Monthly Archives: December 2011

"The Convention thought the Senate the most fit depository of this important trust. Where else than…"

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“The Convention thought the Senate the most fit depository of this important trust. Where else than in the Senate could have been found a tribunal sufficiently dignified, or sufficiently independent? What other body would be likely to feel confidence enough in its own situation, to preserve unawed and uninfluenced the necessary impartiality between an individual accused, and the representatives of the people, his accusers?” - Alexander Hamilton, in The Federalist, No. 65, on why impeachment trials are held in the Senate.

"This brings me to one last point. It is not merely that reporting is usefulin gathering the petits…"

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This brings me to one last point. It is not merely that reporting is useful
in gathering the petits faits vrais that create verisimilitude and make a novel gripping or absorbing, although that side of the enterprise is worth paying attention to. My contention is that, especially in an age like this, they are essential for the very greatest effects literature can achieve. In 1884 Zola went down into the mines at Anzin to do the documentation for what was to become the novel Germinal. Posing as a secretary for a member of the French Chamber of Deputies, he descended into the pits wearing his city clothes, his frock coat, high stiff collar, and high stiff hat (this appeals to me for reasons I won’t delay you with), and carrying a notebook and pen.

One day Zola and the miners who were serving as his guides were 150 feet below the ground when Zola noticed an enormous workhorse, a Percheron, pulling a sled piled with coal through a tunnel. Zola asked, “How do you get that animal in and out of the mine every day?” At first the miners thought he was joking. Then they realized he was serious, and one of them said, “Mr. Zola, don’t you understand? That horse comes down here once, when he’s a colt, barely more than a foal, and still able to fit into the buckets that bring us down here. That horse grows up down here. He grows blind down here after a year or two, from the lack of light. He hauls coal down here until he can’t haul it anymore, and then he dies down here, and his bones are buried down here.” When Zola transfers this revelation from the pages of his documentation notebook to the pages of Germinal, it makes the hair on your arms stand on end. Yourealize, without the need of amplification, that the horse is the miners themselves, who descend below the face of the earth as children and dig coal down in the pit until they can dig no more and then are buried, often literally, down there.

The moment of The Horse in Germinal is one of the supreme moments in French literature-and it would have been impossible without that peculiar drudgery that Zola called documentation. At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hogstomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property. Philip Roth was absolutely right. The imagination of the novelist is powerless before what he knows he’s going to read in tomorrow morning’s newspaper.

But a generation of American writers has drawn precisely the wrong conclusion from that perfectly valid observation. The answer is not to leave the rude beast, the material, also known as the life around us,
to the journalists but to do what journalists do, or are supposed
to do, which is to wrestle the beast and bring it to terms.

Of one thing I am sure. If fiction writers do not start facing the
obvious, the literary history of the second half of the twentieth century will record that journalists not only took over the richness of American life as their domain but also seized the high ground of literature itself.

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- Tom Wolfe, Stalking the billion-footed beast: A Literary Manifesto

vintageanchor: Letter: Vladimir Nabokov Defines…

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vintageanchor:

Letter: Vladimir Nabokov Defines Pornography…

“In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote that, while he couldn’t definitively state what makes a work “pornography,” “I know it when I see it.” Had Stewart only consulted with Vladimir Nabokov, whose 1955 novel Lolita was temporarily banned in France and the UK and withstood several reviews that stated or implied that it was pornography, he might have arrived at a more precise definition. In a 1965 letter to his friend Morris Bishop, Nabokov addressed the “irate Paterfamilias” response to the book and offered a characteristically eloquent take on what is and isn’t pornography: “‘Pornography’ is not an image plucked out of context; pornography is an attitude and an intention. The tragic and the obscene exclude each other.”


—from an article by Judy Berman, Flavorwire. Read more here.

mediumaevum: In the Middle Ages women and men often doted on …

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mediumaevum:

In the Middle Ages women and men often doted on their pets. In York Minster, there is a portrait of the lap dog of Lady Margaret Roos, rendered in stained glass. The dog looks happy and sleek, with a belled collar.

In the picture here of Tobias and Sara, a window of about 1520 from Cologne, the couple’s pet dog is a sleepy symbol of wedded tranquillity.

In other drawings of medieval pets, the British Library has a manuscript showing a woman with a pet squirrel while the Luttrell Psalter shows a collared pet squirrel as a sign of status.

Birds were also popular. Jays and magpies - called ‘pies’ - were kept in cages and taught to copy speech. Larks and nightingales were kept for their sweet songs.

More about medieval pets

"QUESTIONS ABOUT THE reliability of Kapu?ci?ski’s reportage begin with The Emperor. His informants…"

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QUESTIONS ABOUT THE reliability of Kapu?ci?ski’s reportage begin with The Emperor. His informants here are mainly former Ethiopian court servants labouring under anonymising initials, making them sound curiously like characters in an eighteenth-century English novel. Only one of those who assisted him is given a full name (that, we are told, is because he is safely dead), yet the power of the book derives to a large extent from the fact that the story is told almost entirely through the transcribed speech of these unnamed witnesses. Their antiquated cadences have a mesmeric quality. With courtly unctuousness they speak of “His Venerable Majesty”, “His Most Virtuous Highness”, “His Benevolent Majesty, “His Sublime Majesty”, “His Charitable Majesty”, “His Exalted Majesty”, “His Indefatigable Majesty”, “His Masterful Highness”, “Our Omnipotent Ruler”. These expressions of fealty acquire an air of increasing irony as the excesses of the imperial court are borne in on the reader.

It is a subtle piece of reportorial rhetoric, yet native speakers of Amharic say that these honorifics correspond to no known expressions in their language. In particular, they say, they could not occur in the formal registers of speech that were employed at the court, where there were only one or two acceptable forms of address for the Emperor. So it seems these resonant phrases cannot have been spoken as transcribed. Some of the ceremonial titles that Kapu?ci?ski gives his sources are invented too. In the absence of proper names these inventions may be held to cast further doubt on the actual existence of these informants. What Kapu?ci?ski and his unnamed translators created in The Emperor was a brilliant device, Chinese whispers rather than transcription, an imaginary archaic language, with touches of comic opera, one that bespeaks homage while conveying subversion. It falls short, though, of both scholarly and journalistic standards of verity, even of verisimilitude.

There are other implausibilities in The Emperor. We are told that Haile Selassie did not read books: “His Venerable Majesty was no reader. For him, neither the written nor the printed word existed; everything had to be relayed by word of mouth.” In reality, though, Haile Selassie was well-read, both in Amharic and in French. He possessed a large library where he spent long periods of time, and provided copious written comments on manuscripts submitted to him. It seems unlikely that his own palace servants could have been unaware of this. (Haile Selassie’s reading habits are documented in The Mission, a memoir by Hans Lockot, the head of research at the National Library of Ethiopia during the Emperor’s reign.) Kapu?ci?ski even describes one of his informants bringing him the first volume of Haile Selassie’s autobiography, the English translation by the Ethiopianist scholar Edward Ullendorff. But the event is taking place in 1974, and Ullendorff’s translation did not appear until two years later, in 1976. So this cannot have happened in the way described either.

In answer to such criticisms it has been argued that The Emperor is not meant to be about Ethiopia at all, that it is an allegory of Communist power in Poland, or of autocratic regimes in general. Certainly, the book is informed and deepened by such parallels; and its reception among literati in the West was conditioned by an awareness of its doubly exotic origin — a book about a far-off country by an author who was himself rara avis, a master of the new journalism sprung miraculously from within the Soviet bloc. Some apologists for The Emperor have located it, specifically, in a Polish literary genre where dissent masquerades as descriptive prose; and Kapu?ci?ski has subsequently endorsed this interpretation.

Yet there is no indication in the book itself that it is meant to be read as an allegory — or as a traveller’s tale or parable (one in the same genre, say, as Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas or the mediaeval European stories of Prester John, the legendary Abyssinian king). Like Kapu?ci?ski’s other books, The Emperor is presented unambiguously as factual reportage and it asserts its claim on the reader’s attention as such. The dearth of other sources on the subject — no member of the Imperial court of Ethiopia survived to write a memoir of Haile Selassie — means that the book would have considerable documentary importance if the information in it could be relied on.

At the time of first publication there was, of course, every reason for Kapu?ci?ski to maintain the confidentiality of any living sources he might have. Two regimes later, though, there seems no reason for their anonymity to be preserved, particularly since a number of court servants (none of whose names correspond to the initials of the sources in The Emperor) have been giving legal testimony in Addis Ababa as witnesses in the trial of the Derg, the regime, headed by Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, that deposed and killed the Emperor in 1975.

Kapu?ci?ksi’s return to Ethiopia in the 1990s to visit imprisoned members of the Derg occupies one of the later chapters of The Shadow of the Sun. One might have hoped that this would be the occasion for him to consider the issues raised by his earlier work, but the new book oddly makes no mention of The Emperor at all, nor yet of the court proceedings where the death of Haile Selassie is currently under investigation. And Kapu?ci?ksi’s account of his visit to the Central Prison in Addis Ababa raises further doubts about his factual accuracy.

“After Mengistu’s escape,” he writes, “his army dispersed and only the academics were left. They were seized without great difficulty and imprisoned in this crowded courtyard.” This characterisation of the inmates of the Central Prison is misleading; it contradicts, in fact, an earlier reference by Kapu?ci?ski to the “ generals of the army and police” among those captured followers of Mengistu. I visited the prison myself around this time. A few of the prisoners were indeed former professors, but the officials of the former regime who were held there included many prominent military figures (as they still do at the time of writing, though they have been moved from the Central Prison): Fikre-Selassie Weg-Deres, an air force captain who was Mengistu’s Prime Minister; Teka Tulu, an army colonel who was his chief of Internal Security (since deceased); Sergeant Legesse Asfaw, known as the Butcher of Tigray; and the equally notorious Melaku Tefera, the Butcher of Gondar. None of these people were, by any stretch of the imagination, academics. Nor had they been that easy to capture: Melaku Tefera, in particular, was the subject of hot pursuit across the desert to Djibouti, where he was nabbed by an Ethiopian army hit squad.

Kapu?ci?ski’s chapter on Ethiopia in The Shadow of the Sun has other odd bits of misinformation. He describes visiting the bookstore in the University of Addis Ababa. It is, he says, the country’s only bookstore — and completely devoid of books. Really? When I last visited there were at least a half-a-dozen bookshops in Addis Ababa, all with books for sale, in many languages, as there have been since the Derg era. (The books do not include The Emperor. Kapu?ci?ski’s book has been published in more than a dozen translations, but not in any of the languages of Ethiopia.) Not content with this already quite erroneous assertion, Kapu?ci?ski continues “It is this way in most African countries. Once, I remember, there was a good bookshop in Kampala… Now — everywhere, nothing.” Here hyperbole becomes distinctly misleading. There may not be a branch of Borders, or Barnes and Noble, In Kampala, but there are numerous thriving bookshops there, and also in Nairobi, Dar-es-Salaam, Dakar, Abidjan, Durban, Johannesburg, Cape Town and dozens of cities across Africa, small and large.

”

- John Ryle, Tropical baroque, African reality and the work of Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski

"INTERVIEWERHow did you start writing?GARCÍA MÁRQUEZBy drawing. By drawing cartoons. Before I…"

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INTERVIEWER

How did you start writing?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

By drawing. By drawing cartoons. Before I could read or write I used to draw comics at school and at home. The funny thing is that I now realize that when I was in high school I had the reputation of being a writer, though I never in fact wrote anything. If there was a pamphlet to be written or a letter of petition, I was the one to do it because I was supposedly the writer. When I entered college I happened to have a very good literary background in general, considerably above the average of my friends. At the university in Bogotá, I started making new friends and acquaintances, who introduced me to contemporary writers. One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect… .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories. They are totally intellectual short stories because I was writing them on the basis of my literary experience and had not yet found the link between literature and life. The stories were published in the literary supplement of the newspaper El Espectador in Bogotá and they did have a certain success at the time—probably because nobody in Colombia was writing intellectual short stories. What was being written then was mostly about life in the countryside and social life. When I wrote my first short stories I was told they had Joycean influences.

INTERVIEWER

Had you read Joyce at that time?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

I had never read Joyce, so I started reading Ulysses. I read it in the only Spanish edition available. Since then, after having read Ulysses in English as well as a very good French translation, I can see that the original Spanish translation was very bad. But I did learn something that was to be very useful to me in my future writing—the technique of the interior monologue. I later found this in Virginia Woolf, and I like the way she uses it better than Joyce. Although I later realized that the person who invented this interior monologue was the anonymous writer of the Lazarillo de Tormes.

INTERVIEWER

Can you name some of your early influences?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

The people who really helped me to get rid of my intellectual attitude towards the short story were the writers of the American Lost Generation. I realized that their literature had a relationship with life that my short stories didn’t. And then an event took place which was very important with respect to this attitude. It was the Bogotazo, on the ninth of April, 1948, when a political leader, Gaitan, was shot and the people of Bogotá went raving mad in the streets. I was in my pension ready to have lunch when I heard the news. I ran towards the place, but Gaitan had just been put into a taxi and was being taken to a hospital. On my way back to the pension, the people had already taken to the streets and they were demonstrating, looting stores and burning buildings. I joined them. That afternoon and evening, I became aware of the kind of country I was living in, and how little my short stories had to do with any of that. When I was later forced to go back to Barranquilla on the Caribbean, where I had spent my childhood, I realized that that was the type of life I had lived, knew, and wanted to write about.

Around 1950 or ’51 another event happened that influenced my literary tendencies. My mother asked me to accompany her to Aracataca, where I was born, and to sell the house where I spent my first years. When I got there it was at first quite shocking because I was now twenty-two and hadn’t been there since the age of eight. Nothing had really changed, but I felt that I wasn’t really looking at the village, but I was experiencing it as if I were reading it. It was as if everything I saw had already been written, and all I had to do was to sit down and copy what was already there and what I was just reading. For all practical purposes everything had evolved into literature: the houses, the people, and the memories. I’m not sure whether I had already read Faulkner or not, but I know now that only a technique like Faulkner’s could have enabled me to write down what I was seeing. The atmosphere, the decadence, the heat in the village were roughly the same as what I had felt in Faulkner. It was a banana-plantation region inhabited by a lot of Americans from the fruit companies which gave it the same sort of atmosphere I had found in the writers of the Deep South. Critics have spoken of the literary influence of Faulkner, but I see it as a coincidence: I had simply found material that had to be dealt with in the same way that Faulkner had treated similar material.

From that trip to the village I came back to write Leaf Storm, my first novel. What really happened to me in that trip to Aracataca was that I realized that everything that had occurred in my childhood had a literary value that I was only now appreciating. From the moment I wrote Leaf Storm I realized I wanted to be a writer and that nobody could stop me and that the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best writer in the world. That was in 1953, but it wasn’t until 1967 that I got my first royalties after having written five of my eight books.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think that it’s common for young writers to deny the worth of their own childhoods and experiences and to intellectualize as you did initially?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

No, the process usually takes place the other way around, but if I had to give a young writer some advice I would say to write about something that has happened to him; it’s always easy to tell whether a writer is writing about something that has happened to him or something he has read or been told. Pablo Neruda has a line in a poem that says “God help me from inventing when I sing.” It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

”

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Art of Fiction No. 69, Interviewed by Peter H. Stone