A-Z 2021 P - The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (Jan Potocki, 1815)

 

OK, let's see if you can follow along with me, here.

This is a novel written by a Polish nobleman.  He wrote it in French, working on it over a span of roughly twenty years, and its final form isn't necessarily his final draft, as the author committed suicide while still crafting it.  There is no known extant copy of the complete novel in the original French, so roughly 20% instead only exists as a Polish translation of the missing original.  That 20% was later translated back into French, so that the novel could exist in something at least close to its original form.

With me so far?

The novel itself purports to be a manuscript found in a locked safe and written in Spanish.  The finder, a French soldier, is taken prisoner by the Spanish army and discovers that the commander in charge of the unit that has captured him is a descendant of the writer of the manuscript, and proceeds to translate it into French to share the stories within.  The manuscript's writer, one Alphonse von Worden, is a Walloon (read: French-speaking Belgian) soldier who, through a series of misadventures, finds himself stuck in a small valley in Andalusia, traveling around and meeting those who live there, and hearing stories they tell about themselves and their families.  He records the stories being told in his diary over the 66 days he spends in the Andalusian countryside.  Those stories may include other stories within them, which may contain further stories within them...

Yeah.  This is possibly the most intricately-nested set of stories I've ever read.  There are several times that the narrative ends up five layers deep.

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa is a difficult book to sum up.  I'd suggest that it's unfilmably so, except that a film exists (albeit one that is three hours long).  In fact, I actually have it on DVD, somewhere.  It's tempting to directly compare this work with the Thousand and One Nights and the serialized storytelling of Scheherazade, but there's a significant difference between the two sets of stories, primarily in the way that the whole collection of stories is working toward a single unified tale.  There's a whole tapestry being woven here, where multiple of the characters have linked backstories, and especially toward the end of the work, people who figure in one story appear in others, from a different perspective.

The central thematic concern is the mystery of the Gomelez, a Moorish clan of sorts that possesses untold and seemingly endless wealth, living in the ruins of a castle and a network of hidden caves under the valley that Alphonse's narrative takes place in.  For much of the book, it's unclear just what the full nature of the events that befall Alphonse might be; the existence of the supernatural is treated as a matter of course, with several stories dealing with magic or ghosts.  Characters appear and disappear in different guises, and the longest of the tales, that of the gypsy chief Pandesowna, involves repeated instances of changing his appearance and identity in order to navigate his world.

The book reads surprisingly modern; while part of that may be due to its position as a somewhat recent work in translation (and re-translation, as it were), it equally has a sort of out-of-time quality to it, where even though the characters refer to historical figures that were active and that they might have encountered in their adventures, there is little knowledge of the political climates of 17th and 18th century Europe necessary to understand what's going on.  Rather, the far more interesting aspect to this work is the way that it shifts so cleanly between genres, as the various tales take shape, and the way that every narrator has a noticeably different voice, but with everything being in service of Alphonse's journey, each of the twenty or so individual tales is able to possess a completely different feel without being utterly jarring.

It's a fascinating piece of literature, to be sure.  Perhaps the only truly disappointing thing I can say about it is that the end felt rather rushed, though that may be a function of the author's cutting-short of his own authorship.  Even so, the vast majority of questions were answered, and few loose threads were left over.  If nothing else, that serves to show how carefully-crafted this work is.

Klara and the Sun (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2021)

So, here's something I didn't expect.  A dystopian novel where the dystopia not only isn't a focus, but also isn't actually spelled out at all.

The titular narrator in Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun is an Artificial Friend, a robot specifically manufactured to provide companionship to lonely children.  The world on display is largely our own, though the presence of functional human-like robots should be the first indication that we're firmly in sci-fi territory.  The first 40 pages or so concern Klara's time at the store she is eventually purchased from, where her specific gifts become clear.  Klara is particularly adept at observing details and putting them together, which leads to some combination of insightfulness and surrealism in her interactions with the larger world around her.  She comes to believe, for example, that the Sun (as in the incandescent orb in the sky) is alive, has his own will (and yes, the Sun in Klara's mind is gendered), and is capable of performing acts of miraculous healing.  She also believes that the Cootings Machine, a piece of construction equipment which never has its purpose spelled out but which emits so much Pollution that it can blot out the Sun in its immediate surroundings, is obviously the Sun's great foe (and therefore the villain of Klara's story).

Klara's narration has a strange, somewhat disjointed quality to it; there's an almost child-like diction, with a marked tendency toward referring to others in the third person, even when they're the only person she's speaking to.  Her observations can be somewhat unsettling at times, and she has far from a full understanding of emotions, leading her to say and do things that are perhaps not the best choice at the time.

Most of the book is focused on Klara's interactions with Josie, a sickly adolescent girl who chooses her from the store.  From the start, there's something a little off about the whole situation; Josie's mother directly asks Klara to show her imitation abilities off in the store, after a few encounters across the shop window, and the relationship between the Mother and Klara is anything but normal, as the story progresses; the reason for this becomes clear, but the implications are decidedly chilling.

The world on display is a sort of light dystopia, plausible but thankfully not something currently feasible.  Robots have largely replaced even some highly-trained and creative-thinking workers (referred to as "substitution"), and colleges are actively refusing entry to new students who haven't been "lifted", a process of gene-therapy that yields higher intellect (though in Josie's case, also led to significant health issues).  The stresses that this puts on the system are obvious, and appear generally to be exactly what one might expect increased unemployment on that sort of scale to become.

Klara's place in all of this is initially confusing to her, but as she begins to realize what the purpose of bringing her into the household actually is, she finds herself divided in how best to act.  She believes the clear solution is to requrst assistance from the Sun and his miraculous healing, going so far as to accept a quest from him to kill the Cootings Machine at any cost.

It's a delightful read, and the way that the shape of the dystopia creeps in slowly, only as Klara herself becomes aware of each aspect, is amazing.  The way that Klara sees the world is inherently different than the way humans do (details broken out into boxes, shapes abstracted into primitives when she isn't focusing on them specifically) and this comes out perfectly, though it is a touch jarring at first.

I find myself wondering how similar Ishiguro's other works might be.  I know for sure that he has written other, more overt dystopian literature that deals with rather darker themes, though I have little interest in reading it at this time (so soon after Nineteen Eighty-Four).  Even so, though, he's definitely going on my list of authors I need to read more of.

A-Z 2021 O - Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1948)

...I don't think I was ready for this.

There's two directions I could take this post.  There's the one where I take an objective view of Nineteen Eighty-Four and look at the book in a vacuum, digging into the narrative and the writing style and not much else.

That direction is boring.

There's also the direction where I take a very much subjective view of the book, look at the politics and messages in the text and the warnings that are present here, and dig into the relevance that the book has to the modern world.

That direction is uncomfortable and could potentially put all of my own political and sociological views on display if I'm not careful.

That direction is also the one I have to go in, because this book was an uncomfortable read and I need to unpack things a bit before I move on to my next read.  There was never any other option, I was always going to go down this path in writing this piece.

So, we really have to start with the general idea of what this book is.  The phrase 'Big Brother is watching you' has entered the popular consciousness, to the point that there's a whole global long-running franchise of reality shows called Big Brother.  This comes from a partial understanding of the nature of Big Brother and the general form of the police state that is Oceania and more specifically London under the control of Ingsoc.  Yes, it's a surveillance state; nothing can be done that isn't potentially being watched.  But there's a lot more to it than just the surveillance.

The central idea that is at work in Ingsoc London is so much worse than merely being a surveillance state, though.  For one, this is where the idea of "thought police" comes from.  Any ideas that are a deviation from the party line, even memories, are considered to be thoughtcrime and are understood to be a crime that carries the death penalty.  This isn't entirely accurate, but it's very close.  There is no evidence allowed to exist that supports the idea of there being an objective reality other than what the Party wants the population to believe there to be.  This is so ingrained into everyone that at one point in the book, during a vast celebration of patriotic xenophobia that includes posters and banners stating that the foe of Oceania is Eurasia, the foe changes abruptly to Eastasia in the middle of a speech and the whole population spontaneously remembers that they've always been at war with Eastasia, so clearly all these posters vilifying their ally Eurasia were placed by rebellious agitators who want to destroy Ingsoc and thus everything needs to be pulled down and destroyed.

It's that abrupt.  The orator changes the direction of his speech in response to a note handed to him, without even missing a beat, and the whole population just turns on a dime.

A big part of this is because of the nature of the society in question.  Ingsoc is a shortened form of 'English Socialism', though in practice it's precisely as much of a socialist party as the National Socialists in Germany were; indeed, this is what Orwell, a socialist himself, was trying to illustrate.  The most insidious part of Ingsoc is not the surveillance state, or even the organized rewriting of the past to fit the present (an act which is the job of protagonist Winston Smith).  It's how language itself is used as a weapon, wielded like a scalpel to shape thoughts themselves.

A useful thought experiment comes in the form of considering how one generates their words when writing.  If you're thinking about an object that can be described in concrete terms (say, an elephant), you first picture an image of the object, then find the words that match it.  If you think about the feel of the elephant's skin, you have to picture the texture before you can attach the word 'rough'.  But if you're thinking about an abstract concept, such as 'democracy', what image can you attach that properly serves as a base?  You have to start from the words.

Ingsoc is actively working to create a new version of the language, called Newspeak, that will eventually replace modern English, referred to as Oldspeak.  One of the hallmarks of Newspeak is that vocabulary is very precisely defined, so that most basic words have a single meaning; additionally, when two words are opposites, one can be removed and replaced with the other, just with an 'un-' prefix added.  Doubleplus ungood if you're a fan of language, though equally an incredibly insidious way of controlling thought.  One can't think about freedom if the definition of 'free' only allows for its use in the sense of 'sugar-free'.  One can't think about general equality of people as a whole when 'equal' is defined as 'precisely the same', so that all people being equal would require that everyone be, essentially, clones.  If you don't have the words for complex abstract thought that goes against the Party because all such concepts have been imprecisely bodged together into the single term 'crimethink', well...  I'm sure the implications are clear.

Nineteen Eighty-Four goes farther, though, than simply explicating these ideas in a narrative form, however.  It goes so far as to show just how such a ruling class will go about maintaining that power, and how they 'fix' anyone whose thoughts are unable to conform.  Winston Smith spends the last part of the book being tortured and systematically stripped of his ability to maintain his badthinking ways, training him in the art of doublethink, having two contradictory thoughts simultaneously in his head and believing only the one that is suitable, so that he can be a productive, obedient and goodthinking member of society.  This begins with a sequence that was absolutely being referenced when Star Trek: The Next Generation did their torture episode, where Smith is told that when a man holds up four fingers in front of him, he is supposed to know instinctively, to truly believe that there are five fingers being held up.  By the end of the book, he genuinely does, willing and eager to accept without a moment's hesitation or doubt that if the party says 2+2=5, then 2+2 couldn't possibly be 4.

This may be the one thing that's the most chilling about this book, in fact: there is absolutely no hope on display here.  This is possibly the most pessimistic dystopia I've ever encountered; through the whole book, Smith is telling himself repeatedly that he knows exactly how the road he's traveling ends.  He knows that his doubt of Big Brother's benevolence and the Party's rightness will inevitably lead him to the torture chambers of the Ministry of Love, and from there, eventually, to execution.  We don't see this last part in the book, but even in his newfound place as a truly obedient Party member, he knows it's eventually going to come.  That's the point; Ingsoc doesn't just kill dissidents; it re-educates them until they've truly repented and can't do anything less than go perfectly with the Party line, before eventually killing them when it's the most appropriate timing.

For a long time, I've seen a bumper sticker on cars now and then, which reads "The answer to 1984 is 1776."  To me, this indicates that the person who has that sticker on their car hasn't ever actually read the book.  Leaving aside that the appendix on the methods of Newspeak explicitly spells out how the words of Jefferson could never survive the work of those like Smith who rewrite everything to match Party thought, let alone be translated to Newspeak, the book goes out of its way to lay out exactly how Oceanic society has been stratified, how the education system is designed to turn children into good little agents of the Party who are eager to turn in even their own parents for thoughtcrimes, how even the most minor indiscretion will get even the most enthusiastic Party member turned in.  The masses are kept uneducated, the Party members are caught up in infectious hyper-patriotism, and all dissent is rapidly dealt with.  The constant state of war means that even with mechanized production, goods are kept rationed and everyone is left in a state of want, because everything can be sent off to the battle fronts, effectively removing resources and keeping everything in a permanent state of rationing and austerity.  The Party is even going so far as to ensure that future generations will be ever less able to effectively resist, by stripping them of the very words they would need in order to build a resistance, by changing the meaning of words to mean different things than they used to mean...  In short, by building a society designed around the sole purpose of keeping those in power, well... in power.  Objective reality ceases to exist, replaced by the world that the Party and its mouthpieces want those who are subject to its power to believe exists.

Replaced by the world where 2+2=5.

I'm going to be honest here... I look at the world today and it makes me feel decidedly less than optimistic.  An awful lot of people seem to have forgotten that freedom has responsibilities attached, and are more than eager to believe whatever their demagogues of choice spout out, regardless of how those beliefs reflect objective reality.  Words get twisted, so that 'socialism' has over the decades become a political buzzword for 'whatever the political Right doesn't like at the moment, even if they liked it a whole lot just a couple of years ago', and some kind of ridiculous doublethink has people claiming the Newspeak-esque term 'Antifa' (short for anti-fascist) indicates that someone is, in fact, a fascist.  Critical Race Theory, an educational concept that rarely appears outside of post-grad law school, has somehow become something that is taught in Kindergarten, at least if one listens to the mouthpieces.  And far be it for anyone to even suggest that slavery was a problem outside of the American South in the time of the Civil War (which wasn't about slavery, it was state rights! to have legal slavery) and that racism isn't inherently baked into everything that European culture has ever touched.

This book messed me up.  I can't honestly look at Ingsoc and its methods and think of anything other than what I've watched the political landscape turn into over the last decade.  Populism, isolationism, militarism, blind patriotism, the last administration's attempts at a willful rewriting of history to make it reflect what they wanted rather than objective reality, the resulting uncontained crazy that was the January 6th insurrection...

I would have gotten something totally different out of this if I'd read it 20 years ago when I was in high school instead of now.  It probably wouldn't have hit me nearly as hard.  But then, the world was different then.

For one, people generally agreed about objective reality.

A-Z 2021 N - Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Pablo Neruda, 1924)

I've never really read a lot of poetry.  Part of that is that I've often gone through spells where I don't read anything but non-fiction, but equally, it's simply that I've often leaned more into novels (and usually genre stuff at that) than into shorter works, let alone works where the whole thing might be over in a matter of lines.

I may have decided that I don't much enjoy reading Keats, but that absolutely isn't the case with reading poetry in general, as I've learned with this small volume of Pablo Neruda's verse.  Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is a small volume (Penguin's edition comes out to 112 pages, and that's with an 18-page introduction, every poem being bilingual on facing pages, and about a dozen Picasso illustrations with blank facing pages), but it packs a punch, to say the least.

The title isn't 100% accurate; the 'Song of Despair' is absolutely a love poem as well, simply one that's more about the pain of love ending than about adoration of the woman Neruda is devoting the words to.  So what we have here is a small collection, just twenty-one poems, most only a page long.  And yet, there's a very good reason that this was chosen to have not just a whole volume to itself, but one in bespoke Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition styling, making it stand out just that little bit more on the shelf, despite having the lowest spine height of the whole bunch.

The poems here are quite unlike the Romantic poets, with their tendency toward placing the object of affection on a pedestal of sorts, as if the lovers were Greek goddesses.  Rather, there's a sort of raw, earthy quality to Neruda's writing, his lovers a part of the world, creatures of sensuality who inspire both words of love and of lust.

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want to do with you
what spring does with the cherry trees.

I mean...  That's definitely a form of worship toward one's lover, but not in any kind of remotely chaste sense. There's a sense of unbridled eroticism to every poem in the collection; the most common metaphors compare the lover to the ocean's depths, to the weather, love as something more akin to a force of nature that cannot be resisted or controlled, rather than anything that could be captured in stone and placed in a museum.

It's difficult to say that this slim volume gives a solid idea of what Neruda's poetry was like over the course of his life, however; this was one of his first published works (composed when he was only 20), while his career lasted until his death in 1973.  That said, given that it is still, a century on, the highest-selling poetry collection in the Spanish language, their timeless quality ensures that Neruda occupies a solid position among the acknowledged masters of poetry.

Picking up the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971 certainly doesn't hurt, though.

A-Z 2021 M - The Crucible (Arthur Miller, 1953)

If there's one thing that my country is really, really good at, it's attacking itself.  All you have to do to see evidence of that is look at the news; we're always divided, often with at least one side quoting Bible verses as justification for their hatred of the other side.  I've actually seen Leviticus quoted as a pro-face-mask argument in recent days, which, on one hand, good on whoever found that for locating something that speaks the right language, but on the other hand...  Ugh.  I'm not going to get into the theory and practice of using historical religious documents as a guiding principle in the modern world, that's just not what I'm here for, and it would probably just turn into a crazed rant anyways.

What I am here for, right now, is Cold War/Red Scare commentary disguised as a play about the Salem witch trials.

So, because it's absolutely not existing in a vacuum, the first place to start any discussion of The Crucible has to be with the political background to its writing, specifically the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and its intersection with the entertainment industry.  If someone pointed a finger at you and said 'Communist!', you got dragged into Congress where you had to answer whether you were a Communist, and if you knew anyone else who might have been a Communist, and if you say no, they're not going to believe you, and if you say yes, you'd better have names to give, and if you plead your First or Fifth Amendment rights, well, that's just proof that you're a Communist, because nobody has anything to fear if they're innocent, right?

So basically, anyone who got pulled in was either guilty or had to point fingers.  Refusal wasn't an option.

Arthur Miller, The Crucible's author, saw all this happening, saw his friend Elia Kazan actually pointing fingers in 1952, and then went to research in Salem, Massachusetts, because, well...  we've seen this kind of kangaroo court situation before, in this country.  And the result is a Tony-award-winning play that ended up perfectly describing how he was going to end up acting when he got dragged in front of the HUAC himself in 1956.

The play itself does a little bit of playing fast-and-loose with history, but the general form of the narrative follows what actually happened.  Some of the girls of Salem Village get caught doing stuff they shouldn't be, decide to blame it on witchcraft, and when they suddenly have everyone's ears and become celebrities of a sort, which isn't helped by everyone being willing to go with their argument and go into a state of paranoia.  With the courts deciding that since supernatural evidence by definition lacks a physical presence, the situation ended up that the only way out was to lie and say you were guilty of witchcraft, repent before the Lord, and name names.

There's a lot to unpack in the real events, particularly in the political underpinnings; I'm far from an expert, but I can point at the podcast Remarkable Providences as a source of good background information (in particular, the political and economic motives are only glossed over in The Crucible).  Miller provides several short essays in the midst of Act One, in order to give some historical background for the characters, though he does leave out where his inaccuracies lie.  It would be difficult to argue that he wasn't aware of what he was doing, but given that he was making a statement about the nature of guilt in the middle of an uncontrolled moral panic, his messaging through the lead character, John Proctor, requires a bit of that.  In particular, the personal conflict in the play revolves around a past illicit dalliance between him and Abigail Williams, the primary instigator of the witch panic, and ringleader of the group of girls pointing fingers at everyone around them.

In real life, this almost certainly never happened, given that Proctor was in his 60s and Abigail a pre-teen, but in the play, these ages are changed to mid-30s and 18 respectively.  The main reason Proctor gets involved in the proceedings is that Abigail points a finger at his wife, in what is all but directly stated to be an attempt to render Proctor a widower so that she can marry him, but his attempt to talk some sense into the court instead results in him being declared a witch, himself.  In true kangaroo court style, he's essentially declared guilty without anything even remotely resembling a fair trial, and the play ends with his execution after perjuring himself in an attempt to get some real justice for the innocent, an act which he very forcibly recants after it becomes clear that no such justice is present.

In the end of the play, we're told that Abigail stole her uncle's fortune and hopped on a ship; the epilogue suggests that she was later seen as a prostitute in New York, a somewhat poetic ending based on the play's version of her.  It's unclear where Miller got this from, however; Abigail Williams doesn't seem to exist in the historical record after (or, indeed, before) the witchcraft scare in Salem.

So, what are we to take from this?  That paranoia is bad when it results in a bit of face-spiting?  That using scripture and religion to determine what is or isn't a sign of guilt results in the innocent being punished?  That trusting the accuser with no actual evidence is a really, really stupid idea?

That people are really, really good at putting their brains into coast and just going along with whatever the loud voices shouting in their ears tell them?

In 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy (admittedly, not part of HUAC, but very much of the same political moment) made the ill-advised move to turn his anti-Communist attentions toward the US Army.  The resulting proceedings were very much public, and led to his popularity and approval spiraling downward, and eventually a formal censure by the Senate, effectively ending his political career.

In the script he wrote for the 1996 film version of the play, Miller added a scene, just before the final day, where Abigail is directly confronted by Reverend Hale, one of Proctor's allies, who has come to realize how he's been used over the length of the story, and exactly what his expertise in finding apparent witchcraft and devilry has been used for.  In response, Abigail declares Hale's wife to be a witch, an act which results in her being largely discredited due to having accused a preacher's wife, considered beyond reproach, of being a witch.  While this doesn't get those previously accused off the hook, it's the point where she decides to make her escape, ahead of any repercussions landing on her head.

One has to wonder what the tipping point in our culture's current moment of paranoid self-harm and self-destruction is going to be.

A-Z 2021 L - Kalevala (Elias Lönnrot, 1835/1849)

I think I've gone over my love of fairy/folktales before, so I'll forego any introduction about such things, for now.  Instead, given the nature of Kalevala, I should look at the political underpinnings of a writer composing a collection of such stories.

Fairy and folk collections essentially fall into two categories.  There are the variety that most people likely think of, where the stories come from a variety of sources and are thrown together because someone from outside the culture enjoys them; this might best be defined as the Lang approach.  Then there are the collections made with purpose, by people within the culture they are collecting from, trying to make a specific, often inherently nationalistic, statement.  Kalevala is firmly a member of this second variety.

To begin with, it's important to address the things that Kalevala is not.  It is not a collection in the sense that most would think of collections being.  Rather than simply compiling an anthology of sorts, Elias Lönnrot collected the tales that flitted around the 19th-century Finnish landscape, then took his own hand at the bardic skillset, weaving the stories and songs around each other into a single coherent whole, a 600-page poem with chapter breaks.  This is not to say that it's internally consistent; several times characters take credit for events that are properly attributed to others.  That said, the central plotline, largely telling of the interactions between Väinämöinen the eternal singer, Ilmarinen the immortal blacksmith, Lemminkäinen of the islands, and Louhi the Mistress of the North, has mythic qualities all over it, with characters routinely singing (or smithing) reality into the shape they desire, shifting the forms of themselves and others at will, and calling on the gods with visible effects.  A recurring object, the Sampo, is crafted by Ilmarinen for Louhi and provides her homeland with riches, seemingly without end.  While most animals are simply animals, trees and boats seem to be able to speak with Väinämöinen easily.

There are segments that feel almost like in their earlier existence as song-poems in the oral tradition, they were intended almost as a call-and-response; many times through the book, whole sections are repeated with minor variation.  If Ilmarinen is smithing something, he's going to get amazing things that aren't what he was trying to make at least twice, and shove the wonders back into the furnace so he can try again.  If anyone is traveling and needs to request something from a village, he's going to knock on at least two doors and not find what he's looking for before finding it in the third.  The rule of threes is firmly in place here.

All in all, a wonderful read, albeit one with a great many unlikeable characters.  Even the most heroic characters are greatly flawed here; I can count the number of characters who never did anything immoral on one hand, and all of those are female characters.  That seems to be a common trait in mythic scenarios, though; it's near impossible to find characters in epics who aren't flawed and, well... human.

So, what about that nationalistic streak I mentioned?  Well, for that, we have to look at the world as it was for Lönnrot.  His Finland was a largely-autonomous part of Russia at the time, and few were recording the folk songs of the forest people in the north of the country.  A generation earlier, the folklorist Carl Axel Gottlund had lamented that there was no national epic for the Finnish people to unite behind, no central mythology.  Lönnrot's contribution, then, provided that; it's notable that he revised the first edition of it into a single unified whole, 14 years after the initial publishing, and later released an abridged version of the work in 1862 specifically so it could be taught in schools.  A visit to Finland now would show just how important this work became for the culture; it's common to find names from the Kalevala attached to places and businesses (a small town started by Finnish immigrants in Michigan is called Kaleva, with street names to match), and when Don Rosa wrote a Sampo-inspired story in Uncle Scrooge comics, complete with relevant characters, it instantly made him a celebrity there.

It could be, and often has been, argued that Kalevala helped to focus the Finnish national identity, enough that when Russia began trying to limit the autonomy of Finland in the late 19th century, the Finnish people pushed back, long and hard enough that they eventually declared independence in late 1917 (admittedly alongside other issues in Russia).  Its reach extends beyond Finland's borders, however; most notably, J.R.R. Tolkien based parts of The Silmarillion on Kalevala, and the character of Tom Bombadil is almost certainly inspired by Väinämöinen.

In any case, this was a very enjoyable read, and significantly less viking-ey than I expected.  Fancy that, the least coastal part of Scandinavia has a different culture...  but just as rich in mythic lore.

A-Z 2021 K - Plain Tales from the Hills (Rudyard Kipling, 1884-1888)

We may as well start today with addressing the elephant in the room.  Rudyard Kipling was absolutely a believer that British colonialism was fundamentally a good thing.  He doesn't write of it as a uniform good, but in many ways this is because he sees that humans are flawed.  He isn't supporting colonialism out of a nationalistic notion of Empire, but rather, he sees it as an almost sacred duty of good European folks (though especially the English-speaking ones) to bring civilization and Christianity to other parts of the world, whether they already had perfectly good civilizations and religions or not.

We will not, however, be addressing any elephants in today's book, as despite their appearance on the cover of my copy, there are no elephants as significant parts of the narrative in any of Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills.  Sorry, Hathi, I didn't read the book you're in quite yet.

Plain Tales was Kipling's first widely-published work, so what we see here is a very young writer (these stories are from when the author was between 19-23 years old), working as a journalist in British India, turning his pen to (generally comic) fiction in order to fill a few columns in the newspaper he worked for.  This, then, indicates the initial audience as well; he was writing for English folks in and around Lahore.

Perhaps due to that audience, Kipling has a particular focus on English characters; few stories have "native" protagonists, and many have only white characters at all.  There are recurring characters at times, references to earlier stories abound, and it's very clear that the readership were following along from episode to episode.

The subject matter varies widely.  There are a number of short romantic comedies and tragedies alike, tales of pranks gone horribly wrong or spectacularly right, several stories told in a remarkable vernacular about the goings-on of a military regiment...  In short, a cross-section of what life in and around Simla during the mid-1880s was like, at least if you were an Englishman.  The mental imagery created in some of these tales is amazing, particularly in the case of the military regiment's offerings, one of which includes a ghost horse with a skeleton and a pair of timpanis on its back galloping toward a whole battalion.  It makes sense in context.

Kipling's narrator is a sort of self-insertion, usually standing to one side of the stories and simply observing what happens through his journalist's eye; while several times he is drawn into the narrative, this is rarely done in a way that gives him any great agency within the story.  Rather, this device is used to allow him to act as a sort of straight man for the other characters' foolishness (in one case, having to race on a horse in a dust storm to try and stop an unfortunate aftermath to a friend's proposal to the wrong sister; the obvious mistake having been to propose to someone you can't clearly see in a dust storm).

It's hard at times to tell if some of the things Kipling says about India and its people are actually his views or if they are intended as satire.  He clearly feels strongly for the country and its culture, but at the same time, he has an outsider's view, and especially feels that Western culture has some degree of primacy that should be brought in to sort of... improve on what's already there.

It's worth noting that the text that Penguin has used, at least in the edition I have (which is not identical to the one currently in print), is from the third compiled printing of these stories, which was partially adjusted by Kipling due to its nature as a book intended for the "Home" market, back in the British Isles.  This has required some adjusting of text here and there, largely to make things that would have been obvious to his readers in Lahore more clear for readers in London.  The endnotes provided do a good job of making it clear where this has happened, however, and much of the content that one looks at slightly askance now was there all along.  It's not a surprise that this is coming from the same author who would, ten years later, write "The White Man's Burden".

One last thing that I really have to wonder about, and do want to bring up, is the way of referring to race here.  For some reason, the Indian peoples are referred to as "blacks" if their race is mentioned at all, as if they're the same as Africans.  I really don't know for sure what to make of that; in a couple of places it's been described as looking similar to a "Spanish complexion", perhaps indicating that any darker complexion would be considered 'black' in this case.  This would line up with one of the knights in the Arthurian legends, Morien, a half-Moorish knight described as "black of face and limb", despite by all indications being someone who would have something akin to a middle-eastern or, indeed, Indian complexion.  This is one of those places where being American may be to my detriment in this case, as my specific cultural background gives a likewise-specific idea of what 'black' means that may not line up with literature that comes from a British background, particularly that from other centuries.

It's ultimately impossible to separate Kipling from the colonial views and mindset, in any case.  He's a product of his time and culture, and his writings show that.  While the racism on display isn't as hateful as, say, that of H.P. Lovecraft, it's still a clear through-line of sorts in the stories where Indian people appear.  This isn't to say that the English get away without some solid jabs, but the overall form of Kipling's work still celebrates imperialism.  It's simply impossible to escape from that in many of his works, and this early fiction puts it front and center.

A-Z 2021 J: We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson, 1962)

If you read American fiction, you have probably encountered Shirley Jackson's writing at some point, even if you don't remember her by name.  She's especially known currently as the author of The Haunting of Hill House (thanks, Netflix), but she first made her name rather earlier than that, with a 1948 short story in the New Yorker.  In that story, a small New England farming town is engaging in an annual tradition.  It's quite a festive occasion, except...

If by some chance you haven't read that story (and believe me, if you've read it, you know exactly what story that is, just from that one sentence), do please take a moment to follow that link.  I'm not going anywhere.

...

...I know, right?

So, why do I bring this up?  Well...  I think I could safely argue that We Have Always Lived in the Castle takes place in, if not the same small town, one very nearby, perhaps just a few miles farther down the highway from Haunting's Hillsdale.

This is a story told to us by the very neurotic tomboy Merricat (Mary Katherine Blackwood), about how she and her older sister, Constance, came to live alone in their family home.  Merricat is... Something.  She's eighteen years old, but in a similar fashion to Nell in Haunting, she seems somehow emotionally stunted, younger than she actually is.  She's obsessed with mushrooms and other forest foraging, buries treasures as protective amulets around the house, and has a very hard time with breaking rules that determine what she is and isn't allowed to do.  I'm going to be honest, with her intense reliance on schedules and ritual, not to mention the insinuations by the most obvious "villain" of the piece (not that he ever actually states it outright) that she belongs in an institution , I read her as being somewhere on the autism spectrum, though that's never stated in the text (not that the "spectrum" was even an idea at the time).  That or she's actively a budding Baba Yaga sort; she does specifically say early on that she prefers her library books to be fairy tales.

Merricat opens right up with laying out for the reader that she has Constance, and all the rest of her family is dead (though this isn't completely accurate), along with making it rapidly clear that the people of the village all hate her family, mercilessly teasing her whenever she goes into town to get groceries and library books.  Constance, who is rather mentally broken in other ways, unable to handle other people for the most part and rarely willing to leave their manor house any further than the edge of her vegetable garden, is acting as the caretaker for the family, primarily for their sick Uncle Julian, the only other member of the household, who is wheelchair-bound, half-senile, and obsessed with trying to recreate the night that, according to the schoolyard rhymes that continually appear, Connie poisoned the whole family with arsenic in the sugar.  After all, Connie could never be that subtle, and if she was the poisoner, why didn't she do something earlier in the day, like the rarebit at lunch?

This mystery floats through the whole book.  Julian survived the poisoning because he only took a very small amount of sugar on his blackberries for dessert, Constance doesn't especially like sweet things so didn't take any, and Merricat had gotten in trouble for something and was sent to bed without dinner, so wasn't present.  It didn't help that Constance, before help arrived, had washed out the sugar bowl, "because there was a spider in it."  She really doesn't like spiders.

There are a few visitors, now and then, people who were friends of Merricat's mother and insist on inviting themselves to tea in order to try and coax Constance out of her fear of other people and leaving the safe space that is their home, but Merricat is distrustful of all of them.  Anything that might change the routines that she relies on; she gets a chill when Constance even mentions the idea of venturing beyond the garden's edge.

Into Merricat's orderly world comes Charles Blackwood, a cousin from a part of the family that completely cut themselves off when Constance was arrested (though later acquitted) for the mass murder.  Charles very quickly insinuates himself into the household, using Constance as his route of choice, and begins efforts to convince her that his way of addressing everything is better, that it would all be better if he and Constance were the only ones in the house, that Uncle Julian should be in a hospital with trained nurses and Merricat should... he never says it outright, but it's clear what he thinks.

Merricat is distrustful of Charles from the start, and Julian seems to agree in his lucid moments.  This seems to be borne out as the interloper seems to have no compunctions about making himself completely at home, making use of her father's valuables (after noting the value if they were sold, more than anything else), and continually finding Merricat's buried talismans, none of which are given anything less than an utter rage-filled rant that drives her from the house repeatedly.

Everything comes to a head when a fire is "accidentally" started by Merricat, thanks to the newspapers that Charles leaves strewn everywhere and a tobacco pipe left smoldering in his room, at which the entire town becomes involved in a mass riot and looting event.  And here's where we see just how bad the village actually is; when everyone in town follows the fire engine to watch the biggest excitement they'v'e seen in a long time, the crowd includes calls to just let it all burn down, and laments that the girls should have been inside, rather than having been allowed to run for safety.  Even when the fire is put out, it doesn't stop them from, en masse, storming into the manor and starting to just destroy everything they can get their hands on; the only thing that stops them, in fact, is the discovery of a dead body.

So, here's the thing...  After Merricat and Constance they start putting their world back together, the townsfolk, for the most part, seem to realize they made a huge mistake, and it becomes clear that they're going to be trying to make up for it for a very long time.  They know they went beyond the pale, they feel remorse for the way they've treated the Blackwood girls.  It's unclear how long they'll be continuing to try to make up for it, but it's perfectly clear that everyone in the village knows exactly what their mistakes were and are going to apologize specifically.  They know they did wrong, even if it took a complete catastrophe to realize it.

Shirley Jackson has a reputation for being a horror writer, but I think labeling her that way does her a severe injustice.  Her themes are, for the most part, extremely mundane and human; what she writes about isn't as innocuous as a monster or a ghost.  Rather, what her books reveal is the weakness of the human mind under stress, the fragility of peaceful existence, and the ease in which humans are capable of inhuman acts.



It seems that there's been a movie made of this recently, with Crispin Glover as Julian.  Which...  Yeah, I can see Crispin Glover fitting in rather well in any Shirley Jackson project, really; he just fits in this kind of creepy plotline.  It's even on Netflix.  Kind of makes me want to see if it's closer to The Haunting (1963), The Haunting (1999), or The Haunting of Hill House (2018) in terms of how well it works with the source material.

A-Z 2021 I: The Cheapest Nights (Yusuf Idris, 1954-1978)

I think I've mentioned the idea of a curate's egg before.  I have to say, at least from my perspective, Egyptian writer Yusuf Idris's short fiction definitely falls into that category.  I loved the writing style, the way that he captures the world that his characters live in, the descriptions that make places I don't know if I would ever go come alive in my mind.

And yet, I can't really bring myself to say that I enjoyed my time reading The Cheapest Nights.

So, what's the problem here?  There's a lot to unpack in this short volume.  First, it's worth noting that collection this is not the same as Idris's identically-titled first collection, أرخص ليالى, which I don't believe has ever been released in English in its original form.  This collection does, however, include six of the stories from that earlier one, along with nine from his later collections.

There's a throughline here, of people trying to find their ways out of poverty and dealing with the societal problems that prevent that escape.  Sexuality is almost omnipresent, but it's dealt with in a very matter-of-fact way, never graphic.  The title story, for example, deals with a man who made the mistake of drinking black tea in the evening being unable to sleep, wandering his village that has too many youth, but unable to find anything to fill the time with that doesn't cost the money he doesn't have due to having six children, so he goes home, wakes his wife, and they pursue the least expensive entertainment available... nine months later, he now has seven children, and still wonders where all the youth running around in town are coming from.

Everything is that simple, matter-of-fact, straight-forward.  A man who can't hold a job discovers that he can sell his blood at the hospital, allowing him to make ends meet for a time, only to be told eventually that he's sold too much and has anemia, and to come back when he's stronger.  A landowner attempting to charge tolls to get into a marketplace on his land is stymied by the merchants' refusal to go around to the one entrance he wants them to traverse, and instead make their own way through the fence where it's more convenient for them.  An old tradition in a slowly-failing rural farming region regarding offers of hospitality to a wedding party traveling down the road goes awry when one particularly large example of such a party decides to take everyone up on their offers.  The word selection is surgical in its precision, leaving no doubt as to what's going on.

That said, I can't say that the stories on display here are even remotely pleasant for the most part.  Especially when Idris is trying to point out a particular social ill, there are rarely anything like positive conclusions (of the fifteen stories, I would only argue that three have particularly happy endings), and more often than not, the protagonists are left in worse states than they began the stories with.

I think the most frustrating thing, though, is that the two longest stories in the collection are driven largely by sexual assault.  The first of these, "The Dregs of the City," starts out looking like it's going to be about a judge looking for his missing wristwatch, and indeed that's the top-level narrative, but much more of the story is about the judge taking advantage of a married cleaning woman whom he has hired and pushing her into eventually becoming a prostitute; the second, "The Shame," is about how an entire village decides that an innocent girl has had sex with one of the young men in town, and virtually frog-marches her to have the one "trustworthy" woman in the village inspect her, a test that apparently involves several women holding her down while she's stripped, with the potential result of a failed "inspection" directly stated to be an honor killing.

And... I mean, this isn't pleasant stuff to read about.  We've got a guy taking advantage of a woman who lives in abject poverty and can't effectively say 'no', and a whole village working as a mob to rob a girl of her innocence, despite her (truthful) pleas that nothing happened.  Elsewhere, we have religious leaders giving in to sinful behaviors, anonymous murders of physically-and-mentally-disabled people, and bureaucratic red tape hindering even those who are trying to do something resembling good work within the system.  Frankly, it's not surprising that Idris wound up jailed for the political views in some of his writings, given how much of a focus his writing places on the realities of poverty in Egypt.  It's very well-written, very powerful stuff, of a kind with Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, or John Steinbeck.

But powerful doesn't mean pleasant.  And like I said before, I can't say I enjoyed reading this.

Doesn't mean it doesn't belong on my shelf, though.  Or that I would pass up reading more of Idris's writings.

A-Z 2021 H: Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse, 1922)

 

You know, I've encountered this book before.  I hadn't read it before, mind; rather, a class on world religions that I was going to take years and years ago but ended up dropping before the end of the first week had it on the syllabus.

So, the book on the table today is Hermann Hesse's novella, Siddhartha.  This is an incredible book, for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it does actually do a good job of bringing the concepts of samsara and nirvana into very clear view for someone not familiar with them.  There's a general sense in Western culture as a whole for what Buddhism is teaching about nirvana, but very few who don't actively practice Eastern religions have a solid idea of what the actual nature of that state is, which does give some good value to this read.

The book itself is about the life of Siddhartha, a member of the Brahmin caste, who decides early on that the religious life that has been set out for him by his father doesn't interest him and that instead, he wants to give up the comfortable life that exists for him and go into the wilderness, to become an ascetic and search for enlightenment in other ways.  This leads him to encounter the Gautama Buddha (not-coincidentally also one whose original name was Siddhartha, though the text of the book doesn't mention this), an experience which sends him into a life of learning from everything, trying the lives of a rich merchant and a poor ferryman before finally reaching his own enlightenment and, presumably, escape from the cycle of samsara.

It's a beautifully-written book, and Joachim Neugroschel's translation retains the lyrical quality of the work.  The language is almost dream-like at times, flowing like a river and pulling the reader along on Siddhartha's journey to enlightenment.  While Siddhartha is really the only character who is fully built out into three dimensions, the supporting cast, drifting in and out of his journey, are all making their own similar journeys, though perhaps not all with as much success as his own spiritual awakening.

So, with the book review part of this post done, let's look a little more at what's actually going on in this work.  The overall theme seems to be that you can teach knowledge, but you cannot teach wisdom, and any attempt to do so will just sound foolish.  Wisdom must be learned from the self, through experience with the world, and can only be found when you're not looking for it.  As long as you actively search, the search itself will keep you from finding enlightenment.

The key concept to be aware of here is, again, samsara.  Generally, those of us in the Western world have an understanding of the Eastern religions in question here, Buddhism and Hinduism, that really begins and ends with reincarnation and possibly karma if you look a bit deeper.  Coming from a primarily Abrahamic cultural background, these aren't concepts that are easy to really understand properly, simply because that background gives an idea that you get one pass at life, and how you conduct yourself will determine what your afterlife will be.  This isn't the understanding of life that Eastern religions have, where everything is instead seen as cyclical, with the eternal return to life and traversal of the world as a core aspect of the soul's existence.  The world is seen as illusory, as a source of suffering, and the escape from that world into enlightenment and peace, the nirvana state, is the only way out of the endless cycle.  Everything, every action, every encounter, everything around us, is all part of samsara, the constant metempsychosis shaped in each cycle by karma, the return of all good and ill that you created in the world being brought back around to you in the next life, that all are trapped within, for better or worse.

This is where the message of searching being counterproductive comes into play.  Nirvana is a state of being free from desire, pain, and guilt; the act of searching for it, therefore, is succumbing to a desire.  Siddhartha only reaches his enlightenment when he gives up even the search for it, releases himself from the pain that comes of his life experiences and the path he has taken by understanding that his life has, itself, come in a cycle, and discovers the underlying oneness of everything.  He exists in a simple life, in the end, simply ferrying travelers across the river that has become his world, that is the source of his final escape from samsara even as he realizes that water itself is fundamentally caught in its own eternal cycle.

The river is everything, and everything is contained in the river.

A-Z 2021 G: Faust (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1808/1832)

This was going to be two posts, but no, I should treat this as one long work, albeit one that would be ridiculously long and expensive to produce.  Goethe's Faust is perhaps a harder work to get a firm handle on than I expected, largely because my only previous exposure to the Faust legend is through Christopher Marlowe's 1592 play Doctor Faustus.  While Marlowe held closely to the legend in his treatment, Goethe's drama goes rather farther afield, resulting in a work that is about more than simply hubris and wastefulness.

Faust comes in two parts, with a gap of indeterminate length between the two parts of the narrative.  The thematic concerns of the two differ, as well, with the first part focusing on human sorts of concerns, while the second jumps into a mythic space that operates far more in the realm of allegory than anything else.

The general form of the Faust legend is that a scholar who wants to know things beyond human understanding makes a deal with the devil Mephistopheles in order to gain access to those secrets of magic for a set length of time, at which point he will be dragged bodily to Hell forever.  Marlowe held tightly to this narrative; the second half of Doctor Faustus is largely made up of Faust running around being a ridiculous buffoon and wasting the time he bought at the cost of his soul.  Goethe gets this out of the way very early on, and instead uses the legend as a framework to build a far more ambitious tale upon.

The first, and possibly most important, change that Goethe offers is in the nature of the deal between Faust and Mephistopheles.  Faust is frustrated by the limits of human knowledge, and how he can never experience a moment of satisfaction knowing that there are whole realms that he can never even become aware of.  Rather than summoning the devil himself, however, the devil instead comes to him directly, offering a wager that Mephisto can find a way to bring about that satisfaction.  If Faust ever finds himself in a moment that he would want to last forever, the devil wins his soul.

Interestingly, this wager seems to be OKed by God Himself; one of the two prelude scenes in Part One features God and the devil agreeing that the wager is OK.  This has some echoes of the biblical Job, where the Adversary requires the go-ahead from the boss in order to begin.  Of course, Faust is being given everything he desires in order to try to steal his soul, rather than being punished needlessly because...  Well, it's not worth getting into the whole philosophical and theological question of Job here.  Suffice it to say that Goethe's Mephisto got permission for what he's doing from the big guy upstairs.

Faust Part One starts out looking much like Doctor Faustus, with Mephisto's first attempts to reach a quick win backfiring spectacularly; an old scholar who longs for ever more knowledge just isn't going to be that interested in drunken buffoonery, and when the devil tries to tempt him with pleasures of the flesh, the only one Faust is interested in is a girl far too innocent and pure for the devil to work in her.  Suddenly, the Tragedy of Faust becomes the Tragedy of Gretchen as we are shown the effects of Faust's interest upon her.  He manages to win her heart, appearing as a noble who is strangely drawn to the innocent commoner, but the manipulations result first in the death of her mother, then with the devil killing her brother in a duel, and finally with her becoming shunned by the community due to getting pregnant by Faust.

In the end, the baby winds up drowned by Gretchen in order to spare the child the life that has resulted, and the girl herself winds up imprisoned and sentenced to death.  Faust, who has left her by then, sees a vision of her while he's caught up in a witches' Walpurgis Night festival, but is delayed by a truly bizarre take on A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Mephisto trying to keep Faust under thumb; the only indication we get that this doesn't end as a complete loss for everyone involved is a disembodied voice announcing that Gretchen has been redeemed through her own prayers and pleas to Heaven.  Faust himself is left grieving.

And that's where Part One ends.  Literally.  Mephisto announces that Gretchen is dead, the Voice declares her soul saved, and Faust laments.  It's three lines of text and then it's just... Done.

And then Goethe took 30 years to write the second half, which wasnt even published until after his death.

So, with that cliffhanger ending, we'd surely expect this to be addressed in Part Two, but no.  Instead, it opens with Faust exhausted in a flower field, being sung first to sleep then awake by Ariel from The Tempest for some reason, being assured that the spirits of Nature are siding with him and the elves should restore him to good humor.  Which... Ok then.  A little surreal, but given that the fairies and spirits were running around during Walpurgis Night, not totally out of left field.

Next, we're introduced to the Holy Roman Emperor, who is just installing Mephisto as his new fool.  That's surely a good thing to do, as this leads quickly to drunken revelries in which many of the Roman mythic nymphs, along with the Moirae and the Erinyes, show up in the palace to cavort and maybe get the Emperor drunk enough to think that printing paper currency guaranteed against buried treasure that's surely there even though it hasn't actually been dug up is a good idea.  Definitely a good way to get yourself out of debt.

This leads into Faust deciding that the best life for him would be as the husband of Helen of Troy, and we get a Classical Walpurgis Night sequence, featuring a homunculus floating around in a jar, a succession of Roman mythic figures, and Mephisto running around feeling inadequate because he has no power to meaningfully work in a pagan framework. Eventually, he is forced to borrow the form of one of the Graeae in order to have any ability to interact with the narrative.  Meanwhile, Faust inserts himself formally into the Classical narrative by rescuing Helen from her post-Troy fate as a human sacrifice by Menelaus(‽), so that he can take her to Elysium and live a life with her in a blending of Classical and Romantic philosophy, taking the place of Achilles as the father of Euphorion, only to suffer the preordained death of that winged youth due to... whichever one of the many ways of causing him to fall to his death actually happens, because it occurs somewhere up above the top of the stage curtains.  It's a play, remember.  

This whole sequence may or may not be all a dream.  This is a truly strange play.

The final segment of the play features Faust, back in reality, deciding that he wants to control nature, and sets about a plan to reclaim a section of land from the sea through dykes and dams, only to be interrupted by a war that the Emperor got involved in and having to sort it out.  He eventually reaches a point where he can see that the moment he would want to prolong, the endpoint of his wager... he even says out loud, where Mephisto can hear, that the moment is nigh... then drops dead of old age, not having reached it.  The devil decides this means he's won, and prepares to take Faust's soul to Hell, only to have a flight of angels overwhelm him with flowers and take Faust off to Paradise, as Gretchen has successfully interceded on his behalf with the Virgin Mary.

So... yeah.  That happened.  This is somewhat unique as, so far as I can tell, it's the first time that the Faust legend is depicted with a positive ending for the titular scholar.  The second half is far less referenced than the first, perhaps because it's a far more... I'd almost say esoteric work.  The allegory and symbolism is thick here, far more than the comparatively straight-forward first half, and the story harder to keep a solid handle on.  It also has a far more complicated relationship with the fourth wall, with several times where the characters on stage seem to slowly wind up in the audience, and Mephistopheles himself repeatedly talking directly to the audience.  It's not quite to the point of being Modernism, but certainly prefigures it.  This is actually an unusual trait for the devil; he says several times that his power has begun to wane to the point that he needs lesser demons to assist him with his machinations, yet he seems somehow able to reach forward and take this bit of forward-looking dramatic license.

There's a lot to unpack in here, to say the least.  I'm pretty much certain that I'll be coming back to Faust again at a later date, when I'm perhaps a little better-established in my knowledge of the Classical literature that is so heavily referenced here.

Also when I have a copy of Part Two that doesn't have a binding that's falling apart.

A-Z 2021 F: The Autobiography and Other Writings (Benjamin Franklin, 1722-1790)

The founding of my country is taught fairly thoroughly in school; we're exposed to the great heroes of the American Revolution early on, though largely in their mythic forms.  George Washington and the cherry tree, Abraham Lincoln and the log cabin, Paul Bunyan and his digging of the Grand Canyon...  well, OK, that last one's not real, but you get the picture.

For the longest time, my idea of Benjamin Franklin was to the effect of 'bifocals and electrified kites'.  It wasn't ever really clear what his position in everything was, and I quite honestly learned more about him from Robert Lawson's Ben and Me (and its Disney adaptation) than I ever did from anything formal in school.  Even then, and even knowing that he was important enough to get his face on the $100 bill, it really didn't give me a solid feel for just what his place in history was.  Even to this day, what I know of the man is largely based on tangential stories, his interactions with the other figures of the day, and less about his story itself.  Unfortunately, reading The Autobiography and Other Writings did little to demystify this.

The first, and perhaps most relevant, reason for this is simply the nature of the work, cut short by the author's death in 1790, and thus not having actually reached the end of his life.  Unfortunately, from what I can tell, the vast majority of his truly important achievements and his adventures in international politics come during the portion that went unwritten.

So, what are we looking at, with Franklin's autobiography, if not an exploration of his place in the Revolution and the early days of the United States?  To begin with, it's a story of his early life and where he came from.  Roughly the first half of the autobiography was written when he believed it was going to serve largely as a set of family anecdotes for a son, and it takes a form akin to that of a Horatio Alger novel, where he begins in a considerably less than ideal financial situation and, through hard work and perseverance, brings himself to respectability and wealth.  It's very much a rose-tinted look at the man, and indeed the work as a whole acts that way, with even the later part where he knew he was writing for posterity focused on his tendencies toward altruism and the pursuit of knowledge.

Franklin's wit is on clear display through all of this; he's self-deprecating when appropriate, pointing out his own faults and making note of when he made mistakes that it would take him years to remedy, both when he made the error of judgment and when he fixed the issue.  His gift for careful writing and ability to think of solutions that are best for everyone involved is shown, largely through his interactions as part of the Philadelphia city council and the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly, and as postmaster of Philadelphia (his later positions as postmaster-general not being covered here).  These positions gave him the ability to cross paths with British colonial leadership on a regular basis, and his civic-mindedness leads him to go out of his way to set up defensive sites during the French and Indian Wars, even managing to get the anti-military Quakers to help.

Even so, it's difficult to see in the autobiography a man who would later become an important figure of the Revolution.  At the point where the narrative cuts off, what disagreement Franklin has with British royalty is limited to his ongoing battle with the Penn family over their general refusal to give their share of taxes.  While the problems that led to the Revolution are still present, at the end of the narrative (in 1757), he's still rather firmly a monarchist.  Granted, there are two decades of gap between this point and the later outbreak of open hostilities, but this simply means that the 33 years left out of the Autobiography are perhaps the most important.

The Penguin Classics edition of the Autobiography includes about 60 pages of other writings from across the length of Franklin's life, as an attempt to give a more well-rounded view of the man than what his own writings reveal.  These are perhaps too sparse, though; I found myself wanting more context for where some of the essays were coming from ("Advice to a Friend on Choosing a Mistress" being a particular question, as I had a hard time telling if it was intended as satire or not).  Penguin does have an alternate volume, The Portable Benjamin Franklin, which includes a larger selection of writings, and in fact seems to focus more on his political life.  This is an unfortunate omission in the volume I read; the political writings on display here are the satirical "Edict from the King of Prussia" and more serious "An Address to the Public; From the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage," neither of which serves to give any solid view of the man's place in the Revolution.  For someone who met five kings in person, signed all four of the major documents of the founding of the United States, and, well... is pictured on the largest banknote still in use in this country.

For that, I suspect my best source will come up during my next intermission from the A-Z run; at the library today, I picked up The Compleated Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin, a work compiled by Mark Skousen (who otherwise seems to be an economics/Wall Street writer) in which Franklin's writings and speeches during the 1757-1790 period have been reworked into a continuation in his own words, albeit through an editorial lens that, based on the cover flap blurbs, may be biased toward the founding mythologies and the modern view of American Exceptionalism.

Uprooted (Naomi Novik, 2015)

 

OK, let's be honest for a moment... there's a very good reason that the first thing I always do when I go to the library is check the new books to see if there happens to be anything hanging out in the Dewey 398.2 slot.  I honestly can't remember a time I didn't love fairy tales, to the point that I've actively gone out of my way to incorporate them into my assignments in college classes when I'm able to.

And yet, somehow, I managed to not get around to reading Naomi Novik's Uprooted until now, despite having checked it out from the library multiple times, and having one particular online friend bug me about needing to read it for most of this year, as well.  I found a copy at a St. Vinnie's, though, so getting it more formally onto my shelf was maybe a better way to get it read.

The setting is somewhat unusual here in that, although we're in a fairy-tale setting, it's based more on Slavic lore than German or French, the way most of the best-known tales are.  The land that things are happening in is Polnya, clearly inspired by Poland, with a vaguely-menacing foreign power called Rosya; a Venezia is mentioned as well, but only once and in passing.  Names fit this setting, as well; the narrator, Agnieszka, is perhaps the most obvious instance of this, but every character has a certain eastern-European feel to their names, unless they're a mage going by the noun-based nomenclature they use for outsiders.

Around the edges of the setting, bordering both Polnya and Rosya, is The Wood.  This is a vast, horribly corrupted forest, seemingly implacable and always trying to encroach deeper into human lands.  Anything from within its reaches can only serve to spread the corruption further; at one point, the characters travel through a village that, within living memory, was outside the forest, but was overtaken in a single day.  The Wood is also intelligent on its own, able to make decisions based on the effects that an action will have in the long-term, laying traps for those outside in an effort to destroy everything that holds it back.

Agnieszka lives in a valley that directly borders the Wood, where its encroachment is held back through the magics of the Dragon, the local mage-lord (not an actual dragon).  He's a cold, unapproachable sort, actively avoiding any but the most necessary interactions with the villages under his protection.  All he asks, beyond the annual taxes, is that every ten years, one girl from one of the villages be provided to him to be his live-in servant until the next Choosing.  The girls he chooses always say that he never laid a hand on them, nothing of that sort, but they also invariably leave the valley entirely within a month of being released from service, and never come back.

The book opens with a Choosing; Agnieszka (and indeed her whole village) are utterly convinced that the Dragon will be choosing her friend Kasia, who has all the best qualities (beauty, grace, stalwart bravery)... but Agnieszka doesn't know that she carries the gift of magic in her, and so she has to be trained, and thus she ends up chosen instead.  The first part of the book deals with Agnieszka being seemingly unable to actually get the hang of magic at all; it's not until she's forced into action by having to fend off an attack on her home village while the Dragon is away dealing with a different attack by the Wood that she's able to really start showing her abilities; while the Dragon (and indeed most witches and wizards in-setting) relies on a very rigid, almost scientific understanding of how magic works, Agnieszka's gift instead acts in a more artistic way, with her abilities being based less on the rules and more on what feels right.  Art instead of science, as it were.  This shows itself most clearly when she's able to use the spellbook of Jaga (that J makes a Y sound), a long-dead witch who was known for doing things mages oughtn't be able to do and having spellbooks that are utterly useless...  at least, until Agnieszka gets her hands on one.

If this was a Harry Potter book, the entire novel would be about Agnieszka's training.  Instead, it quickly changes to instead be about the ongoing battle that she and the Dragon wage against the Wood, as it plots to bring down the human kingdoms entirely.  This begins with Kasia being kidnapped by one of the Wood's creatures and corrupted, but quickly becomes something far more wide-spread when word of Kasia's rescue reaches the palace and the ear of Prince Marek, second in line to the throne and absolutely certain that where one person could be rescued, the queen (who was taken twenty years prior) surely can be as well.  This goes... rather disastrously; the second half of the book deals largely with the aftermath of the 'rescue', along with delving into exactly what the Wood's true nature is.

Unfortunately, it's hard to get a good read on exactly what's going on in most characters' heads.  We spend a lot of time with Agnieszka and Kasia, but while the rest of the cast is largely understandable in broad strokes, it's difficult to get a good idea of why they act the way they do.  Even when the reason for the Dragon's aloofness in regards to the lands he watches over becomes clear, it offers little in the way of background for him; he's still a cipher, just one with some explanation for why he acts the way he does in this one specific area.

If there's one thing that disappointed me, really, it's that despite Jaga being mentioned as having appeared at a prince's christening long after she had died (and apparently commenting that she was in the wrong time period before vanishing abruptly), she never actually figures into the narrative beyond her spellbook in the Dragon's library and the way that her existence as a liminal figure among mages leaves her as more of a creature of folklore than an actual person, with one wizard outright telling Agnieszka that Jaga is just a fairy tale.  Baba Yaga is one of those characters who really fascinates me, where you're never quite sure going into a story that she appears in whether she'll be good or bad for the other characters, and I think it would have been interesting to see her appear, though at the same time, even invoking her throws a lot of the rules into question.  You just don't know what's going to happen, any more than Agnieszka knows what's necessarily going to happen when she starts a spell.  She actively works magic that she's been told is impossible, several times; over and over, she exceeds everyone's expectations.

I think I'm going to have to keep an eye out for Novik's other books, now.

A-Z 2021 E: Praise of Folly (Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1512)

Everyone needs to take a break from serious writing once in a while.  It's just a healthy way to let off a bit of steam, exercise your sense of whimsy a bit...  basically not be an old stick in the mud.  The danger arises when you write something that is taken the wrong way.

This issue of misinterpretation is something that Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam ran into when he published Praise of Folly, a satirical essay that, in the voice of Folly herself (positioned here as a sort of ur-goddess of happiness and frivolity), lays out the argument that all that is good and right in the world is, at its most basic level, due to foolishness and not anything resembling seriousness.  This is then followed by a point-by-point explanation of how this relates to every field from commoners all the way up to kings, then moves on to the field of theology and works up that hierarchy as well, from churchgoers all the way to the Pope.

The argument is perhaps less important in this case than the effects of making that argument.  The book is in three parts, essentially; before and after the central essay, there are two letters.  The first, before the essay itself begins, was written by Erasmus to his friend Thomas More (author of Utopia), explaining that the Praise of Folly is intended as a tribute of sorts, based on some ideas that came to Erasmus after a visit with More, and asking him to claim some credit and defend the work from criticism (a request that More gladly accepted).  The second, written to Maarten van Dorp, one of Erasmus's colleagues who wrote to advise Erasmus of the criticisms that were beginning to appear in relation to Folly, is kind of the 16th-century version of a comedian having to explain the joke.

It's hard to say exactly what those who criticized Folly at the time thought they were doing; Erasmus goes out of his way through the entire piece to avoid naming anyone or anything specifically (other than himself), simply saying 'these are the qualities of a bad member of this group,' so that anyone who raised criticisms on the basis of themselves being attacked, well...  it would seem that they're drawing attention to themselves.  The letter to van Dorp spells this out, and I have to admit that I didn't even notice that the only individual specifically called out was, well... Erasmus himself.

The essay itself is surprisingly readable, given the philosophical and theological subject matter.  It helps somewhat that in this particular edition, Penguin went with footnotes rather than endnotes, so that any context that needs to be provided is available right there on the same page, rather than requiring you to flip back and forth to the back of the book.  Most of the context is in the form of explaining references to classical literature; Erasmus's central argument when it comes to what makes a bad theologist is that not knowing how to read scripture in the original languages leads to a fundamental lack of understanding of what was meant; he himself wrote in Latin in this work, but Greek and Hebrew are peppered throughout, and even in the English translation I read, some of both were still in place.  He knows the audience he's writing for, and it just adds to his argument.

Yes, I know I'm saying that as someone who only has a functional ability to read English and its derivatives.

I don't know how likely I am to return to Erasmus for his other works; this particular volume's nature as a satire is unique in his bibliography, with his other works largely being serious theology, in many cases critiquing the Church in ways that are similar but separate from what would appear when Martin Luther published his own critiques in 1517.  As much as that might interest me, I'm far from familiar enough with the nature of religion in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance to be able to get a proper understanding of what's on display there.  That said, this was a fun read, and a good wrap-up to the first leg on my little marathon here.