Category Archives: literature

On caricatures and character

One could easily be tempted to ascribe common etymological roots to the words caricature and character. In fact their etymologies don’t connect but that does not stop us from associating the two concepts.

Characters Caricaturas (1743) by William Hogarth

Characters Caricaturas (1743) by William Hogarth

Yesterday, I stumbled upon an epigraph by Poe: “Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul,” which translates to Such a great misfortune, not to be able to be alone. It is from Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd,” but Poe had quoted it before, in his earliest tale, “Metzengerstein.” Poe ascribes it to Jean de La Bruyère, who wrote the Caractères (Eng: The Characters of Jean de La Bruyère). Bruyère’s book is an “augmented” translation of Theophrastus‘s (371 – c. 287 BC) The Characters which contains thirty brief, vigorous and trenchant outlines of moral types, which form a valuable picture of the life of his time, and in fact of human nature in general. The genre of the “character sketch” is generally cited as originating in Theophrastus’s typology.

One of the thirty sketches of Theophrastus reads thus:

Of Obscenity, or Ribaldry
“Impurity or beastliness is not hard to be defined. It is a licentious lewd jest. He is impure or flagitious, who meeting with modest women, sheweth that which taketh his name of shame or secrecy. Being at a Play in the Theatre, when all are attentively silent, he in a cross conceit applauds, or claps his hands: and when the Spectators are exceedingly pleased, he hisseth: and when all the company is very attentive in hearing and beholding, he lying alone belcheth or breaketh wind, as if Æolus were bustling in his Cave; forcing the Spectators to look another way …” [1], translation by Joseph Healey

More recent writing inspired by Theophrastus includes George Eliot‘s 1879 book of character sketches, Impressions of Theophrastus Such.

Illustration in a 19th century book about physiognomy

Illustration in a 19th century book about physiognomy

What I particularly like about these character sketches are their plotlessness, their roots as inspiration for the psychological novel, there generalizations into stereotypes and stock characters, and finally, their link to caricatures and physiognomy.

Snuff (2008) Chuck Palahniuk

My first exposure to Chuck Palahniuk was the film Fight Club. My second was picking up the novel Haunted and reading the epigraph “There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust,” a quotation from Edgar Allan Poe‘s “The Masque of the Red Death.” My third exposure was Diary, a novel I started to read and stopped reading around page 30 for reasons I forget.

The first and second exposures were enough to canonize Chuck.


[Amazon.com]
[FR] [DE] [UK]

Today, I present you Chuck’s latest novel Snuff, about a porn star on sabbatical, her attempt to break the world record of serial fornication and a portrait of three of the men obliging her in her attempt.

I was a huge Stephen King fan between my twenties and my thirties but if I still would be such an avid reader today, Chuck would replace Stephen. Stephen is a mere horror author while Chuck belongs in the tradition of the fantastique and the grotesque, genres which overlap with horror but which are more of a celebration of the ambiguity and ambivalence of expierence.

Back to the novel.

Since the book industry misses something akin to IMDb.com (although LibraryThing[1] comes close), which allows viewers to rate films, we resort to a randomly picked review [2] by minor writer Lucy Ellmann for the The New York Times who does not like the novel:

“What the hell is going on? The country that produced Melville, Twain and James now venerates King, Crichton, Grisham, Sebold and Palahniuk. Their subjects? Porn, crime, pop culture and an endless parade of out-of-body experiences. Their methods? Cliché, caricature and proto-Christian morality. Props? Corn chips, corpses, crucifixes. The agenda? Deceit: a dishonest throwing of the reader to the wolves. And the result? Readymade Hollywood scripts.”

Don’t you just love this? Negative criticism which makes you feel like reading the books involved. Lucy Ellman conveniently forgets all of the sensationalist writers from the past.

French theory: the Annales School

Ernst Bloch-Thomas_MunsterThe Annales School is a school of historical writing named after the French scholarly journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale (first published in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre) where it was first expounded. Annales school history is best known for its approach to history diametrically opposed to various great man theories, incorporating social scientific methods into history resulting in one of the first currents in social history. The Annales school critics influenced later thinkers like Michel Foucault, who, in turn, influenced other Annales thinkers such as American cultural historian Robert Darnton (The Literary Underground of the Old Regime) and the best-known exponent of this school: Fernand Braudel.

Lucien Febvre-Incroyance The Annalistes, especially Lucien Febvre, advocated a histoire totale, or histoire tout court, a complete study of a historic problem. While several authors continue to carry the Annales banner, today the Annales approach has been less distinctive as more and more historians do work in cultural history and economic history.

The images shown (Thomas Müntzer als Theologe der Revolution, 1921 in a French 10/18 translation and Le Problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle. La religion de Rabelais, 1942) are only tangentially related to the Annales School and were sourced at the enigmatic page La Passion des Anabaptistes by Belgian comic book creators Ambre and David Vandermeulen.

I can’t help but wondering what – if there was one – the relation of the Annalistes was to Georges Bataille, who started his journal Documents in the same year as Annales d’histoire économique et sociale. Perhaps Valter “Surreal Documents” knows?

Love Letters of Great Men

Love letter from Beethoven to an unknown woman (his Immortal Beloved), published in the fictional book Love Letters of Great Men. And I thought my handwriting was bad.

dir – mein Leben – mein alles – leb wohl – o liebe mich fort –
verken nie das treuste Herz deines Geliebten
L.

ewig dein
ewig mein
ewig uns

And this is the English translation

you – my life – my all – farewell. Oh continue to love me –
never misjudge the most faithful heart of your beloved
L.

ever thine
ever mine
ever ours

By Freudian free association: Du and Dir are German words for you. “Du” (Bist Alles)[1] is also the title of a European popular song by Peter Maffay later covered by David Hasselhoff [2]. In 1969, when this song came out, you could also have been discovering Kool & The Gang and The Stooges.

Matter?


[Amazon.com]
[FR] [DE] [UK]

The Big Penis Book is a 2008 book by Taschen on big penises and the men they belong to. The book, like its predecessor The Big Book of Breasts, was edited by Dian Hanson.

From a nobrow perspective it’s interesting that one of the earliest researchers on the subject was Caribbean author and theorist Frantz Fanon who covers this subject in some detail in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) tended towards the view that the supposed positive correlation between penis size and African ancestry is erroneous.

See penis size.

WMC#42: To shake memories into the air

This post rhymes with air

She threw back her hair
Like I wasn’t there
And she sipped on a julep.
Her shoulders were bare
And I tried not to stare

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYHEBa6Xx48&]

“Summer (The First Time)” (1973) by Bobby Goldsboro

A Hemisphere in Your Hair (French: Un hémisphère dans une chevelure) is a poem by Baudelaire collected in Paris Spleen.

Laisse-moi respirer longtemps, longtemps, l’odeur de tes cheveux, y plonger tout mon visage, comme un homme altéré dans l’eau d’une source, et les agiter avec ma main comme un mouchoir odorant, pour secouer des souvenirs dans l’air.
Long let me inhale, the odour of your hair,
into it plunge the whole of my face, like a thirsty man
into the waters of a spring and wave it in my fingers like a scented handkerchief,
to shake memories into the air.

In the film Withnail & I Richard Griffith’s character recites the line “Laisse-moi respirer longtemps, longtemps, l’odeur de tes cheveux” (Eng: Long let me inhale, the odour of your hair).

Like willow I will be the willow on your bedside

or, sweet words for sweet ladies

Like willow I will be the willow on your bedside.

Like willow I will be the willow on your bedside

The quote comes from an old Asian ghost tale. The photo was taken by a Wikipedian. As an afterthought: it’s very difficult to find out who at Wikipedia is responsible for which photo, it’s equally difficult to understand the intricacies of Creative Commons licences. Enjoy the photo and quote and have a nice weekend. See you on Monday.

Every woman adores a fascist

Or, in praise of difficult women

In my never relenting quest for the stereotypes of modern culture, I’ve mentioned the “difficult man”[1] and the “sexually frustrated woman”[2]. Today, let’s have a look at another archetype: the “difficult woman.” But before we go on I would like mention that I want to include in my definition of “difficult” the connotation “complicated.” Many difficult people are difficult because they are complex personalities, often torn apart by conflicting inner desires.

The archetypical difficult women in world literature are Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, who both had a quixotic lust for fiction and who both committed suicide. Many difficult women are also strong women and that is why we men love them and at the same time have a complicated relationship with them. We love them and hate them.

Many “difficult” people lead unhappy lives, and many commit suicide. Easy-going people don’t.

To say that Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was a difficult rather than an easy-going woman is a platitude, she is only one of the talented but tortured people who left our planet voluntarily prematurely. She famously said that “Every woman adores a fascist,” in a poem dedicated to the memory of her father. I would like to add to her words that “every man adores a femme fatale, bad girl or difficult woman,” and would like to conclude with Sylvia Plath reading from her own poem “Daddy“. If you want to head straight to the “fascist” quote, scrub to 2:14.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM&]