Love, Vengeance, Purple Blood, etc.

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Classics, Classics Circuit, Excerpts, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley

I suppose I ought to consider this an education in [Classic] Gothic Literature—a movement whose influence I’ve always only encountered in books, though mostly as tone or a small plot detour. But I don’t think I’ve ever really read something that was so solidly Gothic. So. For this installment of the ever-enlightening Classics Circuit, the parameters were simple: read “original” Gothic literature—that is, pre-Victorian, in the age of the Romantics. I had two in my shelves, bought early this year: Zastrozzi by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1810) and Transformation by Mary Shelley(1831), both from Hesperus Press. [Yes, I think of them as a celebrity literary Gothic-Romantic power couple.]

[If you’ll allow me, I’ll be lazy and won’t be dwelling much on the plot of Zastrozzi, because it is all sorts of WTFery, briefly described in this oh-so-reliable Wiki entry, and I will have too much fun lacerating it. Also, please note that the Hesperus Press edition of Mary’s book is actually a translation, but for purposes of this Classics Circuit stop, I will only be focusing on the title story.]

* * *

Percy wrote Zastrozzi when he was seventeen, and it was published when he was 18. I refuse to offer the pithy “it shows”—but maybe, you know, this was before he realized he was a far better poet than he would ever be a fictionist? Because, dammit, Zastrozzi is all sorts of messy and crazy and just weird. Parts of it deliberately weird, most of it funny, a whole lot of it confused with what it wanted to do to itself. Also, the blood that gushed in this novel—and there are buckets—is, well, purple. Yes. Purple. This is a novel where people weep and wail out their monologues as they do so, where people slipping into a fevered coma upon hearing bad news, where the blood is purple.

However, a third of this slim novel—mostly about a kidnapping, foiled escapes to old women he meets, the thugs, his freaking kidnapping—is not really the point, because all those, they’re unnecessary, because they’re not really the story. I don’t think it’s even about Verezzi, or Zastrozzi.

The story is mostly about Matilda, Contessa di Laurentini, who’s madly in love with Verezzi, who happens to hold one hell of a burning torch for Julia, La Marchessa de Strobazzo. Zastrozzi, too, yes, being his vengeance-y self [his reasons for vengeance too tacked-on for me, btw] [also, yes, it must be said that Zastrozzi can rightfully labeled as the catalyst, or, at least, the grand manipulator of the narrative].  It’s all Matilda, for me, and not only because I stopped falling asleep with this book once Matilda came on the scene with all her wild-love yumminess.]

Yeah. It’s about love and revenge, yes, seemingly competing instincts but, if exercised with the same kind of passion, exerts the same kind of destructive energy. All in the desperate Matilda. As Zastrozzi instructs her:

Love is worthy of any risk—I felt it once, but revenge has swallowed up every other feeling of my soul—I am alive to nothing but revenge.

First of all, here’s another teeth-gritting story where the angelic woman is pitted against her sly and lusty counterpart. The ideal wife, with her virtue a mantle around her, a contrast to the woman who loves too much and discovers that her love can drive her too too intensely. It’s the mostly-absent Marchessa against our Contessa, and guess whose team I was on? Though, yes, although I am all for her desperate loving, I wanted to take her aside and say, “Honey, you sure you want to go all ninny for that Verezzi loser?”

[In fact, later on in the novel, when Matilda cunningly and complicatedly succeeds in making Verezzi love her back, his love is described as “a Lethean torpor,” emphasizing the fact that, hell, Matilda will never win. Oh, how happy Matilda was when he saw that Verezzi finally, after a long struggle and seduction, loved her.]

Zastrozzi fans Matilda’s jealousy, turning it into murderous rage. This is Matilda’s weakness—loving Verezzi and not being loved back—and Zastrozzi pounces on this, because of some grand scheme of his that frankly doesn’t make sense to me. Still, however, Matilda needed a Zastrozzi to push her love of Verezzi and hatred of Julia to an extreme. [Because it never occurred to her to, you know, hate Verezzi, or at least try to leave well enough alone?]

‘Oh Julia! hated Julia! words are not able to express my detestation of thee. Thou hast destroyed Verezzi. Thy cursed image, reveling in his heart, has blacked my happiness for ever, but ere I die, I will taste revenge—oh! exquisite revenge!’

* * *

Love and vengeance as bedmates, too, is the focus of Mary’s “Transformation”—it was apparent to me, however, that Mary is the better writer this round. It’s a concise, well-crafted, near-mythical tale of, as our narrator Guido describes it in retrospect, “an impious tempting of providence, and soul-subduing humiliation.”

Briefly, Guido is a wastrel, spendthrift, and prodigal adopted son all rolled into one. He loses his bride, thinks himself a victim of other people’s machinations, and plots sweet, sweet vengeance. In a pivotal scene, Guido all brood-y and shit on a cliff, he goes:

Revenge!—the word seemed a balm to me. I hugged it—caressed it—till, like a serpent, it stung me.

There are many similarities, yes, when I looked for them—but the main difference [aside from the writing skill, haha] is the reversal of the characters’ roles. Mary’s Guido is Percy’s Matilda, overcome by his emotions, lost in the intensity of his feelings. However, it helps that Guido tells this story years into the future, giving the tale a wiser edge, or, at least, one of self-awareness [as seen in what I quoted above].

Mary’s Zastrozzi comes in the form of a grotesque dwarf who comes to Guido on a cliff, offering temptation—better yet, offering a chance for vengeance—Guido can reclaim his beautiful bride [who kept daintily insisting that he behave himself], thumb his nose at his adopted father [who has nothing but love for him], and sneer at the townspeople who drove him out of his home [never mind that he habitually went on binges and orgies]:

‘Oh, you cousin of Lucifer!’ said he; ‘so you too have fallen through your pride; and, though bright as the son of morning, you are ready to give up your good looks, your bride, and your well-being, rather than submit to the tyranny of good.’

Offers from grotesque dwarves don’t augur well. Look at Rumplestiltskin, dammit. The dwarf offers untold riches to fund Guido’s vengeance, in exchange for three days of living in Guido’s body. The struggle in Guido—will common sense win out or his thirst for revenge? And then, when the revenge won out, the three days he waits for his body to return—the suspicion, the panic, the fear.

And, damn, is this book rife with symbolism. Makes me all dorky-giddy. Guido, in the body of that grotesque dwarf, gets the nerve to return to his hometown, encounter the people he’d left behind and hurt. Most especially, his confrontation with the dwarf in his booty-ful body. Wee!

* * *

Yes, I realize that these two works are not considered among these two’s masterpieces, or even their key works—for one, Percy’s a poet [and, man, does his novella know that], and, well, Mary’s got Frankenstein. But, ye know, I decided to go hipster and read their more obscure[d] books. Also, these were the books already in my shelves. Heh.

But, I like what I’ve read. Although Percy’s juvenilia had me stifling mad attacks of the giggles, the quiet dignity—the self-aware Gothic-y yumminess—of Mary’s stories were amazing. Percy’s bored me at first, and then it drove me batshit crazy, but I have nothing but respect for Mary’s writing. You know, I’ve long hemmed and hawed about reading Frankenstein, but, dammit, I think that I will very, very soon.

- – - – - – -

This post is one of many stops for the Gothic Literature Classics Tour of the Classics Circuit. Check out the tour stops before me, and wait with bated breath those that are a-coming!

Truly, Romantic Constancy?

Tags

Classics, Classics Circuit, Excerpts, Jane Austen, Oxford World's Classics, The Classics Project 2011

We don’t quite get along, Jane Austen and I. I’ve all but renounced her much-loved Pride and Prejudice, and not because I enjoy being contrary [though I occasionally do] but because it simply isn’t the story—love, social-niceties, of-the-era—I am looking for, or even want. Austen and I, we do not suit. I have accepted that—although I still remain open to the fact that, perhaps, one slow day years and years from now, I’ll reacquaint myself with Lizzy and Mr. Darcy, and feel something other than Meh.

I wanted to read Persuasion because I figured it was my Austen, finally. No battle of wits, no hiding behind fans, no overheated country balls. Here were two people with history: disappear-into-the-wallpaper Anne Elliott has fallen in love with the ambitious and charismatic naval officer Frederick Wentworth—but breaks off their engagement on the advise of family and friends. It is, after all, young, socially and financially unadvisable love.

Eight years later, they meet again—“Once so much to each other! Now nothing!”—and they have to reconcile the past, and their feelings now: How much has Anne changed? that is, has she grown a spine? how has Wentworth [now a captain] truly been all these years?

It’s an intriguing hook, one with great potential for emotional depth. Premise, I like you, I wrote in my notes.

But that’s about it. All too soon, I realized that Persuasion wasn’t for me—and perhaps Austen would not really be an author I’d love. Oh, I understand its quietness, I can step back and appreciate its subtlety, its undercurrents, the passion sizzling beneath the calm, occasionally tongue-in-cheek narrative. I could see that it was a poignant love story. But, see, it just wasn’t mine.

I could understand that, in much the same way the first chapters saw Anne run roughshod by her family, friends, and the countryside, Anne’s place in the narrative took a backseat. That it’s style reflecting content. But, good lord, it was so frustrating for me—I cheered when Austen would relent and let Anne hint at what she felt. Anne, whose “word had no weight, her convenience was always to give way; —she was only Anne.” Yes, yes, but not for me. I waited for Anne to assert herself.

The intro to this edition mentions how Anne can’t be the timid spinster she’s resigned herself to be—that her mind’s a passionate tumult. Well, yes, yes, I see your point, but I can’t see enough of it in the text. And, yes, perhaps my boredom had me greatly missing Anne’s growth as a character—but after a while, it wasn’t my concern anymore. I just needed story, I needed the assurance that I was reading a novel that remotely liked me.

Anne and Captain Wentworth’s reunion had me cheering. And then I waited, again.

The highlight of the story for me was when Captain Wentworth finally took the stage, and the point of view—just a handful of paragraphs in the entire novel, actually. Here, his feelings toward his and Anne’s steely reunion:

He had thought her wretchedly altered, and in the first moment of appeal, had spoken as he felt. He had not forgiven Anne Elliot. She had used him ill, deserted and disappointed him; and worse, she had shewn a feebleness of character in doing so, which his own decided, confident temper could not endure. She had given him up to oblige others. It had been the effect of over-persuasion. It had been weakness and timidity.

He had been most warmly attached to her, and had never seen a woman since whom he thought her equal; but, except from some natural sensation of curiosity, he had no desire of meeting her again. Her power with him was gone for ever.

This passage raised my hopes—I grinned at the book, I all but swooned. But, well, that was it. That was it for him. I was stuck with Anne and the majority of Bath once again.

The occasional smolder would appear—a little poof here and there in the coals of an already banked fire, I suppose? But no. Subplots abound, pesky characters slip in and out and hog the spotlight to prove some social point.

This, I’ve realized, is part of my main beef with Austen: there’s just so much peripheral action. Fine, this is a social novel—but I’m a fan of the focused and the internal doohickey, ya know. That’s me. And cutting back on the social niceties and those pesky peripherals—that would not make this an Austen novel, then.

Another thing: I’m not affected by Austen’s insights on love. Not in here, not in Pride and Prejudice, not in Sense and Sensibility. I scowled when I read, with Anne, Captain Wentworth’s letter:

“I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W.”

And though I recognize the poignancy of their relationship’s turn, it was too sudden and unseen for me. A mouthpiece reigniting of their love:

There they exchanged again those feelings and those promises which had once before seemed to secure everything, but which had been followed by so many, many years of division and estrangement. There they returned again into the past, more exquisitely happy, perhaps, in their re-union, than when it had been first projected; more tender, more tried, more fixed in a knowledge of each other’s character, truth, and attachment; more equal to act, more justified in acting.

Why am I not moved? Why don’t I believe any of this? Why am I inclined to think that what many have called the constancy of love is only an arbitrary  narrative technique? Why do I suspect that these two allowed themselves to be persuaded, yet again—this time into loving each other, convincing themselves that yes, this love was finally theirs, and for forever?

_______

I read Persuasion by Jane Austen as part of the Dueling Authors: Austen vs. Dickens Tour hosted by The Classics Circuit. [I was pretty confident I wouldn’t touch Dickens.] The link up there leads you to the updated schedule: for more blogs, more books, more opinions. As always, thank you to Rebecca and our current tour’s guest-host Nicole Bonia. See, although it didn’t work out, at least I’m more certain now with where I stand with Jane Austen.

“I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.”

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Classics, Classics Circuit, Excerpts, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fiction - Novel, The Classics Project 2011

#45 of 2011 • This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I admit to having less than pure intentions for reading Fitzgerald’s first novel. I was crazy in love for his The Great Gatsby—and I can’t wait to read it again and reach that calm whiskey feel of that last line. Boats, ya know. So. His first novel, I read because it was his first novel. Curious about the man, curious about his evolution as a writer, curious about what led to Gatsby, which was, you know, great.

Fitzy’s first novel is a thinly disguised autobiography of one of the founders of the Jazz Age. Complete with a skewed childhood with a gloriously degenerate mother—our hero Amory Blaine, known to us early as Amory, Son of Beatrice—followed by a stay in Princeton University, “the pleasantest country club in America,” where he meets a host of artiste friends; and a host of Golden Girls that simultaneously makes Amory’s life more vivid and lays waste to it.

Throughout the novel—with its marked experimentations in style—we see Amory feeling around for a personality he’s comfortable with. In childhood, he was bandied as a tiny talking trophy by his mother. Later on, displaced from his “natural” surroundings of lazy glamour, he’s the unpopular kid who gets teased because of his airs, his snootiness—and Amory’s outward defense is to raise his chin just a notch higher. In Princeton, he seems to fit right in, but even here there are subtle class divisions. More importantly, now that he’s got the power to explore himself, there come the endless opportunities to take on roles. We never read Amory at ease with himself, least of all with other people.

[Holden Caulfield, that annoying snot-phoney (hah, repression!) of a boy, came to mind at times when I read Amory Blaine. The difference is, methinks, Amory knows he’s being a clumsy fake at times, because he needs and wants to belong. I liked Amory better for his socializing and his puppy-dog-trailing, and his ooh-I’m-a-writer-and-a-lover, and his “Oh, darling Byron, snip snip, cock-a-doo” shenanigans, and whatever airs he puts on because, unlike Holden, he’s not insisting, Bah, I don’t like ‘em, ew, ew. Goddamned emo kid with his hands in his pockets. Look to the left, that kid with a cigarette in his lips and an amateurishly assembled cocktail—that kid with pomade in his hair, quoting dead poets and lugging around Wilde and Joyce in his ivory pantsuit? That’s Amory Motherfuckin’ Blaine, ya hear me? He is far from slick, he is doomed, he will walk out of this book drunk and heartbroken—but demmet, guy’s got class, and the guts to admit that he wants to belong, but just can’t.]

Hell, yes, Amory Blaine was annoying, even shallow. But it was right. Plus, vital to his development as a character was his fall from his put-on idealism, his façade of Golden Boy. He falls in love with a procession of women who, one way or another [usually with the glitter of money catching their eye elsewhere] break his heart. He begins to renounce his philosophies—woven from I Want to Hear the Sound of My Voice conversations with his peers—and deplores the world that refuses to accept him.

There is nothing profound about Amory Blaine, no shining epiphany, no drums-and-cymbals defeat. Ultimately, his offenses against his peers, himself, and the reader stack up against him. This is a coming-of-age story at a time when glitz and glamour was the thing. Of course there’d be offenses.

But, see, I read This Side of Paradise because I read The Great Gatsby. A part of me fervently believes that our man Gatsby emerged from this limp-wristed boy and his illusions.

True, I am itching to have Gatsby and Paradise stand side by side, and point out their similarities, their differences. Say how the latter is not as taut and lyrical, but there is an obvious, admirably recklessness with the form and the structure. Say something about how, in Gatsby, we found a man pining for the girl who’d refused him, façade or otherwise—and, in Paradise, we found this boy pining for the girls who refused him, façade or otherwise. Indeed, both stories trace the fizzling of their protagonist’s hope-despite-ennui into full-on cynicism and wretchedness. Both novels have protagonists preoccupied with endless posturing. But this kind of comparison-contrast would be lazy of me, no? Same is true for my giddy need to have Amory Blaine grow up to be our wretched Gatsby.

On its own, This Side of Paradise falters, pales in comparison. Of course it does. Fitzgerald’s vision is fully realized in The Great Gatsby. But Amory’s arc as a character, his haphazard narratives, the string of lost loves—I don’t think I’m that off-kilter as to imagine young Gatsby having tread the same road, to have the Gatsby most of us have met repeat those mind-numbing mistakes of the past. Only this time, with gravitas. This time, with much passionate love—that edged kind, laced with hopeless obsession. Only this time, with boats.

_____

Hello, visitors. I’m thrilled to be one of the first stops of The Lost Generation Tour held by Classics Circuit—please visit today’s other stops: 2606 Books and Counting on The Enormous Room by e.e. cummings; and A Literary Odyssey on The Sun Also Rises by [Papa] Ernest Hemingway. Please note that the tour is until 03 April. As always, much thanks to Rebecca for organizing the tour [and keeping Classics Circuit alive for dorks like me].

“Why does tragedy exist?” – On Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides; translated and with an introduction by Anne Carson

Tags

Classics, Excerpts, Classics Circuit, Translation, NYRB Classics, The NYRB Classics Project, Euripides, Anne Carson, Edith Hamilton

The Ancient Greeks intimidate me. As they should, I suppose. I have an endless fascination with mythology, and, sadly, what feats of human spirit I encountered were mere brushes against the immortals. And so, very young, I learned of Odysseus and Theseus and Herakles and Helen and a host of other fated humans, and they, to my mind, always paled in comparison to the caprice and the power of the gods themselves.

Funny what an education—what reading—does to one’s perspectives. Pooh-pooh the gods—it was the men and women that lived in spite of them. In college, I read the plays and the poetry of the Greeks. No more filtered Cliff Notes here in the form of quaint-ified books on mythology. In college, I sat with others as we read The Iliad—Rage! we murmured. I read The Odyssey, read some Romans here and there. Read a lot. And I read Medea. Medea, I know now, like Emma Bovary, is my spirit animal. That woman is awesome. Murders and all. If it were not for the connotations, I might just name any future spawn Medea.

And so when The Classics Circuit announced an Ancient Greek Tour, I immediately thought of Medea, of unearthing her, and reading her. But then I found the NYRB Classics edition, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripedes, and realized that there was no way I could go wrong. If I wanted humanity, if I wanted to keep pitting our mortal heroes against the immortals above them or the immortals inside them, this was what I should read.

We have to begin with Anne Carson’s preface to the book, “Tragedy: A Curious Art Form,” whose only flaw is that it’s too short, and I really do want more of her brain. The essay begins: “Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.” And she goes on to describe Euripedes thus:

He was also concerned with people as people—with what it’s like to be a human being in a family, in a fantasy, in a longing, in a mistake. For this exploration too he used ancient myth as a lens. Myths are stories about people who became too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible. To be present when that happens is Euripides’ playwriting technique.

Moreover: “There is in Euripedes some kind of learning that is always at the boiling point. It breaks experiences open and they waste themselves, running through your fingers.”

[How to even dare write this blog post—to talk about Euripides and his art at all—when Carson has said it so perfectly in a few lines. Bah, poets.] [No, really, how to talk about Euripides and his heroes, when so very many have done it before me, wrote books about it, spent their lives dedicated to the dissection of a line? And so, as with the reigning philosophy in this blog: I am winging it.]

* * *

HERAKLES. I read Edith Hamilton’s classic, Mythology, in tandem with Euripedes’ Herakles. Hamilton was such a significant part of the literary devourings of my childhood—and now, well, I found the text childish—simplistic, toned down, tamed, quaint.

Reading Euripedes, it’s easy to witness what Carson, in her preface to the play, notes: “Herakles has reached the boundary of his own myth.” As all tragic heroes, he is myth made man, man made myth. If you’ll allow it: an alpha hero brought down. And this demands a transformation.

But Hamilton describes Hercules’ Greek tales as a testament to and record of “his simplicity and blundering stupidity”—hinting that this is because he’s the strongest man on earth. In sweeping strokes, Hamilton paints a portrait of an arrogant man, quick to anger, inconsiderate, dumb: “Intelligence did not figure largely in anything he did and was often conspicuously absent . . . His intellect was not strong. His emotions were.” Even this quality—one that marked utmost tragedy: his stubbornness in holding on to sorrow and guilt and grief, Hamilton paints him as a whining boy—his blunders and bumblings merely excuses to act out. Basically, Hamilton present us with a cliché: the dumb brute.

Carson agrees to a point, but does so amazingly, going beyond this cliché. Because Euripedes does. He sends Herakles to overturn this cliché. To turn him from the perfect hero—to, well, a man made stronger, more noble, and more heroic, because he refuses to bow down to the caprice of the gods, to his own hubris.

* * *

HEKABE. Hekabe is Priam’s wife, the mother of doomed Hector and Paris—but this is the Hekabe after Hector and Priam and Paris. Here is the widow, the defeated queen, the grieving mother.

From Anne Carson’s [lacking] preface: “. . . the Euripedean Hekabe, a character who, until the final scene of this play, has committed no other sin than that of having been born.”

Reading Euripedes, we realize that, for Hekabe—and for countless others—loving is the greatest sorrow. You bear witness, you continue to hurt:

HEKABE: Ah here it is then. Here is my agony.
No lack of groaning. No lack of tears.
I am someone who did not die when I should have died.
Zeus failed to destroy me—he keeps me going!
so I can witness more evils, worse evils
than ever before.

How much pain and sorrow and suffering can a woman go through? The efeat of her kingdom, the loss of her husband, the murders of his children. “Euripedes pushes her to the very limit of human being and then, on the last page of the play, pushes her beyond . . . Revenge brings her to life.”

* * *

HIPPOLYTOS. Phaidra, thanks to Aphrodite, is madly in love with her stepson, that self-righteous virgin prig, Hippolytos. Nice one. There’s pain, yes, and a lot of shame. And one of the best opening lines ever— Aphrodite declaring: “You know who I am. You know my naked power.” There’s such horrific meddling from the gods in this play. Seriously now.

Basically, Theseus kills HIppolytos because Phaidra killed herself and left a note blaming Hippolytos, saying he drove her to this, that he seduced her. She used this shame to her advantage, for her justice.

PHAIDRA: Not from bad judgment
do people go wrong—many are quite reasonable—
no look, it’s this:
we know what is right, we understand it,
but we do not carry it out. Either from laziness,
or we value something else, some pleasure.
Pleasures are many,
long talks and idle time (that sweet badness)
and shame.
There are two kinds of shame.
One is harmless, the other kills a house.
If right action were ever clear,
These two things wouldn’t have the same name.

Here, Anne Carson’s explanation of shame: Aidos (“shame”) is a vast word in Greek. Its lexical equivalence include “awe, reverence, respect, self-respect, shamefulness, sense of honor, sobriety, moderation, regard for others, regard for the helpless, compassion, shyness, coyness, scandal, dignity, majesty, Majesty.” Shame vibrates with honor and also with disgrace, with what is chaste and with what is erotic, with coldness and also with blushing. Shem is felt before the eyes of others and also in facing oneself.

In Euripedes’ own “Why I Wrote Two Plays About Phaidra”—which is a very simple but stunning explanation [or attempt of] of who Phaidra could really be—he writes:

Human forms are puny. Desire is vast. Vast, absolute, and oddly general. A big general liquid washing through the universe, filling puny vessels here and there as it were arbitrarily, however it slights on them, swamping some, splitting others, casually ruinous—an “Aphrodite” as we call that throw of the dice that comes up and changes the game. Doesn’t win the game. Just changes it.

* * *

ALKESTIS. Admetos’ wife Aklestis takes is place when death comes knocking. After searching far and wide, approaching friends and family, for someone to take his place, Aklestis volunteers to give her life in exchange for her husband. Which inspires in Admetos a completely irrational grieving—

ADMETOS: Take me with you, for god’s sake, take me below!
ALKESTIS: Aren’t there enough people dying for you?

Does Admetos not once realize that his wife is in this position because he’s too proud to die? And isn’t Alkestis the true heroine of this story, as Euripedes insists she is? She tells him—throws her sacrifice oh-so-nobly in the face of his whining: “I die—I did not have to die—for you.”

The arrival of Herakles complicates things. Admetos is a good host, so much so that he’s willing to accommodate Herakles’ merrymaking in the midst of this deep mourning, and even lies to him about who really died. As a servant notes: “You could hear these two songs in our house at the same time: / [Herakles] on the one side, without a care for Admetos’ pain, / us, on the other, bewailing our lady.” Here, the house divided.

But Herakles finds out about Admetos’ extreme graciousness, and his tragedy. And so off he goes to wrestle to win Alkestis back. And he does. Which is demonstration of Herakles’ power—that is, bargaining is the crux of this tragedy: Admetos wants out of a contract, Alkestis steps in, Admetos grieves for his wife, but can’t find enough in him to keep up his end of the deal—to die, demmet. And in the midst of this inescapable deal—Herakles gets his shit done by wrestling. I love it.

* * *

There you go. I’m out of faux-profound conclusions, haha—I just feel really accomplished for reading Euripedes. He’s, well, he’s a genius. There ought to be more of him, now. Literature will rest easier then.

marginalia || Excerpted from “What Is Art?” [from Last Steps: The Late Writings of Leo Tolstoy]

Tags

Classics, Classics Circuit, Essays, Excerpts, Jay Parini, Leo Tolstoy, Reference, Translation

I have read Leo Tolstoy. Granted, I only read a snippet of his — and, granted, the initial elation eventually shattered upon learning that the What Is Art? that I read was a mere excerpt — but I’ve read Leo Tolstoy. More disclaimers, I suppose: It’s not his fiction, and am I not “supposed to” read his fiction first? [Plus, I'm reading Tolstoy for The Classics Circuit, and I admit flaking out. For one, I don't have a copy of his novels, though his short stories look appealing.] But — although I enjoyed what I’ve read of Tolstoy, snippets they might be — I’m wondering whether I really do want to read Tolstoy, a Tolstoy not as, well, not as priggish as he came to be. The Tolstoy I was witness to.

From Last Steps: The Late Writings of Leo Tolstoy, edited by Jay Parini, I read Work, Death and Sickness, Three Questions, and an excerpt [augh] from What Is Art?, the bulk of which I’ll talk about in this post. Some quick impressions on the first two — they’re rather pedantic, in the format of “legends” or “fables”, incredibly moralistic, and I was rather tolerant with Tolstoy the Preacher. I don’t know why I bore it — maybe because, well, I had an inkling of the track Tolstoy’s life took in his final years. I was tolerant, yes, but I didn’t like them.

And that leads us to What Is Art?, which I liked. A lot. Too bad it’s not the whole text. [Rest assured, I was crushed upon learning this.] I wasn’t able to take notes on my notebook, but I was scribbling on the margins, some of which I’ve taken pictures of. [I apologize in advance for the crappy photos. I was freaking out re creasing the spine, haha.] Where was I? Oh yeah. I liked this one, I liked it a lot.

Towards a definition of Art

Perhaps it’s today’s whole “Art is whatever art is for everybody” that makes a lot of people reticent about proclaiming something about the nature of art. And when someone does pose a definition, most look upon them with scorn, think them arrogant, at times laughable. How dare you? we tend to say. It’s not so much cowardice, I think, on the part of people who want to define. But it could be indifference, in that Hey, everyone else has a definition, why bother? It could be pragmatism, in that, Hey, everyone else has a definition, why bother? It could be, I don’t know, it could be the humility of knowing that everyone else has a definition. Plus, more often than not, people who have risked defining art these days, well, most do it to just ruffle some feathers.

And Tolstoy, well, he’s got guts. I guess that’s what hit me first with this — The audacity to define what art is, and to do it so skillfully, so artfully. Although a part of me still rebels against the idea that someone dares define art — doesn’t that take away a piece of the art? but that’s just me — I liked how Tolstoy said it, I liked that he said his piece. Then again, he’s Tolstoy — I could forgive him many things.

What makes Art? -- 3 criteria

A recurring theme -- Art must infect!

I suppose what struck me most about Tolstoy’s treatise — and I nodded several times throughout the text — was 1] how earnest the man was, 2] how sincere he seemed, 3] how he himself defined his very standards. A conscious effort, perhaps, or maybe simply effortless. . . . The receiver of a true artistic impression is so united to the artist that he feels as if the work were his own and not someone else’s — as if what it expresses were just what he had long been wishing to express. That’s what Art is, Tolstoy tells us: An infection, a total permeation, a seamless union.

A thousand times, yes, Count Tolstoy

I am the first to admit that I read him as I would read assigned text for school. The scribbles and markings are not so much marginalia as they were notes, even weapons, haha. I wish I had a scanner, then I could show you how I argued with Tolstoy at times, posed questions to the text and myself, seemed like I was preparing for a graded recitation for the next day. Though some may point out that this is not “the right way” to read literature, this was the very way I enjoyed Tolstoy. He who struck fear into many a heart with just the sight of his name printed on the cover of a book.

__________

Reading begets reading:

1. Of course I want to read the whole thing. Of course, not a single copy can be found in this country.
2. Jay Parini, who edited this Penguin Classics collection, has written a novel: The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy’s Last Year, and the novel is threaded with snippets from the collection, be it letters or essays, or just reflections. As of posting this, I’m halfway through the novel. And can I just whine about how many names I have to keep track of? One person has seventy-eight nicknames, it confuzzles me.
3. This means I have to read Anna Karenina, no? Gulp. To those who have read it, seriously now: Is my brain going to melt? Are my bones going to buckle by lugging the book around? [Although I am partial to getting this edition.] Or maybe I just want to read Anna Karenina because of, well, peer pressure? Should I just stop at this collection? I’m leaning towards Yeah, let it go.

marginalia || Arabella, by Georgette Heyer

Tags

Abandoned / Skimmed, Classics Circuit, Excerpts, Fiction - Novel, Georgette Heyer, Romance Novel

I’ve been seeing Georgette Heyer’s name everywhere, usually in connection to them good ol’ days of romance. I’ve never wanted to read her—until I read The Fiction Class by Susan Breen, in which the narrator is named after a heroine of a Heyer novel. And so I immediately put Arabella on my To-Read list. Ah, reading begets reading.

When the Classics Circuit sent out a call for participants to the Heyer tour, I figured this was as good a time as any to try the author out.

The novel opens in a rather Austen-ish, Alcott-ish setting: the family by the hearth, all familial and loving and tittering and good-natured squabbling all around. Of course there’s a ball of some kind. Of course they are talking about arrangements. Of course my eyes glazed over several times. Heh. The Tallants are not that well-off, and so when Arabella’s godmother sends for her to be a companion—complete with a debut to society—it’s good fortune indeed. And then our Arabella meets Mr. Beaumaris, and a comedy of errors ensues. Not to mention a romance borne out of the threat of Big Scandal. [And that was my pathetic excuse for a synopsis. Me and summaries, we don't get along. Anyhoo.]

The first several pages of the story made me reluctant to keep on with the story. It seems I don’t have patience for the set-up of the not-quite-poor country miss preparing for her venture into society. But it’s with the introduction of Mr. Beaumaris that Arabella as character is formed.

It’s classic meet-up: Arabella’s coach meets with an accident and she seeks shelter with the estate of Mr. Beaumaris (er, hunting-box, or whatever). Of course, Mr. Beaumaris thinks she’s a fortune hunter and treats her with “reluctant civility” from the moment they meet. This, of course, riles our Arabella. And here is where Arabella finally shows some spunk: she lies. She’s an heiress, she says. Take that, Scandal! And exclamation points!

“Alas!” said Arabella, “I am fabulously wealthy! It is the greatest mortification to me! You can have no notion!”

Our heroine’s got a warped sense of humor, if only because she gives as good as she got. She mocks Mr. Beaumaris—whom a friend dubs as the Arbiter of Fashion—in faux-naïve speeches:

Miss Tallant, meanwhile, had perceived an opportunity to gratify her most pressing desire, which was to snub her host beyond possibility of his recovery, “Arbiter of Fashion?” she said, in a blank voice. “You cannot, surely, mean one of the dandy-set? I had thought—Oh, I beg your pardon! I expect that in London that is quite as important as being a great soldier, or a statesman, or—or some such thing!”

Arabella’s a strong heroine—never simpering, never overtly stubborn. And I grew fond of Beaumaris, the way I’ve always grown fond of prejudiced gentry who can’t help themselves. Hah.

And then. And then, well, I abandoned Arabella. Around the time our heroine was launched. Sigh. It was the wrong book at the wrong time.

If you guys have stuck with me for some time now, you’d know that I am sadly lacking in Austen-ate literature. I even swore off Pride and Prejudice, at least for the near future. I’ve never been comfortable with the setting, the diction. And the pacing of these Regency romances. That is, I suppose I’ve been preconditioned with reading contemporary novelists writing on Regency romances, that to go back to the so-called undiluted source. That’s a flaw in many circles, I am sure. But, well, I just couldn’t trudge on. And I recognized the book’s merit—I didn’t want to keep on reading it halfheartedly.

I’ve got this theory that the right format works as well. See, my copy of Arabella is an e-book. Pride and Prejudice was an e-book as well. And it just didn’t feel right that I read these beautiful books in digital format. For Austen and Heyer, I need a physical book. There’s too much disconnect with the content and the meta-form, so to speak. [So, yes, eventually, I’ll get a “real” book.]

That’s it. Sorry, Miss Heyer. I was really ready to be a fan. Until next time!