material and authorial commentary than actual plot and character development.
The novel begins with two introductory parts in which nothing happens; the first introduces us to one character (not by any means the most important), just by description and not by him doing anything, and goes on to a long list of dozens of English Lords with descriptions of their lands, houses and so forth which is supposedly written on his wall, and the second describes organized child-trafficking in late Stuart England (contrary to some conspiracy theorists, this is not a new thing created by the liberal conspiracy to destroy America.) How accurate any of this is I have no idea. Then, after about a hundred pages in my edition, he begins the actual plot — for a while.
Apart from the introductory sections, the novel is divided into two unequal parts. The first part takes place in a single night early in the reign of William and Mary, and consists of alternating parallel descriptions of the same snow storm, which were very exciting — except that the descriptions, initially very striking, went on and on and on repeating the same things in different words. They were also introduced by a long digression about how snowstorms are caused by the Earth's magnetic field, which as far as I know was not a mainstream scientific theory even at the time he was writing. There were also other obvious blunders, such as the idea that Basque and Irish Gaelic are so closely related that the Irish and Basque characters can understand each other's language (in fact Basque is not even remotely related to any other existing language.) We are introduced to the protagonist of the novel, Gwynplaine.
After this short stretch of actual plot, the second and longer part begins again with more background, giving us a brief (and not particularly accurate) history of Cromwell and the Restoration under Charles II, passes quickly over James II, and introduces other major and minor characters with brief histories and less brief descriptions of what they were like at the time of William and Mary. He then gives a bizzare description of the activities of the nobility at the time, which I would like to know the sources of (if it isn't simply his own invention.) He then introduces more characters, and brings the descriptions up to the times of Queen Anne, with more authorial commentary about psychology in general, none of which rings true to me. The actual plot then resumes after nearly another hundred pages or about halfway through the novel, with the protagonist now twenty-four years old.
The second half of the novel is much better, more focused on events, although there is still way too much unintegrated historical background explanation and verbose authorial comment. One major problem with the novel is that it presents itself both as a historical novel demonstrating the power and nature of the English aristocracy, and as a satire of the same, so that we can never be sure what is supposed to be actual fact and what is supposed to be exaggerated as satire. The other main problem is that it is full of rhetoric, both in the narrative voice and in the characters. Everything is a speech. Hugo seems to be so caught up in his indignation against the rich and powerful that he forgets he is writing a novel. Whenever someone writes a novel on a political theme, there is a delicate balance between the requirements of the politics and the aesthetic requirements of the work as art; he found the balance more or less in Les Miserables but not in L'Homme qui rit.
Nov. 1290. Nine downloaded articles on Mesopotamia 148 pages
Nine rather random articles on ancient Mesopotamia I apparently downloaded for some reason from the Internet twenty years ago (the most recent ones are dated from 2003) and never got around to reading at the time, probably because my reading priorities changed, as so often happens. I found them in a box and they fit in with some of my current reading. I have no idea why I selected these particular articles, especially the short excerpt from a book published in 1891! (There were also some articles on the Hittites, Nubia, Iran, etc. which I will probably read at some point later on.)
Aziz, Joseph, Wrestling as a Symbol for Maintaining the Order of Nature in Ancient Mesopotamia (Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Research, 2, 2002) 26 pages — A description of some artistic motifs from Sumerian cylinder seals; his interpretation of them as evidence of an "ecological" conciousness really is not convincing.
Sayce, A.H., tr., Three Documents Relating to the Sons of Nebuchadrezzar (Records of the Past v.5, 1891) 3 pages — Three one paragraph legal documents from Babylon, with short commentary.
Veldhuis, Niek, Sumerian Proverbs in Their Curricular Context (Journal of the American Oriental Society 120, 3, 2000) 17 pages — Argues that the proverb collections in their original context were readings assigned to students in Babylonian scribal schools for learning Sumerian grammar.
Galil, Gershom, A New Look at the Incriptions of Tiglath-Pilseser III (Biblica, 81, 2000) 10 pages — Tries to reconstruct the campaigns of Tiglath-Pileser III in Syria-Palestine from some fragmentary inscriptions.
Waters, Matthew W., A Letter from Ashurbanipal to the Elders of Elam (BM132980) (Journal of Cuneiform Studies, 54, 2002) 8 pages — Tries to reconstruct the campaigns of Ashurbanipal in Elam from a previously unpublished letter.
Jacobsen, Thorkild, The Eridu Genesis (Journal of Biblical Literature, 100, 4, 1981) 17 pages — A reinterpretation of a fragmentary Mesopotamian myth which contains the origin of cities, a list of the first cities and their rulers with the number of years each king reigned (from 10,000 to 64,000 years each) and a version of the Flood story. He discusses the similarities to the P-version of the Hebrew Genesis.
Rubio, Gonzalo, Inanna and Dumuzi: A Sumerian Love Song (JAOS, 121, 2, 2001) 7 pages — A review article on an edition of the poems, this discusses some of the difficulties in interpretation, whether eme-sal is a genderlect, and other questions.
Crowell, Bradley, The Development of Dagan: A Sketch (JANER, 1, 1, 2001) 52 pages — The longest and most interesting of the nine, this is an overview of what we do and do not know about the god Dagan. Conclusion: he was a high god of the Middle Euphrates region whose cult spread east and west because of the strategic importance of his major cult centers; there is no evidence that he was the god of the Philistines as the Bible presents him; very little else can be said with any certainty.
Joann Scurlock, Ancient Mesopotamian House Gods (JANER, 3, 2003) 8 pages — Argues for a small number of gods as associated with houses, distinct from ancestral spirits.
Nov. 1691. Nora Benjamin Kubie, Road to Nineveh: The Adventures and Excavations of Sir Austen Henry Layard [1964] 324 pages
As I finish up my Mesopotamian reading for the time being, I read this older popular biography of Henry Layard, the "Father of Assyriology", who excavated the ruins of Nineveh in the mid-nineteenth century. The author, Nora Kubie, is described on the back cover as the writer of "numerous books for young people" who "spends a part of each year on archaeological digs in Israel". This book did not seem to be written for children, although it was fairly simply written; perhaps for older teens, though it seemed to me to be for adult general readers.
The book begins with Layard's early life, but most of the first half deals with his travels and adventures in the Near East, then as now a violent place; the second half deals with the excavations and ends with an epilogue about his later life. There is much about the imperialist intrigues in the region, some of which Layard opposed and some which he endorsed. He was a transitional figure; some of his activities could be considered "treasure hunting", but he also was concerned with historical research and pioneered methods used by scientific excavations later on.
Nov. 1892. Milbry Polk and Angela M.H. Schuster, edd., The Looting of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia [2005] 242 pages
The last book I finished, a biography of Austen Henry Layard, described the beginnings of Mesopotamian archaeology; this book describes its end, at least for the foreseeable future. The barbarian invasion of 2003 resulted in the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad and the various provincial museums around the country; although much of the material looted was eventually found and returned, some was badly damaged and some totally destroyed. But the destruction of the museums was not the worst result. The sites themselves are being systematically looted, destroying any possibility of there ever being studied scientifically. The occupation authorities and later the puppet government have been unable and largely unwilling to protect them (whether this has changed since 2005 I don't know, but I'm not optimistic). The materials looted are going into private collections, unprovenanced and therefore useless for archaeological purposes.
The title is in one way a misnomer; although the book begins by describing the tragic and criminal loss of the world's earliest history, and this is referred to in all the subsequent chapters, the majority of the book is a summary of the history of Iraq illustrated by photos of artifacts which were once housed at the Baghdad museum. I learned much from the book, especially about the later Hellenistic, Parthian, Sassanid and Islamic periods which I had not previously studied.
A portion of the royalties from the book are donated to the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage to try to salvage whatever is still possible.
Nov. 2093. Andy Weir, The Martian [2014] 369 pages
An exciting hard science fiction novel, which essentially retells the story of Robinson Crusoe (without Friday, of course). Mark Whatney is an astronaut who becomes stranded on Mars and has to live by using his wits and what he can salvage from what is left of the materials from his expedition. It was a quick and upbeat read, nothing profound but enjoyable. It is probably best known from the movie, which I will watch tonight.
Nov. 22Three Translations of the Book of Luke 81 pages
Another old download from the Internet, this is a spreadsheet with three side-by-side translations of the New Testament Book of Luke. The first, and the reason I am reading it at this time (one of my current reading projects is tenth-century literature), is the anonymous Old English translation (Wessex Gospels) of the late-tenth century (ca. 990); the second is the Wycliff Bible Middle English translation from the late fourteenth century; and the third is the King James Version. (There was actually a fourth column in contemporary English, perhaps the Good News Bible or something similar, but I didn't bother to read that as it was obviously based on the KJV rather than being an independent translation.) The formatting left much to be desired, especially in the Middle English (using Z for ʒ, with a space before it, as "so Zte" for "soʒte" etc.)
Nov. 2495. Annie Ernaux, Se perdre [2001] 294 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in French]
Se perdre is without doubt one of the most boring books I have ever slogged through. I recently read Ernaux's Une passion simple, about her affair with "S.", which I did not like as well as her other books I have read, some of which I thought were quite good, but it was short (77 pages in the edition I read). This novel takes the same story and stretches it to almost three hundred pages mainly by repeating the same things over and over. It is in the form of a diary, and the entries are all alike. He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not, does he love me?, will he call?, he calls, he doesn't call, why didn't he call?, he doesn't love me, he loves me, he is coming, he didn't come, he came, we made love — the sex scenes are as boring as a porno movie — he left, does he love me?, will he call again, he hasn't called for several days, he doesn't love me, he loves me, etc. Then finally he leaves and goes back to the Soviet Union (he is a diplomat) — no spoiler since she tells us in the preface how it ends up — and he loved me, he loved me not, etc. Did I mention that it goes on and on and on?
In the earlier novels the first person narrator (Ernaux, more or less, since all her novels are autobiographical) is a rebellious adolescent or a strong young woman educating herself or taking care of her mother, in this novel and in Une passion simple she is a dependent, man-dominated woman, obsessed with a boring, unintelligent, vain macho man and unable to free herself from her obsession even though she realizes in her more lucid moments that he is just using her.
A few pages on writing and on cultural themes here and there are the only redeeming feature. I have three more novels by Ernaux to read (I try to read about ten by each Nobel winner); hopefully they will be more like the earlier books than like this or I will give up on them.
Nov. 2796. Annie Ernaux, Retour à Yvetot [2013] 78 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in French]
This was not what I expected (another autobiographical novel) but a lecture given by the author in her home town of Yvetot, along with an interview and question and answer period with the audience. It had some information about her writing style and intentions.
Nov. 28
97. Four Homilies of the Tenth Century [est. 50 pages] [Latin and Old English]
Abbo of Fleury, "Passio Sancti Eadmundi" [ca. 987?] [Kindle, Latin Library] [in Latin]
Aelfric, "Passio Sancti Edmundi" [between 990 and 1002] [in Old English]
Aelfric, "Homily on the Nativity of the Innocents" [989] [in Old English]
Homily X of the Vercelli Book [10th century?] [in Old English]
Hagiography, or accounts of saints, was one of the most prolific genres of early mediaeval literature. According to Michael Lapidge in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, which I read in May, there are over 600 extant saints' lives written before 900, and they continued to be produced in the tenth and eleventh centuries, most in Latin, but many in Old English and some in other vernaculars, most in prose but some in verse. They are usually classified into two types, the passio focused on the sufferings and death of a martyr, and the vita giving the life of a confessor or a virgin who was not martyred. In many cases they are stereotyped, attributing the same or similar histories and characteristics to whichever saint they deal with, almost interchangeable apart from the names, but there are also some with literary merit. Since I am not a Catholic and have no pretensions to be a mediaevalist, and do not really want to spend the rest of my life reading mediaeval literature, I decided to resist my completeness daemon and limit myself to one fairly representative Latin example, Abbo of Fleury's life of St. Edmund, or Eadmund (with Aelfric's Old English life of the same saint). This has two advantages; it is free from The Latin Library website and probably elsewhere, and it is very likely that St. Edmund was actually historical, unlike many of the more obscure local saints we have lives of (his death is reported in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle).
Abbo (935-1004) was a monk and later abbot of the monastery of Fleury near Orléans, France. He spent two years (985-987) as a "visiting professor" at the school of Ramsey in what had previously been the kingdom of East Anglia, where he probably learned the history of St. Edmund. Abbo himself was later considered a saint, although I don't believe he was ever officially canonized (a modern procedure which originated a couple centuries later.)
St. Edmund was a king of East Anglia (at that time what is now England was divided into many separate kingdoms of Angles, Saxons, Jutes and so forth, the so-called Heptarchy). The kingdom was conquered by the pagan Danes and he was martyred in November of 869, or about sixty-five years before the birth of Abbo.
Aelfric's version, in his Lives of Saints, is a very abridged translation of Abbo. The version I read is printed as prose, but the standard nineteenth-century edition by Skeat prints it as verse; it alliterates in the same way as Old English poetry.
I also read his "Homily on the Nativity of the Innocents" (i.e. the children of Bethlehem killed by Herod) from the earlier Catholic Homilies (First Series), as well as the anonymous Homily X of the Vercelli Book (on the Last Judgement), because they were in the same (print) anthology. This finishes up what I intended to read from the tenth century; I will hopefully begin the eleventh century with the Carmina Cantabrigienses in January or early February.
Nov. 3098. Lazarillo de Tormes [1553] 103 pages [in Spanish]
An anonymous work from near the beginning of the Golden Age of Spanish literature, published about a decade before the birth of Cervantes, Lazarillo de Tormes relates the adventures and misadventures of a young "rogue" named Lazáro de Tormes in a number of episodes, mainly turning on his tricks for getting food from his stingy masters. It satirizes the dishonest and avaricious lower clergy and the threadbare nobility of the time. The edition I read is a slightly modernized-spelling version of the Burgos edition of 1554 (the earliest surviving) with a few interpolations from another edition. A very fun read as well as important in the history of literature (the beginning of the "picaresque" novel.)
Dec. 299. Annie Ernaux, Mémoire de fille [2016] 151 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in French]
My ninth and last book, at least for the time being, from the 2023 Nobel Prizewinner Annie Ernaux. It's another autobiographical work. Whether or not to call these autobiographical novels, I'm not sure; they read like novels, but may just be a really idiosyncratic, literary form of autobiography. Apart from the earliest one, they all use her actual names (Annie Duchesne, then Annie Ernaux). From the many allusions, I assume that the model is Proust, but since he is one of the dozen or so most important writers I haven't yet read (it's such a large project I keep procrastinating) I can't really compare them. This is the first one not written in the first person, except for the comments from her "present" self.
This book covers the years from 1958 to the early 1960's. It begins three days before her eighteenth birthday with her first extended period away from her home and parents, as a "monitor" at a summer educational "colony" she refers to as S. At first enthusiastic about her new freedom and living with a group of other people her own age, after her first (one-sided) "love story" it all goes wrong; as the only girl from a Catholic school background, very clumsy about social matters and unused to being around boys, and from a lower social class than most of the others, she doesn't really fit in and becomes the butt of jokes and insults.
Next, we find her at the École Normale or two-year teacher's college studying to be a teacher and living in a boarding house run by Catholic sisters. It soon becomes obvious (to her instructors, if not to her) that despite her high grades and academic proficiency, she has no vocation for teaching. She drops out and goes to London for a year as an "au-pair" in a petty bourgeois English family.
At the end, she returns to France and begins studying literature at a four-year college.
I know from my own experience how important that time of life is; even today, many of my attitudes and beliefs are grounded in the 1970's (I'm a dozen years younger than Ernaux.) There was much in the book that resonated with me. Obviously, much that didn't; there is a big difference between a young woman in France and a male in the United States. However, many of the challenges were the same; learning to deal with freedom after a restrictive religious upbringing, being one of the few working-class students in a private high school and later at Columbia, and so forth. Perhaps this is why I found this more interesting than the last few books I read by Ernaux.
Dec. 6100. Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary [2021] 476 pages
Like Weir's earlier novel, The Martian, which I read last month, Project Hail Mary is basically Robinson Crusoe in space (this time with an alien "Friday" called "Rocky"). The book opens with the astronaut Dr. Ryland Grace waking up out of an induced coma as the only survivor aboard the spacecraft Hail Mary — Hail Mary full of Grace, get it? The book is full of corny humor. He has a temporary amnesia, but as he begins to regain his memory we gradually learn the premise of the novel, that a strange form of microbial life is "eating" the sun's energy and that the Hail Mary has been sent to Tau Ceti to find a solution before the Earth freezes in thirty years.
Project Hail Mary is far less credible than The Martian. Of course, the earlier novel has the advantage of being based on an actual planned mission, the Ares Project, and limiting itself to mostly known science, but more importantly all the action takes place either on Mars or within NASA; the later book includes more Earth politics, and like most writers of good hard science fiction Weir is very weak on the political background, naively assuming that because the Earth would freeze in thirty years all the nations of the world would put aside their differences and work together to save the planet. Consider the current global climate change crisis, and what would actually happen? The Republicans would claim it was all a hoax, the Democrats would try to milk it for partisan advantage, the United States would refuse to cooperate with even its own allies, let alone Russia and China, and in the end nothing would be done until it was too late. The science, if you can suspend disbelief in the unrealistic premise, is on the other hand well done.
The alien "Rocky" is physically well-described and alien enough; but its culture and mentality are not at all alien — I couldn't help imagining him as a character in an early Dr. Who episode, played by a man in a turtle suit. As I said about the first book, it was a quick and upbeat read, nothing profound but enjoyable.
Dec. 22101. John Herman Randall, Jr., The Making of the Modern Mind: A Survey of the Intellectual Background of the Present Age [1926, rev. ed., 1940] 696 pages
When I was an undergraduate philosophy major at Columbia in the 1970's, Prof. Emeritus John Herman Randall, Jr. (1899-1980) was something of a legend. Students would report in an awed tone that they had seen him walking on the campus. An elderly, white-haired gentleman (about the age I am now, but relatively much older at a time when the Biblical three score and ten was still the normal limit), he was the last link with the generation of Frederick J.E. Woodbridge and John Dewey. He is probably best known today for his massive two-volume, nearly two-thousand-page magnum opus, The Career of Philsophy, from the early 1960's, which is on my reading list for this winter or early spring. (The completed chapters from the third volume, unfinished at his death, were published with other essays as Philosophy After Darwin, which seems to be out of print.) This somewhat shorter book (only about 700 pages of small print), The Making of the Modern Mind, is from rather earlier in his career, having been written originally in 1926 and revised in 1940 when Europe was already at war and the US was soon to become involved. Not surprisingly, it is a defense of the imperilled unity and values of "Western" culture. Unlike the later work, it does not focus entirely on philosophy, but neither is it a general history; perhaps it could best be described as a "history of ideas", covering religious, social, economic and political theories as well as philosophy in the narrower sense.
There is much valuable information and synthesis in the book, but I was somewhat disappointed in it in many respects.
The book begins (part one) with the late Middle Ages, specifically the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century and the Thirteenth-Century synthesis; this is one of the weaker parts of the book. While not actually wrong — his history is much better than Durant or Russell — he tends to rather romanticize the mediaeval world-view and the unity of Christendom in a nostalgic way, undoubtedly influenced by the crisis of his own time (as well as the fact that he is basing his view on the written works of the period rather than on what was actually practiced). This attitude towards the Middle Ages is something that he criticizes in discussing the Romantic reaction of the nineteenth century, without apparently realizing that it is largely true of his own account.
This view of what the mediaeval period was naturally also influences his views on the Renaissance and Reformation (part two), giving him a somewhat ambivalent — but perhaps more balanced — view of what they meant for modern thought. He argues that the Renaissance with its emphasis on the classical past and on literary scholarship actually retarded the development of modern ideas, and that the Reformation was essentially reactionary. (As he later founded the Renaissance Seminar, along with Paul Oscar Kristeller, he may have changed his mind somewhat; I will be interested to see how he deals with the Renaissance in The Career of Philsophy.) He sees the real origins of the "modern mind", undoubtedly correctly, in the new sciences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His third part on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the best in the book.
His fourth part, on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which he oddly entitles "The Last Hundred Years" although by 1940 it would have been more like 150 years, represents a more subjective (and from a contemporary standpoint, rather outdated) selection; he is clearly identifying the "modern mind" with the viewpoint of Dewey's pragmatic philosophy. It seems rather strange that a book on the making of the modern mind has only one short paragraph on Marx and Marxism (as a pendant to Hegel), for example. Apart from Marxism, he barely mentions Positivism (only the version of Comte and Mach, no mention at all of the Wiener Kreis or Wittgenstein), Analytic Philosophy (Russell is considered only for his political theories), Phenomenalism, or any other modern philosophy later than the writers who were influential in the 1920's — Spencer, Bergson, Maritain and of course Dewey. He also devotes what seems to me to be a disproportionate amount of space to religious ideas. His main emphasis, however, is on scientific developments, evolution, relativity and quantum theory, among others, and of course this is the most outdated part of the book, especially as it seems not to have been much revised in 1940 — it struck me as mostly 1926 science, for instance claiming that natural selection has been replaced by de Vries' mutationism as the accepted explanation of evolution, which was only true for a short time just before the development of the modern synthesis in the thirties and forties.
The last two or three chapters seem to be the most revised, but paradoxically they also seen the most outdated; the context of the beginning of World War II determines all his discussion.
One very minor point — the lead sentence of the Wikipedia article on Randall describes him as a "New Thought author". This seems to be confusing him with his father.
Dec. 25102-103. Edmund Gosse, Life and Letters of John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's [1899] vol. 1, 318 pages; vol. 2, 377 pages
An example of the peculiarly late-nineteenth-century genre of "Life and Letters", Gosse's two-volume work contains most of the letters known, tied together by a biography based both on the letters themselves and a critical use of the original seventeenth-century short biography by Izaak Walton, as well as what few other sources exist (mainly for his last years when he was an important clergyman). Appearing in 1899, it contributed to the ongoing re-evalutation of Donne's poetry which would culminate in the famous 1921 essay by T.S. Eliot.
Unfortunately, we know little about the childhood and youth of Donne, including the period in which he wrote most of his secular poetry (we know even less about most of his predecessors), before the surviving letters were written; Gosse has frequently been criticized for filling in the gap with a rather fanciful theory of an unsuccessful love-affair based on the poems, but this is hardly as extreme as what Brandes, for example, was doing at the same time with Shakepeare's biography based on the Sonnets and plays. Once the letters begin, his biography is not particularly speculative. While of course Gosse puts the best possible face on most of what Donne wrote, it is impossible to avoid the impression that by today's standards he was pretty much of an opportunist — but then, today's standards don't really apply to the age of the early Stuarts, before the Puritan-bourgeois revolution; and I suspect much of the difference is that contemporary politicians and church leaders are simply more hypocritical than their early modern counterparts.
Dec. 27104. James Winny, A Preface to Donne [1970] 160 pages
As the title implies, this is about what one would expect to find in the preface or introduction to a book by Donne, perhaps somewhat expanded, giving a short account of his life and the intellectual background of his time, with some interpretation of a few of his better-known poems. This would probably be a good place to start for someone who has never read Donne before, although presumably anyone reading Donne would already be familiar with much of the background from reading background on Shakespeare (Donne's life and Shakespeare's overlapped for all but the last fifteen years of Donne's, after he had written nearly all his poetry.)
Dec. 31
105. Achsah Guibbory, ed., The Cambridge Companion to John Donne [2006]
Sixteen chapters by different authors covering various aspects of Donne's writings; as always there was some unevenness but nearly all were informative. This completes my reading in Donne for now; I'm finally going forward rather than backward, and hopefully next up in my seventeenth-century project will be the plays of Dekker.
52. Articles on Coriolanus (18 articles downloaded from Academic Search Premier) 418 pages
Paster, Gail Kern, To Starve with Feeding: The City in Coriolanus (Shakespeare Studies, 11, 1978) 22 pages — A good general interpretation of the play based on a close reading of the image patterns.
Givan, Christopher, Shakespeare's Coriolanus: The Premature Epitaph and the Butterfly (Shakespeare Studies, 12, 1979) 16 pages — Discusses the character of Coriolanus. Points out that Coriolanus' failings are a mirror-image of the failings he sees in the Roman plebs, although I'm not sure he is right in saying that Coriolanus' hatred of the people is because he is afraid of these similarities.
McKenzie, Stanley D.,'Unshout the noise that banish'd Martius:' Structural Paradox and Dissembling in Coriolanus (Shakespeare Studies, 18, 1986) 16 pages — Emphasizes the paradoxes and rhetorical figures (especially antithesis) of the play as creating an atmosphere of uncertainty. Derives the conclusion that the play supports a Machiavellian ethic of dissembling.
Wallace, John M., The Senecan context of Coriolanus (Modern Philology, 90, 4, 1993) 14 pages — Discusses the theme of gratitude and ingratitude in the play in connection with the Moral Essays of Seneca.
Spotswood, Jerald W.,`We are undone already': Disarming the multitude in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus (Texas Studies in Literature & Language, 42, 1, Spring 2000) 18 pages — Discusses the role of the plebeians in the two plays, in connection with the class relations and attitudes of Shakespeare's England.
Lunberry, Clark, In the Name of Coriolanus: The Prompter (Prompted) (Comparative Literature, 54, 3, Summer 2002) 13 pages — Only thirteen pages and I admit I couldn't finish it. He begins in the first sentence by telling us that Coriolanus was seeking election to "a seat in the consul of the Roman senate", apparently taking "consul" as a quaint Shakespearian spelling of "council". After demonstrating that he doesn't even understand the literal plot of the play, he then spends most of the rest of the article discussing Derrida's opinions on Artaud, occasionally dragging in the play as an illustration. He apparently understands the play as being a poststructuralist critique of the inherent falsity of language. Of course, Shakespeare in most of his plays is concerned with language, and in this play with the potential of language for falsehood, but certainly he does not see language as necessarily false in itself (and unlike academic critics, I'm pretty sure Shakespeare had never read Derrida).
West, Michael and Silberstein, Myron, The Controversial Eloquence of Shakespeare's Coriolanus--an Anti-Ciceronian Orator? (Modern Philology, 102, 3, Feb. 2005) 25 pages — A much better and less anachronistic treatment of Shakespeare's treatment of language in the play, placing it in the context of Renaissance debates over Ciceronian rhetoric.
Kumamoto, Chikako D., Shakespeare's Achillean Coriolanus and Heraean Volumnia: Textual Contamination and Crossing of Homer's Iliad in Coriolanus (Journal of the Wooden O, 7, 2007) 14 pages — Argues that the portrayal of the characters of Coriolanus and Volumnia as originally found in Plutarch has been modified by Shakespeare under the influence of Chapman's recent translation of the Iliad.
Miller, Nichole E., Sacred Life and Sacrificial Economy: Coriolanus in No-Man's-Land (Criticism, 51, 2, Spring 2009) 48 pages — Homer in the first verse of the Iliad invokes the Muses; Miller in the first few pages of this article invokes Walther Benjamin, Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, and Slavoj Zizek, among the major gods of trendy lit-crit. She then spends about a page and a half "surveying the literature", essentially listing a few dozen articles approaching the play from different versions of critical theory, giving special mention to "queer theory". At this point I was about to abandon the article as I did with the shorter article of Lunberry, but she then actually begins to discuss the background of the play, summarizing the history it was based on and the constitutional foundations of the early Republic, mainly quoting Cicero and Livy, and giving a very interesting comparison with Machiavelli's warning about professional soldiers in his Art of War, which was available to Shakespeare in English translation. Near the end, she reverts back to theory and ends the article with a discussion of the differences between Agamben and Benjamin, with additional discussion of Derrida, and I couldn't care less. An article of academic criticism in the most negative sense, but with some redeeming value.
Langis, Unhae, Coriolanus: Inordinate Passions and Powers in Personal and Political Governance (Comparative Drama, 44, 1, Spring 2010) 27 pages — One of the better articles I read, this interprets the play based on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (virtue as the mean between extremes) and his theory of the state in Politics. When critics like Agamben are mentioned (very sparingly) they are used intelligently, (I suspect that these theorists are mostly better in themselves than in the use that's made of them by tenure-seeking academics.)
Jones, Emily Griffiths, "Beloved of all the trades in Rome": Oeconomics, Occupation, and the Gendered Body in Coriolanus (Shakespeare Studies, 43, 2015) 25 pages — Despite the obligatory mentions of gender, this was an interesting article on another possible classical influence on the play, Xenophon's Oeconomicus (on my reading list, but probably at least a year down), and trying to specify more exactly the kind of heroic ideology which Coriolanus subscribes to.
Atkinson, John, Coriolanus, Hazlitt and the Insolence of Power (Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 27, 2015) 9 pages — An interesting short article on Hazlitt's review of Coriolanus, actually about Hazlitt rather than Shakespeare.
Hillier, Russell M., "Valour Will Weep": The Ethics of Valor, Anger, and Pity in Shakespeare's Coriolanus (Studies in Philology, 113, 2, Spring 2016) 39 pages — Argues that Coriolanus represents Rome and that the play is a condemnation of the cruel "valor" of the Romans; which I do not see in the play. Otherwise, however, it contains much valuable analysis of the play and possible relations to Machiavelli.
Derrin, Daniel, Sine Dolore: Relative Painlessness in Shakespeare's Laughter at War (Critical Survey, 30, 1, Spring 2018) 17 pages — Discusses comic passages in Coriolanus, I Henry IV and All's Well That Ends Well with reference to Aristotle's theory of laughter.
Craik, Katharine A., Staging Rhetorical Vividness in Coriolanus (Shakespeare Studies 47, 2019) 26 pages — Discusses the contrast between Coriolanus as described in the rhetoric of others such as Cominius and Menenius and himself in person.
Tambar, Jaspreet S., The Rhetoric of Wounds in Coriolanus; or, a Tragedy of Renaissance Rhetoric (Comparative Drama, 54, 1/2, Spring/Summer 2020) 24 pages — Discusses Coriolanus' attitude toward rhetoric in the light of Ovid's debate between Ajax and Odysseus over Achilles' armor.
Carroll, Brian, Tyranny, Insurrection, and the Crowd: Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and Appropriations of the Roman past (Journal of the Wooden O, 21, 2021) 23 pages — Ostensibly a comparison of the two plays, the superficial portrayal of the characters of Caesar and Coriolanus as tyrants is simply an excuse for a polemic against the "tyrant" Donald Trump. "Presentism" at its worst.
Sargent, Gregory W.. City Walls, Borders, Boundaries: Coriolanus and Affective Political Engagement (Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 15, 2022) 28 pages — An interesting discussion of spatial metaphors in the play, with good analyses of some specific passages.
Henderson, Olivia, "Like a dull actor now I have forgot my part": Coriolanus and Shakespearean Autism (Shakespeare Studies, 50, 2022) 27 pages — Interprets the character of Coriolanus as being on the "autism spectrum". No comment.