There wasn’t, so far as I could discover, a line of his writing in the house - the radically uninterpretable "Figure in the Carpet"

I was as game as anyone.  A secret thread runs through the novelist’s work; the critic fails to uncover it; another writer succeeds.  Maybe I can succeed, too.  Maybe the clues to the meaning of the fictional novelist’s imaginary texts are ingeniously concealed within the actual text of “The Figure in the Carpet.”

For example, maybe the novelist’s secret is that he is homosexual.  Anyone ever tried that one?  Or am I the first to suggest it?

A couple of other possibilities:  the novelist was lying (or drunk) when he suggested that his books revealed a plain-sight “figure in the carpet” Is only anyone would see it.  Perhaps the novelist is kissing up to the critic (and, later, the editor of a literary magazine).  Or perhaps he is teasing them, playing a prank.

Another possible hidden story:  the editor, when he claims to have found the solution to the novelistic puzzle, is actually lying in order to trick a woman into marrying him.  He succeeds – she marries him in order to learn the secret.  This may sound absurd,  but I am having trouble with some recurring fuss over exactly when the characters become engaged to marry, e.g. “I subsequently grew sure that at the time he went to India, at the time of his great news from Bombay, there was no engagement whatever” (598).  This must mean something; it must be part of an interpretation of the story, this attention to what looks like a peripheral question.

The clue that convinced me that I was getting “The Figure in the Carpet” more or less right was actually an absence, a dog that did not bark, so to speak.  It would be possible to make a long list of characteristics of the “figure,” most of them straight from the novelist.  But nowhere does the critic who narrates the story give a hint of what might be in the novelist’s texts.  Neither description nor scene nor a single line, not even a title.  No, there is one title, The Right of Way, but the title is of the novelist’s last book, released after the critic has given up on seeing the figure, after the editor claims to have seen it.

A joke, it is all just a joke, even before we get to the absurd over-reactions of the characters who do see the figure.  I mean, I myself have seen such figures in the carpets of other writers.  It is not such a big deal.

James has created a radically uninterpretable story.  Thus the necessity of the vagueness and even absence of what should be essential detail; thus the details that are included pointing towards alternative, unresolvable, stories.  Vladimir Nabokov, when writing a parable of the difficulties of literary interpretation, has to write an entire 999 line poem to make his case.  In the James story, character’s insists that they are reading with a Kinbotean intensity, but it is all concealed from the actual reader – of course it never exists.

At three o’clock in the morning, not sleeping, remembering moreover how indispensable he [the novelist] was to Lady Jane, I stole down to the library with a candle.  There wasn’t, so far as I could discover, a line of his writing in the house.  (583)

Now there, that turns out to be a clue.

"The Figure in the Carpet" - they missed my little point with a perfection

Now it is time for the reverse, the Wuthering Expectations signature move, when I argue that the stylistic irritations I have been whining about are in fact necessary for the writer’s ingenious artistic purpose.  Which is pretty obvious in the case of Henry James, although it has taken me a while to see it.

And I am not entirely wrong.  In a weaker James story, the indirection and vagueness can cause the text to crumble in my hands as I read it.  Some Chekhovian or Flaubertish eggs would help stiffen the batter.  My baking metaphor may have some problems.  Never mind that.

“The Figure in the Carpet”  (1896) would be ruined by more detail or closure.  It is about vagueness, the meaning and purpose of a lack of definition in fiction.

A novelist tells a literary critic, the story’s narrator, that the critic has not understood his novels, as have all critics, as has everyone, “they missed my little point with a perfection exactly as admirable when they patted me on the back as when they kicked me in the shins” (578).  The critic, conceited and intrigued, badgers the novelist into revealing a series of clues about his ”exquisite scheme”:  it is “the loveliest thing in the world,” as “palpable as the marble of this chimney,” but not at all an “esoteric message”:

“My whole lucid effort gives him [the reader] the clue – every page and line and letter.  The thing’s as concrete there as a bird in a cage, a bait on a hook, a piece of cheese in a mouse-trap.  It’s stuck into every volume as your foot is stuck into your shoe.  It governs every line, it chooses every word, it dots every i, it places every comma.” (581)

The critics takes this as a challenge but after ransacking the novels gives it up as a waste of time: “The buried treasure was a bad joke, the general intention a monstrous pose” (583).  But his friend and editor, a magazine writer takes up the challenge and in a moment of mystical inspiration while on a trip to India solves the mystery:  “The figure in the carpet came out.”  On his return to England, he visits the novelist who confirms his discovery, and also reveals the secret to his new wife, herself a novelist.

The poor sap of a critic never learns what it is, though.  In a strange series of events, the magazine writer is killed and the novelist also dies.  The wife refuses to divulge the answer (“It’s my life!”), unless she covertly does so in her novel Overmastered.  Then she dies, but not before marrying a second critic, now the last chance for our narrator.  But it turns out that this poor sap was never told a word about the secret, and ends the story in a state of agitation and dismay.

So, just to be clear about how perverse this allegory of reading and interpretation is, there are five characters, all writers.  The three who are not literary critics are able to see the marvelous figure in the carpet; the two who are critics are mystified.  The story appears to be an irresistible trap for critics.  It begs the reader to solve its puzzle.  Peculiar details of plot and speech are emphasized in such a way that they must be clues.  At the same time, the nature and function of the trap could not be more evident.  And the two baffled critics are alive at the end of the story, while the happily enlightened are not.

Next I will work through how what I think of as James’s weaknesses are in fact necessary to create the Borgesian effect of “The Figure in the Carpet.”

A villa, a carriage, a piano and a banjo - detail in James

The smart thing to do would be to expand – or, honestly, rewrite – yesterday’s business about how Henry James sometimes refuses allows ambiguities that other writers telling similar stories would close off, whether to satisfy convention or to show off their cleverness.  I have a strong taste for writers in the latter group, so this is a reason I do not always read James so well.  I am looking for the wrong kind of clues and solving the wrong mystery.  Failing to solve, of course.  But I will save this for “The Figure in the Carpet.”

Now I will mention a characteristic of James that I think is related, his maddening physical vagueness, which unfortunately intersects another strong taste for the opposite.  Neither of these are merely tastes, but well-defined, justifiable aesthetic positions, but that is irrelevant for his whine about the difficulties of reading James.

The fixed observer of “The Pupil” is a tutor who becomes entangled with a slippery, almost devious family, the Moreens, rich enough to lounge around Europe as long as they occasionally skip town ahead of their creditors.  The tutor is not the narrator but is what D. G. Myers calls a “third-person onlooker,” an outsider who observes only pieces of the family’s eventful story and does not comprehend everything he does see.  The real story, the important one, is the deep friendship between the tutor and his sickly, sensitive pupil and the alliance they form against the boy’s horrible family, so of course the tutor’s point of view is perfect for all of that, even if it is a story taking place “backstage” in some sense.

A description of the chaotic family, part of it, early in “The Pupil”:

They lived on macaroni and coffee—they had these articles prepared in perfection—but they knew recipes for a hundred other dishes.  They overflowed with music and song, were always humming and catching each other up, and had a sort of professional acquaintance with Continental cities.  They talked of “good places” as if they had been pickpockets or strolling players.  They had at Nice a villa, a carriage, a piano and a banjo, and they went to official parties.  (718)

Now, there is a lot to like here, obviously.  Strolling players!  A banjo!  One of the marriageable daughters even strums it a bit later.  Henry James is not typically described as efficient, is he?  But this is pretty crisp.  The tutor “once found [the father] shaving in the drawing room.”  They all mix their French and Italian with “cold, tough slices of American.”  It takes just one long paragraph to pump the Moreens full of life.

But the description remains at this level.  Scenes are almost entirely conversation, sometimes but not always with a few words to establish the setting.  James is specific when generalizing, and general when specific.

Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901) begins with a long party scene in which Mann describes what every character is wearing, where they are sitting in relation to each other, the furniture they sit on, plus all of the other furniture, and also the paintings and wallpaper.

He wore a cinnamon jacket with broad lapels and leg-of-mutton sleeves that closed tight just below the wrist.  His fitted trousers were of a white, washable fabric and trimmed with a black stripe down each side.  The silk cravat wound around his stiff high-wing collar was fluffed to fill the broad, open neck of his multicolored vest.  (5, tr. John E. Woods)

Maybe this all becomes pointlessly fussy as the novel goes on, I don’t know.  Mann demands that I see that pair of pants; James rarely wants me to see anything.  He fills his fiction with imaginative blank spaces.  And he does it on purpose, he says so openly.  But that is “The Figure in the Carpet,” so it will have to wait until tomorrow.

She has depths and depths, and all of them bad - interpreting Henry James

In a fortuitous coincidence, D. G. Myers just wrote a piece about stories with “onlooker narrators,” like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, a “secondary character who also participates in events.”  I have just read three Henry James stories in a row that feature clever variations on the device.  Myers suggests I look at What Maisie Knew (1897) as well, which I will do once I read it.  Now I will keep things simple.  No, one of the stories is “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896).  There is no way to keep that one simple.

The literary critic in “The Figure in the Carpet” is at first an active character but recedes into the onlooker role for most of the story.  The tutor in “The Pupil” (1892) is placed in what should be the position of an onlooker, but his seemingly peripheral story turns out to be the meaningful one.  The cold Jamesian fish who narrates “Louisa Pallant” (1888) is the purest onlooker of the three, except James creates the possibility that his role is something else, even if he does not realize it.

I want to start with the one that is least famous, “Louisa Pallant,” because it is the easiest to deal with.  The narrator meets his old flame, Louisa, at a European spa.  She jilted him long ago (“She had not treated me well and we had never really made it up,” 193).  Now Louisa has an appealing daughter and the narrator has a rich nephew who coincidentally joins them at the spa.

The romance between the youngsters is inevitable.  The mother eventually breaks it up by telling the nephew something about her daughter so terrible that he immediately flees her.  The narrator never learns what was said, from Louisa or from his nephew.  This is where the “onlooker” device is important.  He never learns what was said so neither do I.

Everything he and I learn comes from his conversations with the mother.  Some samples:

‘Do you really mean she is bad?’ I added.

Mrs. Pallant made no immediate answer to this…  (213)

We were silent a moment, after which I resumed:  ‘Then she doesn’t know you hate her?’

‘I don’t know what she knows.  She has depths and depths, and all of them bad.  Besides, I don’t hate her in the least, I pity her simply, for what I have made of her.  But I pity still more the man who may find himself married to her.’  (218)

I am emphasizing the word “bad” because I can only guess what it means – character, presumably, but also behavior?  Who knows.  Whatever the mother tells the nephew is enough to run him off without looking back.

The motive of the mother is an open question.  The truth about the daughter’s character is open, given the various possible motives.  The narrator’s interpretation of the mother’s motive is open – does he think the same thing I do?

We sat there some time longer, while I thought over what she had said to me and she apparently did the same.  I confess that even close to her side, with the echo of her passionate, broken voice still in the air, some queer ideas came into my head.  Was the comedy on her side and not on the girl’s, and was she posturing as a magnanimous woman at poor Linda’s expense?  (218)

For example, is the mother pursuing greater riches, or a title for her daughter?  Is she revenging herself on the narrator for past crimes – or expiating her own sins?

I hardly expect answers to all of these questions.  What is surprising about James is that he does not answer any of them, that he is able to keep a series of incompatible interpretations alive at the end of the story.  The plot does not close off readings but rather causes them to branch.  You probably knew this about James already.  I did not, not until I saw it in this minor story.

Page numbers refer to Complete Stories: 1884-1891, Library of America.

They ate in religious silence - enjoying a Camilleri detective novel

I’m trying to take it easy, so I read a mystery, The Potter’s Field (2008) by Andrea Camilleri, the thirteenth novel featuring Inspector Montalbano.  This puts me two novels behind in English, seven (!) in Italian, although my understanding is that Camilleri is planning to wrap up the series.

The last thing I want to do is review book #13 of 21.  The first thing I want to do is share the following passage.  Montalbano has been accused by his superior of committing a juvenile prank on a journalist; Montalbano is of course guilty, so he blusters: 

“Ah, so you, Mr. Commissioner, actually believed such a groundless accusation?  Ah, I feel so insulted and humiliated!  You’re accusing me of an act – no, indeed, a crime that, if true, would warrant severe punishment!  As if I were a common idiot or gambler!  That journalist must be possessed to think such a thing!”

End of climax.  The inspector inwardly congratulated himself.  He had managed to utter a statement using only titles of novels by Dostoevsky.  Had the commissioner noticed?  Of course not!  The man was ignorant as a goat.  (66)

An astute reader may see a clue as to why I have read so many books in this series.  This stunt is not exactly typical, but the Montalbano novels are always at least lightly salted with literature.  The detective is even named after a Spanish mystery writer, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.  Montalbano sometimes reads Montalbán’s books, but not in The Potter’s Field, where he turns to “a book by Andrea Camilleri from a few years back,” not an Inspector Montalbano novel but one that “[takes] off from a passage in a novel by Leonardo Sciascia” (95).

I wonder if it is relevant that Italian literature has an unusual figure, a canonical writer who specialized in mysteries.  How else to deal with his great topic, the Sicilian Mafia?  Camilleri works the same ground, updating Sciascia, so it is no surprise that he frequently acknowledges his predecessor.

Then there is the food, the Sicilian cuisine, eaten with discrimination and gusto (this is another clue - nay, sufficient proof):

Having finished the first cannolo, he took another.

“I see you’ve helped yourself,” said Pasquano, coming in and grabbing one himself.

They ate in religious silence, the corners of their mouths smeared with ricotta cream.  Which, by the rules, must be removed with a slow, circular movement of the tongue.  (44-5)

Meine Frau began reading the Montalbano books in German, several years before they were published in English.  The German editions included recipes!  Which is admittedly a little silly.  Few readers would have access to the proper ingredients.

The mystery in The Potter’s Field is an unusually good one, which is a bonus.

I suppose there are a number of detective series set all over the world as good as Camilleri’s.  Or, depending on my mood, I doubt there are many others as good.  But I do not know either way.

If Wuthering Expectations ever switches to an all-mystery or all-science fiction format, it will be because I have succumbed to the pleasure of being able to read three hundred books a year.

Stephen Sartarelli translated this one, not to mention all of them.  A good gig.

Oh, I can permit myself a remark like that - Schnitzler's Fräulein Else

Fräulein Else (1924) is another Arthur Schnitzler stream-of-consciousness story.  I believe it is the other story, written an amazing twenty-four years after Lieutenant Gustl.  For Schnitzler, the technique was not a fundamental rethinking of fiction, but just a technique useful for telling  specific story.  For whatever reason, it took Schnitzler a long time to find a second story that fit.  Compare the almost plain prose of Casanova’sHomecoming (1918), or the surreal Dream Story (1926) or the intensely interior yet more traditionally told Night Games (1927).

I will interrupt myself.  The end of Schnitzler’s career – he died in 1931 – was impressive.  His cleverest work (La Ronde, Anatol) is from thirty years earlier, but he did his best writing when he was in his sixties.

Fräulein Else is a nineteen year-old Viennese girl on holiday with her aunt and cousin.  Her mother wires to ask that Else ask another guest, Herr Dorsday, for money to cover her father’s gambling debts.  Dorsday agrees, but demands sexual favors in return.  What will the innocent Fräulein Else do?

Perhaps the stream-of-consciousness device is not needed to tell so much as conceal, in Gustl a Maupassant story, in Else a melodrama.

Or it is meant to conceal something else.  I have not read any of Schnitzler’s early work (by early I am covering twenty years!) that had any Jewish subject matter, or Catholic or anything related to any other religion.  ProfessorBernhardi (1912) is directly about secularized Judaism in an increasingly anti-Semitic Catholic culture.  Else is Jewish, too, although as far as I can tell this is mentioned in only one place (Rudi is Else’s brother):

No, Herr Dorsday, I’m not taken in by your smartness and your monocle and your title.  You might just as well deal in old clothes as old pictures…  But, Else, Else, what are you thinking of?  Oh, I can permit myself a remark like that.  Nobody notices it in me.  I’m positively blonde, a reddish blonde, and Rudi looks a regular aristocrat.  Certainly one can notice it at once in Mother, at any rate in her speech, but not at all in Father.  (24, ellipses in original)

This is pretty sneaky, obscure enough that I had forgotten until I went back to the passage that it first identifies Dorsday as Jewish – I had forgotten and assumed that he was not.  Else has to justify to herself her own anti-Semitic jab at him by acknowledging her own Judaism, however secularized and suppressed.  The line “Nobody notices it in me” is nicely tricky, since “it” looks like it should refer to “remark,” but in the flow of thought “it” has jumped ahead to “Jewishness,” where “it” remains as Else thinks of her mother.  She disparages her mother in favor of her father at other points in the novella; this passage gives a clue as to why.

In these later stories, Schnitzler is a great recycler – gambling, suicide as a solution to debt, the sexual sacrifice of a woman as a solution to debt, public nudity, and duels recur (well, the duels are an old Schnitzler fixture).  But the stories hardly seem similar, even dazzlingly different, all because of how they are told and who, not what, they are about.

I read an old translation, the 1925 F. H. Lyon version now published by Pushkin Press.

They are the hands of an old man - Schnitzler's Casanova

Arthur Schnitzler was blissfully free of the aesthetic crises that afflicted so many of his peers.  He wore Viennese culture lightly.  Schnitzler’s neuroses were sexual.  No wonder Freud learned so much from Schnitzler, and vice versa.  I know far more than I want to know about the inveterate womanizer’s sex life from reading Peter Gay’s Schnitzler’s Century (2002).  Readers with German and a high threshold for this sort of thing can enjoy thousands of pages of it in Schnitzler’s diaries.  He was a skirt-chasing dog, and a successful one.

What is interesting here is that Schnitzler was keenly aware of the psychology of his own behavior, and of its moral risks, too, of the dangers his lack of self-control posed to any woman who succumbed to him.  I know this because of his fiction, where he is insightful and ironic about people who behave like he does.

Thus Schnitzler’s interest in Casanova, the subject of the 1918 novella Casanova’s Homecoming and 1919 play Casanova in Spa (which I have not read).  The novella describes an adventure that is fictional but might as well be taken from the memoirs.  Casanova is 53, down but not out; the  author is 56.  This is why he is interested:

“Look well, Amalia.  See the wrinkles on my forehead; the loose folds of my neck; the crow’s-feet round my eyes.  And look,” he grinned, “I have lost one of my eye teeth.  Look at these hands, too, Amalia.  My fingers are like claws; there are yellow spots on the fingernails; the blue veins stand out.  They are the hands of an old man, Amalia!”

She clasped both his hands as he held them out for her to see, and reverently kissed them one after the other in the shaded walk.  “Tonight, I will kiss you on the lips,” she said, with a mingling of humility and tenderness, which roused his gall.  (171)

I will let Lizzy of Lizzy’s Literary Life address the story itself.  Casanova is still Casanova, even if he now relies more on his reputation than his looks.  “It’s hard to find anyone to admire in these pages” Lizzy says, and I would go a step further.  About two-thirds of the way into the story, several characters (not just Casanova) who seemed self-serving reveal themselves as evil.  The word is not too strong.  Rape, blackmail, and murder are the results.  Schnitzler is cruel in Casanova’s Homecoming, building some sort of understanding between Casanova and me, some sense of how his world works, how he lives in it, before pulling the lever that opens the concealed trap door.

Casanova, of course, does not believe that his acts are evil.  By the end of the story, the events have becomes just another episode for the Memoirs.  Casanova has moved on to his next adventure.  Yet, in the last paragraph, “he was overwhelmed with a weariness amounting to pain, while on his lips was a bitter aftertaste which seemed to rise up from his innermost being.”  The author grants his character the gift of sleep, “heavy and dreamless, taking pity on the aging adventurer.”

I read the version in the German Library Plays and Stories of Schnitzler, tr. Eden and Cedar Paul, revised by Caroline Wellbery.

Schnitzler's medical drama - he would most certainly wind up in jail before supper

If you are rummaging around in that Dedalus anthology of Meyrink, do not miss “The Clockmaker” (1926), which is not one of the Bats but is still quite good.  It replaces poisonous blue flowers and time-leeches with baroque descriptions of clocks.  I was planning to write about it, but I fear I would just be repeating myself, as Meyrink was, aside from all the fine descriptions of clocks (“they seem to be drunk and asleep, for sometimes they snore loudly or rattle their chains”).

Instead, then, onwards and sideways to Arthur Schnitzler.  I have read a few more of his works recently, let’s see.  How about I start with the boring one, which is the 1912 play Professor Bernhardi.

It is deliberately boring; boring is a strategy.  The play at first appears to be about the petty bureaucratic struggles at a private Viennese hospital.  Office politics, personality clashes, budget maneuvering.  Near the end of the first act, Dr. Bernhardi, one of the hospital’s founders, commits either an error or an act of integrity or both.  He refuses to let a priest give extreme unction to a dying woman, the victim of a botched abortion.  The medical reason for barring the priest never made sense to me, but it seems to be taken seriously within the play.

Bernhardi is Jewish.  He is accused of the crime of interfering with the Catholic religion, is tried, and jailed for two months.  Surrounding this bare plot is a lot of office politics, etc.  Act III is set in a conference room!  How dull.  But of course the central conflict, the collision between professional duty and an increasing vehement and angry anti-Semitic politics, is not dull at all.  Bernhardi is made a martyr.

To what, though?  To a cause or to pride?  I will give away the ending:

WINKLER (a friend of Bernhardi’s):  That precisely was your mistake.  If one were always to do the right thing, or rather, if one simply began one morning, without any further thought, to do the right thing and simply continued without interruption to do the right thing all day long, he would most certainly wind up in jail before supper.

BERNHARDI:  And shall I tell you something, Councillor?  In my position you would have done exactly the same thing.

WINKLER:  Possibly.  Then I would have been – I’m sure you’ll forgive me, Professor – just as unreasonable an ass as you were.

It was a pleasure to read a thoughtful Schnitzler story that was about something other than the battle of the sexes, about a meaningful ethical debate in an interesting social setting.  A sort of debate or reconciliation between Bernhardi and the priest in Act IV is even something like an Important Scene, and is probably what I should be writing about.

Look, Professor Bernhardi  is a period piece, but I am a student of the period.  Tomorrow, something more exciting by Schnitzler, with a duel and gambling and rape and other awful stuff.  No conference rooms.

I read the translation in Professor Bernhardi and Other Plays, tr. G. J. Weinberger, Ariadne Press, 1993.

Lures of shiny, silvery tin shaped like human hands - Meyrink's symbolizing

Jorge Luis Borges once edited a series of little books that have tantalized later readers.  One of them contained three stories by Gustav Meyrink, all from Bats.  St. Orberose discussesthe project; he led to Grant Munroe’s piece at The Rumpus, who in turn relied on this Spanish-language site.  Borges picked “J. H. Obereit’s Visit to the Time-Leeches,” “Cardinal Napellus,” and “The Four Moon Brethren.”  When Munroe wrote his piece none of these stories were available in English, but here they are in the 2010 Dedalus Meyrink Reader.

Borges shared Meyrink’s gnosticism and love of esoteric systems, although the former took it all a lot less literally than the latter.  Or such is my understanding, but perhaps I overstate Meyrink’s credulity.  This outstanding paragraph of “Cardinal Napellus” might have some symbolic relevance:

Giovanni Braccesco tried to strike up a conversation by describing our unusual methods of catching he ancient, moss-grown giant catfish that lived in the permanent darkness of the unfathomable depths of the lake.  They never came up to the light and spurned any natural bait; the only things that could get them to bite were the most bizarre forms anglers could think up: lures of shiny, silvery tin shaped like human hands which made swaying movements as they were pulled through the water, or others like bats made of red glass with cunningly concealed hooks on their wings.  (57)

The main character, a lapsed monk, spends his days on the lake, not fishing but plumbing its depths with “an egg-shaped ball of glittering metal on long, fine silk threads” (55).  His friends believe that this is some form of science, but he corrects them:

The intensity brought red blotches to Radspieller’s face and his voice cracked with the emphasis he put on each word: ‘If I could just have one wish’ – he clenched his fists – ‘it would be to let down my plumbline to the centre of the earth, so that I could shout out to the world, ‘See: here, there, see, nothing but earth!’  (64)

So Radspieler is, however strangely, deliberately avoiding a search for secret knowledge, even denying its existence.  A half page later it catches up with him, though.  The characters of H. P. Lovecraft, Meyrink’s literary cousin, are always destroyed by their quest for hidden truths, while this poor sap is punished for not looking.  He would have been happier learning about C’thulu.

If you click on the Spanish-language link above, you will see the cover of the Borges edition of Meyrink, which features a monk emerging from a blue flower.  That is almost accurate, almost in the story.  The “poisonous blue flower” is monkshood.  Any mention of a blue flower in German literature has been permanently poisoned by Novalis.  In “Cardinal Napellus” the Romantic longing for transcendent meaning leads not to bliss or escape or nirvana but to insanity and horror.

While I am making connections – I mean, Novalis and his blue flower, that one is obvious – in Adalbert Stifter’s Indian Summer the dedicated scientific protagonist makes a detailed multi-year study of the topography of a lake bottom (that does not sound right).  I had so many other unnovelistic parts of that novel to discuss that, when discussing Stifter’s novel recently, I did not even mention the scenes where he plumbs the lake and makes maps, leading to discoveries, I guess, about how the seasonal hydrology changes the lake.

So Novalis’s non-rational blue flower is poisonous and Stifter’s rational empiricism is completely useless.  What is left?  I wonder, to what work of German literature do those fishing lures refer?

And the world isn’t real, anyway - Gustav Meyrink's visit to the time-leeches

The book at hand is Gustav Meyrink’s 1916 short story collection Bats.  I love that title.  As in “Meyrink is completely ___ .“  Fledermäuse.  The cover* is perfect, too, a copy of “Lied in der Dämmerung (Song in the Twilight”, 1931) by my new favorite painter, Franz Sedlacek.

That is Meyrink in oil, right there.

No, the painting is too simple.  It is more like E. T. A. Hoffmann, Meyrink’s great precursor.  It omits Meyrink’s esotericism, his interest in tarot and kabbalah and secret knowledge.  I will disclose that I think all of that is in and of itself nonsense, but it serves two purposes for Meyrink beyond whatever belief he might have in it; first, many writers have done interesting, artful things with this or that esoteric system, the pre-built symbols allowing for all sorts of fun, and second, the mysticism stands in for a more universal gnostic impulse, a yearning for a glimpse of the reality behind reality, a momentary lifting of the earthly veil.

Hoffmann’s stories, full of dreams and hallucinations, use the idea, too.  For followers of Schopenhauer, this would be some sort of direct experience of Will; other systems use other terms.  The protagonist of “Herr Kuno Hinrischen, Businessman, and the Penitent Lala Lajpat-Rai,” for example, “managing director of the firm: General Charitable Works, ‘Wholesalers of fat, lard and oils,’” has a dream in which he becomes a Hindu ascetic.  Unfortunately the lesson he learns by becoming one with the universe is to become a more effective embezzler, since the victims are, after all, also him, so he might as well have the money as them.

“’And the world isn’t real, anyway.  I’d never’ve thought there was so much in this Indian philosophy’…  From then on Herr Kuno Hinrischen, businessman, was ‘master’ of even the most difficult situations and a convinced follower of the Indian doctrine of the Vedanta to the end of his days.  (100-1)

Not every mystic has Meyrink’s sense of humor.

In “J. H. Obereit’s Visit to the Time-Leeches” – no, I will stop there.  No story can be as good as that title.  It promises too much.

In “Amadeus Knödlseder, the Incorrigible Bearded Vulture” – same problem, right?  It is almost disappointing to learn that Knödlseder is actually a vulture, who escapes from the Munich zoo and sets up a neckwear shop which is in fact a front for the murder and devouring of marmots, “[j]ust like Cardillac, the jeweller in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Fräulein von Scuderi!” (44)

I start with Meyrink’s esotericism but then go straight to his satire.  And I have gotten nowhere near what I think is most interesting about him, that he is often a fine writer.

*  Bats is to be found, almost, in The Dedalus Meyrink Reader, translated and assembled by the dedicated Mike Mitchell.  One story, “Meister Leonhard,” can only be found in The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy 1890-2000, so strictly speaking I have not read all of the Bats.  Close enough.

Kraus the prophet - Don’t ask why all this time I never spoke

Why have I been avoiding writing this final bit about Karl Kraus?  Because it is too sad, I will bet that’s why.

There are some things you would rather be wrong about.  What I mean is, if you enjoy worrying about catastrophes, I would rather you be wrong.  Maybe you would rather be right, catastrophe and all.  How would I know what you want.

Ricardo de las Caravanas de Recuerdas asks a useful question about Kraus: how “to determine where the slippery satirist ends and where the full-on real life nutjob begins”?  Kraus is one of the few true satirists.  Like Jonathan Swift and Thomas Carlyle, he is most serious exactly when he is most outrageous, when he says what he cannot possibly mean.  Although he likely does not mean what he says in exactly the way he says it.  Satirists are aggravating.

Kraus was both comedian and prophet, Isaiah at the Laugh Factory, Jeremiah Seinfeld.

Newspaper vendors (“E-e-xtra”) are heard throughout The Last Days of Mankind.  At the beginning of his final long monologue, The Grumbler, the Kraus-like pessimist, hears one:

GRUMBLER:  So it is five o’clock.  The answer is here, the echo of my blood-haunted madness.  And no longer does anything resound to me out of ruined creation except this one sound, out of which ten millions who are dying accuse me of still being alive, I who had eyes to see the world, and whose stare struck it in a fashion that it became as I saw it…  Have I deserved this fulfillment of my deathly fear of life?...  Why is my shout of protest not stronger than this tinny command that has dominion over the souls of a whole globe?  (V.54)

The jokes that were funny even at the beginning of the war have turned into something else.  The final scene, German and Austrian officers at a feast, is full of cheers and laughter, puns and jokes, but jokes like this:

GERMAN GENERAL STAFF OFFICER:  Yes sir – our German hand-gas-grenade type B!  With that thing the poisonous substance sprays out and creates suppurating wounds, with a secretion like an honest-to-goodness case of the clap.  (Laughter.)

The party is finally destroyed by artillery and replaced with “apparitions,” essentially a film montage of wartime atrocities, running from the pathetic to the gruesome.  In a strange turn, the apparitions begin singing, even when they are frozen corpses, children drowned by the sinking of the Lusitania, or twelve hundred horses drowned in the torpedoing of an Italian ship, an episode that Kraus mentions elsewhere in the play.  Dead trees have a song.  So do the ravens:

While you gluttons join in gorging,
We don’t do so badly, either.
Since we follow all your armies,
Never have we ached from hunger.

And then – well, Kraus is almost done.  Jeremiah’s prophecy is almost complete.  Except for the grumble grumble Epilogue that sounds if anything even wilder.

I would have thought that the end of the war would relieve some of the apocalyptic pressure on Kraus.  Perhaps it did for a time.  By 1933, though, Kraus was defeated.  He stopped publishing.  He realized that his weapons were useless against the Nazis.  He lived for a few more years, dying in 1936, never having to witness the worst, although he had already guessed it.

Here is his how he ended his career, his last published work, from p. 259 of In These Great Times:

Don’t ask why all this time I never spoke,
Wordless am I,
and won’t say why.
And silence reigns because the bedrock broke.
No word redeems;
one only spoke in dreams.
A smiling sun the sleeper’s images evoke.
Time marches on;
the final difference is none.
The word expired when that world awoke.

Kraus the comedian - now that we have Obu brand, we lack for nothing

The Last Days of Mankind is a piece of post-Biblical prophecy that ends with the destruction of humanity:

(The glow dies out.  Total darkness.  The , on the horizon, the wall of flames leaps high.  Death cries off stage.)

In fact the play ends twice, but the 1974 abridgement does not include the epilogue which includes – I am quoting a “Critical Analysis” by Franz Mauthner that follows the play – a sentence that is “probably the longest in German literature and also the longest catalogue of the sins of the German people” and a second apocalypse, for which God, in his own voice but oddly the words of the Emperor Franz Josef, denies all responsibility: “I did not will it so.”

But despite all this The Last Days of Mankind is mostly a comedy.  Monty Python stuff.  Blackadder.

SUBSCRIBER:  The rumor circulating in Vienna is that there are rumors circulating in Austria.  They’re even going from mouth to mouth, but nobody can tell you –

PATRIOT:  Nobody knows anything specific, but there must be something to it if even the government has announced that rumors have been spread.  (V. 17)

And thus a “rumors about rumors” sketch is up and running, with no one having any idea what the rumored rumors might be about.

OPTIMIST:  What do you say to the rumors?

GRUMBLER:  I am not aware of them, but I believe them.  (V. 18)

Act II, Scene 17 is the Restaurant Sketch, including the patriotic food jokes:

GENTLEMAN:  No, wait a minute – perfidy noodles – whatever does that mean?

WAITER:  Well, macaroni!

GENTLEMAN:  Oh, yes, right – Scoundrel’s salad, what’s that?

WAITER:  Salad with Italian dressing.

A woman at a pricey spa (“No Wounded Soldiers Allowed”) has become completely corrupted, able to speak only the language of propaganda and advertising:

FRAU WAHNSCHAFFE:  I have only two children, and unfortunately they are not yet eligible for military service.  And, to make things even worse, one of them, to our sorrow, is a girl.  So I have to make do by fantasizing that my boy has already been at the front, and has, naturally, already met a hero’s death.  (III.40)

Then she turns to her own duties.  I presume Kraus is simply giving her actual exhortations from newspapers and magazines:

We had a wholesome broth made with the Excelsior brand of Hindenburg cocoa-cream soup cubes…  In the beginning we really missed ersatz margarine, but now that we have Obu brand, we lack for nothing…  Today we’re going to try the much-praised hodgepodge with Yolktex brand of ersatz egg made from carbonite of lime and baking powder, and a bit of Saladfix, a delicious additive that I prefer by far to Salatin as well as to Saladol.

Battlefield skits, incompetent officers, idiotic leaders, self-serving journalists, repulsive psychiatrists – oh how Kraus hated psychiatry.  But as the play progresses, the tone darkens – as does the war – the comedy becomes blacker and in many cases moves beyond the comic as the absurd becomes nightmarish.  Finally Kraus blows it all up, which I suppose, in my next post, is where Kraus week should end.

Notes toward The Last Days of Mankind - this drama has no actor other than all mankind

“In These Great Times” (1914) is bookended by “Tourist Trips to Hell” (1920), concentrated Karl Kraus.  Half of the articles four pages consists of a reproduction of an actual advertisement for an actual organized tour of recent battlefields:

You ride through destroyed villages to the fortress area of Vaux with its enormous cemeteries containing hundreds of thousands of fallen men.

You receive in the best hotel in Verdun a luncheon with wine and coffee, gratuities included.

And the other half is Kraus’s spitting, incredulous response, although I am not sure any response is necessary besides pointing and glaring:

You receive unforgettable impressions of a world in which there is not a square centimeter of soil that has not been torn up by grenades and advertisements.

Kraus’s argument is again literary.  People should visit battlefields; people who visit battlefields should eat lunch.  The offense of the advertisement is in the language, and what the language implies.

The translations are from the old In These Great Times collection, which presents the advertisement as a four page foldout, the original German on the left, and a spatially accurate English translation on the right.  Richard at Caravanas de Recuerdas just wrote about “Tourist Trips to Hell,” including more of Kraus’s shock as well as a photo of Kraus reading the piece – half of the advertisement faces the camera.  For Kraus, the end of the war did not mean the end of the horror.

In between the two pieces, Kraus wrote a unique masterpiece, The Last Days of Mankind, an 800 page satirical play in five acts and 259 scenes about the public face of the war, the war as seen through censored newspaper reports, official dispatches, and propaganda.  Much of the text – perhaps as much as half – is not by Kraus, but is a collage of quotations.  The plot is the war.  Each act covers a year of the war, and the action that begins in Vienna gradually expands to Germany and elsewhere.  The characters are journalists, officers, politicians – anyone, really – with dialogues between the Optimist and the Grumbler frequently recurring.  The Grumbler is often said, by people with a weak understanding of fiction, to be the stand-in for Kraus himself.

The play lends itself to rearrangement – any performance would require it – and I have seen three attempts to give the poor English reader a glimpse of the contents.  The German Library selection of Kraus includes one key scene, the Grumbler’s final monologue and statement of purpose:

I have written a tragedy, whose perishing hero is mankind, whose tragic conflict, the conflict between the world and nature, has a fatal ending.  Alas, because this drama has no actor other than all mankind, it has no audience! 

In These Great Times compresses the play into less than a hundred pages.  The selection looks performable, but becomes deceptively coherent and more directly pacifistic, when the play’s pacifism is actually more ambiguous.  Or so it seems in the longest available selection, the 230 pages of the 1974 translation (by Alexander Gode and Sue Ellen Wright) on which I will rely for the next couple of days. 

Edward Timms, in his two volume critical biography of Kraus, writes that “[t]his edition eliminates from the play antisemitic and anti-capitalist utterances which might give offence to American readers.”*  The notion that whoever the American readers of Kraus might have been in 1974 would have been “offended” by “anti-capitalist utterances” is hilarious; the idea that British readers would not be offended by Kraus’s anti-Semitism is a different kind of joke.  All right, Timms did not think that sentence through.  But I take the warning that I am working with a fragment of a text, however impressive the fragment.

*  Edward Timms, Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist, 1986, Yale UP, p. 429.

Karl Kraus, war writer - his misused language beautifies a misused life

Karl Kraus has become a World War I writer.  It is a strange fate.  The prophet was right, so his prophecy swallowed him.  Clichéd, thoughtless language really did lead to the apocalypse, or at least an apocalypse, a war that quickly became an inescapable nightmare.  The crazy guy with the “World Is Ending” sign was right.  At least metaphorically right.

Also relevant is that much of Kraus’s best writing is in one way or another about the war.  The two decades of writing leading up to it becomes background for The Last Days of Mankind.  Such are the vicissitudes of masterpieces.

Kraus’s first major response to the world war, an article he read in November 1914 and published in December, is titled “In These Great Times,” a horrible phrase taken from the newspapers, a phrase that is easy to mock:

… the times measure themselves and are astonished at how great they have become overnight.  But they have probably always been great, and I simply did not notice it.  Thus it was an optical fault of mine to perceive them as small.  (80)

I had planned to chew through this article for a post or two, but upon review I have discovered that it is so think and knotted, as rhetorically complex as Thomas Carlyle, that I am mostly baffled.  The argument is built of paradoxes:

Let him who has something to say come forward and be silent!  (71)

Perhaps the obscurity of detail helped keep Kraus out of prison.  He was the only major German-language writer to speak out against the war.  Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Hauptmann, Thomas Mann – all wrote and spoke enthusiastically in favor of the German and Austrian cause, at least for a time.  Arthur Schnitzler was wiser; he followed Kraus’s advice and was silent.  Only Kraus spoke in opposition, although the nature of his opposition changed and broadened as the costs of the war grew.

The main target remained the same, though.  Kraus’s greatest enemies were other writers, especially journalists (the line in quotations marks is from Antony and Cleopatra, a messenger’s response to Cleopatra’s anger over bad news.):

“Gracious madam, I that do bring the news made not the match.”  But the reporter does make the match, sets the house on fire, and turns the horrors he fabricates into truth.  Through decades of practice he has produced in mankind that degree of unimaginativeness which enables it to wage a war of extermination against itself…  he has the reflected glory of heroic qualities at his disposal, and his misused language beautifies a misused life – as though eternity had saved its apex for the age in which a reporter lives. (76)

The cause of war – or at least this war – is unimaginativeness, which is caused by misused language.  This is a writer’s argument, a literary argument.  How many people could possibly find it convincing?  But it is not a paradox to Kraus, at least, and his anger at the press and the poets is real enough.

“In These Great Times” can be found in the 1976 Carcanet collection In These Great Times, ed. and trans. Harry Zohn.  The forthcoming Penguin Classics Kraus anthology is titled In This Great Time and Other Writings, so I will bet you one silver dollar that the essay will be in that book too.

I must wait until my writings are outdated - it's Karl Kraus week!

A wiser, more experienced writer,  for instance a professional critic, would have no qualms introducing a week about Viennese satirist and scold Karl Kraus by lightly rewriting the introductory piece I wrote a month ago.  A fool and an amateur, I will just point to it.  The Jonathan Franzen book about Karl Kraus is still on Amazon, evidence but not proof that it is not a prank.

I hear noises which others don’t hear and which disturb for me the music of the spheres, which others don’t hear either.

Today I will borrow some of Kraus’s aphorisms to help describe him.  They are all taken from Karl Kraus, Hermann Broch, Elias Canetti, Robert Walser: Selected Short Writings (Continuum, 2006), pp. 24-33.  For some reason the entire Kraus section is available, at least in the United States, via Google Books.

Kraus was a satirist and cultural critic.  I suppose today we would call him a media critic, since he spent so much time attacking journalism, (“No ideas and the ability to express them – that’s a journalist”).  His weapons include parody, scorn, and even reason, but his main form of attack is accurate quotation.  Kinda hitting below the belt.  His work is filled with lines borrowed from advertising, politicians, and newspapers, sometimes ironically repurposed, sometimes devastating when presented as flatly as possible.

I do not know the work of H. L. Mencken so well, but he might be thought of as an American cousin of Kraus, an enemy of cant, propaganda, and officialese.  This sounds like Mencken, doesn’t it?

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse.

Well, it sounds like any number of curmudgeons.  Kraus is a classic Austrian curmudgeon, perhaps the first great one.

My public and I understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I do not say what it would like to hear.

Both Kraus’s topicality and his emphasis on language have caused problems for translators.  Some – perhaps much – of Kraus’s writing is probably not worth the necessary compromises, although I would like to see some careful, scholarly, independently wealthy translator prove me wrong.  Regardless, enough good pieces can be and have been translated to provide Caravana de Recuerdos and me with plenty of material.

My readers believe that I write just for the day because I write about the day.  So I must wait until my writings are outdated.  Then they may possibly achieve timelessness.

Kraus wrote one long piece, The Last Days of Mankind, nominally a play, a savage, complex treatment of World War I that is said to be 800 pages long.  About a quarter is available in a 1974 English version, and even that mangled fragment is a masterpiece.  Perhaps the best-selling Franzen book will inspire someone to finish it.

The dog sniffs first, then lifts his leg.  One cannot well object to this lack of originality.  But that the writer reads first, before he writes, is pitiful.

Hey, careful with the teeth, there, Karl!

He found a splendid subject for a painting - what The Belly of Paris is about

Of course I emphasize the aesthetic argument of The Belly of Paris, since that is what I usually do, but I do not believe that I overemphasize it.  Gustave Flaubert is still alive and writing in 1873, and this is a novel by a disciple.

My suspicion is that The Belly of Paris is written primarily for passages like the ones I have been writing about, that the plot and characters and so on serving as frames and picture-hanging wire.

He would rejoin them on the opposite side of the street, where he found a splendid subject for a painting: the stallkeepers under their big faded umbrellas, red, blue, and mauve, which, mounted on poles, formed little humps of colour throughout the market, catching the fiery glow of the setting sun, before it faded away over the carrots and turnips.  One vendor, an old woman of about a hundred, was sheltering three scrawny lettuces under a battered umbrella of pink silk.  (171)

I wonder if this is stolen from an actual painting, a Murillo or something like that.

Frankly, I have trouble taking Zola seriously on any subject but art.  I have only read three Zola novels, and none of those the right novels, which I think by reputation would be Nana and Germinal, so I know I am missing a lot.

Zola was a great champion of the poor, or so I understand, but none of these novels have been about the poor.  The Kill is about the nouveau riche, Thérèse Raquin and The Belly of Paris about bourgeois shopkeepers.  L’Assomoir is about poor people, isn’t it – that one comes four years after Belly, and it’s then another eight years to Germinal.  I am just saying that you would not think of Zola as any sort of crusader based on the three books I have read.

The Belly of Paris is also a novel about politics, with a plot about a group of radicals planning to overthrow Louis Napoleon’s government, which is portrayed as, essentially, a police state.  This part of the story features an outstanding twist which would have made Kafka laugh, and the resolution of the story is good, too, with the women of Les Halles, the shopkeepers, at open was with the radicals, using the strongest weapon they have, which turns out to be gossip.  I am only giving away a surprise to readers unfamiliar with French history.  In 1858 a plan for revolution can only fizzle or dissolve; it will not explode.

I do not doubt Zola’s contempt for Louis Napoleon’s oppressive government or for the fat, complacent bourgeois.  Apparently fearing I will miss the point, he gives the painter a monologue about the Battle of the Fat and the Thin, “two hostile groups, one of which devours the other and grows fat and sleek and endlessly enjoys itself” (191).  The book has eighty pages left, but I the ending is no longer in doubt, even setting aside the fact that the revolutionaries are complete fools.

My suspicion, based on what I know about the author but to some degree sniffed out from some of the ambivalences in this novel, is that Zola was aware that he was one of the Fat – thus the loving descriptions of food, the marvelous excess of the writing – but had a novelist’s sympathy for the Thin.  But I am likely just projecting, since I am also one of the Fat.

That was my masterpiece. The best thing I’ve ever done. - the art of The Belly of Paris

The painter, Claude Lantier, young and ambitious, is the character who does not belong in The Belly of Paris, who is an outsider to Les Halles.  He is what is now called a point-of-view character, someone who can offer his eyes to the book’s reader, like a pair of binoculars.  Whenever Zola wants to go for a stroll through Les Halles he drops the painter into the novel as a guide.  Lantier is the one who sees like Zola sees.

But he never felt the elbows digging into him, he stood in ecstasy before the lungs and lights that hung from the auction hooks.  He often explained to Cadine and Marjolin that there was no sight more beautiful than this.  The lights were a tender rose-pink, deepening gradually and turning at the lower edges to a bright crimson.  Claude compared them to watered satin, finding no other term to describe the silken softness of the flowing lengths of flesh which fell in folds like the caught-up skirts of a dancer.  (164-5)

And Zola is not quite done with Lantier’s rapture, but that seems like enough.  Plus I have become distracted by metaphor – “ox hearts as solid as church bells,” “yellow sauerkraut that looked like old lace.”  Zola uses this kind of language throughout the novel, whether or not the painter is present.  It is only the painter, though, who approaches the world with the same sort of appreciative aesthetic distance as the narrator.

His reward is a scene that rivals the Symphony of Cheeses.  He describes what happened when his aunt lets him decorate the window of her charcuterie:

“I had plenty of strong colours to work with – the red of the tongues, the yellow of the hams, the blue of the paper shavings, the pink of the things that had been cut into, the green of the sprigs of heather, and the black puddings – a magnificent black, which I’ve never managed to produce on my palette.  And, of course, the caul, the sausages, the andouilles, and the crumbed trotters gave me a very subtle range of greys.  With all that I created a real work of art.”  (187)

The resulting portrait-in-foodstuffs is crowned by “a huge turkey with a white breast, marbled under its skin by the black truffles,” “magnificent, like  a huge belly,” and also “primitive and ironic.”  This is the first truffled turkey I have encountered since I started Wuthering Expectations, which is exciting.  The aunt “thought the turkey was so obscene that she threw me out.”

“Never mind!  That was my masterpiece.  The best thing I’ve ever done.”  (188)

The word "I" might refer to more than one person, only one of them fictional.  Thirteen years later, Lantier will star in his own novel, The Masterpiece, in which he likely surpasses the sausage shop window in some way or another.   I assume the later novel works quite differently than The Belly of Paris, that as Lantier becomes the object of study another character will have to step into the role of observer and tour guide.  Who will tell me which passages are particularly good?

Zola is a big show-off - Claude stopped in his tracks, uttering little cries of admiration

The belly of Paris is a farmers market, Les Halles, built in the 1850s as one of the many massive and rapid changes to the city from which Zola gets so much juice.  The Belly of Paris is set in 1858 or so, fifteen years before its publication, when the modern glass and iron building is novel, when the society that forms around and within it is new.  The structure was gargantuan, worthy of the city of Rabelais.

In a fit of insanity, urban planners tore it down in 1971 and replaced it with a sterile park and tony, useless underground shopping mall.  This in a country with the gastronomic heritage of France.  Perhaps they will rebuild it someday.  In a spirit of full disclosure, you are reading someone who, when in Europe, will go to a market every day if possible.

Florent, “remarkably long and as thin as a rake” (4), has escaped from Devil’s Island and made his way back to France where – I have to interrupt and mount one of my many colorful hobbyhorses.  Here we have another of the strangely plentiful French novels with a protagonist who has escaped from prison.  At least he is not super strong.  Although other characters in the novel are super strong ("He likes to do a strong-man act; he's got a magnificent physique," 20).  I do not get it.

So the thin, starving Florent is deposited in Les Halles.  He was imprisoned for political crimes (so this is a novel of 1848 and thus also a novel of 1871), and eventually becomes tangled up in politics again, giving the novel something of a story.  The Fat consume the Thin.  Honestly, a third of the way in I had no idea what the story as such was going to be, nor did I care much, nor, based on the wandering way he tells it did Zola.  He was busy with other things.

Boy, as I leaf through the first chapter, I feel like I could quote almost anything.  It is a long, continuous scene that takes the character to and around the market, showing it off to Florent and to me, and showing Zola off in the process.

On the footpath in the Rue Rambuteau there were some enormous piles of cauliflowers, stacked symmetrically like cannon balls.  Their soft white flesh spread out like huge roses in the midst of their thick green leaves, and they looked rather like bridal bouquets displayed on giant flower stalls.  Claude stopped in his tracks, uttering little cries of admiration.  (17)

Claude is me, reading this chapter.  By the way, does “giant flower stalls” sound weird?  “[A]lignés dans des jardinières colossales”?  The translation is British, so perhaps “stalls” sound fine in British English.

Remind me to return to Claude.  He is a painter, and likely an extrusive element in the novel, an unnecessary representative of Art, but he also supplies a scene as impressive and insane as the Symphony of Cheeses.

…  the opening to the Rue Rambuteau was blocked by a barricade of orange pumpkins in two rows, sprawling at their ease and swelling out their bellies.  Here and there gleamed the varnished golden-brown of a basket of onions, the blood-red of a heap of tomatoes, the soft yellow of a display of cucumbers, and the deep mauve of aubergines; while large black radishes, laid down in funereal carpets, formed dark patches in the brilliance of the early morning.

Claude clapped his hands at the sight.  (26)

Maybe, given this kind of passage, the painter is the omniscient narrator.  And maybe, given a revolutionary plot, there is some foreshadowing here – cannon balls, street barricades, “blood-red,” “funereal carpets.”  True, there is, but every reader and I know that there weren’t no revolution in 1858.

Zola's musical cheeses - They all seemed to stink together, in a foul cacophony

For the next three or four days, I am writing about Émile Zola’s The Belly of Paris (1873), the third of the twenty Rougon-Macquart novels and coincidentally the third Zola novel I have read.  There is enough that I am tempted to begin generalizing about Zola, and I am sure that would lead to some entertaining and bizarre errors, but instead I will jump straight to the good stuff, the cheese, the musical cheese:

As they were all rather short of breath by this time, it was the camembert they could smell.  This cheese, with its gamy odour, had overpowered the milder smells of the marolles and the limbourg; its power was remarkable.  (213)

Actually, that is not the good stuff, just set up – here it comes:

Every now and then, however, a slight whiff, a flute-like note, came from the parmesan, while the bries came into play with their soft, musty smell, the gentle sound, so to speak, of a damp tambourine.  The livarot launched into an overwhelming reprise, and the géromé kept up the symphony with a sustained high note.

A couple of pages earlier there is a long paragraph that simply lists the cheeses in the market stall, like “some Dutch cheeses suggesting decapitated heads smeared in dried blood and hard as skull” and roqueforts that “had a princely air, their fat faces veined in blue and yellow, like the victims of some shameful disease common to rich people who have eaten too many truffles” (211), and though some of the cheeses add “its own shrill note” none of them are otherwise described as musical.  They just stink.

But as the sun and wind change, the cheeses begins to sing:

They all seemed to stink together, in a foul cacophony: from the oppressiveness of the heavy Dutch cheeses and the gruyères to the sharp alkaline note of the olivet.  From the cantal, Cheshire, and goat’s milk came the sound of a bassoon, punctuated by the sudden, sharp notes of the neufchâtels, the troyes, and the mont-d’ors.  Then the smells went wild and became completely jumbled, the port-salut, limbourg, géromé, marolles, livarot, and pont-l'évèque combining into a great explosion of smells.  The stench rose and spread, no longer a collection of individual smells, but a huge, sickening mixture.  It seemed for a moment that it was the vile words of Madame Lecoeur and Mademoiselle Saget that had produced this dreadful odour.  (215-6)

Readers not distracted by the cheese may have noticed that the last metaphor is actually related to characters and thus potentially to some sort of story.  The novel also has those, but I may just devote the rest of the week to descriptions of food.

Sometimes I see people say that food writing makes them hungry, but I am a well-fed fellow, so it just makes me gluttonous.  Zola’s scene reminded me of La Maison Jean d’Alos, a cheese shop of genius in Bordeaux (thankfully climate-controlled).  You cannot tell, but my copying of those passages was interrupted several times so I could look at cheese.

Maybe tomorrow I should write about the blood pudding.  It is less seductive.

I have returned to Zola as part of the Zoladdiction event.

One should feel at ease on these amorous occasions - an early French influence on James Joyce, and also Schnitzler

Another precursor of stream-of-consciousness writing, this time suggested to me by Doug Skinner, distinguished translator of 19th century French more-than-curiosities.  I do not really care who invented the technique, or believe that any one writer did invent it, but I enjoy seeing how creative people think.

The text at hand is Edouard Dujardin’s 1887 novella Les lauriers sont coupés, translated by Stuart Gilbert and published by New Directions in 1938 under the title We’ll to the Woods No More.  A dandyish Paris law student is attempting to keep an actress; she is attempting to fleece him while sleeping with him as little as possible.

The stream-of-consciousness device allows the pursuit of a couple of good psychological ideas.  First, to what extent is the student aware he is being robbed.  Moments of awareness flare up but are suppressed by his libido or ego.  Second, he can work on conscious a scheme at odds with his mostly unconscious desires.  He will supply money but refuse to sleep with the actress, thus a) demonstrating his superiority and indifference, and / or b) causing the actress to give in to him.  Of course, the slightest sign of sexual interest from the actress causes the entire scheme to collapse, since he wants sex far more than the rather abstract pleasure of being above it all.

If the student sounds a bit shallow, so was Lieutenant Gustl.  The interior monologue is an especially good tool for working with unreflective simpletons.  These nitwits certainly could not write their own stories.  They would have trouble sitting still for ten minutes.  No, that is not the problem with Dujardin’s writing.  This is:

Here’s the soup, piping hot; waiter might splash some, better keep an eye on him.  All’s well; let’s begin.  Too hot, this soup; wait, try again.  Not half bad.  I lunched a bit too late, no appetite left.  All the same I must eat some dinner.  Soup finished.  (22)

Dujardin only rarely does anything too interesting with his new toy.  Perhaps he lacks the psychological insight of Schnitzler or Joyce, who both read and praised Dujardin.  He has trouble with any direction of thought besides straight ahead.  I will not say that Dujardin is unrealistic in his depiction of thought – I happily accept that in this story this dim fellow thinks exactly the thoughts presented – but I am reading with the knowledge of what Woolf and Faulkner would have done with the same material.  They would not, in order to fill the reader in on the past history of the love affair, have to resort to a long scene in which the student reads  his old love letters.  They would have the past constantly intrude, flashes of remembered dialogue or emotion, a gesture or a color briefly freeing a fragment of a memory.

Dujardin just kind of motors along.  He sometimes achieves some pleasing Romantic poetic effects, and he can be funny:

…in any case, she will refuse to accept my note.  There, I tear it up; in two pieces; tear across; four pieces; again; that makes eight.  Again; no, imposs.  It won’t d to drop these bits of card on the floor; someone might pick them up; better try chewing them.  Ugh!  Horrible taste.  Drop them then…  (27)

More importantly, most importantly, is this scene, which I will edit for length but not content:

…  better take my precautions while I am alone; must be nearly six hours since that lavatory in the Boulevard Sébastopol; the privy here is on the left of the hall; one should feel at ease on these amorous occasions…  good business, the light’s on; door’s ajar; remember gentlemen are requested to adjust; for this relief ------ and very needful it was…  (132-3, ellipses mine but not those dashes)

So lucky and discerning French readers got to witness this character relieve himself over thirty years before shocked English readers accompanied Leopold Bloom to the toilet in Ulysses.  Now here is an innovation worth pursuing back to its source.

Not this week, though, since tomorrow I will move a ways up the French literary digestive tract.