Monday, November 15, 2010

"Its Not My Job to Make People Happy"

Michel Houellebecque Looks Quite Pleased, 10/08/10, The Guardian
Congratulations to Houellebecque on winning France's highest literary award, Prix Goncourt!  He may not aim to give me pleasure, but his writing makes my heart sing. Read The Paris Review throw flowers at his feet.  (This jump includes a fun picture of M. Houellebecque doing his best to look like Iggy Pop)  Oh, here's a fun interview with MH.  His next book--soon to be translated into English--is entitled "The Map and the Land" or something like that.  My French is rough. 

Hurray!

Sunday, October 31, 2010

The Decameron



Benozzo Gozzoli, "Procession of the Magi," Medici Riccardi Palace, 1449-1459
By Giovanni Boccaccio, trans. with intro. by G.H. McWilliam, 2nd. ed., London: Penguin Books, 2003, p. 9009.

October 31, 2010
Dear God,
Please let The Decameron be over soon.  As you know, the conceit of the novel is that ten beautiful courtiers are running from The Black Death that swept through 14th century Florence and take refuge in nearby country estates.  They amuse each other by telling ten stories for ten days.  That's 100 stories, God, and I am growing restless.  I yearn for psychological development.  (Do you hear me whining that I want to read Jonathan Franzen's Freedom?) 
I am on Day Five.  Please grant me patience.
Love,
Kathy

November 5, 2010
My prayers have been answered!  The Decameron is finished.  Well, I made it through Day Seven and decided that I didn't have much to learn from 30 more tales.  The themes of this very elegant novel are Love, Intelligence and Fortune.  The trails of Love can be mitigated by the intervention of either Intelligence or Fortune.  Boccaccio believed in pleasure, and the morality of the tales is neutral.  This is such a bizarre world to me, not a German Lutheran in sight!  As in the Viking sagas, there is not much psychological examination of the characters.  People are defined by events.  Much fun is had at the expense of the Catholic Church (no news there), and Boccaccio drives home the point that the world is not as it seems.  Appearances can't be trusted.

The translator's introduction is truly masterful.  Tick!  Mark this off The List.  On to contemporary fiction.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England


Yale University Press, http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300154535, 10/09/10


 By Amanda Vickery, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, p. 382

Turning to the material culture of 18th century England, Vickery studies how men and women of all classes created a home through their use and procurement of domestic goods and crafts. Gentlefolk saw the explosion of consumer goods during the Georgian Age, but servants could only count a locked box as private space within their employer's home.  Vickery offers a very good history of how male and female acquisitiveness took different paths: affluent men and women kept separate account books within a single household; designers created "masculine" (Palladian) and "feminine" (Rococo) pieces of furniture as rooms within homes became smaller and their use more specialized.  She offers a fun reading of wallpaper and color in domestic space. 

In addition, this book is notable for the sensitive analysis of single women within polite society; given household dynamics of the time, it was far better to be a widow than a spinster.  Vickery writes, "Hierarchy, rank, dependence and independence were the categories used to make sense of the household and the individual's role within it.  One's place in the hierarchy was determined by age, gender, birth order and access to personal capital."*  Virgins were at the bottom of the ladder.  There was no institutional provision in England for women to live apart from a family, and spinsters were expected to be foster mothers, nursemaids or to perform some other role for their kin.

I loved Vickery's reassessment of embroidery, needlepoint and other domestic arts within the discipline of art history.  Vickery helped curate the Mary Delany exhibition at The Yale Center for British Arts that showed how spectacular and peculiar domestic craft could be in the Georgian Age.


*p. 203.

Monday, October 18, 2010

The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England

Thomas Gainsborough, The Byam Family, 1762-6, National Gallery

By Amanda Vickery, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, p. 436.

The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England is social history at its very best.  Decorously welding a battle-axe (I've been reading too many sagas), Vickery takes on Thomas Laqueur, Alice Clark, and other feminist scholars who argue that the birth of the modern age produced a "separate spheres" ideology that inevitably shut women out of public life.  The traditional narrative in women's studies is that during the eighteenth century genteel women were relegated to the hearth while men strode out into the vibrant world of capitalist economy. 

Vickery argues that continuity--not change--characterizes the long, late early modern period.  More important than haggles over historical periodization, she argues that the dichotomy of aligning women with the domestic and men with the public is simply not an helpful distinction.  This dualism is alien to the 18th century British world view.  There were "public" and "private" spaces within a single upper middle-class dwelling: women entertained in the drawing room and men drank with sporting buddies in the kitchen/ breakfast room.  These were understood by 18th century families as public spaces.  In contrast, elites had closets with interior locks were one could pray, wrote letters, or simply seek refuge.

A well-run home that showed an easy elegance was a public asset to any ambitious man.  While Georgian women were shut of public institutions of governance, the home was a stage set for the display of rank and neat propriety.  Domesticity was another location for the play of status within a community.  Women were executive administrators within the home, and their rights as such were broadly endorsed.  Hierarchy was a matter of common sense, and married women were mistresses. In addition, women were tied to the larger world as kin, employers, benefactors, etc. 

What is so admirable about Vickery's scholarship is that she takes Georgians on their own terms.  While not explicitly using the term mentalite, Vickery examines archival material using the categories of thought she finds within letters, diaries, account books, etc.  That is, she evaluates women  who counted themselves as among "the polite" from their point of view.  The discrete values that animated Georgian women's lives (e.g., gentility, love and duty, fortitude and resignation, civility and vulgarity) are explored in separate chapters. 

By highlighting the modes of thought prevalent in Georgian England, Vickery shows just how different people living in the 18th century were.  This was a world based on social connections, and visiting was an important social ritual.  The phenomena of "taste" that developed during this time put women at the front and center of British cultural life.  In addition, women were tied to the larger world as kin, employers, benefactors, etc. 

This is a very carefully constructed piece of scholarship: Vickery defines her group by social role rather than income, separates ladies in the provinces from those in London, and analyzes her sources for what they can and cannot say.  Brava!  Finally, The Gentleman's Daughter is a pleasure to read.  She has an eye for significant detail and in lieu of boring explication drives home her point with a lot of entertaining vignettes.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

The Saga of the People of Laxardal


Viking Silver Brooches, British Museum

Author unknown in The Sagas of Icelanders, preface by J. Smiley, intro. by R. Kellogg, deluxe ed., New York: Penguin Books, 2000, pp 270-421.

While Egil's Saga is the story of a single warrior, The Saga of the People of Laxardal is a sweeping five-generation tale that takes place in the Laxardal region of Iceland.  This is a saga about a blood feud between two families.  Those related to Hoskuld, a rich farmer with many sons, do battle against the family of Gundrun, an ambitious and beautiful woman.  Written in the middle of the thirteenth century when Icelandic society was being destroyed by civil war, the People of Laxardal is concerned with the themes of land rights, the cost of violence, and the pursuit of power.  Each family seems to be testing the limits of social acceptance in striving to get what they want. 

The families and followers of both Hoskuld and Gundrun kill for honor and riches.  Honor is certainly not self-esteem or mere acclaim.  It's defined in saga literature as public recognition for bravery and wisdom.  Honor is collectively bestowed on an individual or her kin, but medieval Iceland was not a world of unfettered individuality.  Icelanders had laws that bound all members of their society, representative legislative councils (the Althing), and people who broke societal codes were branded as "outlaws" and could be killed on sight. 

The Saga Age was dominated by testy, independent farmers who threw off the influence of neighboring kings.  All this adds up to a notion of personal autonomy that's puzzling.  Individual protagonists are often drawn into violence for the sake of family honor and could exercise little choice in the matter.  Fate also undermines the idea of individual freedom. Gundrun has a dream that foretells how each of her four husbands will die.  A feeling of inevitability hangs over the stories.

The Icelandic sagas were written, roughly, 200 years after the events they depict and constitute a foundation myth of national identity.  Iceland was Iceland long before Britain or France ever achieved a unified geography.  The tales are so precise in their details of genealogy, location, and everyday affairs because they function as both historical records and artistic achievement.



Lydia Davis and Emma Bovary



Lydia Davis, a very smart cookie, just translated Madame Bovary for Viking Press.  Read Kathryn Harrison's review from The New York Times, and Ms. Davis's own reflections on the project in The Paris Review.

How will Emma's world and thoughts change when seen through the lens of Ms. Davis?  Emma is such a vividly drawn heroine.  I can't wait to read this translation.






Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Howard Jacobson wins Booker Prize 2010

Howard Jacobson accepts his award last night from http://www.themanbookerprize.com/ 10/13/10
The Finkler Question is the winner!  Its a comic novel (alright, finally) about Jewish identity in England.  Sounds super.  Here's an interview and reviews from The Guardian.

If you're curious about previous Man Booker prize winners, check out their official Web site

With the Nobel Prize for Literature announced just last week, this has been quite an exciting few days for bookworms everywhere.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Egil's Saga

Sea Stallion from Glendalough (reconstruction) Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde, Denmark

By Snorri Sturluson in The Sagas of Icelanders, preface by J. Smiley, intro. by R. Kellogg, deluxe ed., New York: Penguin Books, 2000, pp 3-185.

I love Icelandic sagas!  They are so bracing and forthright.  The reader knows Egil is going to be a troublemaker from a very young age.  A bully pushes him down in the playground, and Egil comes back with an ax and splits his head open.  Welcome to the world of the Viking marauders.  I'm a vegetarian and usually frightened of violence, but saga literature lets me tap into my inner 13 year old boy.  I find myself cheering for Egil as he "runs through" his foes in battle.

MAF, my companion in all things psychological, notes that my pleasure in the gore of Viking warfare is permissible because it is a world--largely--without suffering.  Egil does mourn the deaths of his kin in battle, but those slayed by Egil in blood feuds or raids are not granted full subjectivity.  The other warriors are objects to be overcome in the protagonist's quest for honor, riches.  Like action-adventure movies and our government's depiction of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, death is an abstraction.  (Well, unless it happens to one of Our Own.)

The paradox of Egil's Saga is that it feels utterly alien and strangely familiar.  Both Smiley and Kellogg remark on this distinctive feature of sagas.  The content is undeniably medieval, but the prose narrative form is very like the modern Western novel.  Starting with a very specific time and place, the authors link a character's decision about an everyday event to an unfolding conflict.  Kellogg sums it up best, "[t]he development of a prose fiction in medieval Iceland that was fluent, nuanced, and seriously occupied with the legal, moral, and political life of a whole society of ordinary people was an achievement unparalleled elsewhere in Europe."*


*p. xxi.

The Tale of Genji

Tale of the Genji, Tosa Mitsutada (Japanese, 1738–1806), Metropolitan Museum of Art

By Murasaki Shikibu, trans., E.G. Seidensticker, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007, p.1090.

The Tale of the Genji is comprised of 54 tales that describe the court of 10th c. Heian Japan.  The book is divided into two sections.  The first half of the text describes the life of "the shining Genji" or Genji Minamoto, technically a commoner but the son of an emperor.  Genji is amazingly handsome.  He possesses a ferocious sexual appetite, however, and ravishes many women.  The action occurs within the imperial households of the Heian capital, modern-day Kyoto.  This is an elegant world filled with the sound of rustling silk, wisteria blowing in the wind, and concerts held on verandas.  Personal beauty and skills appropriate to a life spent at court (e.g., calligraphy, graceful dancing) were highly valued.  Refinement is all.

The last chapters, called the Uji chapters for the town in which the plot is set, center around a romantic triangle between Kaoru, believed to be Genji's son but is really the grandson of his best friend, Ukifune, the hapless step-daughter of a provincial governor, and Niou, a rake of the first order that Jane Smiley calls the first anti-hero to appear in world literature.  The plot is complicated.  Ukifune is seduced by both Kaoru and Niou before being abducted by an evil spirit.  She is discovered by monks and renounces the world to become a nun.

The graceful tone of this proto-novel is distinctive.  There's an endearing melancholy about the tales that's very winning.  The name Genji "means" that the good days are behind us.  The evanescence of life is the main theme. 

The author's style in The Tale of the Genji is not only defined by her artistic choices.  (Its a given that Murasaki Shikibu invented the prose narrative with identifiable characters in the East.)  There are important conventions in Japanese and Chinese culture that shape the tales.  What I see as straight-forward, direct communication is too indecorous for Heian culture.  Discourse happens at an oblique angle; its like two people lie at a 45 degree angle from each other and chat.  For example, visitors accept callers from behind screens; friends and lovers devise poems for each other that play on images from a shared canon of classical literature; notes are slipped under curtains during social calls; and puns dominate casual conversation so multiple meanings float in the air. 

This indirect style of communication extends to grammar.  The protagonists in the Tale don't have proper names in the Western sense.  The characters in Heian Japanese are known by elaborately conjugated verbs and adjectives.  Identity is established through shifting sobriquets.  One of Genji's lesser ladies, for example, The Lady of the Orange Blossoms, is named for a poem cited in the chapter where she makes her appearance.

It's this context of high cultural sophistication that makes the sexual violence in the tales so disconcerting.  It is not useful, obviously, to apply 21st century notions of gender politics to such a fantastic world, but I grew weary of reading about of rapes.