Calendary Literature – September – The House of Mirth
September 14, 2009 at 1:49 pm | In Calendary Literature, Gender, Literature, Photos, The Course of the Year | Leave a CommentIt’s been a while since I last posted a “Calendary Literature”, and I figured it was about time.
In Denmark we have a highly popular September song “Septembers himmel er så blå” (“The Sky of September is So Blue”), which is sung by school children throughout the month. It’s a lovely song and the lyrics describe September as a month of an almost unreal fertility: The apples are so red, the sky is so blue, and the larks still sing, and so it’s easy to forget that this is actually the first month of Autumn, and the first step towards winter.
I always liked that idea – September as an almost unnaturally beautiful month, the sky crystally clear and blue like a the eyes of a feverish child, and the ripe fruits red like the cheeks of a consumptive. (Whoa, that last sentence may just be the most emo thing I’ve written since I was 14. But stay with me here).
So September always induces a kind of swan-song-atmosphere in me – it’s the swan song of summer to me – , and as I sat down to think of a piece of literature that gives me that same feeling, I thought of the second-to-last chapter depicting Lily Bart’s feverish hallucination from Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.
I love The House of Mirth, it’s one of my favourite books, and I think that of Lily’s character is one of the most poignantly depicted literary characters I’ve ever encountered. A beautiful, decorative woman, Lily is a product of her society, but she’s also a symptom of it, because she is so clearly doomed to perish in the same society that’s created her.
And Lily’s problem is essentially that she is so extremely, so purely ornamental. I don’t mean to say that she is so beautiful that it kills her, but rather to say that she is doomed to perish because she has succeeded so well in the art of being an ornament, that is, something static and mute, that she’s been rendered incapable of mastering the art of the narrative, the temporal, consecutive story. As Susan Gubar points out in the inspired “The Blank Page”, the excellent tableau vivants that Lily performs in a central chapter actually becomes a foreshadowing of Lily’s dead body on the bed in the last chapter. Lily is a spatial being and masters the spatial arts, but when it comes to the temporal, like story-telling, she is easily lost. This becomes obvious in the way she has no control over her own story as told by her surroundings, and so it becomes a story of her own down-fall.
However, there is one brief moment, just before Lily ends up on her death-bed, when Lily experiences a kind of sudden, ominous blooming, and it becomes one of very few moments in the novel when Lily seems to be linked to something temporal, something that would make Lily part of a story rather than just being a pretty picture. It occurs in the scene where Lily, roaming the streets in her sick and pale state, encounters a poor girl, Nettie Struther, whom she’s helped out in the past. Nettie offers to take Lily home so that she may warm herself in their kitchen and see Nettie’s baby, and Nettie tells her the story of how Lily’s help in the past has succesfully changed Nettie’s life. A story which Lily, with her typical lack of sense of a good story, has been oblivious to: Nettie had been seduced by a gentleman and had been left by him, only to take ill. She came close to succumbing to her illness, until Lily’s financial aids had given her the means to go to a sanatorium. Nettie made a full recovery and was later reunited with George, a childhood friend, who proposed to her. She told him her whole story, but he still wanted to marry her, and Nettie is now living with George and her new-born daughter. In her weak state, Lily enjoys Nettie’s company immensely:
“It was warm in the kitchen, which, when Nettie Struther’s match had made a flame leap from the gas-jet above the table, revealed itself to Lily as extraordinarily small and almost miraculously clean. A fire shone through the polished flanks of the iron stove, and near it stood a crib in which a baby was sitting upright, with incipient anxiety struggling for expression on a countenance still placid with sleep.
(…)
The baby had sunk back blissfully replete, and Mrs. Struther softly rose to lay the bottle aside. Then she paused before Miss Bart. (…) Lily (…) rose with a smile and held out her arms; and the mother, understanding the gesture, laid her child in them. The baby, feeling herself detached from her habitual anchorage, made an instinctive motion of resistance; but the soothing influences of digestion prevailed, and Lily felt the soft weight sink trustfully against her breast. The child’s confidence in its safety thrilled her with a sense of warmth and returning life, and she bent over, wondering at the rosy blur of the little face, the empty clearness of the eyes, the vague tendrilly motions of the folding and unfolding fingers. At first the burden in her arms seemed as light as a pink cloud or a heap of down, but as she continued to hold it the weight increased, sinking deeper, and penetrating her with a strange sense of weakness, as though the child entered into her and became a part of herself. ”
There’s a comforting warmth to this scene that stands out in the novel about a harsh and ruthless social scene, and both the baby and the scenary of the kitchen, I feel, contribute to this atmosphere: Being the ornament that she is, Lily has hitherto been placed in sitting rooms and in halls and in theatres and, as Gubar notes, she has mostly thought of her surroundings as backdrop scenery. In this scene, Lily is placed for the first time in surroundings that are functional rather than decorative; a small, cosy, and functional room where warmth and nurtrition comes from – a room that even shelders a new little life, Nettie’s infant daughter. The scene makes a profound impression on Lily who feels the tragedy of her own life all the stronger later that evening, as she is alone in her own room:
“It was no longer, however, from the vision of material poverty that she turned with the greatest shrinking. She had a sense of deeper empoverishment–of an inner destitution compared to which outward conditions dwindled into insignificance. It was indeed miserable to be poor–to look forward to a shabby, anxious middle-age, leading by dreary degrees of economy and self-denial to gradual absorption in the dingy communal existence of the boarding-house. But there was something more miserable still–it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years. That was the feeling which possessed her now–the feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them. And as she looked back she saw that there had never been a time when she had had any real relation to life.
Her parents too had been rootless, blown hither and thither on every wind of fashion, without any personal existence to shelter them from its shifting gusts. She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer to her than another: there was no centre of early pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others. In whatever form a slowly-accumulated past lives in the blood–whether in the concrete image of the old house stored with visual memories, or in the conception of the house not built with hands, but made up of inherited passions and loyalties–it has the same power of broadening and deepening the individual existence, of attaching it by mysterious links of kinship to all the mighty sum of human striving.
Such a vision of the solidarity of life had never before come to Lily. She had had a premonition of it in the blind motions of her mating-instinct; but they had been checked by the disintegrating influences of the life about her. All the men and women she knew were like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild centrifugal dance: her first glimpse of the continuity of life had come to her that evening in Nettie Struther’s kitchen.
The poor little working-girl who had found strength to gather up the fragments of her life, and build herself a shelter with them, seemed to Lily to have reached the central truth of existence. It was a meagre enough life, on the grim edge of poverty, with scant margin for possibilities of sickness or mischance, but it had the frail audacious permanence of a bird’s nest built on the edge of a cliff–a mere wisp of leaves and straw, yet so put together that the lives entrusted to it may hang safely over the abyss.
Yes–but it had taken two to build the nest; the man’s faith as well as the woman’s courage. Lily remembered Nettie’s words: I knew he knew about me. Her husband’s faith in her had made her renewal possible–it is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be!”
It had taken a man’s sense of temporality to create the continuity that Lily admires about Nettie’s life, and Lily’s tragedy has been that she has been unable to find a man that would construct for her the narrative that she needed and that her ornamental self had been unable to create. Lawrence Selden was the man who came the closest to helping her when she needed her, but he ultimatively failed her. Nevertheless, and this is the part that I find so beautifully Septemberly about this chapter, as Lily is lying on the bed, she is haunted by the benevolent spirit of Nettie’s healthy baby girl. There are other stories about Lily than the one men in Lily’s society are spreading about her, there is also Nettie’s narrative, according to which the little baby would never have existed if it weren’t for Lily. Lily has a dim awareness of this as she empties the sleeping draught that has been her only consolation during the last harsh period of her life:
“She had not imagined that such a multiplication of wakefulness was possible: her whole past was reenacting itself at a hundred different points of consciousness. Where was the drug that could still this legion of insurgent nerves? The sense of exhaustion would have been sweet compared to this shrill beat of activities; but weariness had dropped from her as though some cruel stimulant had been forced into her veins.
She could bear it–yes, she could bear it; but what strength would be left her the next day? Perspective had disappeared–the next day pressed close upon her, and on its heels came the days that were to follow–they swarmed about her like a shrieking mob. She must shut them out for a few hours; she must take a brief bath of oblivion. She put out her hand, and measured the soothing drops into a glass; but as she did so, she knew they would be powerless against the supernatural lucidity of her brain. She had long since raised the dose to its highest limit, but tonight she felt she must increase it. She knew she took a slight risk in doing so–she remembered the chemist’s warning. If sleep came at all, it might be a sleep without waking. But after all that was but one chance in a hundred: the action of the drug was incalculable, and the addition of a few drops to the regular dose would probably do no more than procure for her the rest she so desperately needed….
She did not, in truth, consider the question very closely–the physical craving for sleep was her only sustained sensation. Her mind shrank from the glare of thought as instinctively as eyes contract in a blaze of light–darkness, darkness was what she must have at any cost. She raised herself in bed and swallowed the contents of the glass; then she blew out her candle and lay down.
She lay very still, waiting with a sensuous pleasure for the first effects of the soporific. She knew in advance what form they would take–the gradual cessation of the inner throb, the soft approach of passiveness, as though an invisible hand made magic passes over her in the darkness. The very slowness and hesitancy of the effect increased its fascination: it was delicious to lean over and look down into the dim abysses of unconsciousness. Tonight the drug seemed to work more slowly than usual: each passionate pulse had to be stilled in turn, and it was long before she felt them dropping into abeyance, like sentinels falling asleep at their posts. But gradually the sense of complete subjugation came over her, and she wondered languidly what had made her feel so uneasy and excited. She saw now that there was nothing to be excited about–she had returned to her normal view of life. Tomorrow would not be so difficult after all: she felt sure that she would have the strength to meet it. She did not quite remember what it was that she had been afraid to meet, but the uncertainty no longer troubled her. She had been unhappy, and now she was happy–she had felt herself alone, and now the sense of loneliness had vanished.
She stirred once, and turned on her side, and as she did so, she suddenly understood why she did not feel herself alone. It was odd–but Nettie Struther’s child was lying on her arm: she felt the pressure of its little head against her shoulder. She did not know how it had come there, but she felt no great surprise at the fact, only a gentle penetrating thrill of warmth and pleasure. She settled herself into an easier position, hollowing her arm to pillow the round downy head, and holding her breath lest a sound should disturb the sleeping child.
As she lay there she said to herself that there was something she must tell Selden, some word she had found that should make life clear between them. She tried to repeat the word, which lingered vague and luminous on the far edge of thought–she was afraid of not remembering it when she woke; and if she could only remember it and say it to him, she felt that everything would be well.”
The word escapes Lily, of course – it comes to her too late, and so does Selden, who comes to see Lily the next day and finds only her beautiful corpse. But that ending would not have been quite the same without Lily’s consumptive blooming in this second-to-last chapter, and that short glimpse of what might have been, of Lily tenderly holding in her arms the future of Nettie Struther.
Calendary Literature – December – “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
December 30, 2007 at 9:13 pm | In Calendary Literature, Literature, The Course of the Year | 1 CommentAs I touched upon in my Calendary Music” post this month, December and its solstice tend to get me in a deliciously melancholy mood. This is the reason why I’ve chosen a relatively un-Christmasy piece of literature for my Calendary Literary post – “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost. I realize that I’m bordering on the contrived by choosing this very popular poem, but I do love it so much, and it covers my perception of December quite well.
The sentiment and over-all theme of the poem, the way I read it, is a yearning for Death, and an obligation to go on living, and the two contrasted by each other. The motifs are a wintery landscape around winter solstice (“the darkest evening of the year”), and I think that’s a very appropriate choice of motif. In the times of the most intense darkness and cold we’re drawn towards our own finality, the same way the persona of Robert Frost’s poem is drawn towards the wintery, dark and frozen wood. Here, there is no other noise than “the sweep/of easy wind and downy flake”. How nice to be rid of the noise of the world! I have neighbours who are partial towards Backstreet Boys’s first album (and a special partialiaty ”We’ve Got It Going On” and the repeat button), so I know what I’m talking about here. How nice, also, to be rid of the petty rules and rituals of society; all those limits and boundaries that dictate, for instance, that we do not enter a forest without being sure that we have permission to do so. Living is running into one’s own limitations constantly, and such a freedom could lie in the
But of course, such a yearning for silence is ultimately self-destructive, and luckily, the persona’s horse, who’s been dragging his sleigh on this dark night, is there to wake him up (“He gives his harness bells a shake,/To ask if there is some mistake”).
And the horse is such a wonderfully tangible and productive creature; useful for crafts, intelligent, and sensitive to the company of humans, and the horse is equipped with bells. The persona, presumably, has put the bells on the horse’s harness, and what he’s probably remembering as the horse shakes and makes the bell ring, is that he did that for a reason. He did that because of the other people he might run into during this dark wintery world; the world that he owes the responsibility of doing safety precautions such as fastening bells to his sleigh when riding in the dark. And then there’s also that thing about life that is not an obligation, that is something else; love, perhaps friendship, or the irrationally gratifying feeling of patting a horse’s soft muzzle and reassure it, if it seems to be uneasy on a cold, winter night.
And so, the persona carries on through this dark night, towards brighter days, but not without just a hint of weariness at the thought of the noise of the world and the tiresome, petty repetition of every day life contrasted by the progressively superlative woods: “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,/but I have promises to keep/and miles to go before I sleep/and miles to go before I sleep.”
A beautiful, significant poem. Here it is, in its entirety:
“Whose woods these are I think I know,
His house is in the village though.
He will not see me stopping here,
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer,
To stop without a farmhouse near,
Between the woods and frozen lake,
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake,
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep,
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
/marie
Calendary Literature – June – Mrs Dalloway
September 28, 2007 at 6:35 pm | In Calendary Literature, The Course of the Year | Leave a CommentHere it is – the continuation of my series of entries, where I comment on a particular piece of literature and a piece of music that reminds me of the month we’re in.
So, June, huh? Yeah, I remember June 2007. I turned in my paper on the lais of French medieval poet Marie de France, and the boyfriend and I went to Amsterdam and had a wonderful time there. It was a nice month.
The calm water of an Amsterdam canal on a beautiful June evening
…It was also THREE FREAKIN’ MONTHS AGO, for crying out loud! And I cannot believe I’ve come this far behind. Oh, well. I guess it’s never too late. And perhaps making my June entry at this time of the year will comfort me in my gloomy autumn mood.
My choice for the literary section of my calendary arts project is Mrs. Dalloway, or, rather, a specific part of it. This is hardly an innovative choice; Mrs. Dalloway takes place in June, one day in June, and revolves around a number of characters’ experience of this early summer day.“…For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh,; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass brands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.”
So reads one of the opening passages of Virginia Woolf’s novel. The above quote is told from middle-aged main character Clarissa Dalloway’s point of view, and it sets the premise for the rest of the novel, essentially this question (although I am certainly simplfying it here, now): In this life how is it possible to die?
Virginia Woolf
It’s impossible for me to single out a specific passage of this novel that I love more than the rest of it (although the above passage ranks high on my list of favourite literary quotes) – I love it all equally. I love all the characters, even the ones that annoy me (like the painfully recognizable Peter Walsh and his pathetic attempts at escape from inevitable path of life and death via an endless number of romantic detours with women), I love the slow pace of the story, and above all I love Woolf’s bubbling, lively, yet heavy and significant prose, and the flow of her stream of consciousness. But since this is to be my Literary June entry, I’ve chosen one passage that I find to be the most June-like of the novel: The description of Mrs. Dalloway’s 17-year-old daughert’s omnibus ride.
“And Elizabeth waited in Victoria Street for an omnibus. It was so nice to be out of doors. She thought perhaps she need not go home just yet. It was so nice to be out in the air. So she would get on to an omnibus. And already, even as she stood there, in her very well-cut clothes, it was beginning… People were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lilies; and it made her life a burden to her, for she so much preferred being left alone to do what she liked in the country, but they would compare her to lilies, and she had to got to parties, and London was so dreary compared with being alone in the country with her father and the dogs.”
If March is the month of going out wearing too thin clothes and catching a cold accordingly, June is definitely the month of this: Of being young and attractive and with potential and to be receiving sappy compliments. Everything is blooming in June, the high school students graduate, and the comparison between the blossoming young ladies and the luscious lilacs emerging purple and white from the fences is so very corny, but it’s always made nevertheless. Woolf is obviously fully aware that the comparisons made in the above passage are pure kitsch: early dawn, fawns, and a random collection of botany (with the lily taking the prize as the most clichéd comparison for a virginal young girl), but it’s very authentic in as much as this is exactly the kind of imagery that surrounds a young girl.
This is how what June does to me, too, the same thing that a lovely, promising young woman will do to most people’s clichéd poetic streak. June is when I’m at my most sentimental, and I don’t even really try to fight it. I think of myself as at least somewhat cool and reflected, but June brings out my inner sappy-head. In June I ride my bike singing patriotic summer songs. In June I get misty-eyed over old family pictures. In June I cry openly upon seeing the silhouettes around the St. John’s Eve bonfire. I remember having a picnic with a girl friend around midsummer a couple of years ago, and as we were walking home in the bright summer evening, and the sky was all pastel-icious and the blackbirds were singing, I completely channelled Anne of Green Gables and exclaimed: “Oh! It’s summer now! It’s summer, and we’re young and alive!”, and I swear I came this close to hugging a damn birch tree, right there and then.
In short: June kills my inner critic and makes me childishly happy and sappily poetic. And I think if we have these tendencies within us, we should all let them loose in June.
/marie
Calendary Literature – May – the nightingale in literary context
August 5, 2007 at 5:00 pm | In Calendary Literature, Literature, Odes, The Course of the Year | 1 CommentMay and June came and went without me getting updated my Calendary Literature this year, but I figure better late than never, right? So here I am, with the May post.
May is the month of brightening nights and of serenades being gushed romantically into the increasingly light blue of these nights, and I tried to think of a particular serenade to post here, but instead I think I’ll do a “theme”-post like the one I did for February, and the object of this theme-post shall be the world’s first and oldest serenade-singer, that is the nightingale, in literary context.
I’m sad to admit that I haven’t actually ever heard a nightingale in real life, but I have been told about the alleged beauty of the bird’s song for as long as I can remember – even back in preschool I was taught an elaborate song about a persona’s imaginative puff-the-magic-dragon-ish escape from the real world into a “happy dream-land” through the mere sound of the nightingale’s song. “Nattergal, du er lille og grå, men dine sange må vi lære at forstå!” [“Nigthingale, you are small and grey, but we must learn to understand your songs!”] the lyrics ended, somewhat pathetically, I always thought. But I guess my pre-school teacher would be proud of me if she could se me now, because this past semester I went through a great deal of trouble trying to understand the songs of the nightingale; I incidentally took two different exams on two works of literature that both, to some extent, revolved around this diminuitive little songbird. The works in question were “Laüstic” by Marie de France and “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats.
“Laüstic”
“Laüstic” means “nightingale” in ancient French, which was what Marie de France wrote in. She was something so rare as a medieval poetess and though very little is known definitely about her, researchers determine it is pretty safe to say that she moved to live at the court of Henry II in England and some point in her life and that it was here at this court that she composed the twelve narrative poems (“lais” or “lays” in old English) that have been ascribed to her. The poems are excellent and you can read nine of them, as well as Marie de France’s prologue for the lais, here in brilliant translations by Judith P. Shoaf – I very much recommend them, and in the following quotes from one of Marie’s lais, it is Shoaf’s translations, I am using. I wrote my exam paper on three of the lais; “Laüstic”, “Lanval” and “Eliduc” (a translation of “Eliduc” does not appear on the Shoaf-site, but may be found in a translation by Edith Rickert here), but my favourite among the lais will always be “Laüstic”, I think.
It’s the story of a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage: Married to a man, she finds herself in love with this man’s neighbour, who returns her love. The two have an innocent, courtly affair, consisting of their looking at each other from their windows at night, and sweetly tossing little presents to each other. After a while, however, the Husband demands that his wife tell him what she’s doing out of bed every night and, supposedly reluctant to reveal her secret, the Wife tells him that “No person may be happy who has not heard the song of the nightingale”. Upon receiving this explanation, the Husband orders for glue-sticks to be set up all over the garden, and before long he calls on his wife, triumphantly showing her the trapped nightingale and saying: “Lady, where are you? Speak some word/to us! Look! I caught this bird–/Come here, now! See how my lime glue/Got him! This nightingale kept you/Awake so often, night-long, when/You should sleep in peace. Well, never again!” The Wife asks is she can have the nightingale, and the Husband brutally wrings the bird’s neck and throws it at his wife’s chest. Left to herself, the grieving Wife wraps the bird in an embroidered cloth and has a messenger bring it to her Lover. The Lover places the bird in a relic casket and brings it with him wherever he goes. His love story is soon known around the world.
Courtly lovin’ – a knight and his dame
Is that not the best story ever? I think so. Not only is it a beautiful love story, it’s also a story about the importance and function of art. Being courtly persons by heart, the Wife and the Lover swear by the platonic and the metaphysical, but their romantic aspirations are crushed by the coarse Husband, who insists upon the physical as he turns the nightingale, which his wife attempted to make into a metaphor for her love affair, into first something as trivial and lowly as an animal, then a tragically tangible cadaver. Through the means of art, however, the Wife and the Lover retrieve the nightingale’s symbolic meaning and pass it on into the world to outlive their mortal selves with its immortal, allegorical tale. Beautiful! Whenever my demons tell me that what I’m studying is useless and I should have studied to be a doctor and have been saving lives wearing mask and gloves by now, I think of this and realize that I’m wrong. Art is never irrelevant, never un-important. And of course the nightingale is a central part of this tale. The paradox that was to be found in the song I was taught as a child, is also to be found here: The nightingale is small and grey, but its song carries a lot of weight nevertheless. If we see, as I think we should, the Wife’s explanation to her Husband than more than just a slightly humorous, bad excuse (possibly with some sexual innuendo: As Judith P. Shoaf was kind enough to bring my attention to when I asked her permission to use her translation of the lai in this post, the “nightingale” is used in a Decameron story in such a way; “the nightingale” serving as an euphemism for the male member), what she’s saying is that one has never lived if one has never ignored the inferiority, the greyness of a human life and admired the beauty of it, the way one does when enjoying the celestially beautiful song of a nightingale, allowing oneself to forget that it is simply the mating call of a lowly, grey little bird. That is the paradox of the nightingale, and that is what separates the Husband from the Wife and her Lover.
“Ode to a Nightingale”
John Keats is approximately six centuries younger than Marie de France and unlike the French emigrant poetess we know all sorts of things about Keats. For instance, we know that he studied to become a doctor once and how’s that for interesting? Here is a man who actually could have stood there, with his mask and his gloves (provided that they used such sanitary equipment back then. I honestly don’t know if they did, but I have a nagging feeling that they didn’t and vaguely remember reading some gruesome statistics about the death at childbirth from that period. Shudder.), saving lives, and yet he chose to be a poet. It’s not surprising that his poem about the nightingale should feature the same paradox that his medieval colleague touched upon, as I believe it does.
The presentation I did about Keats’s nightingale ode this semester was on the subject of the theme of aesthesia/syn-aesthesia as themes in the odes; what I found was that the persona’s senses are shut off gradually (“a drowsy numbness pains/my sense” ) as he listens to the song of the Nightingale, only to be mixed together in a kind of synaestesia towards the middle of the poem (rhyming the gradually more fantastic and oxymoronic imagery of the poem: “magic casements, opening on the foam”), and then to have his senses separate and function again in the end.
I was greatly inspired by Jack Stillinger’s chapter “Imagination and Reality in the Odes” in his book The Hoodwinking of Madeline (very recommendable for further reading). Stillinger’s main thesis in this chapter is that medicine-trained Keats did not lose himself into some Kingdom of Imagination through his odes, as much as he explored such a kingdom and then returned to the real world, wiser from the experience. My study of Keats’s ode was, then, to determine how this two-way ticket tour of Keats’s was illustrated through his persona’s use of senses throughout the poem.
The nightingale becomes the catalyst for this spiritual/intellectual journey. It is the song of the nightingale that makes the poem’s persona aware of this “drowsy numbness” of his senses, and, even more interestingly, the poem depicts to a large degree the persona’s attempt at fixing the nightingale, much like the Husband in “Laüstic”. The persona goes on a nightingale-hunt, trying to fully capture the beautiful capacity of the nightingale’s song, through imaginary kingdoms, or kingdoms of the past (the Greek mythological realms of “Lethe”, the “Dryad” and “Hippocrene”, the lost “Provencal” realm, the old-testament realm that “Ruth” represents, and the fanciful, fairytale realm of the “Queen-moon” and her “starry Fays”), and willingly losing his senses to the point where he almost longs for death, as the ultimate sense-duller (“…for many a time/I have been half in love with easeful Death”). Except, as illustrated, once again, by the movement described by Stillinger, such a movement out of reality and life and into imagination and death would not bring him any closer to the nightingale. He would be a lifeless “sod” and oblivious to the beautiful song, and the “faerylands” are only imaginary and thus “folorn”. Like biblical Ruth, he will have to resign himself to the melancholy enjoyment of the nightingale from afar, and accordingly, the persona sets the nightingale free in the last stanza, following its course “Past near the meadows, over the still stream,/up the hillside”, and accepting his perception of the nightingale not as a purely abstract phenomenon, a metaphor, and not just as a mortal bird, but as something in between those two.
I won’t venture to draw some kind of conclusion about the nightingale in literature based on these few examples, but I do find it interesting the way the nightingale seems to trigger our perception of imagination. I guess it’s the paradox of the bird that’s so hard for us to get past: There it is, this bird, so plain and grey and humble-looking, and with a pencil-like neck that we could snap between our fingers if we wanted to – and yet it’s capable of such beauty. And that invokes in us such a unnerving sense of eternity, and how it passes on long after we’ve been given up by well-meaning doctor’s hands. And the fact that the beauty of a bird’s song on a late Spring evening is something swift and flightly and obscure and impossible to fix, however much we might want to. As Homer Simpson would probably put it: Lousy, lovable bird…!
/marie
Calendary Literature – April – Hans Christian Andersen: “Ole Luk-Oie, the Dream-God”
July 15, 2007 at 11:22 am | In Calendary Literature, The Course of the Year | Leave a Comment
April is the cruelest month, said T.S. Eliot, and I did consider choosing his ”Waste Land” as the April submission for this literary calendar, but wouldn’t that have been predictable and clichéd? Yes, it would.
Instead I have chosen to celebrate Danish national poet Hans Christian Andersen, since April was HCA’s birth month. He was born on April 2 1805, which means that this marks the two-year anniversary for that absolutely hideous and very embarrassing Las Vegas-wannabe show they arranged in celebration of his 200th birthday, featuring a selection of completely arbitrary, non-HCA-related artists, such as Tina Turner singing “Simply the Best”, Olivia Newton-John singing “Xanadu”, and some random comedian whose act consisted of dressing up in paper-clothes to music. It was horrible. Very bad taste. And about as far away from poetry as it could possibly get.
So this year, I’ve decided to celebrate old H.C. the best way one probably can anyway; by reading one of his amazing stories. The story is “Ole Luk-oie – the God of Sleep” (also known, in some translations, as “The Sandman”), which is probably my favourite Hans Christian Andersen story.
The edition of “Ole Luk-Oie” that I grew up with – the illustrations are by excellent illustrator Lillian Brøgger.
Ole Luk-Oie (or “Ole Lukøje” in Danish) means “Ole Close-Eye”, and the story revolves around the question of what exactly happens when we dream. The story answers the question quite unambiguously: When people (especially children) go to sleep, they are visited by Ole Lukøje, an elflike little creature, who blows softly on their necks until their heads grow heavy and throws fine dust into their eyes until they blink with fatigue, and as soon as the children are in their beds he spreads an umbrella over the children’s heads. He’s got two umbrellas, one for the good children and one for the bad ones, but they both basically work like a kind of parabolas, channelling either pleasant or grim stories to the perceptive, sleeping children. Ole Luk-Oie is the network executive so to speak, he makes up all the stories and “there is nobody in the world who knows so many stories as Ole Luk-Oie” as the narrator informs us at the beginning of the story. We, the readers, are introduced to Ole’s skills in the story through the sleep-bound boy Hjalmar, and the short story consists of the seven stories that Ole tells Hjalmar in the course of a week. I had this story read to me countless times as a child, completely in love with the fantastic imagery of the stories and then I sort of forgot about it by the time of my adolescence, but I re-discovered the story as an adult three years ago, when the excellent Copenhagen children’s theatre Anemone teatret staged the story as a play.
In the staging they stressed very beautifully the point that will naturally be an adult’s approach to the story: The reading of the seven stories as the depiction of seven stages of a human life, with Hjalmar as a kind of Everyman persona. I absolutely love that interpretation, and I think it’s a great example of how HCA’s tales work just as well for children as for their parents. It’s also funny to see in this tale of nightly dreams how Freud virtually existed before he existed, or at least before he had had the chance to share his ideas with the world: The first dream, the Monday dream, of Hjalmar’s is dominated by repressed feelings – childish guilt feelings as it is. The Monday dream depicts one of the first trials a human being suffers through; that is going to school and coming face to face with one’s own inadequacy. Ole Luk-Oie tries his best to create pleasant dreams for his young client, but the nagging guilt stemming from poorly done homework threatens to wreck Hjalmar’s fantasy of pure childish, sensual pleasure
“…all the flowers in the flower-pots became large trees, with long branches reaching to the ceiling, and streatching along the walls, so that the whole room was like greenhouse. All the branches were loaded with flowers, each flower as beautiful and as fragrant as a rose; and, had any one tasted them, he would have found them sweeter even than jam. The fruit glittered like gold, and there were cakes so full of plums that they were nearly bursting. It was incomparably beautiful. At the same time sounded dismal moans from the table-drawer in which lay Hjalmar’s school books.” Hjalmar’s school accessories are lamenting their poor state, and I particularly love the description of the copy-book’s sorrow: “On each leaf stood a row of capital letters, every one having a small letter by its side. This formed a copy; under these were other letters, which Hjalmar had written: they fancied they looked like the copy, but they were mistaken; for they were leaning on one side as if they intended to fall over the pencil-lines.” Last year I was in the street and I was struck – somewhat pathetically, I admit - by an everyday image that has haunted me, and which reminds me of this paragraph in Ole Luk-Oie: I saw a toddler pushing his own big stroller in front of him with much trouble, his mother smiling and laughing beside him. There was something so significant about that image, I thought, something so sad: This is what we do most of our childhood, we try to grow up as quickly as we possibly can, pushing our stroller in front of us while it’s still twice our own size, or trying to copy neat letters in a copy-book, and failing. Childhood is, to me, a great mixture of fantastic dreams of sensual pleasures like delicious treats and trees growing wildly into the sky, and the harsh reality of our incapability. The Monday story in “Ole Luk-Oie” depicts this so well I think, ending with the words: “…[Ole Luk-Oie] drilled them till they stood up gracefully, and looked as beautiful as a copy could look. But after Ole Luk-Oie was gone, and Hjalmar looked at them in the morning, they were as wretched and as awkward as ever.”
The Tuesday story was my favourite as a child, and actually I think it has something appropriately April-like to it. Hjalmar, trapped in the previous dream within his own little room, goes off into a beautiful Spring landscape, and drifts in a boat down a stream which is significantly headed for the vast sea: Hjalmar is on a adolescent Wanderung in this story, and it is a wonderful experience. Beyond the pure pleasure-seaking fantasies of childhood, Hjalmar encounters fantastic creatures: “..six swans, each with a golden circlet round its neck, and a bright blue star on its forehead, drew the boat past the green wood, where the trees talked of robbers and witches, and the flowers of beautiful little elves and fairies, whose histories the butterflies had related to them. Brilliant fish, with scales like silver and gold, swam after the boat, sometimes making a spring and splashing the water round them, while birds, red and blue, small and great, flew after him in two long lines. The gnats danced round them, and the cockchafers cried ‘Buz, buz’.”There are women there, too, two of them, each playing an important part in Hjalmar’s life: One is a princess who is the likeness of a little girl Hjalmar knows, with whom he playfully shares a piece of candy, and the other is his old nurse from his infancy, who only nods at him and then sings a melancholy little song: “How oft my memory turns to thee,/my own Hjalmar, ever dear!/When I could watch thy infant glee,/or kiss away a pearly tear/’Twas in my arms thy lisping tongue/first spoke the half-remembered word,/while o’er thy tottering steps I hung,/my fond protection to afford./Farewell! I pray the Heavenly Power/to keep thee til thy dying hour.” I was very fond of this verse when I was a child, thinking it was beautiful. When I saw the staging of “Ole Luk-Oie” at Anemone teatret, I was momentarily shocked and sad to find that they had chosen to portray the nurse as a ridiculous looking matron, accompanying her loud, insisting singing on a squeaky accordion, but then I thought about it, and I realized that it was actually a rather good presentation of this woman from Hjalmar’s past: The verse is sentimental, bordering on the saccharine, and while Hjalmar may feel a sting of nostalgia upon hearing her singing and thinking of the care she offered him, his boat is still flowing down the stream and the nurse will necessarily be contrasted by the pretty young princess-girl who has something to offer him.
But of course youth isn’t all fun and games and fairy tales, and Hjalmar learns as much from the Wednesday story, where he’s confronted with the force of peerpressure and slander. One of the things that makes “Ole Luk-Oie” such a great story is that the multitudinous of stories obviously made it possible for HCA to use many of his different talents as a story-teller. In the Monday story he demonstrates his ability to understand the sentiments of a young child, in the Tuesday story he uses his imaginative skills in the wonderful descriptions of a fairy tale landscape, and in this story, the Wednesday story, he uses his talent as a satirist. As stories such a s “The Shepherdess and the Chimney-Sweeper” and “There is No Doubt About It” bear witness, HCA was more than a light-headed dreamer, he was a poignant and humorous observer, and this is very clear in the Wednesday story. Hjalmar reaches the sea in this dream, and he follows a stork, who is placed in a henhouse among hens, ducks and turkeys as he grows tired from travelling. HCA depicts very accurately that certain high school kind of atmosphere among the rural fowl as the in-crowd that isn’t about to accept an outsider into their group, and who, xenophobically, would rather miss out on some great in-puts than to admit to their own significance: “…the stork told them all about warm Africa, of the pyramid, and of the ostrich, which, like a wild horse, runs across the desert. But the ducks did not understand what he said, and quacked amongst themselves, ‘We are all of the same opinion; namely, that he is stupid.’ ‘Yes, to be sure, he is stupid,’ said the turkey-cock; and gobbled. Then the stork remained quite silent, and thought of his home in
Africa. ‘Those are handsome thin legs of yours,’ said the turkey-cock. ‘What do they cost a yard?’ ‘Quack, quack, quack,’ grinned the ducks; but the stork pretended not to hear.”Luckily, Hjalmar is able to learn the right lesson from the encounter: Recognising the worldliness of the stork and the beauty of its storytelling, he dismisses the feathered clique as the temporary, uninteresting creatures they are: “‘Tomorrow you shall be made into soup,’ said Hjalmar to the fowls; and then he awoke and found himself lying in his little bed.” The stories of Thursday and Friday are connected in a sense, in as much as they both depict a wedding ceremony. While Thursday, however, is all about glamour, Friday has something remarkably prosaic to it, and as such one might say that the two stories depict a youthful, and a more disillusionized, mature approach towards love and marriage, respectively. Hjalmar is attending the wedding between two mice in the Thursday story, and it’s all about show and illusion right from the beginning. Hjalmar must get dressed up in his tin soldier’s uniform in order to look proper for the ceremony, and the ceremony is imbued with the satirical take on artificiality that HCA did so well (for instance with his depiction of the Princess in “The Swine-Herd”). The bridal pair’s love for each other is scarcely mentioned and the party is dominated by a sense of unfulfilment and shallow showiness: “The room had been rubbed over with bacon-rind, like the passage, which was all the refreshment offered to the guests. But for the dessert they produced a pea, on which a mouse belonging to the bridal pair had bitten the first letters of their names. This was something quite uncommon. All the mice said it was a very beautiful wedding, and that they had been very agreeably entertained.” Hjalmar is obviously fascinated with the splendour, but also aware of the violence he’s had to do to his own nature: “He had certainly been in grand society: but he had been obliged to creep under a room, and to make himself small enough to wear the uniform of a tin soldier.”
It’s a different atmosphere, if not a less satirical one, we find in the Friday story, which describes the wedding of Hjalmar’s sister’s dolls Herman and Bertha. Hjalmar frets somewhat upon being invited to the wedding by Ole, noting that the two dolls have easily been married a hundred times already by his sister. “’Yes,’” says Ole, “’but tonight is the hundred and first wedding, and when that has taken place, it must be the last, therefore this is to be extremely beautiful.’” Yes, this is the last wedding, and the irrevocability of it hangs heavily over the story, which is dominated by the limitations and fixation that comes with marriage. HCA does love his fowls, so there’s a swallow and a hen present at the wedding to advise the bridal pair about where to settle down, and while the swallow speaks beautifully of all the sights to be seen abroad, the hen wins with her prudent, prosaic defence of their home country: “’Cold weather is good for cabbages,’ said the hen; ‘besides we do have it warm here sometimes. Four years ago, we had a summer that lasted more than five weeks, and it was so hot one could scarcely breath. And then in this country we have no poisonous animals, and we are free from robbers. He must be wicked who does not consider our country the finest of all lands. He ought not to be allowed to live here.’ And then the hen wept very much (…)”The best part of this satirical take on stupidity and cowardice in the name of patriotism is, however, the song the hilariously bad song that has been written by one of the guest (the led pencil) for the occasion: “’What merry sounds are on the wind,/as marriage rites together bind/a quiet and a loving pair,/though formed of kid, yet smooth and fair!/Hurrah! If they are deaf and blind,/we’ll sing, though weather prove unkind.” Hee! The ridiculous lyrics never fail to crack me up. And having applied to go abroad next year, of course this is totally grist to my mill.
The Saturday story revolves around the Big Questions in life, and Hjalmar is torn between superstition and fact as the imaginative Ole has a battle of words against the portrait of Hjalmar’s grumbling great-grandfather who insists on reason and science. Ole, however, wins, and with him the power and omnipresence of imagination and dreams over petty nitpicking: “I thank you; you may be the head of the family as no doubt you are, but I am older than you. I am an ancient heathen. The old Romans and Greek named me the Dream-God. I have visited the noblest houses and continue to do so; still I know how to conduct myself to both high and low (…)’” This serves as a countdown to the last story which is, very appropriately, a story about Death. HCA ventures into meta-fiction here, one might say, as he describes Death as an older brother of Ole’s, that is, a storyteller just like the Dream-God. The afterlife is described as follows: “Hjalmar saw that this Ole Luk-Oie [Ole’s older brother, Death] rode on, he lifted up old and young, and carried them away on his horse. Some he seated in front and some behind, but always inquired first, How stands the mark-book?’ ‘Good,’ they all answered. ‘Yes, but let me see for myself,’ he replied, and they were all obliged to give him the books. Then all those who had ‘Very good’ or ‘Exceedingly good’ came in front of the horse, and heard the beautiful story; while those who had ‘Middling”’ or ’Tolerably good’ in their books, were obliged to sit behind and listen to the frightful tale. They trembled and cried, and wanted to jump down from the horse, but they could not get free, for they were fastened to the seat.” Apart from the fact that Death sounds kind of like a – well, like a horse’s ass, actually, it’s very interesting in a meta way that HCA makes storytelling the premise for the afterlife. Rather than frolic actively in the meadow’s of Paradise or writhe in pain in the flames of Hell, in the afterlife described in this story, we become forever subjects to our imagination, like passive children being told stories at bedtime. As such I think “Ole Luk-Oie” is an important part of HCA’s life’s work and a wonderful celebration of imagination and dreams – a celebration that I hope I haven’t sucked all the life out of with this interpretation. I love the story dearly and recommend it to any lover of stories out there.
Happy 202nd Birthday, Hans Christian. And Happy April, everyone.
/marie
Calendary Literature – March – The Sufferings of Young Werther
July 15, 2007 at 11:10 am | In Calendary Literature, The Course of the Year | Leave a CommentMarch was a rollercoaster-ride here in Copenhagen this year – the weather changing constantly between bright, warm sunshine and storms and sleet, and more than once I was tempted by a sunshiny morning to slip on my ballerina flats when heading off to the library or the university, only to fight my way back home later that day in a storm, with cold, wet feet and scolding myself for not having had the sense to wear my Uggs. Perhaps this is how I caught the cold I reluctantly sported towards the end of that month.
That’s what March is to me; it’s the month where you catch a cold, because you’ve gone out wearing too little clothes, beckoned by the deceitful early signs of Spring. As such, the month reminds me of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther!
Young Werther meets Lotte for the first time. You know it’s love, I suppose, when it gets your motor running to see the object of affection handing out black bread….
Werther and I go way back, and he’s very special to me. I read the novel with all the passion and ardour of youth when I was a teenager and took an instant liking to the passionate, ardent protagonist because he reminded me of my then-boyfriend, an equally passionate, ardent young man, and I wrote my very first university paper on the novel, bearing the pompous title: ”Escapism as a Theme in The Sorrows of Young Werther”, and given that the paper was written with all the ardour and passion of youth, I hope I’ll never, ever have to read it again. *cringe*
But that’s an important part of the appeal of Werther, I think, and part of what makes it so special: It’s a literary study of that Spring-like stage of our youth where we metaphorically run around like idiots in the rain with way too thin clothes on and willingly subject ourselves to all kinds of dangers and sorrows, because we are not ready to accept the fact that life, well, just kind of sucks most of the time. Werther may be said to be a kind of Tristan figure: He is, in a sense, courtly love gone awry. Instead of accepting the fact that his adored Lotte is unobtainable and let his platonic love and yearning for her cultivate him, he refuses to accept such a thing, refuses to accept that the world might be anything less than perfect, and lets his love and yearning for Lotte break him down.
The paragraph I’d like to quote does not take place in March, but it certainly nails that March atmosphere, right down to the bad, changeable weather. Being an epistolary novel that ends with the correspondent’s death, the fatality of the protagonist’s state of mind can be said to be perceivable through the lack of his letters (the last part of the novel is defined by such a lack: Werther has become to distraught for writing and the accounts of his last hours is left to the fictitious editor), and significantly, Werther has neglected his correspondence for a while at this point in the novel, which describes his fatal first meeting with Lotte. I found the translation on online-literature.com, and I hope I’m not violating any copyrights by quoting from it here. If I am, let me know and I will of course remove it immediately. But for now, treat yourselves to some youthful passion and ardour! (Ooh, and take care to notice that wonderfully over-the-top climax of the esoteric “Klopstock!”-exclamation. I imagine that this is just about the 18th century equivalent of wearing a t-shirt with an obscure movie quote on it, and then have somebody recognising the quote and then tell that person that “OMG, you, like, totally get me!” and then take that person to the local indie coffee house and talk for, like, hours.)
“JUNE 16.
“Why do I not write to you?” You lay claim to learning, and ask such a question. You should have guessed that I am well — that is to say — in a word, I have made an acquaintance who has won my heart: I have — I know not. To give you a regular account of the manner in which I have become acquainted with the most amiable of women would be a difficult task. I am a happy and contented mortal, but a poor historian.
An angel! Nonsense! Everybody so describes his mistress; and yet I find it impossible to tell you how perfect she is, or why she is so perfect: suffice it to say she has captivated all my senses.
So much simplicity with so much understauding — so mild, and yet so resolute — a mind so placid, and a life so active. But all this is ugly balderdash, which expresses not a single character nor feature. Some other time — but no, not some other time, now, this very instant, will I tell you all about it. Now or never. Well, between ourselves, since I commenced my letter, I have been three times on the point of throwing down my pen, of ordering my horse, and riding out. And yet I vowed this morning that I would not ride to-day, and yet every moment I am rushing to the window to see how high the sun is.
I could not restrain myself — go to her I must. I have just returned, Wilhelm; and whilst I am taking supper I will write to you. What a delight it was for my soul to see her in the midst of her dear, beautiful children, — eight brothers and sisters!
But, if I proceed thus, you will be no wiser at the end of my letter than you were at the beginning. Attend, then, and I will compel myself to give you the details.I mentioned to you the other day that I had become acquainted with S–, the district judge, and that he had invited me to go and visit him in his retirement, or rather in his little kingdom. But I neglected going, and perhaps should never have gone, if chance had not discovered to me the treasure which lay concealed in that retired spot. Some of our young people had proposed giving a ball in the country, at which I consented to be present. I offered my hand for the evening to a pretty and agreeable, but rather commonplace, sort of girl from the immediate neighbourhood; and it was agreed that I should engage a carriage, and call upon Charlotte, with my partner and her aunt, to convey them to the ball. My companion informed me, as we drove along through the park to the hunting-lodge, that I should make the acquaintance of a very charming young lady. “Take care,” added the aunt, “that you do not lose your heart.” “Why?” said I. “Because she is already engaged to a very worthy man,” she replied, “who is gone to settle his affairs upon the death of his father, and will succeed to a very considerable inheritance.” This information possessed no interest for me. When we arrived at the gate, the sun was setting behind the tops of the mountains. The atmosphere was heavy; and the ladies expressed their fears of an approaching storm, as masses of low black clouds were gathering in the horizon. I relieved their anxieties by pretending to be weather-wise, although I myself had some apprehensions lest our pleasure should be interrupted.
I alighted; and a maid came to the door, and requested us to wait a moment for her mistress. I walked across the court to a well-built house, and, ascending the flight of steps in front, opened the door, and saw before me the most charming spectacle I had ever witnessed. Six children, from eleven to two years old, were running about the hall, and surrounding a lady of middle height, with a lovely figure, dressed in a robe of simple white, trimmed with pink ribbons. She was holding a rye loaf in her hand, and was cutting slices for the little ones all around, in proportion to their age and appetite. She performed her task in a graceful and affectionate manner; each claimant awaiting his turn with outstretched hands, and boisterously shouting his thanks. Some of them ran away at once, to enjoy their evening meal; whilst others, of a gentler disposition, retired to the courtyard to see the strangers, and to survey the carriage in which their Charlotte was to drive away. “Pray forgive me for giving you the trouble to come for me, and for keeping the ladies waiting: but dressing, and arranging some household duties before I leave, had made me forget my children’s supper; and they do not like to take it from any one but me.” I uttered some indifferent compliment: but my whole soul was absorbed by her air, her voice, her manner; and I had scarcely recovered myself when she ran into her room to fetch her gloves and fan. The young ones threw inquiring glances at me from a distance; whilst I approached the youngest, a most delicious little creature. He drew back; and Charlotte, entering at the very moment, said, “Louis, shake hands with your cousin.” The little fellow obeyed willingly; and I could not resist giving him a hearty kiss, notwithstanding his rather dirty face. “Cousin,” said I to Charlotte, as I handed her down, “do you think I deserve the happiness of being related to you?” She replied, with a ready smile, “Oh! I have such a number of cousins, that I should be sorry if you were the most undeserving of them.” In taking leave, she desired her next sister, Sophy, a girl about eleven years old, to take great care of the children, and to say good-bye to papa for her when he came home from his ride. She enjoined to the little ones to obey their sister Sophy as they would herself, upon which some promised that they would; but a little fair-haired girl, about six years old, looked discontented, and said, “But Sophy is not you, Charlotte; and we like you best.” The two eldest boys had clambered up the carriage; and, at my request, she permitted them to accompany us a little way through the forest, upon their promising to sit very still, and hold fast.
We were hardly seated, and the ladies had scarcely exchanged compliments, making the usual remarks upon each other’s dress, and upon the company they expected to meet, when Charlotte stopped the carriage, and made her brothers get down. They insisted upon kissing her hands once more; which the eldest did with all the tenderness of a youth of fifteen, but the other in a lighter and more careless manner. She desired them again to give her love to the children, and we drove off.(…)
The two Messrs. Andran and a certain N. N. (I cannot trouble myself with the names), who were the aunt’s and Charlotte’s partners, received us at the carriage-door, and took possession of their ladies, whilst I followed with mine. We commenced with a minuet. I led out one lady after another, and precisely those who were the most disagreeable could not bring themselves to leave off. Charlotte and her partner began an English country dance, and you must imagine my delight when it was their turn to dance the figure with us. You should see Charlotte dance. She dances with her whole heart and soul: her figure is all harmony, elegance, and grace, as if she were conscious of nothing else, and had no other thought or feeling; and, doubtless, for the moment, every other sensation is extinct.
(…)
We set off, and, at first, delighted ourselves with the usual graceful motions of the arms. With what grace, with what ease, she moved! When the waltz commenced, and the dancers whirled around each other in the giddy maze, there was some confusion, owing to the incapacity of some of the dancers. We judiciously remained still, allowing the others to weary themselves; and, when the awkward dancers had withdrawn, we joined in, and kept it up famously together with one other couple, — Andran and his partner. Never did I dance more lightly. I felt myself more than mortal, holding this loveliest of creatures in my arms, flying, with her as rapidly as the wind, till I lost sight of every other object; and O Wilhelm, I vowed at that moment, that a maiden whom I loved, or for whom I felt the slightest attachment, never, never should waltz with any one else but with me, if I went to perdition for it! — you will understand this.We took a few turns in the room to recover our breath. Charlotte sat down, and felt refreshed by partaking of some oranges which I had had secured, — the only ones that had been left; but at every slice which, from politeness, she offered to her neighbours, I felt as though a dagger went through my heart.
We were the second couple in the third country dance. As we were going down (and Heaven knows with what ecstasy I gazed at her arms and eyes, beaming with the sweetest feeling of pure and genuine enjoyment), we passed a lady whom I had noticed for her charming expression of countenance; although she was no longer young. She looked at
Charlotte with a smile, then, holding up her finger in a threatening attitude, repeated twice in a very significant tone of voice the name of “Albert.”
“Who is Albert,” said I to Charlotte, “if it is not impertinent to ask?” She was about to answer, when we were obliged to separate, in order to execute a figure in the dance; and, as we crossed over again in front of each other, I perceived she looked somewhat pensive. “Why need I conceal it from you?” she said, as she gave me her hand for the promenade. “Albert is a worthy man, to whom I am engaged.” Now, there was nothing new to me in this (for the girls had told me of it on the way); but it was so far new that I had not thought of it in connection with her whom, in so short a time, I had learned to prize so highly. Enough, I became confused, got out in the figure, and occasioned general confusion; so that it required all Charlotte’s presence of mind to set me right by pulling and pushing me into my proper place.
The dance was not yet finished when the lightning which had for some time been seen in the horizon, and which I had asserted to proceed entirely from heat, grew more violent; and the thunder was heard above the music. When any distress or terror surprises us in the midst of our amusements, it naturally makes a deeper impression than at other times, either because the contrast makes us more keenly susceptible, or rather perhaps because our senses are then more open to impressions, and the shock is consequently stronger. To this cause I must ascribe the fright and shrieks of the ladies. One sagaciously sat down in a corner with her back to the window, and held her fingers to her ears; a second knelt down before her, and hid her face in her lap; a third threw herself between them, and embraced her sister with a thousand tears; some insisted on going home; others, unconscious of their actions, wanted sufficient presence of mind to repress the impertinence of their young partners, who sought to direct to themselves those sighs which the lips of our agitated beauties intended for heaven. Some of the gentlemen had gone down-stairs to smoke a quiet cigar, and the rest of the company gladly embraced a happy suggestion of the hostess to retire into another room which was provided with shutters and curtains. We had hardly got there, when Charlotte placed the chairs in a circle; and, when the company had sat down in compliance with her request, she forthwith proposed a round game.
I noticed some of the company prepare their mouths and draw themselves up at the prospect of some agreeable forfeit. “Let us play at counting,” said Charlotte. “Now, pay attention: I shall go round the circle from right to left; and each person is to count, one after the other, the number that comes to him, and must count fast; whoever stops or mistakes is to have a box on the ear, and so on, till we have counted a thousand.” It was delightful to see the fun. She went round the circle with upraised arm. “One,” said the first; “two,” the second; “three,” the third; and so on, till Charlotte went faster and faster. One made a mistake, instantly a box on the ear; and, amid the laughter that ensued, came another box; and so on, faster and faster. I myself came in for two. I fancied they were harder than the rest, and felt quite delighted. A general laughter and confusion put an end to the game long before we had counted as far as a thousand. The party broke up into little separate knots: the storm had ceased, and I followed Charlotte into the ballroom. On the way she said, “The game banished their fears of the storm.” I could make no reply. “I myself,” she continued, “was as much frightened as any of them; but by affecting courage, to keep up the spirits of the others, I forgot my apprehensions.” We went to the window. It was still thundering at a distance: a soft rain was pouring down over the country, and filled the air around us with delicious odours. Charlotte leaned forward on her arm; her eyes wandered over the scene; she raised them to the sky, and then turned them upon me; they were moistened with tears; she placed her hand on mine and said, “Klopstock!” at once I remembered the magnificent ode which was in her thoughts: I felt oppressed with the weight of my sensations, and sank under them. It was more than I could bear. I bent over her hand, kissed it in a stream of delicious tears, and again looked up to her eyes. Divine Klopstock! why didst thou not see thy apotheosis in those eyes? And thy name so often profaned, would that I never heard it repeated!”
/marie
Calendary Literature – February – The Tableau Vivant in Literature
July 15, 2007 at 11:00 am | In Art, Calendary Literature, The Course of the Year | 1 CommentI spent all of last February trying to think of a work of literature that reminded me of this last month of the winter. And I failed! There simply isn’t any particular work of literature that reminds me of February, it would seem.
There is, however, have a literary theme that reminds me of February, so I decided to make that my literary contribution for the month. In Denmark, as in a number of European country, we have a tradition of celebrating Shrove-tide by dressing up, and since Shrove-tide is a February holiday, what better way to celebrate it here on the blog than by doing a post on the tradition of Tableaux Vivants in literature?
An example of a tableau vivant - Jeanne d’Arc in Tourelles
The tableau vivant was a particular kind of social entertainment that had its prime back in the 19th century and it consisted basically of people, usually wealthy guests at a party, dressing up and posing as a painting or etching of their own choice. Piquant and lustrous, it used to be a very popular form of entertainment, but it has more or less completely died out, probably as a result of the boom of the entertainment business in the 20th century, and the birth of cinematography – especially the rise of talkies. It is a pet theory that the silent movie genre was a more or less direct offspring from the tableau vivant. Surely the tendency towards archtypes and the highly dramatic gesturing of silent movies have more in common with the stylized, silent tableau vivant than with the much more verbal theatre which had moved on towards the realistic by the time the first silent movies where made.
However, while the tradition of tableaux vivants has gone out of style in practise, it has lived on via another aesthetic form, namely literature, and what a life it has found for itself here! Several 19th century writers have found inspiration in this meta-artistic form of entertainment and used tableaux vivants as the pivotal point of crucial scenes in novels and short stories, and I’d like to quote and discuss a few of these. While doing the research for this post it struck me as interesting that all the writers I could think of who had included tableaux vivants in their works were women writers.
Behind a Mask
The first of these, and the one to make the most significant use of the motif is Louisa May Alcott. Alcott is most famous for her celebrated novel Little Women, this very modest story about four sisters’ coming of age in the time of the Civil War, however in the 1930s literature critic Madeleine B. Stern unveiled a well-hidden secret about Alcott: She had written several gothic and almost grotesque stories under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, the most prominent of these being the lengthy short story “Behind a Mask: or A Woman’s Power”
Louisa May Alcott
It’s an eerie tale about the middle-aged failed actress Jean Muir who, by way of her charms and her skills as an actress (or simply as a woman?) makes a noble household employ her as their governess in the belief that she is a quaint and virtuous 19-year-old, and three of the men in the household fall in love with her. At the centre of her scheme stands chapter five: “How the girl did it”. I’d like to quote a passage from this chapter:
“At home he [Gerald Coventry, the eldest son of the household] found a party of young friends, who hailed with delight the prospect of a revel at the Hall. An hour later, the blithe company trooped into the great saloon, where preparations had already been made for a dramatic evening. Good Sir John was in his element, for he was never so happy as when his house was full of young people. Several persons were chosen, and in a few moments the curtains were withdrawn from the first of theseimpromptu tableaux. A swarthy, darkly bearded man lay asleep on a tiger skin, in the shadow of a tent. Oriental arms and drapery surrounded him; an antique silver lamp burned dimly on a table where fruit lay heaped in costly dishes, and wine shone redly in half-emptied goblets. Bending over the sleeper was a woman robed with barbaric splendor. One hand turned back the embroidered sleeve from the arm which held a scimitar; one slender foot in a scarlet sandal was visible under the white tunic; her purple mantle swept down from snowy shoulders; fillets of gold bound her hair, and jewels shone on neck and arms. She was looking over her shoulder toward the entrance of the tent, with a steady yet stealthy look, so effective that for a moment the spectators held their breath, as if they also heard a passing footstep. “Who is it?” whispered Lucia, for the face was new to her. “Jean Muir,” answered Coventry, with an absorbed look. “Impossible! She is small and fair,” began Lucia, but a hasty “Hush, let me look!” from her cousin silenced her. Impossible as it seemed, he was right nevertheless; for Jean Muir itwas. She had darkened her skin, painted her eyebrows, disposed some wild black locks over her fair hair, and thrown such an intensity ofexpression into her eyes that they darkened and dilated till they wereas fierce as any southern eyes that ever flashed. Hatred, the deepestand bitterest, was written on her sternly beautiful face, courage glowed in her glance, power spoke in the nervous grip of the slender hand that held the weapon, and the indomitable will of the woman was expressed–even the firm pressure of the little foot half hidden in the tiger skin. “Oh, isn’t she splendid?” cried Bella under her breath. “She looks as if she’d use her sword well when the time comes,” saidsomeone admiringly. “Good night to Holofernes; his fate is certain,” added another. “He is the image of Sydney, with that beard on.” “Doesn’t she look as if she really hated him?” “Perhaps she does.” Coventry uttered the last exclamation, for the two which preceded it suggested an explanation of the marvelous change in Jean. It was not all art: the intense detestation mingled with a savage joy that the object of her hatred was in her power was too perfect to be feigned; and having the key to a part of her story, Coventry felt as if he caught a glimpse of the truth. It was but a glimpse, however, for the curtain dropped before he had half analyzed the significance of that strange face.”
A glimpse, yes, but a well-planned one: as a talented actress – or tableau vivantess if you will – Jean Muir manages to keep her audience guessing by choosing a completely different attire and character for her next performance, and enchanting her attentive audience, Gerald Coventry, who’s been most sceptical about her thus far in the story, by inviting him to join her in a tableau:
“With a smile, Coventry obeyed her; for the picture was of two lovers, the young cavalier kneeling, with his arm around the waist of the girl, who tries to hide him with her little mantle, and presses his head to her bosom in an ecstasy of fear, as she glances back at the approaching pursuers. Jean hesitated an instant and shrank a little as his hand touched her; she blushed deeply, and her eyes fell before his. Then, as the bell rang, she threw herself into her part with sudden spirit. One arm half covered him with her cloak, the other pillowed his head on the muslin kerchief folded over her bosom, and she looked backward with such terror in her eyes that more than one chivalrous young spectator longed to hurry to the rescue. It lasted but a moment; yet in that moment Coventry experienced another new sensation. Many women had smiled on him, but he had remained heart-whole, cool, and careless, quite unconscious of the power which a woman possesses and knows how to use, for the weal or woe of man. Now, as he knelt there with a soft arm about him, a slender waist yielding to his touch, and a maiden heart throbbing against his cheek, for the first time in his life he felt the indescribable spell of womanhood, and looked the ardent lover toperfection. Just as his face assumed this new and most becoming aspect, the curtain dropped, and clamorous encores recalled him to the fact that Miss Muir was trying to escape from his hold, which had grown painful in its unconscious pressure. He sprang up, half bewildered, and looking as he had never looked before.”
A protective, loving quaker maiden – she could hardly have chosen of part more different from the one of the Judith the hateful avenger, and of course this is a premeditated move on Alcott’s morally dubious heroine’s part. What Jean has grasped is the fact that she – like all women – must essentially become a living paradox in order to survive and pave the way for herself. You could say it’s the classic whore-Madonna complex put into action: Coventry will not fall in love with the dangerous Judith, and he will get bored of the quaint, innocent maiden, but the woman who can be both at the same time wins his heart. The tableau vivant is in Alcott’s story used as a way of emphasising her main character’s hiding behind a variety masks, and the unspoken pressure put upon her by her surroundings – by society, one might say – to do so.
Unmasking through the Tableau Vivant
It’s a very different use of the tableau vivant that we find in the novel by another woman writer, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Opera director Kasper Bech Holten recently did a staging of Carl Nielsen’s Masquerade in which the characters wore masks all the time, except when they were at the masquerade that marks the climax of the opera. A reversal similar to this is what we find in the chapter in Wharton’s tragic story that deals with the unfortunate main character Lily Bart’s participation in a tableau vivant at a party:
“…there could be no mistaking the predominance of personality–the unanimous “Oh!” of the spectators was a tribute, not to the brush-work of Reynolds’s “Mrs. Lloyd” but to the fleshand blood loveliness of Lily Bart. She had shown her artistic intelligence in selecting a type so like her own that she could embody the person represented without ceasing to beherself. It was as though she had stepped, not out of, but into, Reynolds’s canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty bythe beams of her living grace. The impulse to show herself in a splendid setting–she had thought for a moment of representing Tiepolo’s Cleopatra–had yielded to the truer instinct oftrusting to her unassisted beauty, and she had purposely chosen apicture without distracting accessories of dress or surroundings. Her pale draperies, and the background of foliage against which she stood, served only to relieve the long dryad-like curves that swept upward from her poised foot to her lifted arm. The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment anote of that eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part.
Lily’s choice for her masquerade: Joshua Reynolds’ Mrs. Lloyd
“Deuced bold thing to show herself in that get-up; but, gad, there isn’t a break in the lines anywhere, and I suppose she wanted us to know it!” These words, uttered by that experienced connoisseur, Mr. Ned Van Alstyne, whose scented white moustache had brushed Selden’s shoulder whenever the parting of the curtains presented any exceptional opportunity for the study of the female outline, affected their hearer in an unexpected way. It was not the first time that Selden had heard Lily’s beauty lightly remarked on, and hitherto the tone of the comments had imperceptibly coloured hisview of her. But now it woke only a motion of indignant contempt. This was the world she lived in, these were the standards by which she was fated to be measured! Does one go to Caliban for a judgment on Miranda? In the long moment before the curtain fell, he had time to feel the whole tragedy of her life. It was as though her beauty, thus detached from all that cheapened and vulgarized it, had held out suppliant hands to him from the world in which he and she had once met for a moment, and where he felt an overmastering longing to be with her again. He was roused by the pressure of ecstatic fingers. “Wasn’t she too beautiful, Lawrence? Don’t you like her best in that simple dress? It makes her look like the real Lily–the Lily I know.” He met Gerty Farish’s brimming gaze. “The Lily we know,” he corrected…”
Lily Bart is the opposite of Jean Muir; while Jean Muir manages to play the parts society wants her to play, Lily Bart fails to do so, their success and failure at this become their source of happiness and eventual downfall respectively, and the two very different tableaux vivants-scenes emphasise this. Lily is an extremely beautiful and accomplished young lady and as such she should have been married – the success criteria for a woman of her time – a hundred times to a wealthy gentleman, except, as one of the characters in the novel notes: it’s as if she always consciously ruins her chances for such fortune-bringing unions, as if she doesn’t really want to give up herself for sale this way. We are told in the story that Lily has put much thought into it when picking her character for the tableau, and that she has estimated that Joshua Reynolds’s Mrs. Lloyd would show off her beauty most efficiently, but as Lawrence Selden and his cousin Gertie note, it’s hard not to see Lily’s choosing Reynolds’s study of pure and unspoiled sensuality as a way of stripping herself publicly of the demands of striving for success that clings to her like dirt in the life she’s leading, and thus setting herself momentarily free.
Artificiality and Charade
Thus, presented in literature, the tableau vivant may serve to emphasise certain sides of characters. As one will observe, the frozen, immobile state of the tableau tends to function in the story that’s told as a means of stopping time momentarily – the air in both “Behind a Mask” and The House of Mirth seems to stand still as the audience literally holds its breath in admiration of the witnessed scene – and creating a condensed space within which the character performing the tableau may reveal to the reader something crucial about herself. I did a university paper on “Behind a Mask” last year with a somewhat feminist angle, exploring the character of Jean Muir as the epitome of woman in society, and her masquerade as a result of her being restricted to a gray area by the contradicting demands she meets from her surroundings (i.e. the innocence and worldliness that were expected, all at once, from a governess), and I’d like to extend this point now onto the tableau vivant-theme: Might one not say that these women writers were fond of the tableau vivant as a literary theme, because if reflected in an extreme sense the kind of masquerade that women were expected to perform daily? That would, in any case, also explain the use Charlotte Brontë (very likely a significant source of inspiration for Alcott’s governess story ) made of the tableau vivant in her most famous novel Jane Eyre: “…A considerable interval elapsed before it again rose. Its second rising displayed a more elaborately prepared scene than the last. The drawing-room, as I have before observed, was raised two steps above the dining-room, and on the top of the upper step, placed a yard or two back within the room, appeared a large marble basin—which I recognised as an ornament of the conservatory—where it usually stood, surrounded by exotics, and tenanted by gold fish—and whence it must have been transported with some trouble, on account of its size and weight. Seated on the carpet, by the side of this basin, was seen Mr. Rochester, costumed in shawls, with a turban on his head. His dark eyes and swarthy skin and Paynim features suited the costume exactly: he looked the very model of an Eastern emir, an agent or a victim of the bowstring. Presently advanced into view Miss Ingram. She, too, was attired in oriental fashion: a crimson scarf tied sash-like round the waist: an embroidered handkerchief knotted about her temples; her beautifully-moulded arms bare, one of them upraised in the act of supporting a pitcher, poised gracefully on her head. Both her cast of form and feature, her complexion and her general air, suggested the idea of some Israelitish princess of the patriarchal days; and such was doubtless the character she intended to represent. She approached the basin, and bent over it as if to fill her pitcher; she again lifted it to her head. The personage on the well-brink now seemed to accost her; to make some request:- “She hasted, let down her pitcher on her hand, and gave him to drink.” From the bosom of his robe he then produced a casket, opened it and showed magnificent bracelets and earrings; she acted astonishment and admiration; kneeling, he laid the treasure at her feet; incredulity and delight were expressed by her looks and gestures; the stranger fastened the bracelets on her arms and the rings in her ears. It was Eliezer and Rebecca: the camels only were wanting. The divining party again laid their heads together: apparently they could not agree about the word or syllable the scene illustrated. Colonel Dent, their spokesman, demanded “the tableau of the whole;” whereupon the curtain again descended. On its third rising only a portion of the drawing-room was disclosed; the rest being concealed by a screen, hung with some sort of dark and coarse drapery. The marble basin was removed; in its place, stood a deal table and a kitchen chair: these objects were visible by a very dim light proceeding from a horn lantern, the wax candles being all extinguished. Amidst this sordid scene, sat a man with his clenched hands resting on his knees, and his eyes bent on the ground. I knew Mr. Rochester; though the begrimed face, the disordered dress (his coat hanging loose from one arm, as if it had been almost torn from his back in a scuffle), the desperate and scowling countenance, the rough, bristling hair might well have disguised him. As he moved, a chain clanked; to his wrists were attached fetters. “Bridewell!” exclaimed Colonel Dent, and the charade was solved.”
In Brontë’s controversial novel about an independent woman, who, true to her own feelings and ideals, achieves what she wants without stooping to play the game that Jean Muir masters and Lily Bart loses, the tableau becomes the symbol of the vanity and artificiality that Jane despises. What the audience perceives as a lovely confirmation of a mutual affection rising between Mr. Rochester and Blanche Ingram, Jane recognises as “acting”, “disguise”, and “attire”, she “knows” Rochester in spite of his costume, and she sees the tableau as well as the supposed mutual affection for what it is, a charade on Rochester’s part. The subtle point made about tableaux vivants by Alcott and Wharton is emphasised by Brontë: the tableau vivant is, in all it’s meta-artisticness, a reflection of the artificiality of our lives.
Tableaux Vivantes today
What, then, of the tableau vivant in our time and day? Have we come so completely to terms with our own self-staging that we don’t need the tableau vivant to let off the steam anymore? Well, one might say the tableau vivant is still around, in some form. Interestingly, in the – excellent – movie adaptation of House of Mirth from 2000, director Terence Davies had chosen a different painting for Lily’s tableau vivant, namely Watteau’s Ceres, supposedly thinking that this painting would show off his Lily’s, the ginger-haired Gillian Andersons’, beauty most efficiently. As such one might say he revived the tableau vivant-tradition momentarily – by consciously creating a new tableau and, thus, lingering consciously on the delicious subject of the staging of a woman’s beuaty, instead of staging the tableau that had been thought out a century earlier by Wharton.
The tableau vivant is obviously still a piquant occupation, and I’ll venture to say that there is still a need for it: As equalisation has run its course within the battle of the sexes, the gray area is more gray than ever, and the sex roles have become even more complex. Perhaps it’s time to let the artificial into our lives and to let ourselves start posing again? I think that photography, made so easy by the invention of the flexible digital camera, would be an obvious media for this. In the childhood of photography the tableau vivant was a popular way of going about portraiture. 19th century photographers such as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll of Alice in Wonderland fame) were partial towards having his subjects posing as mythological or fictional characters when portraying them, but somewhere along the line that tradition was lost, too, and instead followed decades and decades of awkward holiday photographs, with the subjects smiling stiffly, trying to look natural while pointing half-heartedly towards the Colloseum, the Eiffel Tower, or the Statue of Liberty, refusing to embrace the fact that as soon as we stand in front of a camera we are adding to Life a phrame and thus stepping into the realm of art, or, at least, artificiality, and no utterance of the word “Cheese” is ever going to change that. Personally, I sported the Awkward Holiday Photo Smile for years, and now I swear by staged photos and have had great fun posing Tosca-style or in a Dolce Vita-manner in Rome, as Hans Christian Andersen in Odense, and such. I couldn’t say whether the masquerade is bringing me closer to an understanding of my true self or my own sex role, but hey, if it is that’s not too bad a side-effect, is it? And in the meantime I have a lot more fun taking pictures. Because it really is piquant to be allowed to pose as a Tosca or a Anita Ekberg. 
Finally, I’d like to mention Cindy Sherman and Tori Amos as great contemporary artists within the tableau vivant. The latter is obviously inspired by the former, but both women make some truly interesting statements about the art of posing as well as the art of being a woman.
/marie
Calendary Literature – January – Tom Kristensen: Havoc
July 15, 2007 at 10:27 am | In Calendary Literature, The Course of the Year | 2 Comments****Originally written and posted January 2007****
After last year’s winter, which featured non-stop snow-falls from January to April (I am not kidding. It snowed on Palm Sunday last year), I thought I’d never be happy to see a snowflake again, but I’ve really been getting concerned about the extremely mild temperatures we’ve been having; the blooming cherry trees and the March-like rain that’s been pouring down and soaking our Summer-shoe-clad feet this winter. Global warming indeed, and it scares me. However, a couple of days ago the first snow finally fell, the temperatures dropped to below zero, and we’ve been having a bit of winter. And thus I can finally get down to writing my entry for “Literary Year”/”Musical Year” – I simply haven’t been in the mood for it till now. (Or, well, actually I just haven’t gotten around to it until now. But I’ll blame the weather, because that sounds better).
My literary choice for January is Tom Kristensen’s Havoc. Main character Ole Jastrau, a Copenhagen literature critic circa 1930, recognizing what he finds to be the meaningless of his existence, indulges in a reckless journey into Copenhagen night, an odyssey of disintegration of his own self, accompanied by a strange gallery of urban suspicious characters, and a whole lot of alcohol.
The cover for a Swedish edition of Havoc. Strangely poignant with its sinister atmosphere and the black, menacing silhouettes of Copenhagen towers
I’ve been wondering why this of all novels would come to my mind when I considered which literary piece to illustrate the month of January on this blog, because unlike my choice for December, Havoc doesn’t deal with a particular month of the year, or a tendency towards depictions of snowy January landscapes or anything like that. But it does have that certain gloom and that aforementioned champagne-after taste of broken new year’s resolution that I tend to associate with January. More than that, it’s got a rambling flow that resembles stream of consciousness and a cynically accurate approach towards the potentially all-consuming power of decay.
The passage that I would like to quote here is from a significant scene in which Jastrau has gotten drunk and made a spectacle of himself at a dinner party and is taken home in a taxi by his embarrassed wife Johanne. Agitated and already well on his way in his downward spiral, Jastrau decides to make a final, fatal break with his own sanity and the world that could have saved him… I am quoting from the English translation of the novel by Carl Malmberg:
“Johanne drew her wrap closely about her so hat it no longer touched him. There was a space between them, but he could detect her body growing rigid. He did not look at her.But then it came.‘
Why did you turn those photographs around at home?’ she asked harshly.
And in his mind he saw himself as he had been there in the apartment – how, unable to rest because of dissipation and the whiskey in his system, he had paced back and forth through the rooms and suddenly felt himself tormented by the two faces, the photographs of his mother and his son, how he had had a feeling that they could see right through him, and then he had turned the pictures around.
So Johanne had noticed it.
And there she sat in the corner of the cab, pale as a corpse and unassailable. He sensed his powerlessness, and it made him desperate. Something had to happen. But he could not speak.
Suddenly he bent forward, rapped on the window in back of the driver, and signalled frantically for him to stop.‘What do you want? Have you gone completely crazy?’ Johanne cried out in bewilderment.
The taxi slowed and then came to a stop. Jastrau already had the door open so that the breeze came whistling in. And then, with one lea, he was out on the edge of the sidewalk.At a loss to know what was going on, the driver turned on the likght inside the cab.
(…)
Jastrau’s lips were trembling. He wished that his rash act could be undone. He wanted to get back into the cab. But that triumphant silence must be conquered. He had to win this battle, and he would. A stupid conquest. What did the cab drver think? And ten he reached into his pocket, grabbed his keys, tossed them into the cab. Out with his wallet too, and into the cab with it. Inexplicable. A silent, violent scene. And Johanne sat there in the feeble light staring straight ahead like a person who was dying.Without a word, Jastrau turned his back on her and began walking out Vesterbrogade. The glow from the ar lights, the broad, glistening, car track, the shadowy figures on the street corners, white legs flashing, women, and up aboive the roofs the blue-black night sky and some stars; he sensed the street as an extension of his soul, as a confirmation that something conclusive had occurred as an extraordinary, incomprehensibly calming influence. Behind him, he head the taxi start and get under way. It must be it, because there was not another car on the street at the moment. He would not turn around, but must simply keep walking. Then the taxi could catch up with him, draw up alongside the curb, and stop. And then they could talk to each other. The taxi had to come.
But the sound of the engine bacme fainter and fainter, and finally he had to turn around an look.
What he saw was the rear end of the cab. The taillight like ared cat’s eye in the distance. It turned a corner down near Vesterbro’s square and disappeared.
Disappeared.”
/marie
Calendary Literature – December – James Joyce “The Dead”
July 15, 2007 at 10:11 am | In Calendary Literature, Literature, The Course of the Year | Leave a CommentLast year I got it in my head to start doing an alternative kind of calendar where I would write an essay for each month about a piece of literature and a piece of music that reminded me about the month in question. It’s always been something that interested me a lot, the course of the year, and how it affects my perception of things; – of art, in particular.
I’ve sometimes made up little lists, i.e. “Arias in the course of the year” with an aria to match each month, and I thought it’d be fun to share the results of such lists here on the blog. Perhaps you will find that you agree with me in my choices, or perhaps you’ll have another suggestion – in each case I’d love to hear about it in the “comments”. Who knows, maybe I’ll end up adding new works to my lists! I’d like that. Here is my December entry:
My December-choice for my literary calendar is a very famous piece of literature, and thus, one might argue, I’m not contributing with much new by bringing it here, but I still want to bring it, because it is my conviction that this particular work of literature could never be quoted too often. The quote in question is the ending of James Joyce’s “The Dead”, which is my favourite work of prose ever. It takes place in January, more specifically on the Night of the Three Kings, but it always reminded me of December. The image of the faintly falling snow, the languid rhythm of the prose, the sudden and painful lucidity of Gabriel’s vision, the omnipresence of Death, the thickness of the night, and the helplessness of the snowflakes falling into the Shannon waves; it is so incredibly moving to me, and seems to appropriate for this the darkest month of the year, when the insistent little comma of solstice urges us on through the dusk and the cold.
“The Dead” has always comes to my mind in the most poignant times of my life; always when I have the most significant realizations, and always in December.
But I’ll leave the word to Joyce now, and his wonderful, subtly tragic character Gabriel Conroy:
“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and ark. falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over
Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling intot he dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
/marie
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