Three Gothic Novels

Three Gothic Novels: The Castle of Otranto; Vathek; Frankenstein (1968) – Various
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The Gothic novel, which flourished from about 1765 until 1825, revels in the horrible and the supernatural, in suspense and exotic settings. This volume presents three of the most celebrated Gothic novels: “The Castle of Otranto“, published pseudonymously in 1765; “Vathek” (1786); and the story of “Frankenstein” (1818). Introduction by Mario Praz. The cover image of this Penguin edition illustrates one of the main tropes of gothic fiction: the isolated and haunted castle.

My copy of Praz’s The Romantic Agony

My copy of Praz’s The Romantic Agony arrived Thursday, with an introduction by Frank Kermode and the famous Triptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation (c.1485) by Memling on the cover. At times it reads as the gossip pages from the Decadents. Here is a quote on the supposed impotence of Baudelaire:

“[The] case of Baudelaire’s exotic exclusiveness will be understood, and of his strange conduct towards Madame Sabatier, and it can be why so many people give credit to the rumour reported by Nadar. (Baudelair’s impotence, generally admitted in this case, is denied by Flottes.)” pages 153 and 187 of The Romantic Agony.

It seems that I was wrong about Praz’s ‘panning’ of the decadence of late romantic literature. In his introduction Praz that it is his aim to describe the what-is-ness of this sensibility (morbidity and perversion) in romantic literature.

Philippe Noiret (1930 – 2006)

Noiret in good company, I believe the lady on the left is Jeanne Moreau.
Photo credit unidentified, sourced here.

As you reach middle age, actors, singers and other artist whose work you’ve followed start to die. Most recently it was Philippe Noiret’s turn. His peephole closed last Thursday. Noiret debuted on the screen in 1956 in La Pointe Courte by Agnès Varda, but was not cast again until 1960 in Zazie dans le métro. After that, he became a regular on the French screen, without being cast in major roles untill the late 1960s. Noiret first came to my attention in 1984, in the French film Les Ripoux (English title: My New Partner). A story about a veteran cop who sees his habits disrupted by his new partner. (co-written by real internal police officer Simon Michaël) My first unconscious exposure to Noiret must have been the famous 1969 heist movie Topaz which our father encouraged us to see in the early seventies. I recently saw him perform in the 1969 art-agit film Mr. Freedom by William Klein and Zazie (his performance was superb).

He shone in such films as Coup de Torchon, the 1981 French film adaptation of Jim Thompson’s 1964 novel Pop. 1280, directed by Bertrand Tavernier; in the legendary La Grande Bouffe (1973) by Italian director Marco Ferreri; and perhaps most of all in one of my all time favourite films: Life and Nothing But (1989), again directed by Bertrand Tavernier where Noiret turns in an unforgettable performance as a French Army Officer given the thankless task of uncovering the identity of all the dead of the post World War One battlefields (and falls in love with the character of Catherine Deneuve in the process).

He also starred in two feelgood films of the late eighties and early nineties: Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (of minor interest because of its the famous ‘kissing scenes‘ montage near the end of the film) and the sentimental comedy Il Postino (the story of real-life Chilean poet Pablo Neruda ).

Interwar and post-war American erotica

598 Seventh Ave., circa late 1960s. This was originally the Liberty Book Shop, later named Forsythe Books.
Photo courtesy Guy Gonzales, New York City.
Sourced here.

After cleaning up my American erotica and American exploitation pages, I stumbled upon this quote from http://beautyindarkness.blog.ca/, on which Jay Gertzman himself comments with a link to American Fetish – a forthcoming book by Robert V. Bienvenu II, Ph.D.

There was a certain odd gap in my research. I had plenty of material on the Victorian era: Munby and Cullwick, Sacher-Masoch, Krafft-Ebing and My Secret Life, just to name a few things. After WWII there’s Willie, Stanton and Bilbrew, the biker/leatherman culture, L’Histoire de O, the Profumo scandal and so on.

But what happened in kink in the Interwar period? There’s the Weimar Republic of Germany, as documented by Mel Gordon’s [correction mine] Voluptuous Panic. I also want to work in William Charles Moulton and his creation, Wonder Woman. And what else?

Furthermore, what happened in America all those years before the 40s? Why was the US apparently so vanilla compared to Europe?

Jay A. Gertzman’s Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The trade in erotica, 1920-1940 (University of Pennsylvania, 2002) helps a lot. It covers a strange era in US history when Americans grappled with the issue of what is permissible in print, which Europeans had dealt with generations before. The main axis of conflict is between immigrant pornographer and “pariah capitalist” Samuel Roth, and John Saxon Sumner, the more polite and reflective successor to the great American censor, Anthony Comstock.

Gertzman’s divides the erotic book trade into five categories: gallantiana, sex pulps (set in the here and now), erotology and sexology, “bibles” and “readers” (cheap paperbacks), and classical and modern books “judged to be rankly indecent.” (Pg. 61)

Gallantiana, a term coined by Gershon Legman, is “those marginal elements of unexpurgated literature such as jest-books and balladry, works on (and against) women and love, facetious treatises in prose and in verse, and the hinterland of scatologica.” (Pg.62) This included Beardsley’s Under the Hill, Venus in Furs and other works that had, or tried to have, a certain upper-class grace. —Peter Tupper via
http://beautyindarkness.blog.ca/2006/08/09/bookleggers_and_smuthounds~1025167

Physica Curiosa, Sive Mirabilia Naturæ et Artis Libris

Elephant-headed man from Physica Curiosa, Sive Mirabilia Naturæ et Artis Libris
Image sourced here.

Three posts on literary fiction and genre fiction

Three posts on the supposed opposition of literary fiction vs genre fiction (the links point towards Jahsonic.com and were not there in the original posts):

“If you’re like me and it’s only enjoyment you seek from books (no, I’m not kidding), you might assume Stephen King’s novels are right up your street. Millions seem to enjoy them. But “enjoyment” is just a label. To be shared, it has to be unpacked. Otherwise it remains a cliché, the sort of thing you’ll find filling Stephen King novels. —Stephen King on Desert Island from This Space by Steve

“When I was a teenager I read everything [by Stephen King] and he has profoundly shaped my literary sensiblity, for better or worse. But I haven’t read a thing by him for nigh on 15 years, I’ll wager. … What do you think about genre fiction as “work that eschews moral ambiguity, narrative experimentation, verbal nuance and depth of characterization for such “‘lowbrow’ ” considerations as story, suspense and obvious readability.” It’s not really a proper definition because it actually doesn’t say anything about – well, genre, which really ought to be shoehorned in somewhere. But never mind that. Even a proper definition of ‘genre fiction’ will tend to include ‘metafiction’ as a subvariety. — Metafiction from Conversational Reading by Scott Esposito

“As always in populist screeds such as this, the primary target of ire is the “canon-maker-wannabes” in universities. The professors have told an “official story of postwar American fiction [that] recoiled entirely from the Gold Medal writers.” They’ve withheld their markers of “respectable culture.” Putting aside the fact that writers who valorized “sensationalism and sleaze” probably were never looking for the approval of “respectable culture,” MB really ought to take a closer look at what academic critics are actually up to these days. Contemporary literature has been a substantial part of the literary ccurriculum for only about 30 years, and “scholars” of contemporary literature have long since abandoned a gatekeeping role, anyway. Breaking the canon–in this case before it was even clearly established–is much more popular than making it.” —The Content and Form of American Fiction-Writing from The Reading Experience by Daniel Green

I’ve read lots of Stephen King’s book when I was travelling in South East Asia when I was in my mid twenties. At the time I was a huge Stephen King fan, I still think regularly of novels such as The Stand and It. It’s been a while since I’ve read Stephen King (apart from his treatise on the nature of horror Danse Macabre last summer. (which again, I liked)) So yes, I am a Stephen King fan, and Stephen King has become a defining figure in my canon. And as such I find it hard to respect people such as Harold Bloom who state that:

“[Stephen King] is a man who writes what used to be called penny dreadfuls. That they could believe that there is any literary value there or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy.” – Harold Bloom, 1993.

Perhaps most interesting to Jahsonic readers is the original Michael Blowhard post to which the Reading Experience responds, because it perfectly illustrates the intimate link between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture we have termed nobrow:

“To illustrate, let me connect a few dots. French New Wave titans Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut both loved Gold Medal books, and both based films on novels by Gold Medal authors: Godard’s “Pierrot le Fou” was based on a novel by Lionel White; Truffaut based “Shoot the Piano Player” on a novel by David Goodis. By the way, did you realize that Godard based “Made in USA” on a novel by Donald Westlake? Hey, I see that Donald Westlake wrote a few books for Gold Medal himself.” —Michael Blowhard

One more reflection: This debate – between the merits of genre fiction vs. literary fiction – does not seem to take place in the realm of cinema. One seldom hears of comparisons of genre films vs. art films. There seems to be no issue of artistic hierarchy in cinema. How come?

The Arcades Project arrived in the mail today

Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project (1927 – 1940) arrived in the mail today. See my entry at Jahsonic as well as my previous blog entry.

The first thing to catch my eye was this Coetzee review on the back cover:

“[The Arcades Project] suggests a new way of writing about a civilization using its rubbish as materials rather than its artworks: history from below rather than above. And [Benjamin’s] call elsewhere for a history centered on the sufferings of the vanquished, rather than on the achievements of the victors, is prophetic of the way in which history writing has begun to think of itself in our lifetime…”What does The Arcades Project have to offer? The briefest of lists would include: a treasure hoard of curious information about Paris, a multitude of thought-provoking questions, the harvest of an acute and idiosyncratic mind’s trawl through thousands of books, succinct observations, polished to a high aphoristic sheen, on a range of subjects…and glimpses of Benjamin toying with a new way of seeing himself: as a compiler of a ‘magic encyclopedia’…[A] magnificent opus.”
–J. M. Coetzee, The Guardian

More appraisals from Harvard University Press

Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks

Furthering my post on national stereotypes I present you a joke related to the subject:

“Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks are French, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and it is all organised by the Swiss. Hell is where the police are German, the cooks are English, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and it is all organised by the Italians”. [Nov 2006]

Carnography

Carnography (from latin “carnis” meaning “meat” and Greek grafi “writing”) is a neologism for writing, films, images, or other material that contains gratuitous amounts of bloodshed, violence and/or weaponry. It is named by analogy to pornography (although it is often mistaken for a portmanteau of “carnage” and “pornography”, this is not strictly the case), and is sometimes referred to as “violence porn”.

The mere depiction of violent acts, or of their results, does not necessarily qualify a film as carnography, just as the mere depiction of sex acts does not necessarily qualify a film as pornography. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnography [Nov 2006]

I have discovered a haunted house in the midst of London

A friend of mine, who is a man of letters and a philosopher, said to me one day, as if between jest and earnest,–” Fancy! since we last met, I have discovered a haunted house in the midst of London.”

“Really haunted?–and by what? ghosts?”

“Well, I can’t answer that question; all I know is this–six weeks ago my wife and I were in search of a furnished apartment. Passing a quiet street, we saw on the window of one of the houses a bill, ‘Apartments Furnished.’ The situation suited us: we entered the house–liked the rooms–engaged them by the week–and left them the third day. No power on earth could have reconciled my wife to stay longer; and I don’t wonder at it.” —The House and the Brain, also know as The Haunted and the Haunters (1857) by Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton via here.

Lytton is famous for his cliché first sentence: “It was a dark and stormy night”

See also: haunted – horror fiction – 1857