Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs

Strike, Dear Mistress, and Cure His Heart:

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs

Originally Published on About.com’s Classic Literature Page

Not many writers have the distinction—or the notoriety—of having a psycho-sexual term named after them. The astonishing and ingenious sexual cruelties in the Marquis de Sade’s works—particularly in The 120 Days of Sodom—have made his name a byword, and in 1890 the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing introduced the word “sadism” into medical terminology, even though the sole manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom had yet to be discovered and published, the full fury of which would come to wildly intensify the meaning of the term. Fittingly in the shadow of the overpowering de Sade, the Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch inspired the term for sadism’s flip-side, masochism, which was also introduced by Krafft-Ebing. Von Sacher-Masoch was a historian, folklorist, collector of stories, and progressive thinker of the mid-to-late 1900s, but even though he produced dozens of books in any number of genres, he’s almost solely known for his infamous novella Venus in Furs.

Initially meant to be part of an epic novel-sequence called The Legend of Cain, whose grandiose plan von Sacher-Masoch abandoned after a few volumes, Venus in Furs was published as the fourth part of the first book, which was entitled Love. Each book was named after one of the “evils” that Cain introduced into the world, and with this underlying premise—that love is an evil—von Sacher-Masoch reveals a seriously uneasy view of human relations. Venus in Furs is the only work of von Sacher-Masoch’s to be translated into English, and as even people who haven’t read the book know, its fame is certainly not because it’s about love.

The book starts with an epigraph from the biblical book of Judith—a book that narrates the story of a clever and powerful woman beheading Holofernes, an Assyrian general—and then opens into an unnamed narrator’s strange dream of an icy Venus who wears furs and who leads a philosophical discussion about how women’s cruel nature increases man’s desire. When the narrator awakens, he goes to meet with his friend Severin, to whom he relates his dream. Severin is a strange and sober man who at times, the narrator relates, “had violent attacks of sudden passion and gave the impression of being about to ram his head right through a wall.” Noticing a painting in Severin’s room depicting a northern Venus who wears furs and holds a lash that she uses to subjugate a man who is clearly a younger Severin himself, the narrator wonders aloud if the painting perhaps inspired his dream. After a short discussion, a young woman enters to bring tea and food for the pair, and to the narrator’s astonishment, a very slight offense on the woman’s part causes Severin to berate, whip, and chase her from the room. Explaining that you have to “break” a woman rather than let her break you, Severin produces a manuscript from his desk that tells how he was ostensibly “cured” of his obsession with being dominated by women.

Entitled “Confessions of a Suprasensual Man,” this manuscript comprises all but the last few pages of the rest of the novel. Entering into this frame, the narrator (and the reader) finds Severin at a Carpathian health resort where he meets and falls in love with a woman named Wanda, with whom he draws up and signs a contract that makes him her legal slave and gives her full power over him. At first, because she seems to like him and enjoy his company, Wanda shies away from the degradations that Severin asks her to subject him to, but as she slowly allows herself to take up her dominant role, she takes greater pleasure in torturing him and increasingly grows to despise him for how he allows her to treat him.

Leaving the Carpathian mountains for Florence, Wanda makes Severin dress and act like a common servant, forcing him to sleep in disgusting quarters and keeping him isolated from her company unless needed to serve some whim or another. These changes make Severin feel the palpable reality of his desires, a reality that he was in no way prepared for, but although he loathes his detestable new position, he finds himself unable to resist—and to keep from requesting—new humiliations. At times Wanda offers to put an end to their game, because she still has feelings of affection toward him, but those feelings fade as her mantle of power gives her free rein to use Severin for her increasingly twisted devices.

The breaking point comes when Wanda finds a nearly superhuman lover in Florence and decides to make Severin subject to him as well. Unable to bear subjugation to another man, Severin ultimately finds himself “cured” of his need to be dominated by women. Telescoping back to the novel’s outer frame, the narrator, who’s seen Severin’s current cruelty toward women, asks him for “the moral” to all of this, and Severin answers that a woman can only be a man’s slave or despot, adding the caveat that this imbalance can only be remedied “when she has the same rights as he and is his equal in education and work.”

Charlotte Rampling as Venus in Furs,
by Helmut Newton, 1973

This egalitarian last touch squares with von Sacher-Masoch’s socialist leanings, but clearly the events and stresses of the novel—which were mirrored closely in von Sacher-Masoch’s personal life, both before and after writing it—prefer wallowing in inequity much more that eradicating it. And this has been the novel’s main appeal for readers ever since. Unlike the works of the great de Sade, which soar as striking feats of both writing and imagination, Venus in Furs is much more of a masochistic sex fantasy than an artistic piece of literature. Its symbolic orders are muddled; its philosophical excursions are both ponderous and corny; and although its characters are vivid and memorable, they too often fall into “types” rather than exist as fully explored individuals. Still, it’s a curious and often enjoyable read, and whether you take it as literature or as psychology—or as erotica—there’s no question that this book’s whip will leave a distinct mark on your imagination.

—David Wiley

Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift

Missing Keys, Stunted Blooms,

and Emerging Enchanters:

Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift

Originally Published on

About.com’s Classic Literature Page

Best known for his extraordinary English-language novels, particularly Lolita, which he suggested in its 1956 afterword was a record of his love affair with the English language, Vladimir Nabokov had almost as distinguished a literary career in his native Russian language, publishing nine novels and countless stories and poems and plays while living as an émigré in Berlin between 1923 and 1937, a period that ended when Nabokov and his wife, Véra (who was Jewish), fled a regime that was even more insane than the one they and their families had fled almost two decades earlier in Russia. Nabokov claimed in the same afterword that his English was a feeble shadow of his magisterial Russian—an astonishing thing to imagine—but his precarious years in Germany left him and his fellow exiles with an extremely limited reading audience and opportunity to thrive as working artists. While his Russian works are almost as vividly modern and ambitious as his later English works, Nabokov’s writing in these years can be likened to an amber encapsulation of Russia’s great literary past, which in many ways he both culminated and exhausted, in part because of how his works serve as a brilliant coda for a scattered tradition and in part because of how his severed relationship to his homeland made it impossible for his use of the language to grow and evolve for the rest of his life. His estrangement from living Russian became startlingly evident to him when, decades later, he translated Lolita into Russian and was shocked to discover that he had no idea what the Russian words for such modern terms as “glove compartment” were. Still reveling in artistic possibility in Berlin, however, Nabokov’s first novel, Mary, is a tiny diamond of loveliness, while later Russian novels such as The Eye and Laughter in the Dark and Despair are all masterpieces of grotesque and glorious strangeness. Perhaps only somewhat intentionally, never knowing which way history would turn, but probably suspecting that he’d never get to return home, his final Russian novel, The Gift, features a tour through Russian literature that serves as a swan song for Nabokov’s fertile but increasingly uprooted relationship with his native literary soil.

Detailing the artistic growth of a Russian émigré writer named Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev in 1920s Berlin, The Gift, like so many of Nabokov’s other works, features a protagonist who shares much of the author’s history and aesthetic and intellectual predilections. This is not an autobiographical novel, however, as Nabokov insists in his foreword to the book’s English translation, but even though Godunov-Cherdyntsev is not a disguised version of the author, the book still paints a fascinating panorama of the world in which Nabokov, like his novel’s invented young writer, began his literary apprenticeship. Nabokov also significantly notes that the heroine of the novel isn’t Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s girlfriend, Zina, but rather Russian literature itself, which the novel’s progressions imitate and often mock, ravishing it the way that Nabokov ravishes Lolita’s own true heroine, the English language.

The opening chapter finds Godunov-Cherdyntsev having just moved into a new flat on the same week that his first book of poems has been published. With significance that will be mirrored and amplified in the final chapter, the young writer is out walking and doesn’t have the key to get into his flat—an accidental linguistic pun: There’s a repeatedly missing clef in this non-roman à clef. Through a series of reflections and samples and authorial explications, the reader enters into Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s early life through his poems, which in his case are keys to his autobiography, both personal and artistic. Subsequent chapters of The Gift evoke Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol in both literary mode and subject matter as they follow Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s desires and plans to write a great novel about his father, who was/is an explorer who disappeared before the Russian Revolution and who haunts his son’s dreams of both life and art. Delving into Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s research and notes for his projected novel, The Gift in many ways is that novel, but The Gift’s self-reflexive nature insists on being and encompassing more—and unfortunately, through its single-minded focus on the processes of (and varied critical reactions to) artistic creation, it often offers much less.

The Gift’s serious wrong-turn comes in Chapter Four, which comprises a brutally mocking biographical appraisal of the life and work of the nineteenth-century critic and novelist Nikolay Chernyshevski, whose social novel What is to Be Done? (What to Do? in Nabokov’s translation) inspired generations of revolutionaries, most notably Lenin, who reused the novel’s title as the name of one of his most influential political tracts. Serving for Nabokov and Godunov-Cherdyntsev as both a historical and an artistic catastrophe—the novel so hackneyed and over/underwrought that even in my Russophile youth I was unable to force myself to read it in full—Chernyshevski’s work and life find themselves relentlessly drawn and quartered within The Gift’s hundred-page diversion away from literary exploration and into literary impalement. Inspired by a coincidence of names and influences, and perhaps needing to develop his prose muscles before writing the book that he wants to write, Godunov-Cherdyntsev embarks upon this cruel and pointless display of virtuosic learning as a reaction to the wrong-turn he feels that history and literary thought have taken. Aesthetically, politically, and personally, this book-within-a-book is spot-on, and it’s in fact amazingly informative and often hilarious, especially in its ingenious bending of facts and dates and authorities, its dizzying contortions working to make its final twists extra ruthless. But all in all this brilliant tour-de-force is a serious drag on the novel’s thrust and leaves a bitter aftertaste that mars the beautiful arc of The Gift’s mirror of Russian literature, which may in fact be Nabokov’s plan in reflecting the vicissitudes of art in his lost country’s lost mind.

Nabokov has great fun having his characters—and even his invented author—criticize this work of creative criticism, whose circular structure Nabokov would later reprise in his own much more favorable (but still critical) book on Gogol, but this long chapter’s elaborately dense trashing/thrashing of its subject takes Nabokov’s often childish invectives to a new low. Like Dante, who even in the most intoxicating celestial spheres can’t help spewing his obloquy upon the disappointments of reality, Nabokov’s hatreds overtake him far too often, and while he usually satisfies himself with a few crushing words about the things he despises and then moves along to the glories of his own artistic universe, this novel contents itself with highlighting negativity rather than aspiring to the heights. In a novel in which Russian literature is ostensibly the heroine, it’s surprising—and telling—that Tolstoy and his work are mentioned exactly three times, while so much time and space and energy are expended upon a writer whose work and influence Nabokov sees as a tremendous waste of time and space and energy.

Leaving this lamentable chapter behind and moving forward, Godunov-Cherdyntsev surges toward full artistic maturity—as well as full union with Zina—and this final chapter simply dazzles as Nabokov delights in all the pleasures and opportunities available to a novelist in full control of his language and artistic form. The book often shifts from third person to first person, with Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s inner voice supplanting the novel’s outer narration, and with so much literary discussion and sleight-of-hand at play, The Gift often serves as a metafictional dialogue about its own devices and structures and aesthetics. The ending especially leads the book back (or forward) toward itself, and while this Möbius-strip contrivance could simply seem contrived in another writer’s hands, Nabokov and his readers thrill to Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s discovery of the key to his projected masterwork as he and Zina walk together, happily keyless, to the flat that contains their shared future.

The sad thing about all this is that the novel’s surge forward simply ends here and doesn’t bloom into anything near the totality of Tolstoy, who Nabokov possibly could have matched as a novelist in Russian if he’d been privileged enough in time and space to be writing from a luxurious home estate in the country. One of the things I relate to most about Nabokov is how for most of his life he was a working-class itinerant who insisted upon the highest artistic standards. This deracinated yet centered sense of self is what gave him dimensions that Tolstoy never had, but it’s also what kept him from joining Tolstoy’s rarefied company until after he switched to writing in English, his flexible switchiness ultimately becoming his most encompassing artistic superpower. The Gift has much in common with James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—a novel that Nabokov detested—and it’s disheartening that the still-embryonic Nabokov had to stop with Godunov-Cherdyntsev discovering how to write the novel that we’ve just read rather than moving on to write a Russian Ulysses—a novel that Nabokov revered, and which also features a main character wandering around keyless. Nabokov’s artistic vision doesn’t bloom into a Leopold Bloom in this novel, but rather stops short with a quasi-Stephen Dedalus, making us wait almost a generation for his true wings to develop.

A fascinating glimmer of Nabokov’s future literary mastery comes from a wholly unexpected direction, though, and quite ironically. About halfway through the novel, Zina’s detestable stepfather mentions a novel that he’d like to write himself, “from real life”:

An old dog—but still in his prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness—gets to know a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl—you know what I mean—when nothing is formed yet but already she has a way of walking that drives you out of your mind—A slip of a girl, very fair, pale, with blue under the eyes—and of course she doesn’t even look at the old goat. What to do? Well, not long thinking, he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down the three of them. Here you can go on indefinitely—the temptation, the eternal torment, the itch, the mad hopes. And the upshot—a miscalculation. Time flies, he gets older, she blossoms out—and not a sausage. Just walks by and scorches you with a look of contempt. Eh? D’you feel here a kind of Dostoyevskian tragedy? That story, you see, happened to a great friend of mine, once upon a time in fairyland when old King Cole was a merry old soul….

This is of course the seed for Lolita, which takes a far darker course than the one that Zina luckily evaded. Even the grossly nostalgic “once upon a time in fairyland when old King Cole was a merry old soul” prefigures Lolita’s use of Poe’s “Annabel Lee” in its opening pages:

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea.

Near the end of The Gift, Godunov-Cherdyntsev writes a letter to his mother in Paris and discusses his thoughts of writing a “classical novel” and lampoons the “brash trash” that he sees being “considered the crown of literature,” and among his list of despised topics is “incest.” How fitting then that a novel on this rejected topic—and not a classical novel in the vein of Tolstoy—would become his masterpiece, the “crown of literature” that he would never achieve in Russian.

Almost two decades separate The Gift and Lolita, and during that time Nabokov dedicated himself to the exploration of the English language’s wild wilderness, but there’s a significant link between the two novels—and it’s in his native Russian. In 1939, just after completing his first English-language novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov composed a remarkable novella in Russian that he called The Enchanter, an ur-Lolita that he later described as “the first little throb” of the great work that would consume his life between 1949 and 1955—and for years afterward, the novel becoming such a sensation that it changed his life forever. He was dissatisfied with The Enchanter upon completing it and reading it aloud, and in 1957 he recalled that he’d thrown it away—he’d nearly done the same thing with Lolita, which he abandoned several times and which his wife once had to retrieve from the trash can. In 1959, Nabokov discovered The Enchanter in his archives and found it more pleasing than he remembered, and he proposed that it be translated into English by his family, which didn’t happen until 1986 when his son, Dmitri, undertook the task, nearly a decade after Nabokov’s death.

Following all these trails of artistic thread through Nabokov’s work, it’s startling—but not surprising—to find that even the “little throb” of Lolita’s precursor had a precursor. And not in a princedom by the sea, but in the Nazi Germany of the mid-to-late 1930s, in a novel in which the protagonist rejects a theme that reflects the sickness of both a repulsive old man and a literary and historical scene that had little place for truly great Russian literature. The Gift tells the story of one young writer’s growing literary gift, but this gift—in Nabokov’s case—was unfulfillable at the time, even in a novel of The Gift’s scope and complexity. Only when he took up and fully explored the hauntingly vile subject that Godunov-Cherdyntsev so adamantly pushes away from himself—and only after giving up the dream of achieving a true masterwork in Russian—would Nabokov find the key to the literary apotheosis that his own gift so richly deserved.

—David Wiley

John Fante’s Ask the Dust

A Sad Flower in the Sand:

John Fante’s Ask the Dust

Originally published on About.com’s Classic Literature Page

Published in 1939, Ask the Dust is the best-known work from John Fante’s quartet of novels featuring the character Arturo Bandini, a young, struggling Italian-American writer who served as Fante’s fictionalized literary and personal alter ego. In 1933, Fante wrote The Road to Los Angeles, a novel that wound up as the second chronological volume of the series, but it wasn’t published until 1985, during a resurgence in Fante’s popularity, and after several more years of trying to support himself by writing short stories, he dug into his childhood to write a prequel to The Road to Los Angeles called Wait Until Spring, Bandini, which in 1938 became his first published novel. Wait Until Spring, Bandini follows the travails of Svevo Bandini, a bricklayer trying to raise a family that includes the young Arturo. The novel was a very minor success, both commercially and artistically—it reads more like a pained reverie than like a work of serious literary art, but it afforded Fante the time and means to plan and construct the more popular and mature Ask the Dust, which he published the following year.

Finding the journeyman writer Arturo Bandini in Los Angeles (and passing over the intervening time covered in The Road to Los Angeles), Ask the Dust opens with what scores of subsequent novels and films have turned into a tired cliche: the unsuccessful, inexperienced, and uninspired young writer faced with eviction from his cheap hotel. He’s weeks behind in his rent, and he’s writing almost nothing because he has nothing to write about, and his sense of artistic worth hangs on having published just one short story in a magazine edited by J. C. Hackmuth, a fictionalized version of H. L. Mencken (who was the first editor to accept any of Fante’s stories for publication). Bandini spends his days wandering and loafing, and when he writes, it’s either letters to his mother in Colorado, telling of his successes, or letters to Hackmuth, telling of his failures.

Part of Arturo’s problem (he feels) is that he has no experience with women, and one night he meets a Mexican barmaid named Camilla, with whom he slowly embarks on a confusing and cruel courtship that serves as the novel’s substantive center. While their romance goes in malicious circles, however, Arturo meets Vera Rivkin, whose life and death become the inspiration for his first novel, which gets publishes near the end of Ask the Dust. Thus Fante avoids the cliche of having Arturo publish the very book we’re reading, and the disparity between Arturo’s often unsympathetic acts toward Camilla and his deeply empathic exploration of Vera in the novel he writes illustrates how the creation of art can draw out the truest and best aspects of humanity from within a deeply flawed creator. Despite the divergent dynamics in Arturo’s relationships with Camilla and Vera, his experiences with the two women contain mirrors that allow Arturo to see himself more clearly, and as he matures as an artist through Vera’s story, he also comes to mature as a human being in his relationship with and attitude toward Camilla.

This isn’t to say that things go well at all for Arturo and Camilla, because the complications of love, life, and death intervene to keep things from working out in any way but an artistic one. Near the beginning of the novel, Arturo refers to Los Angeles with a spirit of love and loss that serves as a parallel for his physical and emotional feelings for Camilla:

Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, with feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.

At the end of the novel Arturo throws a copy of his own novel into the desert in Camilla’s memory, his novel—like Camilla—a sad flower that both springs from and returns to the desert sands.

Screenwriter and director Robert Towne (author of the great L.A. film Chinatown and director of a breathtakingly bad film adaptation of Ask the Dust) once called Ask the Dust the greatest novel ever written about Los Angeles. Fans of more artistically and thematically ambitious novels such as Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust or Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 may disagree, but Ask the Dust certainly creates an indelible portrait of Depression-era L.A. in all its motley variety. Fante’s prose isn’t incredibly penetrating or vivid (although there are occasional weird flights of whimsy, or memorably phrased descriptions of existence, such as “I went to the restaurant where I always went to the restaurant”), and so this novel will have a much greater appeal to readers who care more about content than artistry. In fact, Charles Bukowski (who was largely responsible for bringing Fante’s work back into print) serves as a good (or bad) example of Fante’s artistic legacy. In his introduction to the 1979 reprint of Ask the Dust, Bukowski dismisses much of the writing he came across in his youth as mere “subtlety, craft and form” written by authors “playing word-tricks,” and he describes his discovery of Fante as a kind of revelation: “The lines rolled easily across the page, there was a flow. Each line had its own energy and was followed by another like it.”

Whether you regard this appraisal as philistine nonsense or not, it does account for some of Fante’s approach and appeal. But Bukowski is only partially correct in saying that the works of the writer whom he refers to as his god are “written of and from the gut and the heart.” Fante wrote this novel from a carefully planned outline and put much thought and craft—and deeply reflective self-criticism—into Ask the Dust, and the results are far removed from the macho swagger, self-aggrandizement, and first-draft bluster of his drunken disciple, who modeled his own literary alter ego, Henry Chinaski, after Arturo Bandini. Ask the Dust may not be the equal of the European Modernists of Fante’s time, but this sad flower from the sand of Los Angeles has a wholly singular beauty that’s well worth the trip west, regardless of whatever literary landscapes its spores propagated later.

—David Wiley

Béroul’s The Romance of Tristan

A Very Rough Diamond:

Béroul’s The Romance of Tristan

Originally Published on About.com’s Classic Literature Page

Although not as ubiquitous as the various versions and adaptations of Romeo and Juliet—which predate Shakespeare and which afterward have spread to nearly every language and art form in the world—the story of Tristan and Iseult is one of the most potent and enduring tales of doomed love in Western literature. As a freestanding romance, or as part of the Arthur-cycle, or as an opera or film or inspiration for a novel (Graham Greene’s excellent The Heart of the Matter, for instance), this strange and mutable story of love and death is one of our central narratives about how romantic love does and doesn’t work.

In brief, the story goes like this: The orphaned Tristan joins his uncle Mark’s court at Cornwell, proves himself a worthy warrior, goes on a wooing expedition to Ireland to win Iseult the Fair for Mark, brings her back by boat, and accidentally drinks a love-potion with her that was intended to bond her to Mark. The pair then embark on an illicit affair that after discovery leads them to escape together into the wilderness, where after a time they become reconciled to returning to Mark’s court, where they continue their affair, which is discovered again, causing Tristan to flee to lands in Brittany. Joining another court there, he resigns himself to marrying his new sovereign’s sister, who also happens to be named Iseult (in Béroul’s version, both women’s names are spelled Yseut). When Tristan is mortally wounded in battle, he sends a message to the first Iseult (who is a powerful healer), but the second Iseult (Iseult of the White Hands) overhears his instructions and foils them, causing Tristan to die just before the arrival of Iseult the Fair, who in despair lays down next to Tristan and dies of grief.

Like the tales of King Arthur, whose love-triangle between Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot is predated and influenced by the Mark-Iseult-Tristan triangle, the story of Tristan and Iseult is almost definitely Celtic in origin, and as with the Arthurian tales, its descent through different ages and traditions has spawned interpretations that mirror the values and conventions of each culture that retells it. The earliest extant full (or nearly full) versions fall into two categories: the “common,” of which Béroul’s The Romance of Tristan is the most exemplary, and the “courtly,” of which the mostly lost Tristran of Thomas served as the template, later finding its highest expression in Gottfried von Strassburg’s unfinished Tristan. As a product of evolving folklore, it’s not possible to arrive at the true original version of the story, but almost all of its core elements are present in Béroul’s version, and this is probably why his Romance of Tristan has come down to us, fragmentary and peculiar as it is.

Nothing is known about Béroul other than that he composed the poem in Norman French in the middle of the twelfth century, and even this is somewhat uncertain. Béroul refers to himself and his version of the tale throughout the poem, but some scholars have suggested that this “Béroul” may have been a later scribe who either embellished the poem or simply inserted his name to make the poem his. In any of these cases, the only surviving manuscript is poorly copied and incomplete, the ravages of time having torn away both the beginning and the end and created several short lacunae throughout the text. Presenting even more problems for a modern reader looking for a complete and coherent narrative, what’s left of the poem itself (about 3,000 lines) is rife with incongruity, illogical motivation, strange assumptions, and unclear characterization. The accumulation of narrative inconsistencies is often hilarious, but even so, the poem’s raw power and unadorned thrust makes it as enjoyable and moving as many much “finer” Medieval romances. What Béroul lacks in subtlety and precision, he more than makes up for with his gift for keeping the reader engaged in his vivid, exciting, and heartwrenching rendering of this dramatic and ruinous love (to borrow a phrase from Jeanette Winterson). Like the early gospel of Mark, which served as the template for the more elaborately fleshed out gospels of Matthew and Luke, Béroul’s version shocks and amuses with its roughness, but it nonetheless stands as the startling original.

In order to create a more complete and comprehensible reader’s edition, translator Alan S. Fedrick has filled in the holes at the beginning and end by adding summaries of Joseph Bédier’s 1900 reconstruction of the romance (which Bédier traced back to a conjectural lost prototype of the poem by drawing on all known sources), as well as by including a short anonymous episode, “The Tale of Tristan’s Madness,” near the end. Fedrick also puts the poem’s style and approach in the context of its times with his excellent introduction, which draws attention to the poem’s oddities and clumsinesses while helping the reader to see them as a common characteristic of the part-oral/part-written style of his era. Fedrick’s apologies aren’t fully convincing, however—or even necessary—because Béroul has the agency to make his own mistakes, and his poem has the verve to remain unfazed by its own carelessness. Béroul’s The Romance of Tristan may not be an imperfect masterpiece anywhere near the scale of, say, Don Quixote, but this wonderfully memorable and poignant poem clearly stands on its own lopsided terms as one of the great flawed gems of Western literature.

—David Wiley

Absence of Mind, by Marilynne Robinson

A Review of Marilynne Robinson’s

Absence of Mind

Originally published on the online edition of the
Rain Taxi Review of Books, Winter 2010/2011

Absence of Mind:
The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self
By Marilynne Robinson
Yale ($24)

Any reader of Marilynne Robinson’s extraordinary works of fiction has experienced how marvelously she explores the mysteries of human existence on—as she calls it in her new work of nonfiction, Absence of Mind—our “tiny, teetering, lopsided planet.” Robinson is fascinated with consciousness and with the mind’s place in the universe, and her novels open readers to the worlds within the world of each of her characters’ particular corner of the swirling cosmos. In Absence of Mind, Robinson addresses these issues directly, confronting the mind head on and arguing for its existence as an entity much larger and more elusive than any merely biological or evolutionary function.

Written in four parts and commissioned for the Dwight Harrington Terry Foundation Lectures on Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy, Absence of Mind has a clear mandate and agenda. The Terry Foundation’s “deed of gift” states its desire that through its series of lectures “the Christian spirit may be nurtured in the fullest light of the world’s knowledge,” and while Robinson allows for an expansive and encompassing conception of Jewish, Christian, and other spiritual wisdoms and philosophies, her objective is certain. A believer in both scientific inquiry and religious mystery, she wishes to reconcile what many on both sides of the science/religion debate see as irreconcilable, but rather than actually pursuing such a course, her book takes the stance of a factious attack on what she refers to as “the closed circle that is called modern thought.”

Railing against positivism, behaviorism, neo-Darwinism, Marxism, and Freudianism, Robinson points out how each of these systems of thought not only offers an incomplete view of the world, but also how incompatible they are with each other when taken as a whole and accepted as a collective view of modernity. One of her most salient criticisms is in pointing out the fallacy of what she describes as a key dictum of each of these systems: “the notion that we as a culture have crossed one or another threshold of knowledge or realization that gives the thought that follows it a special claim to the status of truth.” Although the discoveries of Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein certainly cross thresholds toward a more workable model of truth, Robinson rightfully questions the common contemporary mindset that holds that we were in error before a certain moment and only now we see clearly. This has also been the mindset of many of the world’s religions and metaphysical philosophies, however, and in honoring their valuable insights and wisdoms, Robinson somehow fails to mention their own exclusionary claims to veracity.

Leaving the poets and saints and mystics undisturbed, Robinson’s main targets in Absence of Mind are contemporary writers such as E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Daniel Dennett—writers whom she characterizes as taking a derisive stance toward religion and whom she derisively labels as “parascientific.” One of her repeated methods of refuting them is to call into question the very character of their thought, and many of her arguments consist of choosing a vulnerable sentence in their books (and in the case of Rorty and Vattimo’s The Future of Religion, an introduction written by the book’s editor) and dismantling, discrediting, or lampooning it. At one point, she even refers to an author’s colloquial explanation of altruism (which is one of Robinson’s main arguments against neo-Darwinism) as “sophomore-speak.” While her own prose is high-handed, one of the great disappointments of Absence of Mind is that Robinson fails to dazzle the reader with the flights of insight that this book’s subject matter should have generated in a writer of such talent and profundity, instead maintaining the cold and inelegant register of a defensive (and often offensive) polemicist. This hardly seems the work of the author whose first novel, Housekeeping, inspired a generation of writers to pursue the marvels of both the world and the word.

The greatest contribution of Absence of Mind comes in the book’s third chapter, “The Freudian Self,” in which Robinson recontextualizes Freud and his times in fascinating detail and with an extraordinary command of how Freud’s works interacted with the worldviews that surrounded and inspired his own. Her ultimate aim in this section is to negate certain Freudian and post-Freudian concepts that in her view discount the idea of the individual mind living in an individual time, and with a deftness of thought and knowledge and style, she largely succeeds, turning her double-negative approach into a positive contribution to Freudian criticism, as well as to the ongoing exploration of how the mind exists in time. Whether you find yourself agreeing or arguing with Robinson’s conclusions (or agreeing and arguing with them), this is a classically rigorous and beautifully hewn essay that—like much of Freud’s best writing—is valuable both as an intellectual artifact to be pondered and confronted and as a work of literary artistry.

Despite its overall tone of enmity—and despite its hand-wringing apprehension that our existence is being impoverished by the perils of “modern thought”—Absence of Mind makes a positive and often successful effort at showing us how both science and the mind are far more expansive and inexplicable than many schools of thought would have us believe. It may be unfashionable to think of the mind as a mysterious entity that exists as something much larger than our already large brains, but when Robinson delves into the farthest interior and exterior worlds and drops her offensive defensiveness, she reveals in herself a mind that serves as a living example of many of her best points. Perhaps few will be convinced by this book—its arguments are couched in terms more suitable to those who will probably disagree with it, while most sympathetic readers will be turned away by its antagonistic tone—but Robinson’s learning in all the fields she discusses is remarkable, and her ideas will certainly impress themselves upon the mind of any serious reader, regardless of whether that mind decides to let itself be changed.

—David Wiley

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Several Perceptions:

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Originally Published on About.com’s Classic Literature Page

The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different, whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity.

                     —David Hume, from A Treatise of Human Nature

Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography has long stood as one of the most famous and exemplary memoirs in American and world history, and Franklin himself has often been held up as a multifaceted microcosm of America itself, for better or worse. Naive patriots see the endlessly brilliant and successful Franklin as a role model for self-reliance, reading his Autobiography as an advertisement for individual initiative, while detractors see Franklin as a duplicitous facade-builder whose Autobiography hides as much as it reveals and ignores the fact that the vast majority of America—and of the world—has to sink a bit in order for a brilliant and ambitious individual such as himself to rise. Both views (and many more) easily affix themselves to the Franklin of legend, of reality, and of his Autobiography, and although no one particular reading of the man or his works can encompass his full entirety, examining the dis-united states of his Autobiography and of its readers’ perceptions of it can offer great insight into Franklin himself and into the United States that he ostensibly reflects.

As a text, the Autobiography is a complete farrago: a wholly unintegrated mass of parts that hardly portrays a coherent life at all. What’s fascinating, though, is that its four soldered-together sections show the reader innumerable interconnected and progressive sketches of Franklin that sometimes add up and sometimes don’t, and this is perhaps the only true way to view a human being of his amazing range—or, for that matter, to view any human being. Even the book’s obvious (and not-so-obvious) lacunae tell us a lot about him and ourselves, and anyone who reads the Autobiography with a bit of critical curiosity will discover volumes about how we—individually, and as a country, and as a race of humans—aspire to be and, in Franklin’s words, to be seen.

Joseph Siffred Duplessis’ portrait of
Benjamin Franklin, 1785 

Franklin wrote the first section of the book in 1771 when he was in England, and its stated form and purpose was to chronicle Franklin’s ancestry and early life in a long anecdotal letter to his firstborn son and confidante, William. Franklin did nothing without an eye to the public, however, and when reading of his precocious personal exploits, we need to keep in mind that our perceptions are as much in Franklin’s mind as are his son’s. The book’s second section was written in France in 1784, after the Revolutionary War had severed the deep bond between Franklin and his Royalist son, and this section is expressly (and coldly) addressed to the public and was written in response to the urging of friends who wanted Franklin to publish his projected Art of Virtue, which only came to fruition as this short second section of his Autobiography.

Franklin began the third section of the book later in 1784 when he was back in America, and here he returns to chronicling the progress of his fascinating history, but the focus in this section changes from the personal to the public, and instead of documenting what good he’d done for himself, he documents what good he’d done for his city, country, and world. Franklin was obsessed with doing good, and this is the longest section of the Autobiography, but what’s fascinating is that even with the in-depth accounts of establishing schools, a fire department, and the first lending-library, improving public streets and streetlights, serving as a Colonel in the French and Indian Wars, attending to various public offices, and detailing some of his experiments with electricity and heat, the Autobiography doesn’t even come close to summing up this astonishing man’s contributions to the larger public welfare. If his own personal prosperity came at the cost of outstripping less gifted individuals whose fortunes waned while his waxed—thus nullifying his personal example as a universal model because of the impossibility of everyone rising through his methods—his tireless efforts on behalf of public progress surely lifted the world a bit higher and made life for his fellow human beings a bit easier and lighter.

John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence, 1817

The Autobiography’s very brief fourth section was begun in 1790, in the last year of Franklin’s life, and it merely continues a description of his efforts in 1757 to get some legislation passed, and then the manuscript breaks off. Thus the Autobiography of America’s most famous Founding Father, and perhaps most famous individual, ends decades before arriving at the most significant events and contributions that made him who he is to us. This incompleteness is of course part of the book’s fascination, because in addition to the selectiveness and creative license of Franklin’s self-portrait, the vastness of the missing parts makes us see how impossible it is to conceive (or even perceive) a full view of any individual human being. We round out much of the subject of the Autobiography with knowledge gained elsewhere, but even more than that, we fill in the holes with our own perceptions and self-conceptions, whether they’re positive, negative, or deeply ambivalent.

What I recommend when reading this fascinating and problematic work by this fascinating and problematic human being is to keep your view of its subject, author, and text from closing in any definitive fashion. Franklin can be both hilariously self-conscious and hilariously un-self-conscious—and can be simply embarrassing when he’s at his most un-self-consciously self-consciousness—but despite his wild flaws and foibles, he truly meant to do good, as a world citizen and as a writer of his own self. Perhaps the most good we can gain by reading his Autobiography is to achieve a deeper understanding of who we are—as individuals, as a nation, and as a world—by looking at ourselves through Franklin’s singularly cracked lenses.

—David Wiley

James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Irresistible Grace:

James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and

Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Originally Published on About.com’s Classic Literature Page

In an age when Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu fundamentalists hold profound sway over nations armed with nuclear weapons—and when many other non-religious but nonetheless fanatically extremist ideologies threaten the world’s safety with their urges to fulfill their purifying programs—it becomes imperative that we examine not just the end-results of these perfectionist words made flesh (i.e., the Crusades, the Holocaust, Stalinism, Maoism, 9/11 and its worldwide aftermath), but their roots in our own desires and psyches. It’s easy to point to others and marvel at their insane beliefs and actions, but it’s only when we interrogate our own urges to be right and to be justified (across the globe and often beyond) that we can see ourselves as human beings with the exact same capacity to be as misguided as the most fervent religious terrorist or the most patriotic purveyor of state-sponsored torture.

James Hogg’s strange, terrifying, and largely forgotten novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner explores the inner and outer worlds of “justified” terror, delving into the personal terror within the most haunted fanatic and producing a work that’s unsettling in every sense of the word. Working contrary to many of the solid-rock beliefs portrayed within its pages, Hogg’s novel undermines all sense of certitude and even undoes the faith that we as readers put in its own varying and contradictory narratives. Employing and improvising upon a host of literary conventions, devices, and styles, Hogg’s 1824 masterpiece is thus timely to a twenty-first century audience in both content and form and has even been cited as a forerunner of postmodernism.

Published anonymously because of its scandalous nature, the novel’s sections comprise a ninety-page Editor’s Narrative, the sinner’s 140 pages of Confessions, and an additional fifteen pages of Editor’s Narrative at the end. In the first section, an unnamed editor reports the details of what he’s been able to gather about a strange family history that involved a series of murders in late-seventeenth-century/early-eighteenth-century Scotland. The opening pages recount the marriage of the elderly Laird of Dalcastle, George Colwan (“a droll, careless chap”), to a sternly pious young woman who tries to escape but is returned to Colwan by her father. The unhappy match results in one acknowledged son, also named George, and another son, Robert, who may or may not have been fathered by the mother’s spiritual advisor, the fanatical Reverend Robert Wringhim. Although Hogg is careful never to mention Calvinism by name, Wringhim’s beliefs make the reader infer this affiliation, and the young Robert is raised separately from his brother, reared in an extreme version of this faith, and is adopted by Reverend Wringhim.

A brockengespenst, which may be
what George sees on his hike.

As young men, George and Robert meet for the first time in Edinburgh and become bitter enemies, the latter soon shadowing his popular older brother to haunt his every move. Wherever George goes, and at whatever hour, Robert somehow takes his place next to him to taunt him and ruin his peace of mind. The despondent George begins to fear going into public, and after attempting to seclude himself, he makes an unplanned trek into the hills on a beautiful morning and has a truly bizarre and ghostly altercation with Robert that nearly results in fratricide. After a resulting courtroom scene, George retires with friends to an inn and finds himself in a pointless quarrel with another young nobleman named Drummond, who quickly leaves in anger. Soon afterward, a knock on the door seems to signal his return, and George steps out to meet him, doesn’t return, and is found dead the next morning. Drummond flees the country and is assumed guilty, and Robert soon afterward claims his patrimony and installs himself as the new Laird of Dalcastle.

A complex series of investigations follows, and through somewhat fantastical means, two women pursue a thread of circumstances that leads them to implicate the younger Robert and a mysterious and elusive friend who now seems to be goading him on to murder his own mother. When officers arrive at his mansion, however, they find no trace of either Robert or his mother, at which point the narrative reaches the end of the details passed down about the account and then introduces the memoir left behind by Robert, declaring that “We have heard much of the rage and fanaticism in former days, but nothing to this.”

This makes me laugh.

Robert’s memoir—a kind of novel within a novel—shifts the text to a radically different perspective and tells the tale from his point of view, and true to the words that Hogg ascribes to the novel’s “editor” (who we must remember is a character too), the “rage and fanaticism” portrayed in his Confessions is like nothing in any known literature, either fiction or nonfiction. As a child under the Reverend’s tutelage, Robert learns that the Elect are pre-ordained by God and that no act or belief can influence the spiritual fate of who does or who doesn’t go to heaven, an extreme doctrine known in Calvinism as “Irresistible Grace,” a far-flung extrapolation of Saint Augustine’s original concept of a persevering grace that keeps chosen believers from falling away from their salvation. Exerting a wildly manipulative influence on Robert and his mother, the Reverend struggles and prays to discover God’s will concerning Robert, and one day he announces that it has been revealed to him that Robert is one of the Elect. This day of revelation finds Robert at his most spiritually elated—and relieved, as his deeply cruel and spiteful manipulations as a child and young man have made him fear damnation—but it is also the beginning of an astonishing and relentless descent. Seeking solitude in the woods to pray, he immediately meets a stranger who distracts him from his task and draws him into a theological discussion that seems to echo the Reverend’s teaching, initiating an uneasy but unshakable association in which the stranger, whose looks keeps changing and who only goes by the name Gil-Martin, takes the logic of Robert’s faith to its most extreme lengths and leads him into a life of beliefs and acts that are simply beyond belief.

Evaluating the stranger from within the frame of reference of Robert’s confessions, the reader sees that Gil-Martin is clearly the Devil, but while Robert develops increasing fears about him as the narrative progresses, the logic that the Elect are forever chosen and justified keeps convincing him that Gil-Martin’s murderous suggestions are not just reasonable but are perhaps even the will of God. Unable to elude Gil-Martin as a constant shadow, his situation mirrors (and causes) his haunting presence by his brother George’s side. The dual doppelganger effect becomes further accentuated when Robert writes that even when alone he feels an uneasiness in his own skin, as if there were a second self inside of or somehow concurrent with his own being. Some of his language recalls the ways that Thomas De Quincey writes about his own lack of ease with his body and mind in his famous 1821 memoir, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and at one point Hogg even has Robert write a line that directly alludes to De Quincey’s call of hope within his pain, quoting the Psalms: “O, that I had the wings of a dove….” The self-loathing and terror and inability to escape or transcend that Hogg portrays to such extremes is certainly influenced by De Quincey’s language of addiction, but Robert’s memoir takes things much farther. This is certainly no case study, but Robert’s tortured childhood, his warped upbringing and religious indoctrination, and his heightened capacity as an adult for unspeakable cruelty (urged on by an inexorable outside agent) clearly illustrate Hogg’s view of how fanatical mindsets and already unhealthy minds can combine to take a set of beliefs to the most appalling extents, with dire consequences for everyone involved—especially for the fanatic himself, who may in fact be the most cruelly tortured victim.

Making his novel and its horrors all the more ambiguous, at the end of the book Hogg has the “editor” systematically dismantle the facts that we believed about the story and memoir and dismiss the existence of Gil-Martin as a figment of Robert’s sick fantasy world. This novelistic ruse may seem like a dirty trick because of its placement at the end instead of at the beginning, but a close examination of the book’s various parts reveals that the editor’s dismissal is far from authoritative. He claims that all the information in the first Editor’s Narrative is based on oral tradition and can hardly be taken seriously, but this can in no way account for the tightly interwoven connections between the initial Editor’s Narrative and the Confessions—connections that are so cleverly and complexly plotted that the reader is constantly checking one against the other to piece together timelines that add up almost seamlessly and only contradict each other in ways that their subjective natures would be expected to do. There’s also the simple fact that the murders and many of the other events involved police and other officials, who surely would have left extensive records. So the book’s editor, who belongs to a circle of writers with whom Hogg had a very uneasy relationship, makes his own judgments on the case as suspect as those handed down through gossip.

Surely an influence on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, whose cyclical system of doubles, intricate stratifications of time, and profound emotional and physical violence forms a perfect storm of self-perpetuating terror, Hogg’s novel also seems to anticipate the bifurcating ambiguities of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. As in Wuthering Heights, Hogg also makes extensive use of regional dialect, but he has much more fun with it, and despite all of its horrors, the novel often uses its varied voices and approaches to introduce extremely enjoyable comic relief. As in Pynchon, Hogg delights in all of his devices, and he even makes an appearance himself at the end of the novel. Hogg had published an article on the case in Blackwood’s Magazine the previous year, and a section of his article is excerpted in the second Editor’s Narrative, but when the editor goes to look for information, he runs into Hogg at the market, where Hogg dismisses his efforts as folly and goes about his business of trying to sell his livestock.

An illustration from The Private Memoirs
and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

There are great diversions to be found in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, but at its core there’s definitely not much fun in its view of fundamentalism, and the novel’s deepest tones are of resounding terror. Hogg was neither a psychologist nor a sociologist, but his explorations of the profound suffering at the root of Robert’s haunted journey give great insight into the fanatical mindset, illustrating how it can even bring demons alive to further its mission. Although he has his editor dismiss the memoir’s supernatural aspects, Hogg was certainly insinuating that the Devil plays a significant role in the ostensibly holy programs of religious mania. Whether we believe in any of this or just see it as a metaphor for madness, it’s clear that Robert was haunted by a specter that made itself very real to him, giving the stunned reader of this shocking novel the sense that these specters can appear to any troubled soul of any persuasion, whether religious, ideological, or political, and that the repercussions of following their haunted urgings can become devastating to everyone involved when made flesh in the real world.

—David Wiley