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.

A-Z 2021 D: A Journal of the Plague Year (Daniel Defoe, 1722)

 

There's a tendency among many people to think that modern culture is more knowledgable about how to handle disasters.  That we've learned from the past, and won't repeat it.  We've got modern technology, we won't have the same kinds of problems arising that were around in the past.  Technology, however, can only go so far.  It doesn't get you past human nature, or sheer bullheadedness, and certainly won't get you around misinformation.  And so, we have a book about the 1665 plague epidemic in London that just... keeps... looking like what the last year looked like.  And thus, we get what we just lived through.

Let's address the nature of this book, first.  A Journal of the Plague Year is not precisely what it claims to be.  It's a work of fiction, and yet manages to be possibly the most authoritative book on the realities of urban life during a plague epidemic.  It was written as a warning of sorts, trying to give the people of London a heads-up as to what it would look like if the plague epidemic that was active at the time in Marseilles were to take hold there, and Daniel Defoe went out of his way to do a vast amount of research.  However, a nonfiction work wouldn't have necessarily gotten to the masses the way he needed; it had to be formatted as a novel instead.

What Defoe crafted here is, ostensibly, a document that relates the experiences of a Londoner who lived through the epidemic, combining statistics and primary documents with anecdotes and narration to create what is less a journal and more a long-form history of the titular plague year, beginning with the first deaths from the plague in early 1665 and finishing with the return to something resembling normalcy at the end of the year.  It's formatted as something akin to the narrator writing down a remembrance after everything has ended; several times the Great Fire of London is alluded to in a religious context.  The narrator (a "Dissenter", as Defoe himself was) posits that the "Visitation" (itself rather a telling word) of the plague is God punishing the sinners of London, and that the Great Fire the following year is a follow-up when everything returns to the old ways so quickly afterward.

Defoe's narrator often goes on tangents, breaking midway through discussing one topic to go to another, but manages to always come back and finish the thought.  This is most obvious in the case of an extended anecdote he delivers, making up close to 1/10 of the book, about several men making their way about the countryside over the months of the epidemic while trying to find somewhere safe to ride it out.  The story, which functions largely as a way to describe the effects of the plague outside of London, is introduced about 60 pages in, but then gets left aside almost immediately, and isn't returned to for another 60 pages.  There aren't any loose ends left of this nature; if something is brought up and left unfinished, it is always returned to.

So, how is this all relevant now?  Well, let me give a quick summary of the overall narrative we see in the book:

• News of the pandemic appearing overseas happens
• A couple of overseas travelers die of the plague in London
  
• Trade and travel from the location where the initial outbreak was occurring is shut down.
• The plague starts to gain a foothold in London
• Numbers are manipulated by those in power to make it look like everything is under control until the point where it's impossible to pretend otherwise
• People start to engage in social distancing, doing everything they can to not breathe near anyone who might be sick
• Most of the people with the means to isolate themselves effectively (e.g. clergy, rich folks) skip town, while poor folks have to take the crappy high-infection-risk jobs to make sure everything keeps working and they have food to eat, and largely get sick as a result
• Everything shuts down
• Quacks start peddling sure-fire remedies for the illness
• Everyone starts looking at everyone else suspiciously, nobody wants to let anyone from out of town into any village
• Death tolls rise, then begin to fall again
• Everyone decides that the numbers falling means it's all over, stop behaving intelligently while the disease is still present
• Numbers go up briefly but then resume downward trend
• Everything's fine, we can go back to normal now, everyone back into London and let's proceed without having learned anything from all this
• Next year, everything burns

So... in the current pandemic, I believe we're at the 'Everyone decides that...' step right now.  And unfortunately, looking outside, I get the sense that we're facing another year of 'everything burns', too.  I could write a lot more about the parallels here, but...  welcome to pandemic fatigue, I just don't want to.

It's no surprise that this book was one of the top classics sold last year.  At least once, UK sellers actually ran out of copies of Penguin's edition.  It's basically a blueprint for... well... exactly what we saw happen this time around.  What's that thing where you don't learn from history?  Oh yeah, you repeat it.

But we're definitely a more advanced society now than in the 1600s.  I mean, they didn't even have cell phones or antibiotics or social media to tell them what to believe!

A-Z 2021 C: The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer, ca.1400)

 

My reading selections probably need to be more carefully selected at times.  Or I need to not be quite so ambitious.  There were choices made in this case that probably should not have been made.

So, let's start with the question of what I read.  This is one of five (!) different copies of The Canterbury Tales that I have, three of which are in Penguin Classics.  Because I'm me, and wanted to do the proper reading, I went with the unabridged, glossed-text version.  This led to a couple of discoveries.  First: Middle English isn't actually that hard to read once you wrap your mind around the verb tenses and the ways that spelling has changed.  Second:  There is a very good reason that most translations and adaptations skip over two specific parts of the book.  But more on that later.

This is one of the earliest works of literature that exists in recognizable English, and is largely written in verse, with rhyming lines and a remarkably deft ability to modify the voice and tone of the writing to suggest different voices.  This is useful, given the frame narrative that shapes the whole work.  At the outermost level, The Canterbury Tales is about a group of travelers, brought together by chance, having a storytelling contest on their pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral at the suggestion of an innkeeper who decides to join the group, with the promise of a free meal when the entourage returns to his inn at the end of the journey.  We don't ever actually find out who wins; the prologue suggests that the intention was originally for all 30 of the pilgrims to tell four stories each, but instead we only have 24 tales, three of them incomplete, two tales attributed to Chaucer himself (positioned in-text as one of the pilgrims), and one belonging to a character who joins the pilgrimage after it began, so eight stories are missing just from the first round of tales.  This can at least partly be explained by the fact that Chaucer died while working on the Tales, though two of the unfinished tales have their incomplete nature at least explained within the text as the narrators being interrupted, suggesting that Chaucer himself felt justified in stopping where he did.

The tales themselves cover a wide range of subjects, with the highest chivalry immediately followed by the lowest of sex farces.  At the same time, the narrators span a similar range of backgrounds, forming a cross-section of the entire population of pre-Tudor England.  More than anything else, this gives a general idea of what kinds of thoughts were on the minds of everyone in the era when they looked for entertainment, while simultaneously tempering the levity with religious morals and the wisdom of past philosophers.

That last part, though, brings up the biggest issue I ran into, and what largely caused my reading to take as long as it did: the two prose sections.  There are two of them, both in the second half of the book, and neither has a tendency toward appearing in translations of the work into modern English.  In fact, of the five various versions of the Tales that I have, "The Tale of Melibee" and "The Parson's Tale" only exist in two, this original-spelling version and Burton Raffel's 2008 unabridged translation for the Modern Library.  Raffel acknowledges in his introduction that English prose was a rather young art form when Chaucer was writing, and that he struggled to avoid "improving" the quality of the writing.  This... is definitely an issue in this case, because those two sections are anything but 'good'.  My suspicion is that The Canterbury Tales is a classic more in spite of the prose than anything else.  Chaucer's verse is spectacular (with the exception of "Sir Thopas", one of the aforementioned 'incomplete' tales, which is outright stated in the text to be horrible, though its rhyming scheme ), but... Raffel's description of these two tales as "not entirely readable" is perhaps generous.  I got stalled out for over a week on "Melibee", just trying to make it through the incredibly dense prose, which really felt more like Chaucer showing the reader how well-read he was than anything else, and it took having it pointed out to me that the important part is making the effort, not actually finishing every page, especially in the case of a collection like this.

So, what of the ending?  Well...  what ending?  "The Parson's Tale" is the last "story" in the book, and it does have a prologue that suggests its intention is to be the final of the first 'round' of tales, with the Host telling the Parson that everyone else has told a tale and now it's his turn, and the Parson turning around and basically saying 'Meh, tales are bad for you, I'm gonna give you a sermon instead' and spending 80 pages talking about penitance, the seven deadly sins, and salvation.  This is followed up by the final section of the text, but rather than being anything of the framing narrative, instead we get Chaucer saying 'Oh, by the way, I'd like to take this opportunity to retract anything sinful I may have said in any of my works, including the one you just read.'  We don't find out who won the contest, and indeed, it seems to have been entirely forgotten.  Instead, we get the sense that this is Chaucer making a brief confession of his sins, as this is very likely the last thing he wrote.

So what of our travelers?  How did they fare in the end?  Chaucer doesn't tell us; instead we're left wondering.  One way of addressing this may be through adaptations, however.  I mentioned before that I have five various versions of The Canterbury Tales, and perhaps the most interesting one isn't this original-spelling one (as fun as reading Middle English actually turned out to be), but instead is the Puffin Classics edition, adapted by Geraldine McCaughrean, which is (as all books on the Puffin imprint are) intended for children.

The children's version is kind of an interesting piece.  To start with, it only includes 13 of the original 24 tales, and the order they're placed in has been largely changed.  That said, what I found most remarkable was that McCaughrean chose to keep the original format in place; while they have little resemblance to what Chaucer wrote, this version does maintain the framing narrative of travelers gathering on a pilgrimage and having a storytelling competition.  That said, Chaucer never has the Summoner beating on the door of a closed inn and bellowing, "OPEN THE DOOR OR I'LL EXCOMMUNICATE YOU, YOU HEATHEN SON OF A BENIGHTED INNKEEPER!"  That's some interesting language to find in a book intended for kids, but there you go.  In the end, a winner isn't declared in this version, either; instead, the travelers can't pick a best story, and decide that they'll have a second round on the way back after the pilgrimage.  Perhaps that indicates just how well-established in the English literary canon The Canterbury Tales is; even adaptations that aim to give the same kind of experience in reading, and leave in the same position, with no clear winner to the competition.  Instead, it's the storytelling itself that is the important part.