It has been quite some time (since June 2015) that I posted anything to this blog. I was for most of that time on sabbatical, drafting a book on Indian Buddhism. Consequently, my writing efforts were directed away from reviewing books and toward writing one. Since coming back from the sabbatical, I have not recovered my habit of reviewing the books I read; however, my hope is to recover that habit. To catch up, though, I merely plan to record here a number of the books that I read over that last few months. After all, this blog is primarily a means to record for myself the books I have read. Perhaps one day, I'll return to the most important ones and provide reviews.
Powell, James Lawrence, <i>The Inquisition of Climate Science</i>, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 2001. This work is a brief (192 page) book describing the concerted efforts by climate change deniers to sew doubt about the fact and effects of our changing climate. It also recounts many of the highest profile attacks on climate scientists by deniers.
Stern, Nicholas, <i>The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review</i>, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2006. This work is a major landmark (if not the major landmark) in the literature related to the economics of climate change. It has been criticized for employing an inordinately low discount rate, but this mainly reflects a moral judgement regarding the importance of the well-being of future generations.
Nordhaus, William, <i>The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World</i>. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013. The importance of this work is perhaps second only to <i>The Stern Review</i> with regard to the economics of climate change. William Nordhaus (not be confused with his son Ted Nordhaus) is an eminent environmental economist. His analysis of the economic consequences of climate change and climate change mitigation strategies differs somewhat from Nicholas Stern's analysis. Nordhaus applies a higher discount rate making which has the consequence of estimating a higher relative cost for mitigating climate change and he is more sanguine regarding future generations' abilities to adapt to climate change. Nonetheless, he strongly advocates a carbon tax and stresses the importance of acting quickly and decisively to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.
Jamieson, Dale, <i>Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed -- and What It Means for Our Future</i>, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2014. This work, by a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. Jamieson provides and account of how governments have failed to address climate change in a time frame adequate to preserve the kind of planet that existed prior to the industrial revolution. He acknowledges that we live in the Anthropocene Era, viz., a geological era in which the actions of human beings are having a determining effect on the natural history of the planet. He also provides chapters on the ethics of responding to climate change.
Medvedev, Zhores A., <i>The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko</i>, I. Michael Lerner, trans., N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1969. This is an account of the period from 1929-1961 during which the influence of T.D. Lysenko distorted Soviet genetics and agricultural sciences. The account is written by a Soviet scientist who had first hand experience with the internal struggles to maintain the integrity of Soviet science.
Joravsky, David, <i>The Lysenko Affair</i>, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970. Joravsky is an American historian, emeritus professor at Northwestern University specializing in Soviet studies. This work is recognized as among the very best accounts of the Soviet science under the influence of T.D. Lysenko.
Wood, Mary Christina, <i>Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age</i>, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2014. I consider this book the best of the year. It describes the decline of environmental regulations established by the promising environmental laws of the 1970s. According to Wood, environmental regulatory agencies have become captured by the industries that they were designed to regulate. Consequently, their primary role now is to approve exceptions to environmental restrictions -- essentially blessing the very damages they were designed to protect us from. Wood argues that our best response to this is to employ trust law to require Congress and the executive branch to protect the public's interest in a livable environment. Basic to this approach is the idea that the natural world is like a trust, with government serving as its trustee on behalf of current and future generations.
Speth, James Gustave and Peer M. Haas, <i>Global Environmental Governance</i>, Washington D.C.: Island Press, 2006. This work provides a brief history of the international efforts to reach an agreement on how to protect the climate from anthropogenic changes.
Kolbert, Elizabeth, <i>Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change</i>, N.Y.: Bloomsbury, 2006. This work is among the most important of several books that were published around this time on the contemporary and pending damages that climate change presents. Ten years on, it is depressing to see how little has been accomplished to address the problems that Kolbert describes.
McKibben, Bill, <i>Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet</i>, N.Y.: N.Y.: Henry Holt and Co., 2010. Bill McKibben may be remembered as the most important voice warning Americans about the damage that we are doing to the climate. His work <i>Eaarth</i> asserts that our actions have already ensured that our planet will become qualitatively different from the one which has been our home. Thus, he slightly alters the spelling of the planet's name. His description of unavoidable changes are clear and illuminating, fully justifying his rather radical observation. McKibben suggests ways in which we might alter our lifestyles in a way that will allow us to live "lightly, carefully, and gracefully" such that we can live reasonably well despite the terrible consequences of our past actions.
Brechin, Gray, <i>Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin</i>, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. This work is a history of the city of San Francisco and the social, political, and particularly the environmental consequences of its development. The story begins with the devastation produced by mining gold and clear cutting California's forests and concludes with the establishment of the academic institutions that developed nuclear weapons. It provides an unflinching critique of the consequences of the unrestrained economic exploitation of people an nature for private gain.
Shelley, Mary, <i>The Last Man</i>, London: Henry Colburn, 1826. This little-known novel by the author of <i>Frankenstein</i> describes in three volumes the extinction of humanity as a result of a virulent plague. The story come to us from 1818 when visitors to a "gloomy cavern of the Cumaean Sibyl," where they find written prophecies, often of events now just past. Among the prophesies is an account of the last man to perish in the world-wide plague. Though set in the last decade, the world Shelley describes is little different from her own time. It is without electricity or internal combustion engines and the struggle between monarchists and republicans is only now becoming resolved in favor of republicanism. The first volume works primarily to introduce and develop the novel's characters. Its story mostly concerns interpersonal relations and political ambitions. The plague makes no appearance. Indeed, appart from passing mention, it only appears one third of the way through the second volume. From there the novel describes the epidemic decimation of England. The third volume recounts the surviving remnants of the country trekking to Switzerland where they hope to find refuge from the plague. Ultimately three survivors continue on to Rome. The novel ends with the last man determining to sail a bark along the oceans' shores in search of another survivor. "Thus around the shores of deserted earth, while the sun is high, and the moon waxes or wanes, angels, the spirits of the dead, and the ever-open eyeof the Supreme, will behold the tiny bark, freighted with Verney--the LAST MAN." If the Victorians were obsessed with death, Shelley's <i>The Last Man</i> is an extreme expression of this obsession. Not only does every character die, but the entire human race is extinguished. The early volume is graced with the romantic prose of the time and peppered with reflections on life, love, and death, but once the plague appears, there is hardly a page in the novel which is not a meditation on mortality.
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Thursday, February 25, 2016
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle Earth / J.R.R. Tolkien -- Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1980
After the publication of The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien's son, Christopher, released Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle Earth. It was a testament to his confidence in the importance of his father's work as The Silmarillion did not meet the expectations of Tolkien's fans. As it happened, Unfinished Tales fared no better. That's a shame as both posthumous works are great achievements despite being unfinished by the author. Unfinished Tales contains stories from each of the three ages of Middle Earth. The First Age is primarily the history of the elves. In Unfinished Tales we can read about Tuor, a human raised by elves and his coming to the hidden elf kingdom of Gondolin. We also can read about the fate of the children of Hurin, Turin and Nienor, both ill-fated by a curse placed on their father. From the Second Age, we have stories of the men of Numenor, blessed by the god-like Valar, but virtually destroyed by the seduction of Sauron. We also find a history of Galadriel and her husband Celeborn, elves of the noblest rank. Told of the Third Age, the age in which the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place, are accounts of the loss of the Ring of Power, relations between Gondor and Rohan, and stories filling in a few gaps in the account given in The Lord of the Rings. Finally, there are three short accounts of the Wild Men of the Druedain, the five wizards, and the palantiri.
By and large the prose of Unfinished Tales is out of keeping with the novelistic form of Tolkien's more popular works and more akin to The Silmarillion, but there is enough connection to the popular works to make it somewhat more engaging to the casual Tolkien fan than was The Silmarillion. Most certainly, the stories chosen by Christopher Tolkien to include in this volume are among the most important for gaining a deep understanding of Tolkien's larger vision of Middle Earth.
By and large the prose of Unfinished Tales is out of keeping with the novelistic form of Tolkien's more popular works and more akin to The Silmarillion, but there is enough connection to the popular works to make it somewhat more engaging to the casual Tolkien fan than was The Silmarillion. Most certainly, the stories chosen by Christopher Tolkien to include in this volume are among the most important for gaining a deep understanding of Tolkien's larger vision of Middle Earth.
Saturday, January 24, 2015
The Silmarillion / J.R.R. Tolkien -- Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1977
The Silmarillion has a bad reputation. After a spike in the popularity on American college campuses of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, his readers were eager for a similar work. When they discovered that Tolkien's unpublished stories were consciously not in a traditional novelistic form, they largely turned their backs on them -- not just The Silmarillion, but all of his remaining unpublished works. In the years following the publication of The Silmarillion, one could easily find copies of it in used bookstores. This is all too bad, since there is much to appreciate in The Silmarillion, if one does not expect it to be like The Lord of the Rings.
The volume is composed of five works: "Ainulindale," "Valaquenta," Quenta Silmarillion, "Akallabeth," and "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age." "Ainulindale" is and account of the work of Eru, the One, called "Iluvatar" by the Elves. Eru created everything. First among his creations were the Ainur (or more specifically, the Valar), god-like beings that remind one of the Olympian gods. Tolkien describes their primary activity as the making of music, which is disrupted by the dissonance of one of the Ainur, Melkor, because of his pride. Later, the music of the Valar takes on a new ontological form as Ea, the material universe and Arda, the world in which all of Tolkien's stories are set. Included as a region of Arda is Middle Earth. The tone of all of this is rather like The Book of Genesis. Never does Tolkien establish what one might consider a novelistic plot or characters of any substance. What story line that can be found, is based on the rebellion of Melkor. Upon my first reading, I was thrilled by the depth and majesty of the work and fascinated by its theological undertones, but like so many other readers, I was hoping that the remainder of the work would be more like The Lord of the Rings.
The second work in the volume, "Valaquenta," seems more like a snippet from an encyclopedia, providing entries on the Ainur: the Valar mentioned above and the Maia a demi-god like being. Ther is also an entry on "the Enemies," including Melkor and Sauron, a Maia of The Lord of the Rings. There is no doubt value here, but because the roles of the Valar and the Maia are not great in the remainder of the volume, the detail we find here is rather unnecessary for the whole. We do get, however, a deeper understanding of the powers of the world that the Valar represent and so have a better sense of the cosmology within which the stories of the "Childern of Iluvatar" (elves and men) unfold. Those stories are told in the three subsequent works in the volume.
The Quenta Silmarillion is the longest and most complex work in the volume. It is a history of the First Age of the world in which the actions of the elves are of greatest import. Elves are the "first born" of the Children of Iluvatar, discovered first by Melkor who had taken refuge in Middle Earth. Their fate was decided by a war between Melkor and the other Ainur, the outcome of which was the defeat of Melkor and his imprisonment for three ages. Following the war, the Ainur invited the elves to come to Aman, "the Undying Lands" to live forever in peace and under the protection of the Ainur. Three ambassadors were chose from the elves to receive the summons, Ingwe, Finwe, Elwe. Each became a king of a portion of the elves and each encouraged their subjects to travel across the sea to the join the Ainur. However, not all of them made the journey.
Perhaps the most gripping story in the Quenta Silmarillion is that of the "Flight of the Elves." While in the Undying Lands, one elf, Feanor, son of Finwe, made three precious jewels that contained a sacred light. He called the jewels "the silmarils." They were, however, stolen from him and taken to Middle Earth by Melkor who had finished his time in prison. In his pride and lust for the silmarils, Feanor and all his sons made a vow to recover them and treat anyone who withheld the silmarils from them as an enemy. His decision to return to Middle Earth was opposed by the Valar, who declared that Feanor and any elf that left the Undying Lands with him could not return. Feanor's pride led him to disregard the decree and he journeyed to Middle Earth. Shockingly, his departure involved a civil war among the elves in which elves killed elves, forever staining their history. In the end, Feanor and his followers made it to Middle Earth. The remainder of the Quenta Silmarillion is the story of their struggle against Melkor to regain the silmarils.
Many of the stories told of that struggle contain thrilling details, but by and large they are schematic, outlining the broad history of the elves in Middle Earth. The most well developed stories have been published in other works by Tolkien's son Christopher as part of the series of volumes entitled The History of Middle Earth and in one instance as a separate book, The Children of Hurin. In all, the Quenta Silmarillion truly demonstrates Tolkien's expansive imagination. If one is fascinated by the complexity and extent of his vision in The Lord of the Rings, one should be absolutely overawed by what he has given us in the Quenta Silmarillion. Unfortunately, the idiom in which he has chose to write has not attracted the audience it deserves. To truly appreciate the value of the work, one must give it more than a single reading. I'm sure very few people have been so committed to understanding Tolkien's vision as to do this.
As if the Quenta Silmarillion were not enough to establish the majesty of his vision, Tolkien provides us with accounts of the Second and Third Ages of Middle Earth in The Silmarillion. The Second Age is an account of the history of men, particularly the race of men called the Numenoreans, following the defeat of Melkor which ends the First Age. During the Second Age, the evil of Melkor is carried on by his surviving vassal, Sauron. Deceived by Sauron, men are induced to attack the Valar in the Undying Lands, which unsurprisingly brings about their destruction, with the exception of a dissident group, loyal to the Valar.
The final work in The Silmarillion is "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age." This tells the story of the creation of the rings of power by Sauron and ultimate the War of the Last Alliance in which men and elves defeated Sauron and in which the prince of the Numenoreans, Isildur acquired the one ring of power, only to lose it when ambushed by orcs. It is with the end of this last work that we are finally brought up to the time of Tolkien's more popular works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Undoubtedly, The Silmarillion is not everyone's cup of tea, but for anyone who loves The Lord of the Rings, the stories and history it holds give depth and meaning to that world. It may take two or more readings to become clear about the various events and numerous figures in the legendarium, but once one has this, Frodo, Samwise, Gandalf, Aragorn, and all the rest of Tolkien's familiar characters can be seen in the supremely heroic light that the author envisioned for them.
The volume is composed of five works: "Ainulindale," "Valaquenta," Quenta Silmarillion, "Akallabeth," and "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age." "Ainulindale" is and account of the work of Eru, the One, called "Iluvatar" by the Elves. Eru created everything. First among his creations were the Ainur (or more specifically, the Valar), god-like beings that remind one of the Olympian gods. Tolkien describes their primary activity as the making of music, which is disrupted by the dissonance of one of the Ainur, Melkor, because of his pride. Later, the music of the Valar takes on a new ontological form as Ea, the material universe and Arda, the world in which all of Tolkien's stories are set. Included as a region of Arda is Middle Earth. The tone of all of this is rather like The Book of Genesis. Never does Tolkien establish what one might consider a novelistic plot or characters of any substance. What story line that can be found, is based on the rebellion of Melkor. Upon my first reading, I was thrilled by the depth and majesty of the work and fascinated by its theological undertones, but like so many other readers, I was hoping that the remainder of the work would be more like The Lord of the Rings.
The second work in the volume, "Valaquenta," seems more like a snippet from an encyclopedia, providing entries on the Ainur: the Valar mentioned above and the Maia a demi-god like being. Ther is also an entry on "the Enemies," including Melkor and Sauron, a Maia of The Lord of the Rings. There is no doubt value here, but because the roles of the Valar and the Maia are not great in the remainder of the volume, the detail we find here is rather unnecessary for the whole. We do get, however, a deeper understanding of the powers of the world that the Valar represent and so have a better sense of the cosmology within which the stories of the "Childern of Iluvatar" (elves and men) unfold. Those stories are told in the three subsequent works in the volume.
The Quenta Silmarillion is the longest and most complex work in the volume. It is a history of the First Age of the world in which the actions of the elves are of greatest import. Elves are the "first born" of the Children of Iluvatar, discovered first by Melkor who had taken refuge in Middle Earth. Their fate was decided by a war between Melkor and the other Ainur, the outcome of which was the defeat of Melkor and his imprisonment for three ages. Following the war, the Ainur invited the elves to come to Aman, "the Undying Lands" to live forever in peace and under the protection of the Ainur. Three ambassadors were chose from the elves to receive the summons, Ingwe, Finwe, Elwe. Each became a king of a portion of the elves and each encouraged their subjects to travel across the sea to the join the Ainur. However, not all of them made the journey.
Perhaps the most gripping story in the Quenta Silmarillion is that of the "Flight of the Elves." While in the Undying Lands, one elf, Feanor, son of Finwe, made three precious jewels that contained a sacred light. He called the jewels "the silmarils." They were, however, stolen from him and taken to Middle Earth by Melkor who had finished his time in prison. In his pride and lust for the silmarils, Feanor and all his sons made a vow to recover them and treat anyone who withheld the silmarils from them as an enemy. His decision to return to Middle Earth was opposed by the Valar, who declared that Feanor and any elf that left the Undying Lands with him could not return. Feanor's pride led him to disregard the decree and he journeyed to Middle Earth. Shockingly, his departure involved a civil war among the elves in which elves killed elves, forever staining their history. In the end, Feanor and his followers made it to Middle Earth. The remainder of the Quenta Silmarillion is the story of their struggle against Melkor to regain the silmarils.
Many of the stories told of that struggle contain thrilling details, but by and large they are schematic, outlining the broad history of the elves in Middle Earth. The most well developed stories have been published in other works by Tolkien's son Christopher as part of the series of volumes entitled The History of Middle Earth and in one instance as a separate book, The Children of Hurin. In all, the Quenta Silmarillion truly demonstrates Tolkien's expansive imagination. If one is fascinated by the complexity and extent of his vision in The Lord of the Rings, one should be absolutely overawed by what he has given us in the Quenta Silmarillion. Unfortunately, the idiom in which he has chose to write has not attracted the audience it deserves. To truly appreciate the value of the work, one must give it more than a single reading. I'm sure very few people have been so committed to understanding Tolkien's vision as to do this.
As if the Quenta Silmarillion were not enough to establish the majesty of his vision, Tolkien provides us with accounts of the Second and Third Ages of Middle Earth in The Silmarillion. The Second Age is an account of the history of men, particularly the race of men called the Numenoreans, following the defeat of Melkor which ends the First Age. During the Second Age, the evil of Melkor is carried on by his surviving vassal, Sauron. Deceived by Sauron, men are induced to attack the Valar in the Undying Lands, which unsurprisingly brings about their destruction, with the exception of a dissident group, loyal to the Valar.
The final work in The Silmarillion is "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age." This tells the story of the creation of the rings of power by Sauron and ultimate the War of the Last Alliance in which men and elves defeated Sauron and in which the prince of the Numenoreans, Isildur acquired the one ring of power, only to lose it when ambushed by orcs. It is with the end of this last work that we are finally brought up to the time of Tolkien's more popular works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Undoubtedly, The Silmarillion is not everyone's cup of tea, but for anyone who loves The Lord of the Rings, the stories and history it holds give depth and meaning to that world. It may take two or more readings to become clear about the various events and numerous figures in the legendarium, but once one has this, Frodo, Samwise, Gandalf, Aragorn, and all the rest of Tolkien's familiar characters can be seen in the supremely heroic light that the author envisioned for them.
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sellic Spell / J.R.R. Tolkien, trans. -- Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014
Several years ago, I heard a rumor that a translation by Tolkien of Beowulf was found in his papers and that an eminent Tolkien scholar was working on editing it for publication. Later, I heard that the scholar had abandoned the task. So I was very pleasantly surprised to find Tolkien's translation of Beowulf on sale at my campus bookstore, edited by Tolkien's son, Christopher. Tolkien's relationship to Beowulf and Beowulf scholarship is legendary. In 1936, he published an influential study of the entitled, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." More than anything, that study elevated the reputation of Beowulf to the preeminent literary status that it has today. Prior to that, Beowulf was seen mostly as a hotch-potch of story fragments which W.P. Ker described as putting peripheral matters at the center and central matters at the periphery. According to Tolkien, the tangential narratives and allusions to other histories and legends lent depth and context to the story and that the centrality of the monsters (Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon) and how they were treated by the author offered an important insight into the poem and its telling. For example, the reference to Grendel as being of the race of Cain and the connection between the dragon and Satan showed that Beowulf was neither fully a pagan epic nor a Christian homily. Instead, it was a retelling of an earlier pagan legend by a Christian author. The author's Christian world view could not help but make him (or her?) include a Christian slant on the drama.
It is clear that Tolkien's understanding of Beowulf is first rate if not second to none and so his edition of the poem can not be ignored. Tolkien was also the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University and so his mastery of Old English verse is also of the first order. At one time in his life he wrote a poem entitled The Fall of Arthur in the alliterative verse form of Old English. This form is composed of verses made up of two phrases each usually made up of two stressed and two unstressed units of the form: x / x / | x / x /. The alliteration occurs when the third stressed unit is the same sound as the sound of the fist stressed unit and sometimes also the second unit. For example: "the Geat prince went / for Grendel's mother" or "funeral fires / fumes of wood smoke." Of course, every line in Old English meter is not slavishly fitted to these forms, but any attempt to capture the sound of the Old English poetry would tend to follow these patterns. Tolkien, however, chose not to write his edition of Beowulf in verse. Instead, the narrative is presented in prose. This permits him to more easily capture the meaning of the poem since he is able to choose Modern English expressions that do not alliterate, but what is lost in poetry is gained in semantic accuracy. At the same time Tolkien's rendition of the story is colored by his sense of drama. His diction and word order make the work suitably archaic and often quite stirring. Anyone with an appreciation for his prose will thoroughly enjoy his rendition.
In addition to the rendition of the poem itself, Christopher Tolkien has included a commentary on the text that was taken from Tolkien's lecture notes. The commentary is nearly twice the length of the poem and this more than anything will provide the reader with deep insight into the poem and to the pagan times about which the poem is written. For example, Tolkien explains the passage, "Leave here our warlike shields" with the annotation: "Note the prohibition of weapons or accoutrements of battle in the hall. to walk in with spear and shield was like walking in nowadays with your hat on. The basis of these rules was of course fear and prudence amid the ever-present dangers of an heroic age, but they were made part of the ritual, of good manners." The annotation goes on further to point out that this custom was appropriate to a king's hall and that "It was death in Scandinavia to cause a brawl in a king's hall."
The presence of the commentary in the same volume as the rendition gives a reader three extremely attractive options: (1) Read the narrative strait through without reference to the commentary. This allows you to best appreciate Tolkien's own literary techniques. (2) Read the the commentary along with the narrative. This provides you with a deep understanding of the story with Tolkien as your guide. (3) Read the commentary alone. This provides you with a fascinating study of Old English and the customs of pagan Northern Europe. It's hard to decide which of these approaches is best. Perhaps three readings of the work would be ideal.
It is clear that Tolkien's understanding of Beowulf is first rate if not second to none and so his edition of the poem can not be ignored. Tolkien was also the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University and so his mastery of Old English verse is also of the first order. At one time in his life he wrote a poem entitled The Fall of Arthur in the alliterative verse form of Old English. This form is composed of verses made up of two phrases each usually made up of two stressed and two unstressed units of the form: x / x / | x / x /. The alliteration occurs when the third stressed unit is the same sound as the sound of the fist stressed unit and sometimes also the second unit. For example: "the Geat prince went / for Grendel's mother" or "funeral fires / fumes of wood smoke." Of course, every line in Old English meter is not slavishly fitted to these forms, but any attempt to capture the sound of the Old English poetry would tend to follow these patterns. Tolkien, however, chose not to write his edition of Beowulf in verse. Instead, the narrative is presented in prose. This permits him to more easily capture the meaning of the poem since he is able to choose Modern English expressions that do not alliterate, but what is lost in poetry is gained in semantic accuracy. At the same time Tolkien's rendition of the story is colored by his sense of drama. His diction and word order make the work suitably archaic and often quite stirring. Anyone with an appreciation for his prose will thoroughly enjoy his rendition.
In addition to the rendition of the poem itself, Christopher Tolkien has included a commentary on the text that was taken from Tolkien's lecture notes. The commentary is nearly twice the length of the poem and this more than anything will provide the reader with deep insight into the poem and to the pagan times about which the poem is written. For example, Tolkien explains the passage, "Leave here our warlike shields" with the annotation: "Note the prohibition of weapons or accoutrements of battle in the hall. to walk in with spear and shield was like walking in nowadays with your hat on. The basis of these rules was of course fear and prudence amid the ever-present dangers of an heroic age, but they were made part of the ritual, of good manners." The annotation goes on further to point out that this custom was appropriate to a king's hall and that "It was death in Scandinavia to cause a brawl in a king's hall."
The presence of the commentary in the same volume as the rendition gives a reader three extremely attractive options: (1) Read the narrative strait through without reference to the commentary. This allows you to best appreciate Tolkien's own literary techniques. (2) Read the the commentary along with the narrative. This provides you with a deep understanding of the story with Tolkien as your guide. (3) Read the commentary alone. This provides you with a fascinating study of Old English and the customs of pagan Northern Europe. It's hard to decide which of these approaches is best. Perhaps three readings of the work would be ideal.
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
The Hobbit / J.R.R. Tolkien -- Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1976
A few weeks ago, I watched the concluding film of Peter Jackson's three-film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. I was not disappointed, but only because I had seen the prior two films and had low expectations. Jackson appears to have decided to make a set of films for an audience that loved his adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, but has not read The Hobbit. In order not to allow the movies to confuse my recollections of the book, I decided to re-read The Hobbit for what was probably the fifth or sixth time. Mind you, those readings were spread over a period of 44 years, though my last reading of it was only a few years ago, prior to Jackson's first Hobbit film. Over the course of those decades, my experience of the book has changed little.
For me, The Hobbit ranks first among light, "escapist" reading. It's my literary "comfort food." In contrast, The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien's other works provide us with more weighty themes. Three characters are well-developed in The Hobbit: Bilbo Baggins, Thorin Oakenshield, and to a lesser extent Gandalf the Grey, but character development is not really the central virtue of the book. Instead, The Hobbit takes us on a journey through a mysterious world which has horizons that are mainly limited to the scene of its action. Certainly, there are hints of a wider world. Much has been made of these hints by literary critics who ascribe the attraction of the novel to those hints. Tolkien himself thought this, but in truth the hints are quite few. Instead, the intimation of a wider, imaginary world is mostly a consequence of the non-human cast of characters. If the characters are so different from us, then surely their world must be different. No hints are really required for that. What really makes the story endearing is that the reader understands Middle Earth's horizons to be much wider than what we see, but this world is one which is revealed to us only slowly and in the course of the journey. This is analogous to a child's experience of his or her development to adulthood.
Following the story of The Hobbit along the journey to the Lonely Mountain, one begins in Bilbo's house. Despite being built into the side of hill, Bilbo's house is familiar enough. One can imagine the cozy fire, comfortable chairs, and of course plenty of food. Soon enough, Bilbo's world is disturbed by a company of dwarves. As a child, this intrusion from the outside was not terribly different from the appearance (in real life and on television and radio) of people from the world outside of my family and immediate friends. They produced both interest and anxiety. Eventually, Bilbo sets out with the Dwarves and plunges into a world that he knows little about. In the course of his "adventure," his horizons become wider and wider, encounter challenging environments, trolls, goblins, wolves, a shape-shifting bear-man, a dismal forest, elves, men, and finally the Lonely Mountain and its dragon. Along the way, Bilbo progressively rises to the challenges he faces.
His first real challenge comes with his encounter with the trolls. Here Bilbo succeeds only in the sense that he musters the courage to attempt to pick the pocket of one of the trolls. His (and the dwarves') escape is arranged by the intervention of Gandalf. Bilbo's second challenge comes with his game of riddles with Gollum. Again his escape is less of his own doing than, luck. By finding a ring that makes him invisible and accidently uttering a riddle that stumps Gollum, Bilbo manages to escape the caverns beneath the Misty Mountains. It is really not until the travelers make it into Mirkwood (a dismal forest) that Bilbo really begins to discover his capabilities. His defeat of the spiders that have captured the dwarves is mostly a product of his invisibility, but by now, the powers of the ring can be thought of as indistinguishable from Bilbo's own evolving resources.
Bilbo's maturity as an agent in the story really begins in full when he formulates a successful plan to free the dwarves from imprisonment in the caverns of the wood elves. It is an elegant escape, but not without sacrifice to the dwarves. The culmination of Bilbo's progress comes at the Lonely Mountain, when he rather willingly confronts the dragon Smaug. Bilbo is now most certainly a formidable actor in the wild and dangerous world that had been far outside his horizons at the start of his journey, but his development is more than one of adult confidence. In the final acts of the novel, Bilbo steps out of his role as someone having an adventure when he truly acts to shape the course of events by delivering the Arkenstone (a gem prized by Thorin Oakenshield) to the armies arrayed against the dwarves. Far from betraying his friends, Bilbo's action creates the possibility of their salvation and indeed, results in the moral salvation of Thorin Oakenshield.
What we see in The Hobbit is Bilbo's development from a childish existence to a mature adult actor. At the same time, his maturity does not completely lose touch with his simple persona. When the War of the Five Armies breaks out at the very end of the action, Bilbo is struck on the head with a rock and misses the greater part of the battle. Some things remain too large for the hobbit.
Reading the story as a child, I was fascinated, indeed enchanted, by the unfolding mysterious world and thrilled by Biblo's capacity to rise to meet its challenges. I found strength in the idea that someone so small and unheroic might succeed in his foray into the wider world.
The two other characters that stand out in the novel are Thorin Oakenshield and Gandalf. Gandalf clearly serves as a parental figure, wiser than Bilbo, watching out for his safety, and guiding his steps. Still, his failure to save Bilbo, the dwarves, and even himself from the wolves and goblins east of the Misty Mountains reveals both the dangers of the wider world and the limitations of those we must rely upon. It is noteworthy that Biblo's developing maturity only becomes manifest when Gandalf leaves the adventure.
Thorin's character development stands as a cautionary tale. At first Thorin is a reasonably admirable, if flawed, adult character; but he is overcome by his greed and he leads the people for whom he is responsible into needless danger. It is Bilbo's recognition of Thorin's failing that leads him to take the final step in his own development. Bilbo's relationship with Thorin reminds us that in the end, one must be responsible for one's own actions and know when to depart from ostensible authority.
Again, these character developments are not really the magic in the story -- at least not for me. Instead, it is Tolkien's ability to posit a world unlike our own and show us only what a developing character can see along his journey. The hints of the grand stories of Middle Earth told in The Silmarillion are not what makes The Hobbit exciting. What gives the novel its power is the slow, but progressive revelation of a mysterious world that provides a model for one's own actual coming of age. Reading it much later in life reminds me of those days when the wide, actual world (or should I say the "unimaginary world") seemed dark and mysterious, and where all that was familiar was closely bound in space, time, and culture. Like no other book The Hobbit allows me to recapture that exciting sense of pending discovery.
For me, The Hobbit ranks first among light, "escapist" reading. It's my literary "comfort food." In contrast, The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien's other works provide us with more weighty themes. Three characters are well-developed in The Hobbit: Bilbo Baggins, Thorin Oakenshield, and to a lesser extent Gandalf the Grey, but character development is not really the central virtue of the book. Instead, The Hobbit takes us on a journey through a mysterious world which has horizons that are mainly limited to the scene of its action. Certainly, there are hints of a wider world. Much has been made of these hints by literary critics who ascribe the attraction of the novel to those hints. Tolkien himself thought this, but in truth the hints are quite few. Instead, the intimation of a wider, imaginary world is mostly a consequence of the non-human cast of characters. If the characters are so different from us, then surely their world must be different. No hints are really required for that. What really makes the story endearing is that the reader understands Middle Earth's horizons to be much wider than what we see, but this world is one which is revealed to us only slowly and in the course of the journey. This is analogous to a child's experience of his or her development to adulthood.
Following the story of The Hobbit along the journey to the Lonely Mountain, one begins in Bilbo's house. Despite being built into the side of hill, Bilbo's house is familiar enough. One can imagine the cozy fire, comfortable chairs, and of course plenty of food. Soon enough, Bilbo's world is disturbed by a company of dwarves. As a child, this intrusion from the outside was not terribly different from the appearance (in real life and on television and radio) of people from the world outside of my family and immediate friends. They produced both interest and anxiety. Eventually, Bilbo sets out with the Dwarves and plunges into a world that he knows little about. In the course of his "adventure," his horizons become wider and wider, encounter challenging environments, trolls, goblins, wolves, a shape-shifting bear-man, a dismal forest, elves, men, and finally the Lonely Mountain and its dragon. Along the way, Bilbo progressively rises to the challenges he faces.
His first real challenge comes with his encounter with the trolls. Here Bilbo succeeds only in the sense that he musters the courage to attempt to pick the pocket of one of the trolls. His (and the dwarves') escape is arranged by the intervention of Gandalf. Bilbo's second challenge comes with his game of riddles with Gollum. Again his escape is less of his own doing than, luck. By finding a ring that makes him invisible and accidently uttering a riddle that stumps Gollum, Bilbo manages to escape the caverns beneath the Misty Mountains. It is really not until the travelers make it into Mirkwood (a dismal forest) that Bilbo really begins to discover his capabilities. His defeat of the spiders that have captured the dwarves is mostly a product of his invisibility, but by now, the powers of the ring can be thought of as indistinguishable from Bilbo's own evolving resources.
Bilbo's maturity as an agent in the story really begins in full when he formulates a successful plan to free the dwarves from imprisonment in the caverns of the wood elves. It is an elegant escape, but not without sacrifice to the dwarves. The culmination of Bilbo's progress comes at the Lonely Mountain, when he rather willingly confronts the dragon Smaug. Bilbo is now most certainly a formidable actor in the wild and dangerous world that had been far outside his horizons at the start of his journey, but his development is more than one of adult confidence. In the final acts of the novel, Bilbo steps out of his role as someone having an adventure when he truly acts to shape the course of events by delivering the Arkenstone (a gem prized by Thorin Oakenshield) to the armies arrayed against the dwarves. Far from betraying his friends, Bilbo's action creates the possibility of their salvation and indeed, results in the moral salvation of Thorin Oakenshield.
What we see in The Hobbit is Bilbo's development from a childish existence to a mature adult actor. At the same time, his maturity does not completely lose touch with his simple persona. When the War of the Five Armies breaks out at the very end of the action, Bilbo is struck on the head with a rock and misses the greater part of the battle. Some things remain too large for the hobbit.
Reading the story as a child, I was fascinated, indeed enchanted, by the unfolding mysterious world and thrilled by Biblo's capacity to rise to meet its challenges. I found strength in the idea that someone so small and unheroic might succeed in his foray into the wider world.
The two other characters that stand out in the novel are Thorin Oakenshield and Gandalf. Gandalf clearly serves as a parental figure, wiser than Bilbo, watching out for his safety, and guiding his steps. Still, his failure to save Bilbo, the dwarves, and even himself from the wolves and goblins east of the Misty Mountains reveals both the dangers of the wider world and the limitations of those we must rely upon. It is noteworthy that Biblo's developing maturity only becomes manifest when Gandalf leaves the adventure.
Thorin's character development stands as a cautionary tale. At first Thorin is a reasonably admirable, if flawed, adult character; but he is overcome by his greed and he leads the people for whom he is responsible into needless danger. It is Bilbo's recognition of Thorin's failing that leads him to take the final step in his own development. Bilbo's relationship with Thorin reminds us that in the end, one must be responsible for one's own actions and know when to depart from ostensible authority.
Again, these character developments are not really the magic in the story -- at least not for me. Instead, it is Tolkien's ability to posit a world unlike our own and show us only what a developing character can see along his journey. The hints of the grand stories of Middle Earth told in The Silmarillion are not what makes The Hobbit exciting. What gives the novel its power is the slow, but progressive revelation of a mysterious world that provides a model for one's own actual coming of age. Reading it much later in life reminds me of those days when the wide, actual world (or should I say the "unimaginary world") seemed dark and mysterious, and where all that was familiar was closely bound in space, time, and culture. Like no other book The Hobbit allows me to recapture that exciting sense of pending discovery.
Friday, October 25, 2013
The Fall of Arthur / J.R.R. Tolkien -- Christopher Tolkien, ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013
When most of us think of Britain's mythopoeic tradition, the legends of King Arthur and his knights come quickly to mind. According to J.R.R. Tolkien's biographer Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien found them "too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive," but Tolkien did enjoy them as a child. His appreciation for them as an adult was great enough to move him to edit (with E.V. Gordon) a Middle English version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and later to translate the poem into modern English, retaining its alliterative verse form. It is not clear exactly when, but roughly around this stage of his career, Tolkien also began writing an alliterative poem "in the Beowulf meter" (according to his friend R.W. Chambers) entitled The Fall of Arthur.
The poem was never completed by Tolkien, but numerous manuscripts survived. Much to our benefit, Tolkien's son Christopher has assembled the best of these verses into a striking version of the story of the death of Arthur. Tolkien is a master of Britain's traditional poetic meter and "Norther" alliterative verse, having composed numerous works in this style, so it is a pleasure to read Christopher's edition of his father's work, and to see how Tolkien chose to tell a story often told, but often told out of the context of the time. Tolkien's knowledge of the literature and history of medieval England makes him especially equipped to give us what seems to be an authentic version of legend.
Along with the poem itself, Christopher Tolkien provides us with three essays of his own. The first is the most interesting. It recounts various tellings of the events that are included in Tolkien's The Fall of Arthur, including those by Geoffrey of Monmouth and Sir Thomas Mallory. Christopher Tolkien ably puts his father's imaginative treatment of the story into the context of this tradition, allowing us to see what Tolkien retained from that tradition and what is new in his narrative. Perhaps the most interesting addition that Tolkien brings to the legend is his treatment of Guinevere (or "Guinever" as Tolkien chooses to spell her name.) While modern treatments of her character make her out to be a beautiful, but star-crossed, heroine, Tolkien's Guinever seems more akin to Lady MacBeth. Possibly less sympathetic, Guinever seems a good deal more autonomous and powerful than the more popular Guinevere.
Christopher Tolkien's second essay seeks to draw connections between The Fall of Arthur and Tolkien's larger legendarium, The Silmarillion. While this essay includes a good deal of interesting paragraphs and valuable insights, it is largely disconnected and confused. One is never sure if there are any broader points to be made by the essay. The third essay amounts to little more than a record of various alternative drafts of the version that Christopher Tolkien chose to make "canonical" as The Fall of Arthur. We are provided with page upon page of alternate passages that serve little purpose than to let the reader know that Christopher Tolkien needed to make numerous editorial decision in creating the canonical version. Given these alternate passages, one could, in principle, re-do the work of the editor and create a number of very different versions of Tolkien's work, but it is hard to imagine who would want to bother.
In all, The Fall of Arthur is a welcome addition to the compiled work of J.R.R. Tolkien, it illustrates Tolkien's poetic genius, and tempts one to further explore both Tolkien's other alliterative poems and the treatments by other authors of the Arthurian legends.
The poem was never completed by Tolkien, but numerous manuscripts survived. Much to our benefit, Tolkien's son Christopher has assembled the best of these verses into a striking version of the story of the death of Arthur. Tolkien is a master of Britain's traditional poetic meter and "Norther" alliterative verse, having composed numerous works in this style, so it is a pleasure to read Christopher's edition of his father's work, and to see how Tolkien chose to tell a story often told, but often told out of the context of the time. Tolkien's knowledge of the literature and history of medieval England makes him especially equipped to give us what seems to be an authentic version of legend.
Along with the poem itself, Christopher Tolkien provides us with three essays of his own. The first is the most interesting. It recounts various tellings of the events that are included in Tolkien's The Fall of Arthur, including those by Geoffrey of Monmouth and Sir Thomas Mallory. Christopher Tolkien ably puts his father's imaginative treatment of the story into the context of this tradition, allowing us to see what Tolkien retained from that tradition and what is new in his narrative. Perhaps the most interesting addition that Tolkien brings to the legend is his treatment of Guinevere (or "Guinever" as Tolkien chooses to spell her name.) While modern treatments of her character make her out to be a beautiful, but star-crossed, heroine, Tolkien's Guinever seems more akin to Lady MacBeth. Possibly less sympathetic, Guinever seems a good deal more autonomous and powerful than the more popular Guinevere.
Christopher Tolkien's second essay seeks to draw connections between The Fall of Arthur and Tolkien's larger legendarium, The Silmarillion. While this essay includes a good deal of interesting paragraphs and valuable insights, it is largely disconnected and confused. One is never sure if there are any broader points to be made by the essay. The third essay amounts to little more than a record of various alternative drafts of the version that Christopher Tolkien chose to make "canonical" as The Fall of Arthur. We are provided with page upon page of alternate passages that serve little purpose than to let the reader know that Christopher Tolkien needed to make numerous editorial decision in creating the canonical version. Given these alternate passages, one could, in principle, re-do the work of the editor and create a number of very different versions of Tolkien's work, but it is hard to imagine who would want to bother.
In all, The Fall of Arthur is a welcome addition to the compiled work of J.R.R. Tolkien, it illustrates Tolkien's poetic genius, and tempts one to further explore both Tolkien's other alliterative poems and the treatments by other authors of the Arthurian legends.
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age / Sven Birkerts -- Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994
In 1994, the Internet was mainly a text-based medium. "GUIs" or graphic user interfaces were relatively uncommon. The first major web browser "Mosaic Netscape 0.9" was not released until October of that year. Still, the prospect of the ubiquitous use of the Internet to browse linked documents was being discussed with great excitement, at least within academic circles. Luddites were hard to find. For that reason alone, Sven Birkerts's The Gutenberg Elegies now appears to be a remarkably prescient warning of the downside of our new device-obsessed society. At the same time, many of his observations seem quaint. Birkerts got the main picture right, but he can hardly be faulted for mistaking the details or not seeing just how far down the road to digital hypnosis we would traveled.
The first half of the book tells the back story. Birkerts, in an early chapter, recounts how he became attracted to books and writing, including his attempts to become a novelist and how he ultimately discovered his aptitude for writing essays. In any case, we learn early on that Beikerts is devoted to print books, reading, and writing. He goes on to describe the phenomenology of deep reading or reading in which we become thoroughly immersed in the text. He provides an account of how reading can be instrumental in "self-formation," how reading and interpreting texts is related to our life activities apart from reading, and how the activities of reading and writing are not so very different.
In the second part of the book, Birkerts explores the coming new world of digital reading and as you might guess, he greets it with apprehension. Birkerts fears that the beneficial habits and frame of mind created by deep reading will be undermined by the new electronic media. He predicts the erosion of language. He writes that "the complex discourse patterns of the nineteenth century" are becoming "flattened by the requirements of communication over distances. That tendency runs riot as the layers of mediation thicken. Simple linguistic prefab is now the norm, while ambiguity, paradox, irony, subtlety, and wit are fast disappearing....Verbal intelligence, which has long been viewed as suspect as the act of reading, will come to seem positively conspiratorial. The greater part of any articulate person's energy will be deployed in dumbing-down her discourse." It's hard to deny that his prediction has come to pass. The 140 character twitter message has joined the 30 second sound byte to dominate much of our communication. Worse yet, the cell phone text has returned us to the age of brief telegraphic wire messages, except everyone is able to send these messages hundreds of time a day.
Birkerts fears that with the loss of physical books will undermine our sense of the past. No longer will the past be represented to us in surviving artifacts, but it will be stored in databases "flattening" our historical perspective. The extent to which university students are turning their backs on physical books is, indeed, striking. Their work relies very significantly on texts that can be viewed online. This is, perhaps, a product of the ready availability of electronic journal literature. Not long ago, libraries had access only to a limited number of journals and student research relied significantly on books. Now, back issues of journals are sold to libraries in extremely cost effective packages. Money is made mostly on expensive access to recent issues. This is a boon to humanities research, but Birkerts's point that our historical perspective is flattened seems credible, particularly when one views a pdf of an 80 year old journal article in contrast to an original paper version of it.
Perhaps Birkerts's most worrying prediction is of "the waning of the private self." He detects "a process of social collectivization that will over time all but vanquish the ideal of the isolated individual." He writes, "for some decades now we have been edging away from the perception of private life as something opaque, closed off to the world; we increasingly accept the transparency of a life lived within a set of systems, electronic or otherwise....One day we will conduct our public and private lives within networks so dense, among so many channels of instantaneous information, that it will make almost no sense to speak of the differentiations of subjective individualism." I'm not entirely convinced that we are losing the notion of subjective individualism. Much of our social networks are designed to create at least an image of ourselves as individuals, but at the same time we are becoming conduits for memes that waft through the electronic social space; and if Birkerts's concern about "the waining of the private self" was really a concern about the waning of privacy itself, he could not have been more prescient.
The more quaint aspects of Birkerts's work appear in this latter half, where he describes Perseus 1.0 as the "hot new thing in the classics world." Perseus 1.0 was an early an interactive multimedia database for the Classics. The "Perseus Project" is still going, but it has been overtaken by so many new and more sophisticated databases. Still, Birkerts's "curmudgeonly" remarks about the use of such tools in education, particularly humanities education remain worth considering and continue to be discussed among teachers and researchers. Birkerts also has chapters on hyperlinks and audio books. The observations about how hyperlinks change the character of writing and reading are worthwhile; however, his prediction that audio books would supplant print books is obviously mistaken.
The third part of The Gutenberg Elegies laments the demise of literature and the educated reader. My knowledge of literature is far too shallow to comment on his points, though they seem a tad overstated. Regarding the disappearance of the educated reader, I suspect he has a point. In decades past, reading had far less competition. Now, finding an avid reader is rather difficult. This is surely a function of the time we spend looking at text messages, screen-shots, and Youtube video clips, not to mention downloadable movies, audio files, and much more. The ubiquity of cell phones means that people seldom find themselves separated from people with whom they would like to converse and so carrying around a pocket sized paperback to fill the odd empty 20 minutes isn't something we do.
All in all, The Gutenberg Elegies is becoming (or has become) a classic, early work in the expanding debate over the social and personal consequences of our new digital culture. Any one interested in this debate would do well to read it.
The first half of the book tells the back story. Birkerts, in an early chapter, recounts how he became attracted to books and writing, including his attempts to become a novelist and how he ultimately discovered his aptitude for writing essays. In any case, we learn early on that Beikerts is devoted to print books, reading, and writing. He goes on to describe the phenomenology of deep reading or reading in which we become thoroughly immersed in the text. He provides an account of how reading can be instrumental in "self-formation," how reading and interpreting texts is related to our life activities apart from reading, and how the activities of reading and writing are not so very different.
In the second part of the book, Birkerts explores the coming new world of digital reading and as you might guess, he greets it with apprehension. Birkerts fears that the beneficial habits and frame of mind created by deep reading will be undermined by the new electronic media. He predicts the erosion of language. He writes that "the complex discourse patterns of the nineteenth century" are becoming "flattened by the requirements of communication over distances. That tendency runs riot as the layers of mediation thicken. Simple linguistic prefab is now the norm, while ambiguity, paradox, irony, subtlety, and wit are fast disappearing....Verbal intelligence, which has long been viewed as suspect as the act of reading, will come to seem positively conspiratorial. The greater part of any articulate person's energy will be deployed in dumbing-down her discourse." It's hard to deny that his prediction has come to pass. The 140 character twitter message has joined the 30 second sound byte to dominate much of our communication. Worse yet, the cell phone text has returned us to the age of brief telegraphic wire messages, except everyone is able to send these messages hundreds of time a day.
Birkerts fears that with the loss of physical books will undermine our sense of the past. No longer will the past be represented to us in surviving artifacts, but it will be stored in databases "flattening" our historical perspective. The extent to which university students are turning their backs on physical books is, indeed, striking. Their work relies very significantly on texts that can be viewed online. This is, perhaps, a product of the ready availability of electronic journal literature. Not long ago, libraries had access only to a limited number of journals and student research relied significantly on books. Now, back issues of journals are sold to libraries in extremely cost effective packages. Money is made mostly on expensive access to recent issues. This is a boon to humanities research, but Birkerts's point that our historical perspective is flattened seems credible, particularly when one views a pdf of an 80 year old journal article in contrast to an original paper version of it.
Perhaps Birkerts's most worrying prediction is of "the waning of the private self." He detects "a process of social collectivization that will over time all but vanquish the ideal of the isolated individual." He writes, "for some decades now we have been edging away from the perception of private life as something opaque, closed off to the world; we increasingly accept the transparency of a life lived within a set of systems, electronic or otherwise....One day we will conduct our public and private lives within networks so dense, among so many channels of instantaneous information, that it will make almost no sense to speak of the differentiations of subjective individualism." I'm not entirely convinced that we are losing the notion of subjective individualism. Much of our social networks are designed to create at least an image of ourselves as individuals, but at the same time we are becoming conduits for memes that waft through the electronic social space; and if Birkerts's concern about "the waining of the private self" was really a concern about the waning of privacy itself, he could not have been more prescient.
The more quaint aspects of Birkerts's work appear in this latter half, where he describes Perseus 1.0 as the "hot new thing in the classics world." Perseus 1.0 was an early an interactive multimedia database for the Classics. The "Perseus Project" is still going, but it has been overtaken by so many new and more sophisticated databases. Still, Birkerts's "curmudgeonly" remarks about the use of such tools in education, particularly humanities education remain worth considering and continue to be discussed among teachers and researchers. Birkerts also has chapters on hyperlinks and audio books. The observations about how hyperlinks change the character of writing and reading are worthwhile; however, his prediction that audio books would supplant print books is obviously mistaken.
The third part of The Gutenberg Elegies laments the demise of literature and the educated reader. My knowledge of literature is far too shallow to comment on his points, though they seem a tad overstated. Regarding the disappearance of the educated reader, I suspect he has a point. In decades past, reading had far less competition. Now, finding an avid reader is rather difficult. This is surely a function of the time we spend looking at text messages, screen-shots, and Youtube video clips, not to mention downloadable movies, audio files, and much more. The ubiquity of cell phones means that people seldom find themselves separated from people with whom they would like to converse and so carrying around a pocket sized paperback to fill the odd empty 20 minutes isn't something we do.
All in all, The Gutenberg Elegies is becoming (or has become) a classic, early work in the expanding debate over the social and personal consequences of our new digital culture. Any one interested in this debate would do well to read it.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Demian / Hermann Hesse -- W.J. Strachan, trans. -- London: Panther, 1971.
Nearly 40 years ago, I read Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf. It was a profound experience. I immediately ranked it as one of the most intriguing and insightful books I had ever read. It is curious, then, that I read nothing else by him until just this month. Part of the explanation certainly must be the ocassional disparaging comments that friends have made about Hesse's novels. "Adolescent" is a frequent epithet. Still, I was curious enough about what might have attracted me to his work lo, those many years ago that I picked up Demian and read it on a transcontinental flight home.
No doubt, there is something adolescent about Demian and appropriately so as it mostly chronicles the coming of age of a young boy. Hesse masterfully depicts the anxiety of childhood moral dilemmas and the adventure of learning about the world beyond one's nuclear family. If there is a weakness in Demian it is that it seems to take its metaphysics and metaethics a little too seriously. The main character in the novel slowly enters a subculture of people who believe themselves to be the early adherents of a new religion, worshiping the god "Abraxas," who encompasses both the good of the Christian god and the evil of the Devil. Along the way, the reader is treated to a spread of vaguely Jungian psychology and Nietzschean philosophy.
For anyone sympathetic to these views, Demian must be a literary treat, but without such sympathies, it is notably dated. Setting aside what seems to be the author's own sympathies for the psychological and philosophical backdrop, the description of the protagonist's excitement over his induction into an esoteric world is brilliant. Anyone thoughtful enough to question the worldview of one's childhood and to seek a deeper understand of reality in the course of growing up will recognize the enchanting allure of entertaining and exploring mysterious, new philosophical ideas. I suspect it is exactly this that attracted me to Hesse's work so long ago.
Perhaps the most grounding aspect of the novel is the sudden intrusion of war into the lives of its characters. It is as if Hesse acknowledges that the religious and philosophical preoccupations of his characters are a small and private matter in comparison to the enormous currents at work in the world. At the same time, one is left with the impression that the great currents of history are merely unavoidable interruptions in the spiritual and progress of the individual characters. It is well worth reflecting on the contradiction.
No doubt, there is something adolescent about Demian and appropriately so as it mostly chronicles the coming of age of a young boy. Hesse masterfully depicts the anxiety of childhood moral dilemmas and the adventure of learning about the world beyond one's nuclear family. If there is a weakness in Demian it is that it seems to take its metaphysics and metaethics a little too seriously. The main character in the novel slowly enters a subculture of people who believe themselves to be the early adherents of a new religion, worshiping the god "Abraxas," who encompasses both the good of the Christian god and the evil of the Devil. Along the way, the reader is treated to a spread of vaguely Jungian psychology and Nietzschean philosophy.
For anyone sympathetic to these views, Demian must be a literary treat, but without such sympathies, it is notably dated. Setting aside what seems to be the author's own sympathies for the psychological and philosophical backdrop, the description of the protagonist's excitement over his induction into an esoteric world is brilliant. Anyone thoughtful enough to question the worldview of one's childhood and to seek a deeper understand of reality in the course of growing up will recognize the enchanting allure of entertaining and exploring mysterious, new philosophical ideas. I suspect it is exactly this that attracted me to Hesse's work so long ago.
Perhaps the most grounding aspect of the novel is the sudden intrusion of war into the lives of its characters. It is as if Hesse acknowledges that the religious and philosophical preoccupations of his characters are a small and private matter in comparison to the enormous currents at work in the world. At the same time, one is left with the impression that the great currents of history are merely unavoidable interruptions in the spiritual and progress of the individual characters. It is well worth reflecting on the contradiction.
Monday, July 25, 2011
The Flanders Panel / Arturo Perez-Reverte -- NY: Bantam Books, 1996
I read a novel about once every six months. There's usually no real rationale behind which novel. Instead, someone recommends one to me, usually putting it physically in my hand, and for reasons I don't quite understand, I end up reading it. It's not that I have anything against novels. I actually quite like reading them, it's just that I'm so addicted to non-fiction that it is nearly impossible to set aside the long list of non-fiction works that I'm so eager to read.
Recently, I was given Arturo Perez-Reverte's novel, The Flanders Panel. It was recommended to me due to the facts that I enjoy playing Chess and that a Chess problem is central to the plot of the novel. Years earlier, the novel had been recommended to me by a Chess-playing friend, who enjoyed the idea of making a Chess problem central to the plot, but found an error in the story's analysis of the problem. My friend is rated an "expert" which is out of my league, so I was unable to confirm his conclusion, about the problem, but I can certainly agree with his appreciation for the novel's conceit.
The main character in the novel is a highly skilled art conservator living in Madrid. Most all the rest of the characters are art dealers or auction house managers. Perez-Reverte portrays them (with the exception of the main character) more or less unsympathetically. They are generally arrogant, selfish, and self-absorbed. At the same time, Perez-Reverte exhibits an appreciation for their high culture arrogance by strewing his prose with a dizzying array of references to art and music (always classical and jazz). While it does help to establish the sensibilities of his characters, it often simply comes off as stilted.
The story itself turns on the main character's work restoring a painting by a fifteenth century Dutch painter, entitled "The Chess Game." Using UV and x-ray photography, she discovers that the painter included the question, "Who killed the Knight?" in his original work, but shortly after, painted over it. To increase the value of the painting, she and her mentor enlist a Chess master to answer the question by solving a reverse Chess problem appearing in the painting.
The plot thickens as her ex-lover and art historian is murder and it becomes clear that someone is playing out the painting's Chess game, killing people as pieces are taken. Perez-Reverte does an admirable job setting out clues (and false clues) to the murder mystery, but in the end the crimes are feebly motivated and need far too much new information to make sense when they are explained at the end of the novel.
There are a few very good portraits of three of the supporting characters, but the main character is rather flat and uninteresting. Were it not for the Chess problem, it would be a fairly unremarkable book. The real mystery is how it became an "international bestseller," at least according to the publisher's copy.
Recently, I was given Arturo Perez-Reverte's novel, The Flanders Panel. It was recommended to me due to the facts that I enjoy playing Chess and that a Chess problem is central to the plot of the novel. Years earlier, the novel had been recommended to me by a Chess-playing friend, who enjoyed the idea of making a Chess problem central to the plot, but found an error in the story's analysis of the problem. My friend is rated an "expert" which is out of my league, so I was unable to confirm his conclusion, about the problem, but I can certainly agree with his appreciation for the novel's conceit.
The main character in the novel is a highly skilled art conservator living in Madrid. Most all the rest of the characters are art dealers or auction house managers. Perez-Reverte portrays them (with the exception of the main character) more or less unsympathetically. They are generally arrogant, selfish, and self-absorbed. At the same time, Perez-Reverte exhibits an appreciation for their high culture arrogance by strewing his prose with a dizzying array of references to art and music (always classical and jazz). While it does help to establish the sensibilities of his characters, it often simply comes off as stilted.
The story itself turns on the main character's work restoring a painting by a fifteenth century Dutch painter, entitled "The Chess Game." Using UV and x-ray photography, she discovers that the painter included the question, "Who killed the Knight?" in his original work, but shortly after, painted over it. To increase the value of the painting, she and her mentor enlist a Chess master to answer the question by solving a reverse Chess problem appearing in the painting.
The plot thickens as her ex-lover and art historian is murder and it becomes clear that someone is playing out the painting's Chess game, killing people as pieces are taken. Perez-Reverte does an admirable job setting out clues (and false clues) to the murder mystery, but in the end the crimes are feebly motivated and need far too much new information to make sense when they are explained at the end of the novel.
There are a few very good portraits of three of the supporting characters, but the main character is rather flat and uninteresting. Were it not for the Chess problem, it would be a fairly unremarkable book. The real mystery is how it became an "international bestseller," at least according to the publisher's copy.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
The Lost Road and Other Writings / J.R.R. Tolkien -- New York: Ballantine Books, 1996
Following J.R.R. Tolkien's death, his son Christopher Tolkien began combing through Tolkien's papers to provide the world with posthumous works much in demand. Among the material the Christopher published is the twelve-volume series The History of Middle-earth. Volume Five The Lost Road and Other Writings is among the most important of the series. In it, we find versions of the stories that serve as the backdrop for The Hobbit and especially The Lord of the Rings. Furthermore, the versions in Volume Five were written just before the time of the writing of The Lord of the Rings. Consequently, they give us the clearest picture of Tolkien's legendarium as it bears on understanding The Lord of the Rings.
The first part of the work details the history of Numenor and its fall. Numenor was an island created for the race of men who fought with their half-kin the elves in the epic battle against Morgoth. Ultimately, the Numenoreans were seduced by Saron into waging war against the Valar, the gods who inhabited the forbidden Western land of Valinor. Upon the defeat of the Numenoreans, the island of Numenor was submerged into the ocean, with only a remnant of the race (loyal to the gods) escaping to Middle-earth. With the destruction of Numenor, the Valar reshaped the planet -- Arda -- such that it was now impossible for mortals to travel "the road" to the forbidden shores of Valinor, forever separating the men Middle-earth from alinor; hence, the story of "the lost road."
The Lost Road itself was an attempt by Tolkien to write a time travel story in which the travelers found their way back to Numenor through the vehicle of dreaming. The Lost Road was never completed, though Tolkien again attempted the story in a later work known as The Notion Club Papers. The Notion Club Papers can be found in Volume Nine of The History of Middle-earth -- Sauron Defeated.
Time travel as conceived in The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers bears an interesting relationship to the work that Tolkien was engaged in as a philologist. Reconstructing dead, prehistoric languages from the remnants of descendant historical languages and thereby recreating the prehistoric culture is at least as much an art as a science. It inevitably involves creativity and imagination which are most at liberty in our dreams. How much Tolkien saw his work as a philologist as traveling through time is an open question, but The Lost Road is strong evidence that this is how he conceived of it.
Part two of Volume Five reaches even further back in the history of Arda, providing a description of its creation, annals of the world before the fall of Morgoth, and a version of the Quenta Silmarillion which tells the history of elves from their origins to the fall of their arch enemy, Morgoth. It also includes a version of The Llammas, a treatise on the history of the languages of the people of Arda.
Much of the material in Volume Five appears in earlier published work by Tolkien, particularly The Silmarillion. After each section by Tolkien, Christorpher makes an heroic effort to describe how the present version differs from other versions, but the level of detail is too great for the casual reader to appreciate the distinctions. Setting the texts side by side and using Christopher's notes as a guide might yield valuable insight into the transformation of Tolkien's creation, but in the end, it would probably only be of interest to the most dedicated Tolkien scholar. Nonetheless, Tolkien's narative, given to us in The Lost Road and Other Writings will reward anyone who appreciates Tolkien's work.
The first part of the work details the history of Numenor and its fall. Numenor was an island created for the race of men who fought with their half-kin the elves in the epic battle against Morgoth. Ultimately, the Numenoreans were seduced by Saron into waging war against the Valar, the gods who inhabited the forbidden Western land of Valinor. Upon the defeat of the Numenoreans, the island of Numenor was submerged into the ocean, with only a remnant of the race (loyal to the gods) escaping to Middle-earth. With the destruction of Numenor, the Valar reshaped the planet -- Arda -- such that it was now impossible for mortals to travel "the road" to the forbidden shores of Valinor, forever separating the men Middle-earth from alinor; hence, the story of "the lost road."
The Lost Road itself was an attempt by Tolkien to write a time travel story in which the travelers found their way back to Numenor through the vehicle of dreaming. The Lost Road was never completed, though Tolkien again attempted the story in a later work known as The Notion Club Papers. The Notion Club Papers can be found in Volume Nine of The History of Middle-earth -- Sauron Defeated.
Time travel as conceived in The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers bears an interesting relationship to the work that Tolkien was engaged in as a philologist. Reconstructing dead, prehistoric languages from the remnants of descendant historical languages and thereby recreating the prehistoric culture is at least as much an art as a science. It inevitably involves creativity and imagination which are most at liberty in our dreams. How much Tolkien saw his work as a philologist as traveling through time is an open question, but The Lost Road is strong evidence that this is how he conceived of it.
Part two of Volume Five reaches even further back in the history of Arda, providing a description of its creation, annals of the world before the fall of Morgoth, and a version of the Quenta Silmarillion which tells the history of elves from their origins to the fall of their arch enemy, Morgoth. It also includes a version of The Llammas, a treatise on the history of the languages of the people of Arda.
Much of the material in Volume Five appears in earlier published work by Tolkien, particularly The Silmarillion. After each section by Tolkien, Christorpher makes an heroic effort to describe how the present version differs from other versions, but the level of detail is too great for the casual reader to appreciate the distinctions. Setting the texts side by side and using Christopher's notes as a guide might yield valuable insight into the transformation of Tolkien's creation, but in the end, it would probably only be of interest to the most dedicated Tolkien scholar. Nonetheless, Tolkien's narative, given to us in The Lost Road and Other Writings will reward anyone who appreciates Tolkien's work.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Heart of Darkness / Joseph Conrad -- London: Hesperus Press, 2002
Not long ago I watched "Apocalypse Now: Redux" which inspired me to finally read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The work was much less shocking than I had expected. This is probably due to the explicit descriptions of brutality that flood the world today, but despite this, Conrad's dream-like prose remains powerful and deeply affecting. His sometimes subtle observations of the brutality of the exploitation of the Congo by Belgian commercial interests remains haunting, perhaps even more so for anyone who has read Adam Hochschild's history of this era, King Leopold's Ghost. Among the most striking aspects of the work is Conrad's ability to quickly and succinctly describe characters in a way that makes them seem highly multi-dimensional.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Blindness / Jose Saramago -- Giovanni Pontiero, trans., NY: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1998
Blindness describes the experiences of a small group of people who are among the first to go blind in a nearly sudden, universal epidemic of blindness. The primary interest in the story is its account of how human behavior would change under such circumstances. The basic premise is implausible, but could be easily forgiven if it served to illustrate some important idea. It does not. Furthermore, many of the actions of the characters are less than believable. During the epidemic, there is one woman who retains her sight. There is no explanation for the exception. Her purpose in the novel appears only to allow the other characters some greater degree of freedom to cope with their situation.
Saramago's writing occasionally hints of a broader meaning of the blindness, but he is never clear, and his hints are too infrequent and unintelligable for any text-based interpretation to emerge. If Blindness is an allegory, it is hopelessly obscure. What is left is a simple exploration of how an epidemic of blindness might lead to social chaos and psychological stress -- not a terribly surprising consequence. For a more meaningful examination of how people behave under extreme stress, one would do much better to read Elie Wiesel's account of his actual experiences during the Holocaust in Night.
Saramago's writing occasionally hints of a broader meaning of the blindness, but he is never clear, and his hints are too infrequent and unintelligable for any text-based interpretation to emerge. If Blindness is an allegory, it is hopelessly obscure. What is left is a simple exploration of how an epidemic of blindness might lead to social chaos and psychological stress -- not a terribly surprising consequence. For a more meaningful examination of how people behave under extreme stress, one would do much better to read Elie Wiesel's account of his actual experiences during the Holocaust in Night.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation / Seamus Heaney, tr. -- NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.
Reading Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf was a delight. Of course, I've never read a translation of Beowulf and not been delighted; so a more critical review of the work requires a bit more thought. This drove me to compare it to the two other translations that I have read. It's difficult to judge a translation without a good understanding of the original language -- which I certainly lack -- so I'm left to judge the work based on its translated poetry alone. On that score, Heaney's translation, for me, competes well with translations by Michael Alexander (Penguin Classics, 1973) and Francis B. Gummere (P.F. Collier & Sons, 1910). Each translation has its merits and reading them together deepens one's appreciation for each and for the poem itself.
Comparing specific stanzas in the three translations gives one a flavor of how different various translations can be. Heaney directs his readers to his translation of the opening stanza to exemplify his own approach:
Heaney:
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.
Alexander:
Attend!
We have heard of the thriving of the throne of Denmark,
how the folk-kings flourished in former days,
how those royal athelings earned that glory.
and Gummere:
Lo, praise of the prowess of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!
One can immediately feel the tone that Heaney adopts: direct simple word choices, shorn of poetic pretense. In his introduction, Heaney writes: "I came to the task of translating Beowulf with a prejudice in favour of forthright delivery. I remember the voice of the poem as being attractively direct, even though the diction was ornate and the narrative method at times oblique," and later, "I am attending as much to the grain of my original vernacular as to the content of the Anglo-Saxon lines."
What Heaney rejects is the notion that a translation of Beowulf must be guided primarily by the notion that "we must labour to be beautiful." The result is a translation that reads easily and simply, and indeed, beauty flourishes in that simply. At least this is true most of time. What is sometimes lost is the remarkable, stirring phrases that appear in more self-consciously poetic translations. Compare the various translations of one of my favorite passages (lines 2550-2558), when the aged Beowulf first challenges the dragon in his lair:
Heaney:
Then he gave a shout. The lord of the Geats
unburdened his breast and broke out
in a storm of anger. Under the grey stone
his voice challenged and resounded clearly.
Hate was ignited. The hoard-guard recognized
a human voice, the time was over
for peace and parleying. Pouring forth
in a hot battle-fume, the breath of the monster
burst from the rock. There was a rumble under ground.
Alexander:
Passion filled the prince of the Geats:
he allowed a cry to utter from his breast,
roared from his stout heart: as the horn clear in battle
his voice re-echoed through the vault of grey stone.
The hoard-guard recognized a human voice,
and there was no more time for talk of friendship:
hatred stirred. Straightaway
the breath of the dragon billowed from the rock
in a hissing gust; the ground boomed.
and Gummere:
Then from his breast, for he burst with rage,
the Weder-Geat prince a word outgo;
stormed the stark-heart; stern went ringing
and clear his cry 'neath the cliff-rocks gray.
The hoard-guard heard a human voice;
his rage was enkindled. No respite now
for pact of peace! The poison-breath
of that foul worm first came forth from the cave,
hot reek-of-fight: the rocks resounded.
To my ear, Heaney's version is certainly unencumbered by the "laboured poetry" of the Gummere version, but it is still stirring; however, in comparison to the Alexander version, Heaney's reads like a newspaper account. Nothing more exemplifies the difference than lines 2556-2568. Alexander's version best captures the ominous moment when Beowulf courageously faces his death: "...Straightaway / the breath of the dragon billowed from the rock / in a hissing gust. The ground boomed." Reading "the ground boomed" makes me want to put down my book and flee, lest I be cornered by the dragon. This is not to say that Heaney's directness and Gummere's laboured poetry do not outshine Alexander on other occasions, but on balance, for me, Alexander finds just the right poetic balance.
Regardless of the translation one choose to read, Beowulf is a stirring experience if one reads the poem slowly and thoughtfully -- aloud is best -- taking the time to let the words and images shape your experience and transport you to a time and place when honor and undauntable courage were prized above all. Heaney will do this for you and in an idiom that speaks directly to today's vernacular.
Comparing specific stanzas in the three translations gives one a flavor of how different various translations can be. Heaney directs his readers to his translation of the opening stanza to exemplify his own approach:
Heaney:
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.
Alexander:
Attend!
We have heard of the thriving of the throne of Denmark,
how the folk-kings flourished in former days,
how those royal athelings earned that glory.
and Gummere:
Lo, praise of the prowess of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!
One can immediately feel the tone that Heaney adopts: direct simple word choices, shorn of poetic pretense. In his introduction, Heaney writes: "I came to the task of translating Beowulf with a prejudice in favour of forthright delivery. I remember the voice of the poem as being attractively direct, even though the diction was ornate and the narrative method at times oblique," and later, "I am attending as much to the grain of my original vernacular as to the content of the Anglo-Saxon lines."
What Heaney rejects is the notion that a translation of Beowulf must be guided primarily by the notion that "we must labour to be beautiful." The result is a translation that reads easily and simply, and indeed, beauty flourishes in that simply. At least this is true most of time. What is sometimes lost is the remarkable, stirring phrases that appear in more self-consciously poetic translations. Compare the various translations of one of my favorite passages (lines 2550-2558), when the aged Beowulf first challenges the dragon in his lair:
Heaney:
Then he gave a shout. The lord of the Geats
unburdened his breast and broke out
in a storm of anger. Under the grey stone
his voice challenged and resounded clearly.
Hate was ignited. The hoard-guard recognized
a human voice, the time was over
for peace and parleying. Pouring forth
in a hot battle-fume, the breath of the monster
burst from the rock. There was a rumble under ground.
Alexander:
Passion filled the prince of the Geats:
he allowed a cry to utter from his breast,
roared from his stout heart: as the horn clear in battle
his voice re-echoed through the vault of grey stone.
The hoard-guard recognized a human voice,
and there was no more time for talk of friendship:
hatred stirred. Straightaway
the breath of the dragon billowed from the rock
in a hissing gust; the ground boomed.
and Gummere:
Then from his breast, for he burst with rage,
the Weder-Geat prince a word outgo;
stormed the stark-heart; stern went ringing
and clear his cry 'neath the cliff-rocks gray.
The hoard-guard heard a human voice;
his rage was enkindled. No respite now
for pact of peace! The poison-breath
of that foul worm first came forth from the cave,
hot reek-of-fight: the rocks resounded.
To my ear, Heaney's version is certainly unencumbered by the "laboured poetry" of the Gummere version, but it is still stirring; however, in comparison to the Alexander version, Heaney's reads like a newspaper account. Nothing more exemplifies the difference than lines 2556-2568. Alexander's version best captures the ominous moment when Beowulf courageously faces his death: "...Straightaway / the breath of the dragon billowed from the rock / in a hissing gust. The ground boomed." Reading "the ground boomed" makes me want to put down my book and flee, lest I be cornered by the dragon. This is not to say that Heaney's directness and Gummere's laboured poetry do not outshine Alexander on other occasions, but on balance, for me, Alexander finds just the right poetic balance.
Regardless of the translation one choose to read, Beowulf is a stirring experience if one reads the poem slowly and thoughtfully -- aloud is best -- taking the time to let the words and images shape your experience and transport you to a time and place when honor and undauntable courage were prized above all. Heaney will do this for you and in an idiom that speaks directly to today's vernacular.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
The Prose Edda / Snorri Sturluson -- NY: American-Scandinavian Foundation and London: Humphrey Miford Oxford University Press, 1923.
In the early 13th century, Iceland's great poet Snorri Sturluson collected the stories of his culture now known as The Elder Edda and worked them into retelling now known as The Prose Edda. It is divided into three self-sufficient sections: Gylfaginning or The Beguiling of Gylfi, Skaldskaparmal or The Poesy of Skalds, and Hattatal or Enumeration of Metres. These and portions of these works have been translated into English since the first attempt in 1770; however, not until 1916 was the whole of Skaldskaparmal translated. This was done by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur for the American-Scandinavian Foundation. Brodeur's The Poesy of the Skalds appeard in the same volume with his translation of Gylfanginning. Hattatal, however, defied Brodeur's translation abilities, due to its highly technical nature. Indeed, fitting appropriate English vocabulary into the metre of the original work is likely impossible.
The Beguiling of Gylfi is the most accessible and engaging to the two translated works. It tells the story of the Norse gods, from the creation of the world to their death at the hands of the giants. While the work is certainly pagan, Snorluson introduces it by telling how the original knowledge of the Biblical story of Genesis was forgotten by the people of Northern Europe and how they constructed the Odinic myths; however, once he has established his Christian credentials, Snorluson faithfully retells the pagan stories without lacing them with foreign Christian interpolations.
The Beguiling of Gylfi recounts the exploits of Odin, Thor, Loki, Baldr, Freyja, Freyr, and other lesser Norse gods. Its stories include norns, valkyries, giants, elves, dwarves, men, shape shifters, and dragons. It provides a brief account of the story of Sigurd, Brynhild, and Gudrun. The stories are told to Gylfi by Harr of the AEsir, descendants of the Norse gods. The work provides an excellent summary of the Norse pantheon and cosmology.
The Poesy of the Skalds contains verses and some brief narratives, but is essentially a compendium of ways in which the poets of the Elder Edda referred to various gods and important subjects. Essentially, it is a handbook for poets (skalds) seeking to understand how to poetically refer to the subjects in their poems. So, for example, a young skald is directed to refer to Odin as "Allfather" and Thor as "Defender of Asgard and of Midgard" or "Smiter of Hrungnir." Baldr is "Companion of Hel" or "God of Tears." Loki is "Theif of the Giants" or "Forger of Evil;" "the Sly God" or "Contriver of Baldr's Death." Poetic references are recommended for such things as man, gold, the sky, the earth, battle, fire, etc.
The epithets for all these relate to the subject's place in Norse legends, and along with helping us understand the Norse view of the world, provide a rich summary of the poetic sensibility of the Icelandic skalds. Snorluson quotes stanzas of poetry that employ these epithets and sometimes provides us with longer narratives illustrating why the subject has received the epithet. Reading these stanzas in the context of Sturluson's poetic instruction allows us to understand why Norse poetry feels so loaded with meaning.
The Beguiling of Gylfi will reward anyone interested in the Norse mythology. Its gritty narratives are thrilling in a way that Greek and Roman mythology with all its glamour is not. The Poesy of the Skalds, on the other hand, will reward the more poetic reader, unconcerned with plots or narratives, but happy to read the isolated, but stirring, turn of phrase.
The Beguiling of Gylfi is the most accessible and engaging to the two translated works. It tells the story of the Norse gods, from the creation of the world to their death at the hands of the giants. While the work is certainly pagan, Snorluson introduces it by telling how the original knowledge of the Biblical story of Genesis was forgotten by the people of Northern Europe and how they constructed the Odinic myths; however, once he has established his Christian credentials, Snorluson faithfully retells the pagan stories without lacing them with foreign Christian interpolations.
The Beguiling of Gylfi recounts the exploits of Odin, Thor, Loki, Baldr, Freyja, Freyr, and other lesser Norse gods. Its stories include norns, valkyries, giants, elves, dwarves, men, shape shifters, and dragons. It provides a brief account of the story of Sigurd, Brynhild, and Gudrun. The stories are told to Gylfi by Harr of the AEsir, descendants of the Norse gods. The work provides an excellent summary of the Norse pantheon and cosmology.
The Poesy of the Skalds contains verses and some brief narratives, but is essentially a compendium of ways in which the poets of the Elder Edda referred to various gods and important subjects. Essentially, it is a handbook for poets (skalds) seeking to understand how to poetically refer to the subjects in their poems. So, for example, a young skald is directed to refer to Odin as "Allfather" and Thor as "Defender of Asgard and of Midgard" or "Smiter of Hrungnir." Baldr is "Companion of Hel" or "God of Tears." Loki is "Theif of the Giants" or "Forger of Evil;" "the Sly God" or "Contriver of Baldr's Death." Poetic references are recommended for such things as man, gold, the sky, the earth, battle, fire, etc.
The epithets for all these relate to the subject's place in Norse legends, and along with helping us understand the Norse view of the world, provide a rich summary of the poetic sensibility of the Icelandic skalds. Snorluson quotes stanzas of poetry that employ these epithets and sometimes provides us with longer narratives illustrating why the subject has received the epithet. Reading these stanzas in the context of Sturluson's poetic instruction allows us to understand why Norse poetry feels so loaded with meaning.
The Beguiling of Gylfi will reward anyone interested in the Norse mythology. Its gritty narratives are thrilling in a way that Greek and Roman mythology with all its glamour is not. The Poesy of the Skalds, on the other hand, will reward the more poetic reader, unconcerned with plots or narratives, but happy to read the isolated, but stirring, turn of phrase.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs / trans. by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris in Harvard Classics 49 -- NY: P.F. Collier and Sons, 1910.
The Icelandic sagas known as the Eddas have come down to us in two forms: the Elder Edda and the Prose Edda. The Elder Edda is composed of poems and fragments of poems that connect us to the oral tradition of ancient Norse cultures. The Prose Edda is a compilation and arrangement of many of these poems into mainly prose form. This was accomplished by Snorri Sturleson in the 13th century. While Sturleson's work was translated into English and does contain material about the Volsungs and the Niblungs, the full story did not appear in English until 1870 when a translation was published by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris.
The Magnusson-Morris translation is mainly written in prose, though some poetry is included. This translation brings the story into modern English and mainly conveys the plot. It has none of the thrilling resonance of Morris's later poetic treatment of the story in Sigurd the Volsung, but its vocabulary is generally limited to words derived from Old English. Consequently, it is able to transport the reader more or less into the ancient North.
Every treatment of "the Great Story of the North" that I have read has it strengths and weaknesses. Preferring one to another is probably a matter of taste, but in each, the remarkable story of the Volsungs, the Niblungs, and the Budlungs shines through and never fails to dazzle. Unlike the heroes of Rome and Greece, the Norse heroes have a tragic nature to them as they face their inevitable defeat. It is how they accept their defeat that makes them heroic.
It is difficult for me to discuss the Lay of the Niblungen without mentioning Tolkien. A good bit has been said about Tolkien's appropriation of names from the Eddas, particularly, Gandalf and Frodo; however, I have not read commentary that has drawn parallels between the life of Sigurd and Aragorn, Brynhild and Arwen, and Gudrun and Eowyn -- parallels that are of much greater interest.
In the Eddas, Sigurd falls in love with Brynhild the valkyrie. Before marrying her he sets off to earn her love and journeys to the house of the Niblungs. There he leads them to greatness, but is enchanted by Gudrun's mother, causing him to fall in love with Gudrun. Similarly, in The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn falls in love with Arwen the elf, but before marrying her, heads off to join the House of Theoden (the Riders of Rohan), also leading them to greatness. Furthermore, just as the Niblungs defend themselves against the Budlungs in a bloody siege in Atli's hall, so too do the Riders of Rohan defend themselves against the forces of Sauruman at Helms Deep. Finally, in a looser parallel, just as Atli, King of the Budlungs, is married to Gudrun of the Niblungs, so too is Grima Wormtongue (Sauruman's lieutenant) seeking to marry Eowyn, daughter of Theoden.
There are, of course, dissimilarities in the story. There is no enchantress in Rohan to cause Aragorn to fall in love with Eowyn as Sigurd fell in love with Gudrun, betraying Brynhild, but the attraction between Aragorn and Eowyn surely threatens to betray Arwen. The most significant dissimilarity lies in the victory of the Riders of Rohan at Helms Deep. Where the Niblungs are defeated by the Budlungs, the Riders of Rohan are saved by what Tolkien describes in an essay as a "eucatastrophe." Out of the blue, Gandalf leads a contingent of Riders to rescue the beseiged, just as the besieged are preparing to end their lives in a paradigmatically Norse fashion, with an honorable and glorious, but completely hopeless attack on the enemy.
Clearly, Tolkien is indebted to the Lay of the Niblungen, but in his hands the story is transformed into one in which hope is triumphant, but while the valor characteristic of the ancient Norse remains undiminished.
The Magnusson-Morris translation is mainly written in prose, though some poetry is included. This translation brings the story into modern English and mainly conveys the plot. It has none of the thrilling resonance of Morris's later poetic treatment of the story in Sigurd the Volsung, but its vocabulary is generally limited to words derived from Old English. Consequently, it is able to transport the reader more or less into the ancient North.
Every treatment of "the Great Story of the North" that I have read has it strengths and weaknesses. Preferring one to another is probably a matter of taste, but in each, the remarkable story of the Volsungs, the Niblungs, and the Budlungs shines through and never fails to dazzle. Unlike the heroes of Rome and Greece, the Norse heroes have a tragic nature to them as they face their inevitable defeat. It is how they accept their defeat that makes them heroic.
It is difficult for me to discuss the Lay of the Niblungen without mentioning Tolkien. A good bit has been said about Tolkien's appropriation of names from the Eddas, particularly, Gandalf and Frodo; however, I have not read commentary that has drawn parallels between the life of Sigurd and Aragorn, Brynhild and Arwen, and Gudrun and Eowyn -- parallels that are of much greater interest.
In the Eddas, Sigurd falls in love with Brynhild the valkyrie. Before marrying her he sets off to earn her love and journeys to the house of the Niblungs. There he leads them to greatness, but is enchanted by Gudrun's mother, causing him to fall in love with Gudrun. Similarly, in The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn falls in love with Arwen the elf, but before marrying her, heads off to join the House of Theoden (the Riders of Rohan), also leading them to greatness. Furthermore, just as the Niblungs defend themselves against the Budlungs in a bloody siege in Atli's hall, so too do the Riders of Rohan defend themselves against the forces of Sauruman at Helms Deep. Finally, in a looser parallel, just as Atli, King of the Budlungs, is married to Gudrun of the Niblungs, so too is Grima Wormtongue (Sauruman's lieutenant) seeking to marry Eowyn, daughter of Theoden.
There are, of course, dissimilarities in the story. There is no enchantress in Rohan to cause Aragorn to fall in love with Eowyn as Sigurd fell in love with Gudrun, betraying Brynhild, but the attraction between Aragorn and Eowyn surely threatens to betray Arwen. The most significant dissimilarity lies in the victory of the Riders of Rohan at Helms Deep. Where the Niblungs are defeated by the Budlungs, the Riders of Rohan are saved by what Tolkien describes in an essay as a "eucatastrophe." Out of the blue, Gandalf leads a contingent of Riders to rescue the beseiged, just as the besieged are preparing to end their lives in a paradigmatically Norse fashion, with an honorable and glorious, but completely hopeless attack on the enemy.
Clearly, Tolkien is indebted to the Lay of the Niblungen, but in his hands the story is transformed into one in which hope is triumphant, but while the valor characteristic of the ancient Norse remains undiminished.
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun / J.R.R. Tolkien -- Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.
A couple years ago, I read in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien that Tolkien had written poem that attempted "to unify the lays about the Volsungs from the Elder Edda," written in the Old Norse eight-line stanzaic metre. Having read William Morris's brilliant epic poem Sigurd the Volsung, I was delighted to think that Tolkien's poem might still exist, but pessimistic that it might ever see publication. Happily, Christopher Tolkien has found and edited the work and released it as The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun. Rather than a single poem, the work is composed of two poems.
The first recounts the life of Sigurd, the greatest hero of Norse legend, describing his slaying of the dragon Fafnir and his acquiring Andvari's gold. Later, his romance with the beautiful valkyrie Brynhild, his alliance with the Niflung, and his tragic end. The second recounts the life of Gudrun following Sigurd's death. Sigurd had been enchanted by Gudrun's mother, causing him to fall in love with Gudrun and breaking his vow to marry Brynhild. With the death of Sigrun and Brynhild, Gudrun lived in sorrow, watching her family destroyed, and finally cast herself into the sea to drown.
The death of Gudrun in Tolkien's version is different from most treatments of the story. For example, in the Magnusson-Morris translation, Gudrun is washed ashore and eventually marries for a third time, living in sorrow and weaving a tapestry depicting the life of Sigurd. Tolkien's version is, however, not unique. William Morris's later work also ends with her death by drowning.
Tolkien's poetry, faithful to the Old Norse metre, is beautifully archaic and stirring, but nonetheless clear and intelligible to the modern reader. The story's unity seems to owe much to William Morris's work. In his letters, Tolkien notes having read and been influenced by Morris's romances, though he does not mention Sigurd the Volsung. It is unlikely that he did not read it, though.
Much of Tolkien's posthumous work has been of interest only to his die-hard readers. Happily, this work and his previously published work The Children of Hurin are more accessible and in line with the works that have made him famous. For anyone who appreciated The Lord of the Rings, these recent publications will be an exciting adventure back into Middle Earth and the legends upon which it was conceived.
A good bit has been said about Tolkien's appropriation of names from the Eddas for The Lord of the Rings, particularly, Gandalf and Frodo; however, I have not read commentary that has drawn parallels between the life of Sigurd and Aragorn, Brynhild and Arwen, and Gudrun and Eowyn -- parallels that are of much greater interest.
In the Eddas, Sigurd falls in love with Brynhild the valkyrie. Before marrying her he sets off to earn her love and journeys to the house of the Niblungs. There, he leads them to greatness, but is enchanted by Gudrun's mother, causing him to fall in love with Gudrun. Similarly, in The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn falls in love with Arwen the elf, but before marrying her, heads off to join the House of Theoden (the Riders of Rohan), also leading them to greatness. Furthermore, just as the Niblungs defend themselves against the Budlungs in a bloody siege in Atli's hall, so too do the Riders of Rohan defend themselves against the forces of Sauruman at Helm's Deep. Finally, in a looser parallel, just as Atli, King of the Budlungs, is married to Gudrun of the Niblungs, so too is Grima Wormtongue (Sauruman's lieutenant) seeking to marry Eowyn, daughter of Theoden.
There are, of course, dissimilarities in the story. There is no enchantress in Rohan to cause Aragorn to fall in love with Eowyn as Sigurd fell in love with Gudrun, betraying Brynhild, but the attraction between Aragorn and Eowyn surely threatens to betray Arwen. The most significant dissimilarity lies in the victory of the Riders of Rohan at Helm's Deep. Where the Niblungs are defeated by the Budlungs, the Riders of Rohan are saved by what Tolkien describes in an essay as a "eucatastrophe." Just as the besieged Riders of Rohan are preparing to end their lives in a paradigmatically Norse fashion, with an honorable and glorious, but completely hopeless attack on the enemy, Gandalf arrives with a contingent of Riders to rescue the beseiged -- a "good castastrophe."
Clearly, Tolkien is indebted to the Lay of the Niblungs, but in his hands the story is transformed into one in which hope is triumphant, but while the valor characteristic of the ancient Norse remains undiminished.
The first recounts the life of Sigurd, the greatest hero of Norse legend, describing his slaying of the dragon Fafnir and his acquiring Andvari's gold. Later, his romance with the beautiful valkyrie Brynhild, his alliance with the Niflung, and his tragic end. The second recounts the life of Gudrun following Sigurd's death. Sigurd had been enchanted by Gudrun's mother, causing him to fall in love with Gudrun and breaking his vow to marry Brynhild. With the death of Sigrun and Brynhild, Gudrun lived in sorrow, watching her family destroyed, and finally cast herself into the sea to drown.
The death of Gudrun in Tolkien's version is different from most treatments of the story. For example, in the Magnusson-Morris translation, Gudrun is washed ashore and eventually marries for a third time, living in sorrow and weaving a tapestry depicting the life of Sigurd. Tolkien's version is, however, not unique. William Morris's later work also ends with her death by drowning.
Tolkien's poetry, faithful to the Old Norse metre, is beautifully archaic and stirring, but nonetheless clear and intelligible to the modern reader. The story's unity seems to owe much to William Morris's work. In his letters, Tolkien notes having read and been influenced by Morris's romances, though he does not mention Sigurd the Volsung. It is unlikely that he did not read it, though.
Much of Tolkien's posthumous work has been of interest only to his die-hard readers. Happily, this work and his previously published work The Children of Hurin are more accessible and in line with the works that have made him famous. For anyone who appreciated The Lord of the Rings, these recent publications will be an exciting adventure back into Middle Earth and the legends upon which it was conceived.
A good bit has been said about Tolkien's appropriation of names from the Eddas for The Lord of the Rings, particularly, Gandalf and Frodo; however, I have not read commentary that has drawn parallels between the life of Sigurd and Aragorn, Brynhild and Arwen, and Gudrun and Eowyn -- parallels that are of much greater interest.
In the Eddas, Sigurd falls in love with Brynhild the valkyrie. Before marrying her he sets off to earn her love and journeys to the house of the Niblungs. There, he leads them to greatness, but is enchanted by Gudrun's mother, causing him to fall in love with Gudrun. Similarly, in The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn falls in love with Arwen the elf, but before marrying her, heads off to join the House of Theoden (the Riders of Rohan), also leading them to greatness. Furthermore, just as the Niblungs defend themselves against the Budlungs in a bloody siege in Atli's hall, so too do the Riders of Rohan defend themselves against the forces of Sauruman at Helm's Deep. Finally, in a looser parallel, just as Atli, King of the Budlungs, is married to Gudrun of the Niblungs, so too is Grima Wormtongue (Sauruman's lieutenant) seeking to marry Eowyn, daughter of Theoden.
There are, of course, dissimilarities in the story. There is no enchantress in Rohan to cause Aragorn to fall in love with Eowyn as Sigurd fell in love with Gudrun, betraying Brynhild, but the attraction between Aragorn and Eowyn surely threatens to betray Arwen. The most significant dissimilarity lies in the victory of the Riders of Rohan at Helm's Deep. Where the Niblungs are defeated by the Budlungs, the Riders of Rohan are saved by what Tolkien describes in an essay as a "eucatastrophe." Just as the besieged Riders of Rohan are preparing to end their lives in a paradigmatically Norse fashion, with an honorable and glorious, but completely hopeless attack on the enemy, Gandalf arrives with a contingent of Riders to rescue the beseiged -- a "good castastrophe."
Clearly, Tolkien is indebted to the Lay of the Niblungs, but in his hands the story is transformed into one in which hope is triumphant, but while the valor characteristic of the ancient Norse remains undiminished.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
The Yiddish Policemen's Union / Michael Chabon -- NY: Harper Collins, 2007.
Michael Chabon’s most recent book, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, is a rarity—a book that simultaneously succeeds massively on all three main levels that one often wants to read for. It is a novel of ideas, dramatizing serious sociopolitical issues concerning Israel and America’s Jewish community. It is a genre novel, in this case a noirish murder mystery. And it is funny as hell—with new and laugh-out-loud hilarious takes on classic Jewish humor tropes that would make Groucho or Woody extremely jealous. It is impossible not to greatly enjoy reading this book, and I look forward to re-reading it in the future.
Chabon is perhaps America’s best male writer at this point, leaving aside Thomas Pynchon, whose recent Against the Day was a huge disappointment. Few American writers are very intellectually ambitious these days, and Chabon is not quite up to Pynchon’s level in that category, but this is as ambitious a work as we are likely to see in the current literary culture. He is influenced by Pynchon--often not such a good thing, as in David Foster Wallace’s case—but Chabon has his own very focused visions, which rein in potential excesses (especially that of over-writing) while leaving an incredibly inventive and skilled fictional voice to provide literary craftsmanship of a very high order. He uses metaphor and simile in as inventive and creative a way as anyone, and rewards close reading with astonishing regularity.
The main conceit is a courageous one—Chabon re-imagines Israel as having failed to take hold in the Middle East after WWII, with a refuge for Jews instead having been temporarily established in Alaska. Now the US is, under a right-wing administration, kicking the Jews back out of Alaska--to what destinations it is unconcerned, though some hope that they can now try to establish Israel in the Middle East again. The hugely controversial issues of the current Israeli situation are given milder local analogues by Chabon—for example, the role of the Palestinians is now played by the local Native American Tlingit tribes, who have been forced to “make room” for the Jews. The US government is of course not really concerned about Tlingit rights, either—it is cynically playing various right-wing political cards. It is to Chabon’s credit that he (Jewish himself) does not shy away from portraying the complexity of the issues, with Jews here remaining victims but having hugely flawed features to their society, including Jewish terrorists and a Jewish Mafia. Chabon humanizes the issues, avoiding stereotypes, in clever and imaginative ways that every political ideologue of the right should be forced to read. Two wrongs never make a right here—instead they usually lead to recognition that there are a lot more than two to worry about.
The rest of the plot is classic noir: broken down alcoholic detective Meyer Landsman must solve a mysterious death, and has all odds stacked against him, both personal and societal. He is Jewish, as is almost everyone in the refuge who isn’t Tlingit—the latter including Landsman’s half-Jewish, half-Tlingit partner, who provides muscle and (some) sanity to Landsman’s seemingly doomed attempts to pursue justice. The murder victim is a potential new Messiah, estranged son of a Jewish Mafioso, and Messianic solutions to problems are one of the main themes of the book—also doomed, Chabon suggests. There are lots of plot twists, all engaging and informed by the best long-suffering Jewish humor to be had in a long time. No point detailing these things—rest assured you will absolutely enjoy reading them.
Things get a bit implausible along the way, and the ending is fairly canned and pat—but one can’t really consider these minor flaws as very detrimental, for Chabon uses the noir and plot devices (and humor) only as hooks upon which to hang his greater aims—his visions of loneliness, separation, victimhood, and loss, and of how, to remain human, we must try to overcome these in humane ways no matter how insane and inhumane the world around us is becoming. These aims he accomplishes wholly successfully—by creating his own world, fairly similar to our own, but different enough to make us really think about the comparison. That’s what great writers do, and Chabon is finally approaching this status. I am currently reading his earlier, Pulitzer-winning book, Kavalier and Klay, which attempts similar things in a bit less focused and successful fashion. If his next book shows similar improvement, Chabon may be approaching a pinnacle that few American writers before him have scaled.
Chabon is perhaps America’s best male writer at this point, leaving aside Thomas Pynchon, whose recent Against the Day was a huge disappointment. Few American writers are very intellectually ambitious these days, and Chabon is not quite up to Pynchon’s level in that category, but this is as ambitious a work as we are likely to see in the current literary culture. He is influenced by Pynchon--often not such a good thing, as in David Foster Wallace’s case—but Chabon has his own very focused visions, which rein in potential excesses (especially that of over-writing) while leaving an incredibly inventive and skilled fictional voice to provide literary craftsmanship of a very high order. He uses metaphor and simile in as inventive and creative a way as anyone, and rewards close reading with astonishing regularity.
The main conceit is a courageous one—Chabon re-imagines Israel as having failed to take hold in the Middle East after WWII, with a refuge for Jews instead having been temporarily established in Alaska. Now the US is, under a right-wing administration, kicking the Jews back out of Alaska--to what destinations it is unconcerned, though some hope that they can now try to establish Israel in the Middle East again. The hugely controversial issues of the current Israeli situation are given milder local analogues by Chabon—for example, the role of the Palestinians is now played by the local Native American Tlingit tribes, who have been forced to “make room” for the Jews. The US government is of course not really concerned about Tlingit rights, either—it is cynically playing various right-wing political cards. It is to Chabon’s credit that he (Jewish himself) does not shy away from portraying the complexity of the issues, with Jews here remaining victims but having hugely flawed features to their society, including Jewish terrorists and a Jewish Mafia. Chabon humanizes the issues, avoiding stereotypes, in clever and imaginative ways that every political ideologue of the right should be forced to read. Two wrongs never make a right here—instead they usually lead to recognition that there are a lot more than two to worry about.
The rest of the plot is classic noir: broken down alcoholic detective Meyer Landsman must solve a mysterious death, and has all odds stacked against him, both personal and societal. He is Jewish, as is almost everyone in the refuge who isn’t Tlingit—the latter including Landsman’s half-Jewish, half-Tlingit partner, who provides muscle and (some) sanity to Landsman’s seemingly doomed attempts to pursue justice. The murder victim is a potential new Messiah, estranged son of a Jewish Mafioso, and Messianic solutions to problems are one of the main themes of the book—also doomed, Chabon suggests. There are lots of plot twists, all engaging and informed by the best long-suffering Jewish humor to be had in a long time. No point detailing these things—rest assured you will absolutely enjoy reading them.
Things get a bit implausible along the way, and the ending is fairly canned and pat—but one can’t really consider these minor flaws as very detrimental, for Chabon uses the noir and plot devices (and humor) only as hooks upon which to hang his greater aims—his visions of loneliness, separation, victimhood, and loss, and of how, to remain human, we must try to overcome these in humane ways no matter how insane and inhumane the world around us is becoming. These aims he accomplishes wholly successfully—by creating his own world, fairly similar to our own, but different enough to make us really think about the comparison. That’s what great writers do, and Chabon is finally approaching this status. I am currently reading his earlier, Pulitzer-winning book, Kavalier and Klay, which attempts similar things in a bit less focused and successful fashion. If his next book shows similar improvement, Chabon may be approaching a pinnacle that few American writers before him have scaled.
Against the Day / Thomas Pynchon -- NY: Penguin Press, 2006.
The most recent Thomas Pynchon novel, Against the Day (AD), is his longest and least focused. This is saying a lot, as he has several works that are as labyrinthine and extended as any in literature. Indeed, his masterpiece of the 70’s, Gravity’s Rainbow (GR), which everyone should read, set the post-modern standard for such works, much as Ulysses did for modernist works in the early 20th century. GR is a masterpiece because its tightly integrated themes and allusions are illustrated by characters who, however sprawling the canvas on which they play out their stories, “come alive” for readers in the focused way that we expect all great novelistic creations (and their internal novelistic relationships) to hold our sympathy and/or interest.
But since GR, Pynchon’s works have been increasingly less successful. Like Faulkner, Pynchon works in only one style—instantly recognizable as his own, though influencing many others, often to their detriment. This style has two main parts: one is mannered, artificial, and often pastiche-oriented, in which dry, sardonic, black comedy, rich with minutely documented social incident, dominates. (Unfortunately, his humor has grown increasingly arch—often witty, but not very funny.) Mixed and/or alternating with this is a quasi-mystical, portentous and ominous magical-realism, often verging on a vague sort of science fiction, in which his interest in larger questions of the “meaning” of life can play out. This latter part allows Pynchon to gain the force of “religious” import for his otherwise very secular imaginative world, and is largely responsible for the eerily original “voice” with which Pynchon swept the literary world in the 60’s and 70’s.
Unfortunately, both techniques have begun to wear—particularly the magical realism. Though Pynchon remains endlessly inventive, in order to be successful while no longer “original”, his style must be put to work in the service of an actual story and characters that dramatically illustrate and draw the reader into the author’s take on his larger socio-political themes. And this is what Pynchon has been increasingly unable to accomplish, to the point in AD where, frankly, the book simply became (for me) an irritating and almost endless exercise in “virtuoso” verbiage. And though Pynchon can still on occasion produce writing of tremendous skill and beauty, the verbiage is increasingly slack as well—the novel would have been better at two-thirds its size, as sentences and paragraphs have far too much useless internal “filler”.
There are literally hundreds of characters in Against the Day. We see any one (or subset) of them only at widely spaced intervals, many make only token appearances, and even the main ones wander the globe so haphazardly as to vitiate any sustained interest in them. Virtually no internal psychology is presented for them by the author, and the external incident that could possibly define them more clearly is so multifarious and bewilderingly scattershot that it, too, fails to create any lasting impressions. Segment after segment starts promisingly with characters and incidents that might develop into something—then soon disappears, as a different segment begins.
This is a shame, as Pynchon remains one of the few American novelists, especially now that William Gaddis is dead, who has a serious critique of capitalism and its role in the ongoing crumbling of American society and culture. To its credit, AD is close to unique in presenting a sympathetic take on the factors that cause terrorism—by focusing (in part) on the American–born dynamiters of the early 20th century, as mine workers fought bosses in murderous class war. Our current mainstream political/media take on terrorists has no room for such notions, and suppresses our own labor history to avoid engaging the subject. Pynchon courageously (at first) lays out conditions that might make a normal worker turn to terrorism, when the owners’ power is so repressive as to be “terrifying” in its own right.
But this promising set of themes is soon lost in a thicket of others that are unrelated; connections and implications are imposed but rarely dramatized or fleshed out; and the emotional force and weight of any critique dissipates as characterizations are thin or non-existent. Pynchon’s “erudition” remains, as always, but is itself less impressive in these days of Google and Wikepedia. He vividly portrays aspects of the world of the early 20th century, particularly swirling around technology and World War I, that readers with his socio-political take will recognize as analogously evil to our own current world. But he fails to focus sufficiently on any particular human part of that world, giving readers no reason to care about reading his own book about it. AD should be the last Pynchon book anyone reads. (Though it won’t be the last one I read, as he has another (much shorter) one coming out soon, and hope springs eternal…)
But since GR, Pynchon’s works have been increasingly less successful. Like Faulkner, Pynchon works in only one style—instantly recognizable as his own, though influencing many others, often to their detriment. This style has two main parts: one is mannered, artificial, and often pastiche-oriented, in which dry, sardonic, black comedy, rich with minutely documented social incident, dominates. (Unfortunately, his humor has grown increasingly arch—often witty, but not very funny.) Mixed and/or alternating with this is a quasi-mystical, portentous and ominous magical-realism, often verging on a vague sort of science fiction, in which his interest in larger questions of the “meaning” of life can play out. This latter part allows Pynchon to gain the force of “religious” import for his otherwise very secular imaginative world, and is largely responsible for the eerily original “voice” with which Pynchon swept the literary world in the 60’s and 70’s.
Unfortunately, both techniques have begun to wear—particularly the magical realism. Though Pynchon remains endlessly inventive, in order to be successful while no longer “original”, his style must be put to work in the service of an actual story and characters that dramatically illustrate and draw the reader into the author’s take on his larger socio-political themes. And this is what Pynchon has been increasingly unable to accomplish, to the point in AD where, frankly, the book simply became (for me) an irritating and almost endless exercise in “virtuoso” verbiage. And though Pynchon can still on occasion produce writing of tremendous skill and beauty, the verbiage is increasingly slack as well—the novel would have been better at two-thirds its size, as sentences and paragraphs have far too much useless internal “filler”.
There are literally hundreds of characters in Against the Day. We see any one (or subset) of them only at widely spaced intervals, many make only token appearances, and even the main ones wander the globe so haphazardly as to vitiate any sustained interest in them. Virtually no internal psychology is presented for them by the author, and the external incident that could possibly define them more clearly is so multifarious and bewilderingly scattershot that it, too, fails to create any lasting impressions. Segment after segment starts promisingly with characters and incidents that might develop into something—then soon disappears, as a different segment begins.
This is a shame, as Pynchon remains one of the few American novelists, especially now that William Gaddis is dead, who has a serious critique of capitalism and its role in the ongoing crumbling of American society and culture. To its credit, AD is close to unique in presenting a sympathetic take on the factors that cause terrorism—by focusing (in part) on the American–born dynamiters of the early 20th century, as mine workers fought bosses in murderous class war. Our current mainstream political/media take on terrorists has no room for such notions, and suppresses our own labor history to avoid engaging the subject. Pynchon courageously (at first) lays out conditions that might make a normal worker turn to terrorism, when the owners’ power is so repressive as to be “terrifying” in its own right.
But this promising set of themes is soon lost in a thicket of others that are unrelated; connections and implications are imposed but rarely dramatized or fleshed out; and the emotional force and weight of any critique dissipates as characterizations are thin or non-existent. Pynchon’s “erudition” remains, as always, but is itself less impressive in these days of Google and Wikepedia. He vividly portrays aspects of the world of the early 20th century, particularly swirling around technology and World War I, that readers with his socio-political take will recognize as analogously evil to our own current world. But he fails to focus sufficiently on any particular human part of that world, giving readers no reason to care about reading his own book about it. AD should be the last Pynchon book anyone reads. (Though it won’t be the last one I read, as he has another (much shorter) one coming out soon, and hope springs eternal…)
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
What is the What / Dave Eggers -- NY: Vintage Books, 2007.
What is the What is the most extraordinary book I have read in quite a while. Dave Eggers novelizes the astonishing experiences of Valentino Achak Deng. Achak, born in a small village in southern Sudan, was made a refugee at the age of six. Torn from his family when genocidal horsemen descended on his village, he fled alone until meeting up with a group of boys led by Dut Majok, a young teacher from his village. Apparently, Dut is leading the boys to safety in Ethiopia, but in time it is revealed that he may be delivering them to the Sudan People's Liberation Army to become child soldiers.
The structure of the novel provides further interest to the story and insight into Achak's psyche. Achak narrates the story by imagining himself recounting his events to Americans he encounters once he has emigrated to Atlanta. Achak has a desperate need to tell his story, but without a venue for doing so, he recounts it to himself. We, the readers, are the beneficiaries of his reflections.
Among the most striking features of the book is the role that sheer luck played in Achak's survival. He is often placed in a situation where he must choose between two or more courses of action without any basis for knowing what is best. One path leads to survival, the other to disaster or even death. On his journey, many of his fellow travelers die of malnutrition, disease, and exhaustion. Some are attacked and eaten by lions and hyenas. At one point, Achak is running through the forest with another boy and a lion "takes" the boy. The lion comes so close to Achak that he can smell it. It's clear to the reader that survival is entirely a matter of chance.
While the novel recounts horrors and hardships, it also recounts Achak's adolescent urges, his friendships, his school-day triumphs, and romantic passions, allowing the reader to not merely feel sympathy for him, but to empathize with him. Other characters are also well constructed. His friends are multidimensional and his fellow Sudanese refugees are engagingly diverse, leaving the reader to understand that the horror of the civil war beset real people and not merely generic African victims.
More than anything, What is the What provides a clearer understanding of war and the personal cost of war than any political or military history that could be written.
The structure of the novel provides further interest to the story and insight into Achak's psyche. Achak narrates the story by imagining himself recounting his events to Americans he encounters once he has emigrated to Atlanta. Achak has a desperate need to tell his story, but without a venue for doing so, he recounts it to himself. We, the readers, are the beneficiaries of his reflections.
Among the most striking features of the book is the role that sheer luck played in Achak's survival. He is often placed in a situation where he must choose between two or more courses of action without any basis for knowing what is best. One path leads to survival, the other to disaster or even death. On his journey, many of his fellow travelers die of malnutrition, disease, and exhaustion. Some are attacked and eaten by lions and hyenas. At one point, Achak is running through the forest with another boy and a lion "takes" the boy. The lion comes so close to Achak that he can smell it. It's clear to the reader that survival is entirely a matter of chance.
While the novel recounts horrors and hardships, it also recounts Achak's adolescent urges, his friendships, his school-day triumphs, and romantic passions, allowing the reader to not merely feel sympathy for him, but to empathize with him. Other characters are also well constructed. His friends are multidimensional and his fellow Sudanese refugees are engagingly diverse, leaving the reader to understand that the horror of the civil war beset real people and not merely generic African victims.
More than anything, What is the What provides a clearer understanding of war and the personal cost of war than any political or military history that could be written.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Petals of Blood / Ngugi wa Thiong’o -- New York, NY: Penguin, 1977.
A couple of years ago I read another novel by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, which I found to be an extraordinarily gripping and brilliant political novel. So it was with high expectations that I picked up the celebrated Kenyan author’s earlier work, Petals of Blood. The novel opens as a murder mystery but does not function as one. Those who were murdered develop as characters very little and much later in the novel, and Ngugi does not build much suspense around solving the mystery of who murdered them. Petals of Blood is not as gripping as Wizard of the Crow and moves quite slowly for the first third. However, in the second two thirds of the books, a handful of very well developed characters from a remote village in Kenya engage in some interesting and revealing dilemmas. Although the novel may have been shocking in its time, political corruption in Africa is not news today. Petals of Blood remains an excellent novel, however, not only for its beautiful writing but also as a meditation on the dynamics of power and development.
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