May Is the Month to Be Happy!

Here's a short film about how we should all feel about each other, created by the British children's author, poet and artist Giles Andreae.

The Pig of Happiness

riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius......A way a lone a last a loved a long the

Philip - my husband - often calls me a Joyce freak, which I don't suppose is really right - or is it? It is true that exactly one half of my PhD dissertation was about Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; it is also true that I enjoy reciting parts from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake which I know by heart, although, besides Philip, my two young daughters are my only audience, and now they know by heart almost as much of those extracts as I do myself and start enjoying joycean word poliphony and alliterations; it is also true that I seriously believe that it was the real spirit of James Joyce that came to me in one of my dreams some 13 years ago and talked to me about his writings. So, may be after all, I am a Joyce freak. But then - of those who like linguistics, literature or philology - who isn't?

It is common knowledge that James Joyce is probably the most influential writer of the 20-th century. He introduced many stylistic tricks that make up his individual literary method and have been widely studied and used by the writers of the second half of the 20-th century. In fact, without knowing those joycean tricks, one is likely to miss a thing or two while reading a good contemporary book. I was pleasantly reminded of that last June, when I had the luxury of having enough time to read two fabulous books by two of my favourite writers. Perhaps, it was even more pleasant since stumbling upon James Joyce in those books was the last thing I could have expected. And having delighted in enjoying this exquisite surprise in the first one that I read, I could not believe my eyes to find it in the other one as well. The two books I read last June could not be more different in their genre, plot or composition. It would never have occurred to me to compare them had I not read them one after the other. But now, the more I think about them, the more similarities I find. These two books are Vladimir Nabokov's Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle and David Lodge's The British Museum Is Falling Down.

• Both books were written at about the same time in the 1960s.

The British Museum is Falling Down was written between 1964 and 1965 by a young aspiring English writer David Lodge, this was his third novel, one of his shortest, written quickly and easily in less than a year while he was in the United States on a Harkness Commonwealth Fellowship.

Written between 1966 and 1968, Ada or Ardor was one of the last novels written by Vladimir Nabokov almost at the end of his professional career and life - when he was seventy. This is his longest novel and probably one of his most sophisticated ones.

• Both books are mainly about sex, even though quite different aspects of it.

One of the most erotic books ever written, Ada or Ardor, as the title suggests, is about passionate and everlasting love. It being incestual and therefore socially unacceptable and doomed from the start only adds to the romance. But as in any fairy-tale - which the book partly is - after years of torturous long separations and few short meetings, the main characters, already in their 50s, find the way to start living together and live happily everafter until death doth them part, which happens when they are well into their mid-nineties. It is even likely that they die on the same day "... into the finished book..." of a family chronicle that they have written together - "... into the prose of the book or the poetry of its blurb", leaving it to the critics to argue whether they committed mutual euthanasia or not.

Unlike this romantic and highly poetic hymn to unearthly love (for Ada or Ardor takes place on a different planet called Antiterra), The British Museum Is Falling Down is a comic down to earth novel about the most unromantic aspect of sex possible - contraception or, rather, lack of it in an English Catholic family, and hence the dread of a young father of having yet another (the fourth) baby. This book also has a fairy-tale-like ending, when a good fairy materialising in the form of a wealthy and fat American millionaire driving around London in a limousine and smoking cigars offers the anxious father a good job which will allow him to rent a house with enough room for the new possibly coming babies.

• But of course, what made me even think of comparing these two books, was neither of the previous similarities but the presence of joycean method in both of them.

By the joycean method I mean here the language play that is present in Joyce's books. This language play to a lesser (The Ulysses) or greater (Finnegans Wake) extent makes joycean text more or less unreadable - illisible, and writable - scriptible (in Roland Barthes's terminology) and requires an active role on the part of the reader to decipher the puzzles hidden in the text and may be find a couple more, which the author was not even aware of. This process - again in Roland Barthes's terms - turns the reader into a co-writer, and the regular pleasure of just passively reading a regular readable book into the jouissance, the total bliss of losing oneself within the unreadable text and starting to recreate or even create it while reading and interpreting it.

Now, with James Joyce's books this is a really hard thing to do, especially with Finnegans Wake. The number of puzzles is so enormous, and the number of languages used to make up those puzzles is so vast, that unless one is a real Joyce freak (not at all a make-believe one like me) it is virtually impossible to read the whole book. To get the jouissance from reading it would just take too much time - solving all these puzzles. To get the regular pleasure from reading it is impossible because without solving the puzzles it is completely unreadable and makes no sense. Still, it is quite a doable task to read and decipher some part of it and get the jouissance there. This is exactly what I did once, choosing the most famous part and obviously, the one that James Joyce was most satisfied with, since he chose it for his audio recording: Anna Livia Plurabelle. But even doing as little as that, gives you a good training in this game. And once you get the hang of it, you can use the skill whenever you read any other book and stumble upon any similar style, which becomes very recognizable to you.

This is exactly what happened to me while I was reading Ada or Ardor. But it did not happen immediately. As I have said before, I did not expect to find any joycean tricks in Ada. I read Lolita almost 20 years ago, when I was still a naive reader, not acquainted with James Joyce, and therefore completely unaware of the importance of being "an ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia". So I missed all the puzzles there and probably a lot more than that. But in Ada, all the allusions, puns and alliterations started jumping out at me, providing a second source of pleasure (or, indeed, jouissance!) from the otherwise very readable and enjoyable text. What makes Nabokov different and a lot easier to read than Joyce is the fact that his books are virtual page-turners with a suspenseful plot. So if you miss all the rest, you can still enjoy it, as I enjoyed Lolita 20 years ago. In his work The Role of the Reader, Umberto Eco says that complex or open texts, similar to those by Joyce, demand a very special reader, and that one can read, for example, Kafka's Trial "as a trivial criminal novel, but at this point the text collapses". Would Ada collapse, if read, say, as a romance novel? Did Lolita collapse when I read it naivley 20 years ago, even though I totally enjoyed its music and atmosphere?

The other thing which makes Nabokov's books easier to read is the number of languages used for the puzzles. The three main languages that he uses are English, Russian and French with the addition of some Latin. In fact, the first three are not only used for puzzles, but make up the whole body of the text of the book, since the majority of the characters are trilingual and enjoy ornating their English with French and Russian colorful expressions.

Unlike Ada or Ardor, The British Museum Is Falling Down does not have any joycean puns, alliterations or allusions within the text itself: it is the form of the Ulysses that it alludes to or, rather, parodies. Similar to Ulysses, the action of the whole book is limited to one day. There are ten chapters and an epilogue, and just as every chapter of Ulysses corresponds to and resembles a chapter from Homer's Odyssey, so does every chapter of The British Museum Is Falling Down by way of a parody imitate the style of one of the following authors: Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Fr. Rolfe, C.P. Snow, and Virginia Woolf. But with the exception of the Epilogue which quite obviously parodies Molly Bloom's stream of consciousness at the end of Ulysses and may be a chapter where the main character faints and has a horrible in its absurdity Kafka-like dream or hallucinations, these imitations are not so easy to spot. They were not at first recognized even by the literary critics who reproached David Lodge of inhomogeneous writing style. So 15 years after The British Museum Is Falling Down was first published, David Lodge wrote a An Afterword for the 1981 edition of the book, explaining its structure and listing the writers whose style he parodied.

To sum it all up, both of these books are brilliant, a real joy to read, and - thanks to James Joyce who is quite obviously smiling through them - inspire the reader who has read them once to read them all over again, this time trying to find what has been missed the first time. And isn't it also just like in Finnegans Wake - where the first sentence begins at the very end of the book, as if the book itself invites the patient champion-reader who succeeded in reading it to the end, to start it all over again and this time - to really understand it?

MARDIS GRAS FROLICKING

The Gruffalo

A Mouse

The Grinch

Butterfly

The Pretty Duckling

Christmas Spirit - Camilla's Postcards

Christmas - 2010 - The Shepherds

Christmas - 2009 - The Star of Bethlehem

Christmas - 2008 - The Magi

Christmas - 2007 - In the Manger

THE ZAX

Here's Dr. Seuss's The Zax with my translation into Russian

ЗАКСЫ Когда-то давно по прерии Пракса Навстречу друг другу шли молча два Закса: Один шёл на север, другой шёл на юг. Приблизились и лбами стукнулись вдруг. В свою сторону каждый прокладывал путь. И, казалось бы, надо с дороги свернуть, Отойти чуть в сторонку, пропуская другого, Но Заксы не знали закона такого. Воскликнул злой Закс, на север идущий: «С дороги сойдите! Не перечьте мне лучше! Стоите Вы тут у меня на пути, А мне надо прямо на север идти!» «Я на вашем пути? Да Вы всё переврали! ВЫ мне путь преградили! А я Вам – едва ли!» Ответил злой Закс, идущий на юг. «Потрудитесь уйти! Мне Вас ждать недосуг!» «Ах, Вам ждать недосуг! – Что ж, у меня – так есть время! Мы, североходцы, все – гордое племя. Не уступим ни шагу! Так и буду стоять! Хоть бы мне тут стоять пришлось дней 55!» «Ну а я здесь стоять могу 55 лет!» На юг шедший Закс закричал тут в ответ. В Юго-ходческой школе я выучил точно Все правила: Не уступать! Стоять прочно! Ни шагу на запад и ни на восток! То ученье дало во мне крепкий росток. Так и буду стоять я на этом вот месте, Хотя бы весь мир вдруг застыл с нами вместе!» Но мир не застыл. Мир развивался. Через пару лет новый проспект простирался По прерии Пракса – и был он проложен Над Заксами, что там так и стоят непреложно.

THE ZAX One day, making tracks In the prairie of Prax, Came a North-Going Zax And a South-Going Zax. And it happened that both of them came to a place Where they bumped. There they stood. Foot to foot. Face to face. "Look here, now!" the North-Going Zax said, "I say! You are blocking my path. You are right in my way. I'm a North-Going Zax and I always go north. Get out of my way, now, and let me go forth!" "Who's in whose way?" snapped the South-Going Zax. "I always go south, making south-going tracks. So you're in MY way! And I ask you to move And let me go south in my south-going groove." Then the North-Going Zax puffed his chest up with pride. "I never," he said, "take a step to one side. And I'll prove to you that I won't change my ways If I have to keep standing here fifty-nine days!" "And I'll prove to YOU," yelled the South-Going Zax, "That I can stand here in the prairie of Prax For fifty-nine years! For I live by a rule That I learned as a boy back in South-Going School. Never budge! That's my rule. Never budge in the least! Not an inch to the west! Not an inch to the east! I'll stay here, not budging! I can and I will If it makes you and me and the whole world stand still!" Well... Of course the world didn't stand still. The world grew. In a couple of years, the new highway came through And they built it right over those two stubborn Zax And left them there, standing un-budge in their tracks.

Allusions in Art

I have been studying Pre-Raphaelite art recently and stumbled upon this picture called Lady Godiva by John Collier:

All of a sudden it reminded me of this painting by Kozma Petrov-Vodkin called Bathing the Red Horse:

I wouldn't dare call this plagiarism, which I'm sure it's not - but... isn't there a sort of an allusion to the Lady Godiva?

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud...

Background. #1

When I was a teenager, one of my favourite musical pieces was Franz Schubert's Wanderer Fantasie. (In fact, it still is.) I often listened to it and thought about it. There was something enchanting about it, which I couldn't put my finger on. The strangest thing, as it seemed to me, was that the title totally didn't reflect the music. When thinking about a "wanderer" I imagined an old man with a stick on his shoulder and a little sack at the end of that stick, walking slowly, being tired from that long walk. Mikhail Lermontov's brilliant translation of Goethe's "Wanderer's Night Song" always came to mind:

Горные вершины

Спят во мгле ночной;

Тихие долины

Полны свежей мглой;

Не пылит дорогоа,

Не дрожат листы...

Подожди немного,

Отдохнёшь и ты.

Über allen Gipfeln

Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde,
Warte nur, balde

Ruhest du auch.

But the music, starting pretty diabolically, then changing into an angelic melody in the middle and changing back and forth, surely meant something else. The vigor also suggested a young fellow rather than an old man... Besides, this is quite a challenging piece for pianists. There is a well-known story about Schubert - how when he was playing it for his friends and broke down in the last movement, he sprang up from his seat with the words: "Let the devil play the stuff!"

(Thank you, Anton Nel, for the beautiful performance!)

Background. #2

I'll start again. When I was a teenager, my favourite writer was Honore de Balzac. I read all of his books that were translated into Russian, some of them several times. There was one short story which I liked but didn't quite understand. It was called "Melmoth Reconciled". I loved the story itself, even though I didn't know what it referred to. Balzac was making fun of poor Sebastian Melmoth, saying that to sell his terrible sin which he couldn't get rid of, all he had to do was come to Paris - which was so full of vices. And in this story, Melmoth comes to Paris and first "sells" his sin to a wealthy banker. Then the banker realizes that what he'd bought was not that great, and sells it to somebody else, and so the sin goes down the social ladder until acquired by a very insignificant man.

Development

When I was in my 3rd or 4th year at the university, I once asked my cousin Naden'ka to recommend me a book to read. And, quite excited, she handed me a thick academic volume and said: "Read this. It's a very strange but fantastic book. The theme is the same as in Goethe's Faust, but it's different. It's like a matryoshka doll. One story within another". I read the title: "Melmoth the Wanderer". I immediately started to wonder...

Charles Robert Maturin. Melmoth the Wanderer.

As I read the story of Sebastian Melmoth who had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for 150 extra years of life and then spent these years vainly trying to find someone who would buy this "sin" from him, ranging from a prisoner of the Inquisition, about to be executed, to a naive young girl who had grown up on an uninhabited island in the Indian ocean having survived the shipwreck, I was thinking more and more about Franz Schubert's Wanderer. Could it be that Schubert wrote his brilliant piano piece after having read this book? Let's look at the odds.

Chronology

• Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer was published in 1820
  
• FranzSchuberts's Wanderer Fantasie was composed in November 1822, although some sources state late 1820

So, chronologically it is possible.

Melmoth's Popularity

Why would Schubert read Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer? The answer is simple: even though almost completely forgotten today, Melmoth the Wanderer was an extremely popular book back in those days. I have already mentioned Balzac's short story based on it. There are many more examples. One of them is Eugene Delacroix's The Interior of the Dominican Convent in Madrid painted back in 1831 and depicting one of the scenes from the book.

Another spectacular example is Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin which starts exactly as Melmoth the Wanderer and where Pushkin several times alludes to Maturin's book:

Порок любезен и в романе,

И там уж торжествует он.

Британской музы небылицы

Тревожат сон отроковицы

И стал теперь её кумир

Или задумчивый Вампир,

Или Мельмот, бродяга мрачный.

Melmoth can be traced in books by Mikhail Lermontov (Demon, A Hero of Our Time), Oscar Wilde - whose mother was Charles Robert Maturin's niece (The Picture of Dorian Grey) , Robert Louis Stevenson (The Bottle Imp), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (The Possessed) and many others. So why not Franz Schubert's as well?

Schubert's Wanderers

If you look at Franz Schubert's music you will find several Wanderers, not only the piano Fantasy. There are several songs or Lieds that bear the same title. Now, with songs it is easy. The words will tell you what the music is about!

• One of the songs is written to the poem by Schmidt von Lübeck and called Der Wanderer. Here's the English translation:
  

I come from highlands down to shore,

The valleys steam, the oceans roar.

I wander silent, joyless here:

My sigh keeps asking, Where? Oh, where?

Their sun appears to me so cold,

their blossoms limp, their life so old;

and what they speak of, empty fare:

I am a stranger everywhere.

Where are you, land, beloved home?

Imagined, sought, but never known!

The land, the land, whence hope does flow,

the land where all my roses grow,

where friends shall never meet in vain,

where all my dead shall rise again,

the land that speaks my language true:

Oh land, where are you?...

I wander silent, joyless here,

my sigh keeps asking, Where? Oh where?

The specters answer my distress:

"Where you are not, there's happiness."

• Another one is written to the poem by Johann Gabriel Seidl and called The Wanderer Speaks to the Moon. Here's the English translation and the YouTube performance follows:
  

I on the earth, you in the sky -

we both wander briskly on:

I stern and troubled, you mild and pure;

what might be the difference between us?

A stranger, I wander from land to land,

so rootless and unknown;

up mountains and down, into forests and out,

but nowhere am I - alas! - at home.

But you wander up and down,

from the eastern cradle to the western grave,

on your pilgrimage from land to land;

and wherever you are, you are at home.

The sky, endlessly spreading,

is your beloved homeland;

o happy is he who, wherever he goes,

still stands on native ground!

• There is still another Wanderer written by Friedrich von Schlegel. The original German version and the YouTube performance follow:

Wie deutlich des Mondes Licht Zu mir spricht,

Mich beseelend zu der Reise;

"Folge treu dem alten Gleise,

Wähle keine Heimat nicht.

Ew'ge Plage Bringen sonst die schweren Tage;

Fort zu andern Sollst du wechseln, sollst du wandern,

Leicht entfliehend jeder Klage."

Sanfte Ebb und hohe Flut, Tief im Mut,

Wandr' ich so im Dunkeln weiter,

Steige mutig, singe heiter,

Und die Welt erscheint mir gut.

Alles reine Seh ich mild im Widerschein,

Nichts verworren In des Tages Glut verdorren:

Froh umgeben, doch alleine.

• Still another Wanderer was written to the poem by Goethe quoted at the beginning.

Just reading and listening to all the other Wanderers written by Schubert

makes it obvious that the piano fantasy is nothing like any of them. It is

something totally different. It is a different concept of a wanderer. Not a

tired man searching the meaning of life. Not a person who was not

understood by others. Not someone looking for his place on earth. It is

desperation that you feel in the music. Not the matter of earthly life and

death - it is eternity that is at stake...

So, the conclusion is...

Conclusion

We will probably never know whether Schubert's piano

Fantasy called The Wanderer is based on Charles Robert

Maturin's book or not. But it is a beautiful hypothesis - is it not?