‘Could a rule be given from without, poetry would cease to be poetry, and sink into a mechanical art. It would be μóρφωσις, not ποίησις. The rules of the IMAGINATION are themselves the very powers of growth and production. The words to which they are reducible, present only the outlines and external appearance of the fruit. A deceptive counterfeit of the superficial form and colours may be elaborated; but the marble peach feels cold and heavy, and children only put it to their mouths.’ [Coleridge, Biographia ch. 18]

‘ποίησις’ (poiēsis) means ‘a making, a creation, a production’ and is used of poetry in Aristotle and Plato. ‘μóρφωσις’ (morphōsis) in essence means the same thing: ‘a shaping, a bringing into shape.’ But Coleridge has in mind the New Testament use of the word as ‘semblance’ or ‘outward appearance’, which the KJV translates as ‘form’: ‘An instructor of the foolish, a teacher of babes, which hast the form [μóρφωσις] of knowledge and of the truth in the law’ [Romans 2:20]; ‘Having a form [μóρφωσις] of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away’ [2 Timothy 3:5]. I trust that's clear.

There is much more on Coleridge at my other, Coleridgean blog.

Saturday 25 April 2015

Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road To The Deep North (2013)



I read this in the recent Vintage paperback edition, on the verso cover of which is the following quotation from A C Grayling, Chair of the Man Booker Prize Judges 2014: 'some years very good books win the Man Booker,' he says. 'This year a masterpiece won it.' To which we're liable to return: are you high? This may be the worst novel to win the Man Booker since ... well: there are several candidates for that unsplendid title, actually, Still, this is no masterpiece. This is not a good book at all.

It's a novel that piggybacks itself on the visceral horror of Australian POWs in a WW2 Japanese work camp, straining every pip to emphasize the somatic and psychological suffering and yet leaving the reader unmoved. Its through-line is simple to the point of being simplistic: Dorrigo Evans works as a doctor on the Burma Railway trying keep men alive in an impossible situation, and remembering the affair he had with his elderly uncle's gorgeous young wife before the war. Yet though it piles on every strategy for yanking the readerly heart strings, it feels, I'm sorry to say it, phoney. One reason for that is the badness of the writing. Very much bad. Very badly written.

'I shall be a carrion monster, he whispered into the coral shell of her ear, an organ of women he found unspeakably moving in its soft, whorling vortex, and which always seemed to him to be an invitation to adventure' [20] Just terrible writing. Quite apart from anything, 'shell-like ear'? Seriously?

Which brings me to: cliché. The Japanese soldier-characters are all central casting sadists and drunkards. The female characters are from some antediluvian world of fictional representation. The prose is full of the hackneyed.  People die 'like flies' [22], are 'laid low' [181]; sleep 'like logs' [44]; 'Dorrigo's mind was awhirl' [167]; 'his whole body was aflame' [247]. A beautiful woman has 'raven hair', a 'full figure and radiant complexion' [386]. That cinematic cliché in which sex between two people is represented by waves crashing on a beach? 'Afterwards, he remembered only their bodies rising and falling with the crash of waves' [135]. Indeed, the sex-writing throughout is a mess of sub-Lawrentian overwriting: the lust he feels is 'animality ... its power and its scarcely believable ferocity ... this life force ... he surrendered himself to it. Desire now rode them relentlessly. They became reckless, taking any opportunity to make love ... the ocean rising and breaking ... their exertions slowly merging into one, bodies beading and bonding in a slither of sweat' [151]. Pages and pages of this sort of stuff.

When it's not cliché, its just baffling. 'His words ran down the empty hallway and over its threadbare coconut mat runner, searching for Amy. But she was gone from the room.' [173]  See, that's the thing about spoken words. They have lots of, er, little legs.

'On the Saturday that they were to fly to Hobart he thus took a phone call about his brother Tom's heart attack with mixed feelings' [404]. Thus?

A prisoner has eyes like 'protruding dirty golf balls' and a chin that 'looked like the snout of a wild pig' [217]. I challenge you to visualise such a face.  Or: 'the Judge's candle-wick eyes had looked down at him with flickering flames' [326]. Or Japanese officer Colonel Kota, who has a face that 'seemed to sag and fall away from either side of a shark-fin nose to ripples that trailed down his wrinkled cheeks' [111]. Or the 'Indian Captain, with silver spectacles behind which his glistening tadpole eyes swam slowly back and forth' [344]. Just dreadful writing.

There are apothegms that crumble to dust if you think about them for ten seconds ('memory is the true justice' [243]; 'the gods was just another name for time' [11]; 'the highest form of living is freedom, a man to be a man, a cloud to be a cloud' [303]). The ones that don't crumble are so self-evident as to approach fatuity. ‘Thinking: How empty is the world when you lose the one you love’ [431]. No shit.

'The happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else' [3]. Really? You're going to rip off Tolstoy's single most famous line? Well. Maybe nobody will notice.

Wednesday 22 April 2015

Pervigilium Finneganis



Following on from my previous post, here's the beginning of my (we can be honest: long overdue) translation of Finnegans Wake into Latin:
curretfluvius, et transierunt Eva et Adam, declinationem ab litore ad flectere lauri, commodius ab nobis facit Houuthī vicus de castro et recirculus ad circumstant.

Tristram Eques, violator Francorum amat, ab super brevis mare transierat core iterum venit ab Aquilone Armorica erant hinc et longum invalidi isthmus Europa Minor vetui pugnam penisolate bellum: et habebant summo fabri saxa a flumine Oconee affingebat se ad Laurens Comitatu scriptor gorgios dum irent Doublinum eorum mendicabulum omni tempore: neque avoice ex incendit; rugiebam mishe mishe ad tauf-tauf tuartpeatricus nondum erat, quanquam venissii post, quam ad puerscade finisanus a coelum isaaci: non tamen, quamquam omnia aequa in vanessia, erant soror sestheri irascaris duunus nathetjoe. Gerrae modios pa scriptor Jhemus aut braseum habuit braciatam ad lucem et inter Sen et rugiens, et usque ad angulum perveniret ad videndum quasisignaculum, regginbruus fuit aqua super faciem suam.

Lapsum (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarr-hounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurus—nuc!) De muro a olim vetus Parro mane in lecto, et postea in aeternum manet semen eorum vita per omnia Carminibus Christianis. Lapsum magnus murum importatur tam celeriter pftjschutus de Finneganis, prius solidum homo, qui est campus caputmontishumptii se propere mittit percontamur an bene ad occidentem in quest tumptytumdigiti sui: faciesque eorum vicissimpunctumindoloetlocus est ad mé in hortos, ubi fuerint citra repositus est diabolo quoniam Deus prior dilexit livvius super viridi.
More to follow. Pervigilium refers to the vigil that was kept during Roman funerary practices, and, as a word, usefully points in the same two directions as Joyce's 'Wake': towards death and remembrance on the one hand, and towards vigilance and wakefulness on the other. Obviously, I'm waiting for a publisher to push serious sums of money my way to complete this project. It could be the breakthrough blockbuster title of 2016. Hic omnes pervenerit!

Monday 20 April 2015

Actually Reading Finnegans Wake



It's one of the great gaps in my reading that I've never tackled Finnegans Wake. Well, I've finally decided to dive in. Being several months away from my half-century I still have the chance to ensure that the claim 'I read Finnegans Wake before my fiftieth birthday' becomes true. So I'm giving it a go.

It would be pointless for me to offer any pretense of interpretation or critical observation, of course; I barely know the book (it's patently not the sort of book one can 'know' on a single sit-down reading) and know nothing at all about the huge delta of critical commentary upon the book. But I suppose there's no harm in jotting a few things down, as records of my experience.

The main one at the moment is my surprise at the texture of the experience of Actually Reading Finnegans Wake, or ARFW (wife of HCEW) as I shall call it. What I mean is: although I'd not previously read the book, I had a pretty good sense of what Finnegans Wake was like, what the deal was with it, what motivated Joyce to persevere through the 17-year-long project of writing it. I'd read passages. I read some criticism. But none of that prepared me in the least for the experience of just sitting down and reading it, long stretches at a time. I'll explain what I mean: everything else I had read lead me to believe that there was something immensely fine-grained, even fernickerty, about the novel: that I would have to navigate it word by word, unpicking complex multi-layered and interlinguistic puns step by step, picking my way through the massive thicket as a snail might. And it's certainly true that there is a density of semantic generation in the novel; that particular passages provide the learned and/or ingenious reader with such a wealth of possibilities that they could spend long hours just on this sentence, or that. But my experience of ARFW has not proved grittily word-specific after that fashion. On the contrary, it has been one of (often clogged and sticky, but as often as not) flow. The trick, it seems to me, is to defocus one's attention, much as one does when looking at one of those 'Magic Eye' pictures that used to be so popular ten years ago or so.

This is the big surprise (for me, I mean). I had assumed that the building blocks out of which the Wake was made were specific pun-compacted words. I'm now not so sure. I'd say there are three overlapping principles here, or three iterations of the same underlying principle. One is drunkenness, where words gets slurred and people utter unintentional malapropisms and yet still get broadly understood. Two is the tradition of what we might call 'Stage Oirishry', where RP English gets altered and mangled to represent the supposed oddity or idiolectic nature of speaking English with an Irish accent. There's a great deal of this in English Lit, and in culture more generally ('See Seamus, dere's an advart here for "Tree Fellers"'; 'And isn't dat de shame Paddy, and dere's only the two of us!' and so on). It's this that made me wonder if, rather than being one night's sleep, the book isn't rather a week-long Irish booze-up ('wake' being Oirish for 'week' as well as being, well, wake), with many different drinkers slurring their words and speaking idiomatically, sense accordingly swimming in and out of view. Three is ... well, three is what kept popping into my head as I read, and it's this gentlemen:


Stanley Unwin, there, of course. The point about Unwin's comical gibberish is that it was perfectly comprehensible in larger doses, although it's liable to baffle on a word-by-word level. We may not be sure what peeploders are or what cuffle-oteedee means, out of context; but we all grasp the meaning behind the words that were actually read out at his funeral service: "Goodly Byelode loyal peeploders! Now all gatherymost to amuse it and have a tilty elbow or a nice cuffle-oteedee—Oh Yes!"

This has meant that I've been moving more quickly through the book than I thought I would. It's also meant that I'm not recognising the book I thought I would. I assumed, for instance (because I'd read about the work) that it would be a four-part dream narrative, in which a publican named Mr Porter dreamed an alter-ego called Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, whose adventures range eruditic-punningly through an ambitious four-part phantasmagoric version of the whole of human history via the theories of Giambattista Vico. Now, obviously, I'm hardly in a position to say that's not what the book is 'about', in some sense. All I can say is that's not the impression the book makes upon me. What I have been getting from it is: a gathering of different people, drunk but awake (in various different degrees of drunkenness and awakedness), chatting uninhibitedly in a venue that tends to render sounds both muffled and clanging. What are they all talking about? Finnegan, I suppose; who is dead and whose wake this is. But the action is a finnegans week long (seven sections to part 1 are seven days; seven sections in total to parts 2, 3 and 4 are seven nights). They talk about the things we talk about at wakes: life and death, reminiscence of happier times, but also sorrow and regret. But more to the point they talk about things the fuller contexts of which we, as readers, are not privy, and so which are often more or less incomprehensible to us. Not just specific referents, but idioms and emphases escape us, and the result is a mishmash. To detune the readerly-sense is to have much more quotidian, if sometimes random and knight's-move-leaping descriptions and conversations, loom into focus. An example from the first section:
Jute. — Yutah!
Mutt. — Mukk’s pleasurad.
Jute. — Are you jeff?
Mutt. — Somehards.
Jute. — But you are not jeffmute?
Mutt. — Noho. Only an utterer.
Jute. — Whoa? Whoat is the mutter with you?
Mutt. — I became a stun a stummer.
Jute. — What a hauhauhauhaudibble thing, to be cause! How, Mutt?
Mutt. — Aput the buttle, surd.
Jute. — Whose poddle? Wherein?
Mutt. — The Inns of Dungtarf where Used awe to be he.
Jute. — You that side your voise are almost inedible to me. Become a bitskin more wiseable, as if I were you.
Mutt. — Has? Has at? Hasatency? Urp, Boohooru! Booru Usurp! I trumple from rath in mine mines when I rimimirim!
Jute. — One eyegonblack. Bisons is bisons. Let me fore all your hasitancy cross your qualm with trink gilt. Here have sylvan coyne, a piece of oak. Ghinees hies good for you.
Mutt. — Louee, louee! How wooden I not know it, the intel-lible greytcloak of Cedric Silkyshag! Cead mealy faulty rices for one dabblin bar. Old grilsy growlsy! He was poached on in that eggtentical spot. Here where the liveries, Monomark. There where the mis-sers moony, Minnikin passe.
Jute. — Simply because as Taciturn pretells, our wrongstory-shortener, he dumptied the wholeborrow of rubba — ges on to soil here.
Mutt. — Just how a puddinstone inat the brookcells by a riverpool.
Jute. — Load Allmarshy! Wid wad for a norse like?
Mutt. — Somular with a bull on a clompturf. Rooks roarum rex roome! I could snore to him of the spumy horn, with his woolseley side in, by the neck I am sutton on, did Brian d’ of Linn.
Jute. — Boildoyle and rawhoney on me when I can beuraly forsstand a weird from sturk to finnic in such a pat-what as your rutterdamrotter. Onheard of and um — scene! Gut aftermeal! See you doomed.
Mutt. — Quite agreem. Bussave a sec. Walk a dun blink roundward this albutisle and you skull see how olde ye plaine of my Elters, hunfree and ours, where wone to wail whimbrel to peewee o’er the saltings, where wilby citie by law of isthmon, where by a droit of signory, icefloe was from his Inn the Byggning to whose Finishthere Punct. Let erehim ruhmuhrmuhr. Mearmerge two races, swete and brack. Morthering rue. Hither, craching eastuards, they are in surgence: hence, cool at ebb, they requiesce. Countlessness of livestories have netherfallen by this plage, flick as flowflakes, litters from aloft, like a waast wizzard all of whirlworlds. Now are all tombed to the mound, isges to isges, erde from erde. Pride, O pride, thy prize!
We could say it's a diminishment to read that as follow, except that it's only a sort of preliminary diminishment, one that sets up the possibility of returning to the denser, pun-rich text Joyce actually wrote.
Jude. — You there!
Matt. — Pleased to see you.
Jude. — Are you deaf?
Matt. — Somewhat.
Jude. — But you're not deafmute?
Matt. — No! Only a stutterer.
Jude. — What? What's the matter with you?
Matt. — I have bit of a stam- a stammer ...
Jude. — What a [laughing] horrible thing, to be sure! How, Matt?
Matt. — The bot- the bottle, sure.
Jude. — Whose bottle? What d'ye mean?
Matt. — The Inns of Dundalk where I was always to be found.
Jude. — When you stand that side your voice's almost inaudible to me. Be a bit more clearly-spoken, if I were you.
Matt. — Ha-how's that? Hesitancy. Huh. Deafmute. Deafmute is—ugh! I tremble with wrath in my-my ... when I rem-rem-rem ...
Jude. — Well, I take it back. Bygones be bygones. Let me assuage your hesitancy, cross your palm with ... a drink. Here: have silver coin, a piece of eight. Guineas. Guinness is good for you.
Matt. — Lovely, lovely! How wouldn't I not know it, the incredible great cup for a shi- shi- shilling a glug! Except: these are very highfalutin prices for one Dublin bar. Old gri- gri Growlson, he got poached in that exact spot. Hurt where the liver is, ma- ma- mark it. There until Mi- Mi- Minnie came past.
Jude. — Sounds like the story Tacitus tells about our long history. To shorten it, how he dumped a wheelbarrow of rubbish onto the soil here.
Matt. — Boasted he put investment in- in- a brewery over by Liverpool.
Jude. — Lord have mercy! With, what? [knowingly] The worse for wear?
Matt. — Stupified, as if a bull had clomped his head. All rau- rau- raucous roo- roaring, Then, oh I could hear him snore!  All on account of that spumy drinking horn, with whiskeys on the side, an- and necking them, I'm certain of it—ask Brian Dufflein.
And so on. This is, clearly, a vastly more dilute, indeed an actively banal text. That's not my point. I'm approximating a way of reading the book, one where instead of continually interrupting the flow, the flow instead smooths the fractal jags of the textbed into smoother shapes. And what interests me is: where does this strange drunken conversation in a Dublin bar between a man with a stammer and an old friend, mocking him with the familiarity of old acquaintance, the two of them reminiscing about the time old Growlson got hammered in this selfsame overpriced pub .... where did it come from? I open Burgess's Here Comes Everybody book, and he describes this same exchange as 'dimly heard dialogue out of the far past', to do with the founding of mythic Ireland and premonitions of the to-come giant. Burgess is sure that, thought demotic and hilarious, the Wake is a book with grandeur, to do with dreams and history and mythic recycling on the most epic of scales. Why don't I get that, when I read it? Is it an index to the pettiness of my imagination? Perish that thought.

It's one of the shibboleths of Wake criticism that the text is multivalent, deliberately spawns myriad meanings, and I daresay few Joyce critics would begrudge me my modest little rewriting. Except: this is characteristic of my detuned sense of the whole thing. A patchwork of overlapping voices filling the air with chatter, sometimes in dialogue more often monologuing; sometimes saying interesting things, more often speaking phatically, but all creating in me the sense of a succession of drinking places filled with booze and reminiscence. So I ask: where does it come from, this (as far as I can see) universal axiom that the book relates a dream, with the attendant questions as to the identity of the dreamer and so on? I ask because I really don't get the vibe of a dream, at all. I get the vibe of a pub, and as per the title a wake.

I know that Joyce himself made pronouncements that the whole thing was a night-book to follow Ulysses' day-book, and that it is about a capacious worldmyth dream. But, you know: the one-eyed author is dead. Why should I take his word for it? Then again, there are lots of hints and clues in the text itself to do with dreaming and so on. But then there are lots of hints and clues in the text about a thousand different things. That's the very nub of a text like this, surely. Surely?

The sort of reduction I've (very glancingly) attempted here could be done for the whole book, of course, had I but world enough and time. I wonder what the result would look like? I wonder if there'd be any point in it (I mean the exercise, the redaction; not the original novel) at all?

Tuesday 7 April 2015

Red Eve



If ever I am tempted in the future to suggest that Rider Haggard 'wasn't that bad, really, as a writer', then direct my attention back to Red Eve (1911), his historical novel of plague and the Hundred Years War. Oh dear lord it's badly written. Here's the opening:
There was none to tell them of the doom that the East, whence come light and life, death and the decrees of God, had loosed upon the world. Not one in a multitude in Europe had ever even heard of those vast lands of far Cathay peopled with hundreds of millions of cold-faced yellow men, lands which had grown very old before our own familiar states and empires were carved out of mountain, of forest, and of savage-haunted plain. Yet if their eyes had been open so that they could see, well might they have trembled. King, prince, priest, merchant, captain, citizen and poor labouring hind, well might they all have trembled when the East sent forth her gifts!

Look across the world beyond that curtain of thick darkness. Behold! A vast city of fantastic houses half buried in winter snows and reddened by the lurid sunset breaking through a saw-toothed canopy of cloud.
And from later on: '"Will the French fight to-day, what think you?" asked Hugh of Grey Dick, who had just descended from an apple-tree which grew in the garden of a burnt-out cottage.'

Thursday 2 April 2015

Joose Lips Sink Ships



This is odd. I was chasing down an Elizabethan something through the thicket of Google Books (it came to nothing in the end, sadly) when I chanced upon a collection of Latin letters by the Dutch scholar and Stoic Joose Lips, better known by his Latin name, Justus Lipsius. The letters (Epistolarum centuriae duae: quarum prior innovata, altera nova (1590); '200 Letters, the first hundred previously published, the second new') are from all over Europe. Most look like this one, from The Hague:



Or this from Frankfurt:



Two of the 200 were sent from London. Curious, I took a look. But in the Google Books edition, the London letters look like this:





Intrigued, I tracked down a second edition of the book (this a later-published Collected Works of Lipsius from 1613, Iusti Lipsi Opera). But this was no more enlightening:





There are only two letters from London in the whole collection. What was Lipsius saying about that city, under Elizabeth, that provoked whoever-it-was to censor it, not once but twice? It really is very tantalising. Incidentally, the bit you can read, from that second letter, is: 'An potius linguam? Ista enim deest, qui tamdiu siles. Vindictam talionis merebare: sed noster amor si non maior, certe acrior: procatur, & lacessit te utro. Valemus ego, tuo liberi, tua uxor, non meae Musae quae …?' which means 'Or rather the language? For this will be lacking in one such as you, silent for so long. Even vengeful retaliation ought to be returned with our love, if not bigger then at least more focussed: for who is really the provoker and who the provoked? I bid you farewell, to your children, your wife, not my muses that ...'

What ...?

One quick PS: despite the publication date on the title page, up there, it looks as though the vol actually includes letters written as late as 1592.