Transformations of a Pot of Basil

  

     Numbers in parentheses refer to line numbers of Keats’ poem; those in brackets refer to endnotes.  The Italian text of “La canzone del basilico” is appended.

 

     With its strong appeal to those most powerful of human tastes, those for love and for violence, the bizarre story of a lover’s head buried in a pot of basil has endured through many forms from mythic origins through an Italian folk song, Boccaccio’s short story, Keats’ narrative poem, a remarkable series of mostly pre-Raphaelite paintings, and a film by Pasolini. 

     Ultimately, the roots of the gruesome motif go back to archaic practices like the burying of offerings of human flesh to ensure fertility of which Frazer had so much to report, but here the sacrifice is futile, pathetic, hostile to the lovers’ vitality (though it does benefit the basil).  The song is thus sentimental, a very human cri de coeur from a woman whose lover is gone, a reveling in loss with no vestige remaining of a faith in the magical regeneration of nature.  The song, in keeping with its lyric genre, is first-person and passionate.  Like narration in many old English ballads, the story is only obliquely referenced; it must be independently known to the listener or in part inferred. 

     Boccaccio's version in the Decameron in which the narrative of the pot of basil is story five of day four, is naturally expanded.  While the song is mentioned at the end to conclude the story on a poignant emotional note, Boccaccio’s prose account, though only a few pages in length, includes sociological details, including the class distinction that exacerbates the brothers' anger at the affair between Lorenzo and Isabella and such psychological information as the cruel laughter as they feigned friendship with Lorenzo shortly before killing him.  The brothers’ flight to Naples when they fear they will be found out reinforces their villainy.  What had been primarily emotional expression in the song becomes here a drama.  Isabella’s vision of her dead lover is a sensational addition, and the gruesome details of her fondling and kissing the decapitated head contribute a macabre horror movie frisson.  Here the emphasis is not so much on defining a single strong emotion as in telling an entertaining story that will hold the interest of the party assembled outside Florence to wait out the pestilence.  Like the aristocratic audience in the Decameron’s frame, the modern reader takes pleasure in the turns of plot, in motivation and character, whereas the song expressed a pure emotion and little else.

     These two focusses – the expression of passion and the telling of a good story – are combined and extended in Keats’ narrative poem “Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil.”  Keats had taken a hint from Hazlitt’s remark that poetic versions of stories from Chaucer and Boccaccio “as that of Isabella” “if executed with taste and talent, could not fail to succeed in the present day” [1].  What is new in Keats’ version is the construction of image systems that add both aesthetic appeal and sharpen the thematic implications.  The tragedy of the lovers is here cast into a dialectical structural pattern with an attractive symmetry of balancing bipolar oppositions, while their fate is recast as a part of larger patterns of nature.  Joy and sadness are the warp and weft of life and thus of all action, all stories.

     The doubling begins in the first line when Isabella is called “fair” only to have “poor” and “simple” added, creating a tension the entire poem seeks not to resolve, but to make into a harmony.  Love is a “malady” (4), a “sick longing” (23), a “sad plight” (25).  “Love and misery” (50) coexist.  This is, of course, an ancient trope, found in Ovid, Catullus, and a thousand medieval courtly love lyrics, but Keats makes the additional move of linking the ambivalence of love to the turning of the seasons in nature, and, indeed, the whole narrative proceeds with the course of the year, from a hopeful spring and a glad summer to the ominous autumn and in the end the lethal grasp of winter.  In this way, when their love is young, it leads Lorenzo “from wintry cold” (65) to the “ripe warmth this gracious morning time” (68).  Their love is “like a lusty flower in June’s caress” (72).  Yet mythological references to Ariadne (95) and Dido (99) remind the reader that the wheel will turn and that there is “richest juice in poison-flowers” (104).

     With “the mid days of autumn,” the “breath of Winter comes” (249-250) and “plays a roundelay/ Of death” (from 249-252) until “quick Winter chill its dying hour!” (450)  Yet the cycle continues: “Love never dies, but lives” (397); the basil flourishes fed by tears and rotting flesh (LIV).  The tragic muse Melpomene (442) emerges and, in an image that combines death and healing, Isabella “withers” like a palm/ Cut by an Indian for its juicy balm” (447-448).

     Thus the reader has a perspective in which all things are turning and churning.  If one has a high position on the wheel of fortune this will surely mean that one will soon be descending, only to rise again as the vegetation does annually.  Isabella’s mourning for Lorenzo is balanced by the thriving plants in the pot.

     A surprising aspect of this dialectical view of nature and human life is the denunciation of capitalism and imperialism in stanzas XIV-XVI.  Isabella’s brothers are not only heartless toward her and murderous toward Lorenzo, their comfort is the product of countless workers’ suffering. 

  

for them alone did seethe

  A thousand men in troubles wide and dark:

Half-ignorant, they turn’d an easy wheel,

That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel.        (117-120)

 

Thus wealth for one depends on exploitation of another, just as sorrow follows joy and heat follows cold.  What had been a linear story of a particular couple becomes in Keats’ hands an exemplum of the instability of circumstance and the inevitable link of bipolar oppositions.  There are countless further antinomies, from the class distinction that prejudices the brothers to Keats’ desire both to write the purest poetry and to be popular.  Keats was probably hoping that Isabella would sell well, as the story about Hazlitt’s suggesting using the Decameron as a source suggests, just as van Gogh painted flowers with the idea that they would be marketable, and one need not believe Shelley’s suggestion that “savage criticism” had caused “a rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs” [2] to recognize that the poet sought recognition and was troubled by attacks like Lockhart’s in Blackwood’s Magazine.    

     In the following generations, his poem was very widely-read and reprinted, as well as inspiring an extraordinary number of works of visual art.  A favorite topic of the pre-Raphaelites and associated schools, representations of the story of the pot of basil were made by a good many artists,, among them William Holman Hunt (1868), Joseph Severn (1877), Meacci Isabella (1890), John White Alexander (1897), John William Waterhouse (1907). Edward Reginald Frampton (1912), John Melhuish Strudwick (1886), , Arthur Nowel (1904), Henrietta Rae (1905), W. J. Neatby (1913), and George Henry Grenville Manton (1919), among others.  These visual works are the epigones of the pot of basil tradition, more sentimental, faux-Romantic, faux-medieval and self-consciously aesthetic than the earlier versions. 

 

 

William Holman Hunt The Pot of Basil (1868)

 

In Hunt’s painting the elaborate decorative motifs almost overwhelm the subject matter.  Her embrace of the pot with its gruesome contents is sensual and erotic in an implicit blending of love and death.  Isabella’s features are those of Hunt’s recently deceased wife.    

     The tale has continued to attract interest in the later twentieth century, most notably [4] in Pasolini’s film version as the penultimate story in his 1971 The Decameron.  The erotic and, indeed, the perverse elements as well as the social criticism doubtless attracted Pasolini.  He makes Lorenzo a Sicilian, and considered of lower social status, though in Boccaccio he was a Pisan.  Thus the narrative continues to survive, in different media, styles, and themes.

     The narrative of the tragic lovers and the pot of basil has been repeatedly transformed, from archaic roots into a melancholy folk song, expressing the poignance of lost love, like fado or blues or, indeed, a good share of all popular music.  In Boccaccio’s hands it becomes an engaging narrative to pass an idle evening, while Keats used it as the basis to imply a sort of cosmic dialectical pulse in which what Wordsworth called “the still, sad music of humanity” [3] is heard inevitably again and again.  By the late Victorian era people were using the story as the stimulus for exercising refined taste (appreciating the luxurious patterns in Hunt’s painting) and similarly cultivated emotions (recall Poe’s declaration of the death of a beautiful woman as “the most poetical” of all subjects) [5].  Pasolini relished the raciness and gruesome weirdness of the old story when he brought it to the screen.  As each genre is aiming at a distinct effect, each must be judged by different standards.  The plot line itself is clearly only one element of an ensemble that together shape the impact of each new iteration of the pot of basil. 

 

 

    

1.  Vol 5 p. 82 The Complete Works of Wiliam Hazlitt vol. 5, p. 82

2. Preface to Adonais.

3.  “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.”

4.  I know of no other feature film retelling.  Shorts have been made by Michael Groom (2004),  Cara  Lawson (2017), and Madeleine Haslam (2017). 

5.  “The Philosophy of Composition.”

The Decline of American Democracy

 a retrospective

 

     Trump’s election clearly threatens the end of American democracy.  In spite of all its limitations and failures, in spite of racism, exploitation, and imperialism, this country had, at least up to this point, avoided military takeover and fascist dictatorship.  There will be for the next four years a leader who admires tyranny and cares for nothing but his own power.  Immigrants, gays, and those who lack what Trump called his “beautiful white skin” will suffer in particular, as will all the poor.  In fact the great majority of Americans lost last night.  All women and all workers will find their rights restricted and their options narrowed.  Everyone will suffer, in fact, except a few billionaires.  The voices of scientists regarding climate change and vaccines will go unheard while charlatans and know-nothings govern policy.  Knowledgeable foreign policy experts will be replaced by hacks.  Politically neutral civil servants will lose their jobs to the toadies in a return to the long-discredited spoils system.

     During the Lyndon Johnson administration I and others felt that the Republican Party was all but obsolete.  Democrats had held the White House for a generation with the exception of the two terms of the basically non-political war hero Dwight Eisenhower.  The New Deal brought together big city residents and many rural working people into a consensus that recognized the positive role of government in social problem-solving.  The business tycoons who had always powered the G. O. P. found through necessity that most Democratic politicians were equally willing to accommodate their wishes, and progressives began  to condemn what was called corporate liberalism.  Both parties followed the old Cold War assumptions in world affairs, with Democrats sometimes feeling they had to be even more anti-Communist just to prove their Americanism. 

     The critical change in the American political balance of power during that period was Johnson’s reluctant acceptance of the cause of civil rights, the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and the shift in the South, on purely racist grounds, from wholly Democratic territory to solid Republican, after a transitional pause to embrace George Wallace.  The loss of the Deep South, combined with the disaffection of those who opposed the war and felt outrage after the brutal repression in Chicago that summer, was enough to elect Richard Nixon, whom everyone knew to be a shifty character.  The Tet Offensive led many to think the conduct of the war by the U. S. should be even more violent.  We now know that Nixon while only a candidate was secretly interfering with peace talks to heighten his own political chances.  Yet even Nixon, though, while personally corrupt, supported the Equal Rights Amendment, the Environmental Protection Act, and a sort of national health system, placing him far to the left of his party today. 

     The formation of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority placed evangelical Christians in the service of conservatism (in spite of Christ’s criticism of the wealthy and sympathy for the poor and outcast) and then the seizure of the American embassy in Teheran in 1979 inspired a moralistic nationalism that ousted Carter and found a leader in Ronald Reagan whose career as a movie star boosted his support among the poorly-educated.   His terms allowed him to crush the air traffic controllers’ union PATCO, cut taxes for the wealthy, senselessly invade Grenada, illegally aid the contras in Nicaragua, and appoint political activists to the Supreme Court.

     Though Clinton had largely maintained center right policies and had managed to run the government with historic surpluses, the scandal of his affair with Monica Lewinsky tainted the end of his administration and then Nader’s campaign (assisted by the Republican Leadership Council) and, in the end, a decision from the politicized Supreme Court assisted Bush Jr. into office.  (He and Reagan were surely the most intellectually lightweight of modern presidents until the astonishing incapacity of Trump.)  Bush appointed more highly partisan Supreme Court justices, leading to the egregious Citizens United decision in 2010 which allowed big money even more of a say in American elections.

     And finally, the stage was set for Trump, with his phony reputation as a successful businessman, his widespread popularity as a television personality, and his willingness to be overt about his prejudices.  He provided scapegoats for many working-class white voters who had genuine economic anxieties and grievances.  Racism, sexism, and nativism gave them someone to blame, and old ideas of machismo led many to admire behavior that was simply rude. 

     What revived the Republican Party after it had seemed in my youth to be waning was a combination of the old corporate wealth, always unsatisfied, with moralistic Christians, many of modest means, old-fashioned male chauvinists, and ultra-nationalists.  Trump’s contempt for women and for other races unfortunately but undeniably held an appeal for just over half of America’s voters.  Now we are stuck with Trump for another four years, a man who unashamedly promotes himself, insults women, immigrants, and the handicapped, and who looks out for nobody but a few ultra-rich friends.  Perhaps his worst characteristic is his erratic decision-making, based on impulse and whim and without regard for advice or precedents.  There is, it is sad to say, no telling what the man will do.  This country’s recovery from the 2024 election will be long and hard, if it can occur at all. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Month of Films

flash reviews of twenty-two films 

Actually I ended this after only three weeks.  Perhaps I am watching too many old movies, but I have little taste for most newer ones.  The selection here is not necessarily representative, though it does include some of the genres to which I regularly return: noir, old comedies, silents.  

On Approval

     On Approval, a 1944 British comedy based on Fredric Lonsdale’s play, is a most enjoyable farce, something like watered-down Oscar Wilde.  Written, produced, and Directed by Clive Brooks, who also does a grand job portraying the cynical and witty Duke of Bristol.  The cast also includes Googie Withers, Beatrice Lillie, and Roland Culver, and the two couples attract and repel each other in the most satisfyingly symmetrical way.  The opening sequence, in a documentary style, jokes about WWI, in  a way one would have thought scarcely possible during WWII, and the closing fantasy, in which photographs of the characters become animated, are unusually clever.

 

Genuine

     Everyone loves Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but his other films are also strong Expressionist works.  Though the original subtitle was Tragödie eines seltsamen Hauses (Tragedy of a Strange House), the film was also released as Genuine: A Tale of a Vampire, in spite of the fact that Genuine is not really a vampire.  Portrayed by Fern Andra, she is a marvelously feral woman, snapping like a beast, yet fascinating men.  The primary appeal of Genuine (1920) is certainly Cesar Klein’s wonderfully weird sets, representing a world of the imagination. 

 

The Secret Window

     David Koepp’s 2004 The Secret Window, based on a Stephen King story with a score in  part by Philip Glass, is the sort of thriller one might enjoy the first time through, but which few would care to see again.  Johnny Depp’s rumpled nerves as the main character and John Turturro’s fierce understated menace as his antagonist are creditable, but there are continuity problems.  Why did the neighbor first say he saw a stranger, and then that he didn’t if Shooter never existed?  Why does the dog exit, and we don’t ever see Mort follow him until he goes out to discover the animal’s body.  The issue of the conclusion of the story, with the alteration to killing the wife, and the revelation that Shooter means “shoot her” are one-time surprises at best.  Clues that the makers may not have felt the story quite held together might be inferred from the facts that the film has an ending different from the print story and that still another variation is on the home video version.

 

Theodora Goes Wild

     This 1936 screwball comedy directed by Richard Boleslawski delivers the requisite laughs and mild social satire of its genre with Irene Dunne as a sheltered small-town resident living with her conservative maiden aunts who is somehow the pseudonymous author of a best-selling racy novel.  Her sophistication is challenged by Melvyn Douglas, her publisher’s illustrator, who promptly makes her drunk and invites her to his apartment from which she flees.  The light play with impropriety continues when he follows her to her village and manages (in an unlikely turn of events) to become a gardener as well as later, when she returns to town holding a baby some assume to be hers.  It is all light and fluffy, if implausible.  The director, an émigré artist, had been a pioneering teacher of  Stanislavski’s methods, and Orson Welles wrote and directed a radio version, also starring Dunne, for his Mercury Playhouse in 1940.

The Garden of Allah

     Directed (like Theodora Goes Wild) by Boleslawski, this 1936 film derives its charm in  part from the exotic desert landscapes – this was only the third film made using the Technicolor process –  and in part from the acting of Charles Boyer and Marlene Dietrich.  Boyer is painfully anxious, silent, and troubled as a monk who has run away from his monastery in North Africa in search of love with Dietrich, whose role here is uncharacteristically moral and thoughtful.  Contemporary viewers will probably be surprised at the horror with which she regards his abandonment of his vocation, and might be distressed rather than impressed, at his leaving his beloved to return to the Trappists.  (Anyone who accepts the Mother Superior advising Dietrich to venture out into the sands to settle her soul will find that it is all providential.)  This piety coexists with John Carradine’s turn as a presumably Islamic diviner whose role, like that of the title, is to emphasize the story’s exciting foreignness.

 

By Candlelight

     Director James Whale showed equal talent at sophisticated comedy as he did at the horror genre for which he is best known.  This 1933 film By Candlelight, adapted from Siegfried Geyer’s play by P. G. Wodehouse, is an outstanding example.  With farce elements of mistaken identities and people shunted into back rooms just as a jealous husband is about to appear, the story is consistently amusing, and it  delivers on the “pre-Code” label with frequent double entendres and suggestive details such as when the butler adds a pillow to the bed when he expects his employer to be entertaining a lady.  Even though the plot’s parallelism is transparent early on – the butler is pretending to be a prince and the maid to be a countess -- its unfolding is consistently entertaining.

 

Desert Fury

     Lewis Allen’s 1947 Desert Fury has a familiar plot-line: the vulnerable young woman is rescued from a relationship with a criminal by the hero.  The bad guy dies and the couple glides off into a happy future.  This basic narrative is enriched and complicated by several striking elements.  Luminous, almost garish,  Technicolor photography by Edwad Cronjager and Chales Lang is accompanied by a similarly sumptuous score by Miklós Rózsa that moves from heart-stopping excitement to romantic violins, to bouncy Western themes.  What has attracted most recent notice is the clear implication of a gay relationship between the characters of John Hodiak and Wendell Corey.  Though treated as a minion by his intimate friend, the latter is fiercely jealous after Lizabeth Scott’s appearance as a rival love object.  Further, Mary Astor is represented as wishing to be her daughter’s “friend” or “sister,” taking all responsibility while shielding the younger woman from the male betrayal she had herself experienced. The late forties was the boom-time for quasi-Freudian psychological elements in movies, and plenty here invites analysis as the characters trade suggestive remarks and slap each around.  Burt Lancaster, meanwhile, is the straightest one around, if the hypermasculinity of his role as cop as well as cowboy and rodeo rider can be considered normal. 

 

The Magic Christian

     Joseph McGrath’s 1969 film The Magic Christian never holds together, in spite of the considerable talent that went into it.  The director had worked on the Goon Show and writer Terry Southern and star Peter Sellers had been in part responsible for the memorable Dr. Strangelove.  Here they are joined by Ringo Starr (who walks through his part passively as though the mere glow of Beatles fame is sufficient), John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Raquel Welch, Spike Milligan, Christopher Lee, Richard Attenborough and Roman Polanski.  Yul Brynner does a drag number, and the film’s theme is composed by Paul McCartney.  Yet still it doesn’t work.  Randomness can be effective, when incoherence itself is a meaningful stylistic choice, but it here becomes tiresome, especially since the one joke – that people will do anything for money – is repeated far too often.   The scene in which greedy and well-dressed men wallow in gore and excrement to grab a few banknotes is vitiated by the fact that it simply underlines what has been conveyed multiple times before.  More than anything else, perhaps, I was amused by Sellers’ vocal modulations at certain moments.  McGrath had worked on Hard Day’s Night and Help as well as on the Beatles’ videos featuring a number of their hits.  Simple high spirits and chaos served just fine for those productions, but a feature film requires something more.

 

Destiny

     Fritz Lang’s Destiny, originally titled Der Müde Tod, is a fantasy in  which a young women contends with death in an attempt to reclaim her lover, in the course of which three stories of tragic love and death set in exotic locales are related.  Here the art direction  is less significant than in Genuine or Caligari, though the Near Eastern and the Chinese towns are represented with more attention  to the charm of the strange than to authenticity.  The principal story is simple enough, and its conclusion in which the lovers are reunited but only in death, is familiar.  The three internal stories are likewise elementary – in each case outsiders aligned with the powers that be frustrate and ultimately bring to a violent end the lovers’ relationship.  The chief appeal of the film as a whole is simply its joyous embrace of the cinematic possibilities: flitting among historical eras and around the globe with scenes enhanced by  special effects such as double exposures and A Hi’s flying carpet.  Bernhard Goetzke’s somber performance as Death is more sympathetic than most (He asks, ”Why do people hate me simply for doing God’s will?”), though in general highly conventional, and I was surprised to learn that Lang credited his storyline not only to the Indian tale of Savitri, but more intimately to childhood dreams and visions of his own.

 

Inside Llewyn Davis

     I have no idea why both the BBC and the New York Times feature this film on their lists of the best movies since the turn of the last century.  Though I am a fan of Dave Von Ronk and an observer if the early ‘sixties folk scene, this unpleasant and shapeless story seems to me to convey very little of either.  The assault (apparently based on a true incident) has no clear meaning in relation to the period, yet it is shown twice (somewhat confusingly).  Davis is alternately explosively nasty and quietly brooding.  Jean accuses him of caring more about the lost cat than about her, but I, for one, did, the same.  I guess it would be inappropriate to expect the Coens to represent the social warmth and idealistic politics of the period.

 

Ménilmontant

     Named by Pauline Kael as her favorite film of all time, Dimitri Kirsanoff’s 1926 Ménilmontant’s lack of intertitles signifies the director’s dedication to purely visual cinematic values.  The montages, hand-held sequences, and double exposures are striking and, for the most part, effective.  Kirsanoff was originally Russian and surely owed much to Eisenstein (though he claimed to be self-taught), but he is innovative as well.  This film was his second.  He made three features and two shorts during the silent era and one feature with sound (including music by   Arthur Honegger and Arthur Hoérée, but never thereafter exercised creative control.   Every cinemaphile should watch this thirty-eight minutes of intense visual code. 

 

You're Telling Me!

     Though not one of Fields’ best films (among which I would count The Fatal Glass of Beer, The Barber Shop, The Pharmacist, International House, and anything with Mae West), You're Telling Me! (1934) is nonetheless consistently entertaining.  With Fields the whole point is his routines which he repeatedly reused and, unlike most comedians, copyrighted.  If he goes on a bit long, the viewer knows another routine will soon follow.  As usual, this film finds Fields in a small-minded burg, with plenty of gossipy ladies on his case and, here, a few ne’er-do-well male friends.  We expect character types, not realism, in this sort of comedy and he is disreputable, his long-suffering wife is censorious, and his daughter’s prospective mother-in-law snooty, all contributing to the background for his shtick.  The young lovers, as in Marx brothers plots (or, for that matter, most of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales), do little more than create pauses between the scenes that his audience came to see.

 

Fading Gigolo

     The viewer wonders if John Turturro’s 2013 comedy, featuring himself and Woody Allen in the leads, is having a bit of fun with itself.  Turturro is not the most obviously sexy of movie stars, and the plot is packed with implausibilities.  How likely is a dermatologist to ask her patient, a down-at-heels book dealer, if he might be able to arrange a ménage-a-trois for her?  Why does Vanessa Paradis’ Satmar character suddenly accept her suitor who had complained that she was avoiding him?  Does the rabbinical court think she’s in good standing after she says she is lonely?  What is Jade Dixon’s character doing in the story at all, except to highlight the mixture of Hasidic and Black in Williamsburg?  What will become of Murray when his shop has closed?  The film’s main charm is Turturro and Allen together.

 

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

     In 1927 F. W. Murnau, the German director best known for Nosferatu, was invited to Hollywood by William Fox where he made this melodrama.  The film was in several ways innovative.  Made just prior to the sound era, it used the Movietone sound-on-film process to include a sound track and a few other sounds.  (One hears at one point Gounod's composition Funeral March of a Marionette, later adopted by the Alfred Hitchcock television show.)  Intertitles are sparingly used, and the camera work is striking, with long tracking shots and creative use of superimposed images.  The sets are fanciful and the film is worth watching to see the dizzying city and the amusement park scenes.  Oddly, Murnau seems to have thought himself still in Europe: the unnamed couple at the center of the story have a home with a thatched roof and, at one point, an orchestra conductor tells his musicians to play “a peasant dance” whereupon the man and his wife proceed to do what looks like a mélange of Central European and Russian moves.  Sunrise reminds the twenty-first century viewer of the days when cinema was young and often more cinematic and  more purely visual than it is today. 

Bedtime Story

     A 1941 comedy directed by Alexnder Hall, a productive contract director for Columbia for years, Bedtime Story features Fredric March as a zany playwright who schemes to keep his wife , played by an elegant Loretta Young, while refusing to leave the theater.  It is a well-done if fairly routine piece of work.  A highlight for me was Robert Benchley’s performance as a sort of pal and casting director for March’s character, though Helen Westley (who had in fact been an outstanding actor, active in  the Washington Square Players and the Theatre Guild) was also quite amusing.  The mad accumulating scene toward the end in which March’s rival’s apartment is filled with crowds of people, among them servers, repair and exterminating service workers, and drunken conventioneers.  When the security staff shows up, the place erupts in a free-for-all.  I was reminded of the stateroom sequence in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, which had been released six years earlier. 

 

Scarlet Street

     Fritz Lang’s 1945 film had a similar plot and starred the same actors as his 1944 The Woman in the Window: Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, and Dan Duryea.  The story, about a mousey cashier who is enthralled by a hard-hearted woman, recalls as well The Blue Angel and Of Human Bondage.  There are several convention-bending twists at the end that might surprise a first-time viewer, and the conclusion is so bleak with the murderer never apprehended to boot – that the film was banned in Milwaukee, Atlanta, and New York State.  Duryea, like Richard Widmark, exceled at playing lowlifes, and he is thoroughly despicable here, while Joan Bennett underplays for the most part, and Robinson is so very passive as to almost lose the viewer’s interest.  Curious canvases representing his character’s Sunday paintings present an odd notion of what might have intrigued the art world at the time.  They had been made by Hollywood artist John Decker, whose other works include representations of W. C. Fields as Queen Victoria and Blue Boy with the face of Harpo Marx.

 

Human Desire

     Fritz Lang’s Human Desire (1954) is certainly watchable, if only for Gloria Grahame’s wounded, pouty  performance as Vicki Buckley.  The theatrical poster declared, in lettering larger than the film’s title “She was born to be bad . . . to be kissed . . . to make trouble.”  And so she does in this version of Zola's novel La Bête humaine.  Glenn Ford’s character Jeff Warren, a recently returned Korean War veteran portrayed as an ordinary worker (he says his dream, apart from his work, is to do a lot of fishing who generally seems a nice guy.  Thus the viewer may be surprised when he more or less readily agrees to knock off her husband, his co-worker.  In Zola’s hands, and in the first two films of the story, the character suffers from hereditary madness and is seized by violent outbursts victimizing women, and the plot made a bit more sense.  There is considerable footage that will engage railroad buffs, but cinephiles would do better to see the Jean Renoir’s 1938 film La Bête Humaine with Jean Gabin. 

 

Goin’ to Town

     Originally titled Now I’m a Lady, a title to which the Hays Office objected, Goin’ to Town (1935) was directed by Alexander Hall but the film’s genius is its star and screenplay writer Mae West.  The jokes were sufficiently suggestive that the censors found plenty in the dialogue and even the songs to complain about.  (Of course, West commented in a late interview with Dick Cavett that she would sometimes include bits she knew would be cut in order to satisfy the moral authorities so they would allow her to retain the lines she really wanted to keep.)  Fans of Mae West will enjoy her sinuous postures and double entendres, as well as several bluesy songs by Sam Fain and Irving Kahal.   She even sings a bit of Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah!  Her dedicated pursuit of an English Earl, for true love yet, and her social climbing may seem a bit dissonant with her usual character, but who cares about the plot?  The original New York Times review found her to be past her prime here, but Goin’ to Town remains thoroughly entertaining with plenty of good one-liners, even if some may be slightly shopworn.

 

Cry of the Hunted

     Critics refer to veteran B-picture director Joseph H. Lewis’s 1953 Cry of the Hunted as a noir, though it is better described as a chase drama.  Not only is it set for the most part in Louisiana bayous which hold menaces far different from those of urban back alleys -- alligators, disease-inducing water, and even a pit of deadly quicksand – but its criminal is a sweet guy (though his wife is less principled).  Virtuoso actor Vittorio Gassman plays a fugitive and Barry Sullivan his pursuer (oddly, not a cop but a prison administrator).  Much recent reception of the film has focused on the homoerotic implications of the two, who are repeatedly generous to each other and end up buddies.  Even when they are grappling, it looks like horseplay.  Sullivan’s  character has a weird dream that the psychoanalytically inclined might view in this light; at any rate, it makes little sense otherwise. 

 

Three Weird Sisters

      This 1948 drama, directed by Daniel Birt, attracted my attention when I saw that Dylan Thomas was a co-screenwriter, a job that he might have regarded as hackwork but which produced an atmospheric film with a surprising storyline.  The sisters, played by Nancy Price, Mary Clare, Mary Merrall, are indeed weird as decayed aristocrats in a Welsh mining village (the setting is surely what suggested Thomas to the producers).  The ladies seem merely superannuated vestiges of the past until their sense of honorable noblesse oblige leads them to try to murder their brother in a town in which they command such respect that no one will believe them capable of such villainy until their third or fourth attempt.  This was Birt’s first feature and the final appearance of a still-young veteran of two Hitchcock films with a redoubtable name, Nova Pilbeam.

 

The Trouble with Harry

     This Hitchcock rarity, a true comedy, indicates that the master was wise when he returned to thrillers, yet this film is not without its appeal.  A consistent tension is here, with  the contrast between the oh-so-ordinary, here signified by a small Vermont village, and its residents, who turn out to be rather surprising once one gets acquainted.  For one thing, they all are very blasé about the appearance of a corpse and little concerned about informing the authorities, though each might be implicated in the man’s death.  Shirley MacLaine in her film debut is especially entertaining with her light insouciance, though Edmund Gwenn (who had played Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34^th Street) also excels in keeping it frothy and just slightly absurd as the retired captain.  However, the spirits prove a bit thin in the end, and the humor is insufficient to maintain the story’s length.  Nonetheless, the difficulties are all resolved and there are, not one, but two, marriages in view at the end.  (Do not miss the Saul Steinberg drawing with the opening credits.)

 

Lonelyhearts

      Vincent J. Donehue’s 1958 Lonelyhearts, based on Nathanael Wests’ Miss Lonelyhearts, starred  Montgomery Clift, Robert Ryan and Myrna Loy.  A principal pleasure of the film is watching Montgomery Clift’s discomfiture at life.  Though at first he feels too much empathy for his correspondents, an unfortunate encounter leads him to a more despairing cynicism, and through it all he grimaces and looks pained.  All the Angst of the 1950s teenage youth earlier defined by Marlon Brando and James Dean is here painfully reiterated.  Like Johnny in The Wild One and Jim Stark in Robel Without a Cause, Clift’s Adam White feels the pain  of not fitting in.  Robert Ryan is chilling as the cool, utterly amoral manipulative boss who sets out to destroy the young writer’s illusions (but who seem to soften at the very end).

 

 

 

Bankei’s Zen Made Easy

  

Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in Peter Haskel’s Bankei Zen: Translations from the Record of Bankei; those in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

     The prize of enlightenment is so precious, one might naturally think it must be very difficult to attain.  The history of Zen certainly includes some heroic strivers, among them the Second Patriarch Huìkě who cut off his own hand to offer Bodhidharma as evidence of his earnestness.  The very last advice the Buddha gave his followers was to strive hard [1], and monks of the sangha have virtually always been given a rigorous and demanding regimen of meditation and sutra chanting. 

     Yet Zen, particularly the Rinzai (Linji) tradition that arose from the Southern School has always recognized the possibility of sudden enlightenment.  Their founder Huìnéng, after all, experienced what the Japanese came to call satori when he overheard a passage of the Diamond Sutra.  Though monasteries of all sects continued the demanding spiritual practices they had inherited, none considered diligent effort sufficient to guarantee enlightenment, and many thought spiritual liberation might suddenly arrive at any moment. 

     The seventeenth century Japanese monk Bankei served as abbot of several important monasteries (including that at Ryoanji in Kyoto where the celebrated “dry garden” of raked sand and rocks is found).  He was as well a genuinely popular teacher whose public sessions attracted tens of thousands of listeners.  His approach to Zen, though singular in its simplicity and surprising to many, was approved by such masters as he could locate and his work became sufficiently influential that he is today regarded as one of the greatest exponents of Japanese Buddhism [2].

     Bankei’s central teaching is his exhortation to dwell in the Unborn Buddha Mind, a concept derived from the concept called in Sanskrit anutpāda, which is to say unconceived, or unborn [3].  His sermons hammer away at this one simple counsel to the point of becoming tiresome.  “Straightway abiding in the Unborn Buddha Mind just as it is , and you’re a living  tathagata from  today forever after” (4).  “Everything is perfectly managed with the Unborn” (13).  ”You’re always a living buddha, and there’s no time when you don’t remain a buddha” (22).  One need do nothing to achieve this status; it is in fact always already present {4].

     Bankei repeatedly recounts his own history of pursuing enlightenment by practicing zazen, reciting sutras, and studying Chinese to read the accounts of earlier masters, only to assure his followers that they need do none of these, though, if they wish, they may (49).  Bankei does not shout or strike meditators, seeking to shock them into enlightenment.  He tells them that, rather than anticipating years of rigorous and perhaps fruitless effort and self-denial, they are fortunate to hear his advice which has the potential to bring them enlightenment the very same day they hear his message.  The question is problematized by Bankei’s claim that “there’s no such thing as enlightenment” (83) and that “talking about wanting to achieve ‘enlightenment’ is certainly useless.” (84). But the aspirant need not worry about his meaning.  Everything, Bankei says, is already perfect.  There are no rules: “Do whatever you like” (58, 155), he says.  A student need do nothing but recognize the fact of a liberation fully present in every moment [5].

     Thus he insists that moral laws and miracles are irrelevant (7), there is no need even to speak of Buddhism or Zen (8), koans are nothing but “old wastepaper” (23) and icons useless (25).  All methods are merely expedients (103) and, if study has any role at all, it would be only to confirm one’s satori (114). 

     One must, however, contend with an adversary perhaps more subtle than memorizing characters on a sparse diet with a harsh teacher: the old bugbear of self-consciousness.  Bankei notes that his listeners are paying attention to his sermon with their conscious minds, yet they are simultaneously aware of other extraneous sounds such as sparrow, crows, or human voices which they hear without intention or effort, thus with the Buddha Mind [5].  While one may intentionally concentrate on a lecture or on achieving a goal, one must sneak up on oneself unawares to avoid paying attention or striving.  Surely this is the reason that most of Bankei’s listeners did not find their lives transformed after once hearing him speak.  Will is powerless, one must fall without thought into the Unborn Mind . 

     By his account Bankei’s own enlightenment came after prolonged arduous effort, when he was ill and had not eaten for a week, “on the verge of death.”  He spit against the wall and, when he “noticed that the sputum had congealed into a jet-black lump like a soapberry,” he suddenly realized “Everything is perfectly managed with the Unborn . . .I’ve just been uselessly knocking myself out!” Presumably his overstressed physical state had taken him out of himself and brought him momentary thoughtlessness which was sufficient to alter his consciousness, leaving his spirit “clear and buoyant” (13).  Yet he insists that his listeners need not follow his path.

     Bankei does not shrink from self-contradiction; indeed, he embraces paradox.  In spite of criticizing the traditional means for pursuing enlightenment, since one need do nothing whatever to find the Unborn Buddha Mind, he also declares that “to practice is hard” (67) and advises students “don ‘t fritter away your time” (89).  In spite of considering koan study “of no particular usefulness,” (23) he uses koans to bring his followers to understand his position. 

     The very koan that elicits Bankei’s dismissal of the device in fact enriches the subtlety of his vision.  An old man asks Hyakujō Oshō whether an enlightened person remains subject to causation.  He says he had told a follower of his own that such a one would no longer be subject to birth and death whereupon the student was condemned to five hundred lives as a fox.  When he was told that an enlightened state “does not ignore causation,” the student was freed from his fate and died in the form of a fully enlightened fox [6].  His error had presumably been to provide too definite an answer.  Bankei thus reminds his listeners of the value of such old stories for some and warns against accepting duality.  Bankei's use of the story, reminds his followers of the teaching while holding it at arm’s length, using it while explicitly rejecting its value. 

     Another central koan for Bankei’s Unborn Buddha Mind is that in which a monk who pursues the Sixth Patriarch, expecting to challenge his succession is startled into a higher consciousness by being told  “Think neither good nor evil. At this very moment, what is the original self of the monk Myo?” [7]  This “original self,” identical with the Unborn, though always and inevitably present, is obscured by delusion and accumulated habitual ignorance.   Hui-neng assures his questioner who inquires whether this is the most profound mystery that “what I have told you is no secret at all.  When you look into your own true self, whatever is deeper is found right there.”  He sounds here very much like Bankei.

     We twenty-first century Americans may feel that our era, even more than seventeenth century Japan is a “degenerate age of Buddhism” (6), sorely in need of a kickstart of insight.  Bankei reminds us that the Unborn Buddha Mind is always present, always perfect, for those who can recover a spontaneous unselfconscious grasp of it.

 

 

 

1.  "Behold now, bhikkhus, I exhort you: All compounded things are subject to vanish. Strive with earnestness!" Maha-parinibbana Sutta: Last Days of the Buddha translated from the Pali by Sister Vajira & Francis Story.

2.  In the century following Bankei, Hakuin rose to prominence.  He was an advocate of very rigorous and unremitting practice and very critical of what to him was “do-nothing” Zen, including that practiced by Bankei’s followers.  Most modern Japanese Zen has roots in Hakuin.

3.  The term is often encountered in the Prajñāpāramitā Sutras and in the Lankavatara Sutra as well as in  Nagarjuna.

4.  Readers may be reminded of the use of the expression “always already” (immer schon) in Heidegger, Althusser, Derrida, and others.

5.  This point appears on pages 5, 27, 28, and 33.  The reader may be reminded on Cage’s celebrated piece 4’33” (1952).  In another image, Bankei notes that one withdraws the hand from hot fire without thought, prior to conscious perception.

6.  Case 2 Mumonkan.  The phrases here quoted are from Two Zen Classics: The Gateless Gate and the Blue Cliff Records, translated with commentaries by Katsuki Sekida and edited and introduced by A. V. Grimstone, p. 31. 

7.  This is quoted from the above edition of the Mumonkan, Case 23, p. 81. This story appears as well in the Sung version (the Hui-sin edition) of the Platform Sutra.  The questioner’s Chinese name is Hui-ming.

Zweig’s Obsessive Protagonists

 

 

     Apart from folk stories, most ancient and medieval narratives concerned gods or aristocrats undergoing major upheavals.  Novel writers found drama then in bourgeois and sometimes even proletarian milieux.  By the time of Chekhov overt drama came to seem unnecessary.  Character could be revealed by the smallest of events, a vague impression, a velleity, a trivial accident.  With the insights of Freud the significance of matters of apparently little consequence emerged, justifying attention to details that could sometimes generate major crises.

     Stefan Zweig was a good friend of Freud’s, corresponding with him and visiting for decades.  In a letter of October 21, 1932, Zweig wrote: “Everything that I write bears your influence and perhaps you can tell that the strength to tell the truth, possibly the essential element in my work, is due to you.  You have provided a model for an entire generation.” [1]  Zweig’s stories depict more or less ordinary protagonists, driven by one stimulus or another into odd and extreme cathexes, producing overmastering obsessive-compulsive behaviors that come to dominate their lives.

     In the world of Stefan Zweig’s stories, a façade of stable respectability (not unlike that that marked most of Freud’s patients) masks turbulent emotions, usually erotic, that prove uncontrollable and ultimately ruinous.  The psychoanalytic influence is evident, but in no formulaic application but rather in the general sense of a more or less calm-looking ego fronting, as long as possible, for a cyclonic id.  In one novelle after another the reader finds minds in extremis, helpless to manage obsession.  Whether the psychological structure mirrors the apparent cultured bourgeois satisfaction of the Vienna of the author’s youth thrown into the madness of Nazism or not is debatable, but the parallel seems apt.

     In Zweig’s “Chess Story” (“Schachnovelle”) the political analogy is explicit as the protagonist is forced into a kind of madness by Nazi persecution.   To escape the irrational lunacy of a criminal government, he mentally retreats to the ordered if competitive world of the chess, a realm entirely abstract and idealized, empty equally of virtue and wickedness.  The ego is entirely overpowered by his absorption in this world of the mind, producing a total breakdown.

     In “The Man who Ran Amok” (“Amoklaufer”) a doctor already strained by long service in a tropical colony hesitates to perform an illegal abortion for a respectable lady who consults him.  When she then dies after resorting to a back-alley practitioner, he is overcome with regret and himself commits suicide.  Doubtless his reaction would have been milder had his sensitive nerves not been affected by long colonial service, but he is also aware that his initial rejection of her request was in part due to his resentment of her position among the elite.  Thus it is his own inhumanity rather than her suffering that disturbs him.  The use of the Malay term amok highlights the fact that the cultivated European is every bit as capable of mad behavior as the Asian tribesman.

     In both these stories there is a narrative frame; the story is told to another character as though to hear it directly from the mouth of the neurotic would be too agonizing.  The frame stories insulate the reader from too hot a point of passion, placing the reader at a safe remove from the mental maelstrom of the protagonists.

     “The Burning Secret” (“Brennendes Geheimnis”) has a simple third person omniscient narrator.  The main character is a baron identified as a “ladykiller” (“Frauenjäger”) who pursues liaisons as a sort of sport.  Cynically cultivating a relationship with the son of a lady in whom he is interested, he offends the child who, realizing he is simply being used, resolves to frustrate the would-be lover.  Here the main character experiences only frustration from his compulsive and selfish romancing.  Though powered by the dynamo of erotic desire, the baron’s game is in fact altogether ego-centered.  Such men as he “are always burdened with passion, but not that of a lover, rather that of a player, cold, calculating, and dangerous.” [2]  With his thoughtless attempt to use the child Edgar, the baron condemns his own project.  If he cannot bear to be alone [3], it is perhaps because he feels so strongly the ugliness of his own soul.

    “Angst” (“Fear” or “Anxiety), the single word that best defines the Zeitgeist of the first half of the twentieth century, is the title of a Novelle with a typical bourgeoise as protagonist.  She resembles a case study by Freud with her comfortable, respectable home and social standing.  Yet her sexual desire leads her to an affair that she might have initially considered a mere peccadillo but which comes to occupy her constantly, bringing ceaseless anxiety.  A surprise twist in the end produces what might seem even more surprising: a somewhat optimistic ending. 

 

She distinctly recognized the boy’s voice and felt surprised how much it was like his father’s.  A gentle smile came to her lips and rested there quietly.  With eyes closed she lay that she might all the more deeply enjoy the thought of what her life was and her happiness as well.  There remained a bit of pain within but it was a promising one, glowing and yet mild, just as wounds burn before they scar over for good. 

 

     The first-person narrator of “Letter from an Unknown Woman” (“Brief einer Unbekannten”) has dedicated her entire life since the age of thirteen to her passion for a writer, though he is never really aware of her existence.  She says “I will tell you my whole life, that truly began only on the day that I came to know you.” [5]  She even bears him a child that dies as she does as well, without his ever recognizing her.  She describes her passion as dominating her entirely, “hopeless, servile, submissive,” and as “slavish, dog-like, and devoted.” [6]  Clearly she suffers from what an observer would call an obsessive, abnormal fixation, yet to her it is altogether inevitable and even the writer, for whom she has not existed until she had died, seems in the end to accept the love-offering. 

 

He could feel a death and an immortal love.  Something broke internally in his soul and he thought of that invisible woman, incorporeal and passionate like music in the distance. [7]

 

     In each of these stories someone is driven by overpowering emotion to a desperate state of mind.  In most cases the impetus is sexual, though the chess player responding to unjust imprisonment is an exception. [8]  For Zweig civilization and rationality are shallow and deceptive and the ego is in the last analysis impotent, unable to control the passions.  In the past Zweig was once very highly thought of, particularly toward the end of his lifetime (though a rediscovery has occurred in recent years on a small scale), but he has always had his critics.  A reviewer finds him “fake” and “stiltedly extreme,” a “schematic grand guignol.”  The author himself admits to a “preference . . . for intense, intemperate characters.” [9]  Perhaps the reader must have at least glimpsed a life out of control to realize that the irrational is as central to our minds’ operation as what we generally consider to be logic, and for the most part more so.  Zweig’s artful prose describes the psychic disorder that can an any moment overcome even those who seem the most sensible and proper among us.  The author’s suicide during World War II suggests that the danger of such mental storms does not belong to fiction alone.

 

 

1.  “In Alles was ich schreibe ist von Ihnen beeindruckt und vielleicht spȗren Sie, dass der Mut zur Wahrhaftigkeit, der möglicherweise das Wesentliche meiner Bücher ist, von  Ihnen stammt: Sie haben ein ganzen Generation ein Vorbild gegeben.”

2.  “Sie sind immer geladen mit Leidenschaft, aber nicht der des Liebenden, sondern der des Spielers, der kalten, berechnenden und gefährlichen.”

3.  “Although he was not lacking in inner resources, he had an entirely sociable nature, and his nature was entirely sociable for which he was well-liked and his inability to be alone was well-known.”  (“Er war, obwohl innerer Befähigung nicht entbehrend, eine durchaus gesellschaftliche Natur, als solche beliebt, in allen Kreisen gern gesehen und sich seiner Unfähigkeit zur Einsamkeit voll bewußt.”)

4.  “Deutlich erkannte sie die Stimme des Knaben und spürte erstaunt zum erstenmal, wie sehr sie der seines Vaters glich. Leise flog ein Lächeln auf ihre Lippen und rastete dort still. Mit geschlossenen Augen lag sie, um all dies tiefer zu genießen, was ihr Leben war und nun auch ihr Glück. Innen tat noch leise etwas weh, aber es war ein verheißender Schmerz, glühend und doch lind, so wie Wunden brennen, ehe sie für immer vernarben wollen.”

 5.  “Mein ganzes Leben will ich Dir verraten, dies Leben, das wahrhaft erst begann mit dem Tage, da ich Dich kannte.”

 6.  “Hoffnungslos, so dienend, so unterwürfig,” and “sklavisch, so hündisch, so hingebungsvoll geliebt.”

 7.  “Er spürte einen Tod und spürte unsterbliche Liebe: innen brach etwas auf in seiner Seele, und er dachte an die Unsichtbare körperlos und leidenschaftlich wie an eine ferne Musik.”

8.  The doctor in “The Man who Ran Amok” originally acts out of pride, but many readers, especially those inclined toward Freud, will see eros in the immediate background.

9.  Michael Hofmann “Vermicular Dither,” London Review of Books XXXII:2  (28 January, 2010). 

Fiction and Truth in Marie de France

 

Numbers in parentheses are lines of the text in Les Lais de Marie de France, ed. Jean Rychner (1966).  Translations of cited phrases are my own.  Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

     Marie de France is an enigmatic figure in that virtually no biographical information about her is known.  Her name and a few scraps of information about where she lived are included in her lais and fables.   Nearly as obscure as the particulars of the author’s life is the issue of her narratives’ fictionality.  In what sense were the stories considered to be “true”?  What did narrative truth mean to her and her audience?

     The question must arise since the lais tell of many unlikely and impossible events, for instance a speaking deer (“Guigemar”), a man who tuns into a bird (“Yonec”), and another who becomes a werewolf (“Bisclavret”).  In spite of such fabulous incidents, a good number of the self-reflective comments that open and close certain of the lais specifically insist that they are veridical.  The epilogue to “Equitan” assures the reader “These things happened, as I have told you.” (“Issi avient, cum dit vus ai” [309]), adding that she is merely repeating an earlier version, thus providing a sort of reliable provenance.  At the end of “Bisclavret” one finds the same formula: “The adventure you have heard really happened, do not doubt me.”  (“L’aventure k’avez oïe/ Veraïe fu, n’en dutez mie” [315-316]), then noting that an earlier poem had been made of it to preserve and see that it is not forgotten.  “Lanval” opens with the statement that “the story of another lay I shall tell you as it happened.”  (“L’aventure d’un autre Lai/ Cum il avint vus cunterai.”[1-2])  “Les Deus Amanz” concludes in just the same way: “The things I have told you happened and the Bretons made of it a lay.”  (“Issi avint cum dit vus ai/ Li Bretun en firent un Lai. [241-242])

     In each case Marie is defending her story as true and pointing to the fact that it is a retelling and not her invention as support.  While since Romanticism originality has been celebrated, many medieval authors claim that repeating a narrative they have heard is a positive value adding the prestige of an earlier authority.  While this gesture can indicate evidence for the tale’s factual basis, in Marie its implication is broader: as “auctor” meant writer to Chaucer, “auctorite” was sometimes “writerliness.”  The word in this sense suggests propriety, a competently made poem, with conformity to accepted  standards of  beauty and elegance and reflection of earlier models providing its artistic credentials rather than facticity.

     The issue is further obscured by the fact that the European Middle Ages had different concepts of truth in written accounts.  One influential critic [1] argues that until the twelfth century advent of the Arthurian romance, stories were generally accepted as more or less factual, but that a concept of “truth in fiction” deriving from a kind of “higher truth” first appeared around the time of Marie in Chrétien’s Erec et Enide.

     The value Marie suggests for her stories is associated with the pleasure they give due to their beauty.  This pleasure is part of an elegant courtly complex of customs that for her is the highest expression of culture.  Her prologue calls skill at writing a God-given gift on a par with factual knowledge [2], since artistic ability brings pleasure to receptive readers.  Such value is described in aesthetic terms as a flower: “When something really good is heard by many people, it has its first bloom, but when it is praised by many people then it fully flowers.” [3] 

     The motive for her poems is to recast in more beautiful form “tales I have heard” [4] in order that they should not be forgotten [5].  Here the contrast is not a matter of verisimilitude, between narratives that seem “true” and those that seem “false,” but rather between those whose worth is associated with their having existed in the tradition, in the past, and not being simple innovations.  In this way the excellence of the ancestors as exemplary models will be preserved.  According to Marie the people of Brittany had been in the past “valiant and courtly and noble,” and among their achievements was to record the stories they heard in order that they never be forgotten [6].

     The novel element in her retellings is her refinement, her application of the polish of a fine style to a worthwhile pre-existing story.  “Anyone who wants to relate a tale must begin in an original way and proceed with words so well-chosen that the story will please people.” [7]  The added value is aesthetic, attracting readers or listeners through a heightened beauty such that “the sound is good to hear” [8].

     The “truth” of Marie’s lais resides in  their embodiment of ideals of behavior and social order.  Viewed as a method of preserving and perpetuating the courtly refinement assigned to the past, this “rightness” transcends the simple facts of historicity.  This is the reason that the characters are so outstanding, the women so lovely, and the men so valiant.  As a picture of what men and women might be, how “correct” their behavior, how dazzling their lifestyle, these stories are decidedly more "real" than the mere facts of the past.  Just as myth tells of events that are less incidents that once occurred than descriptions of the way things are, Marie’s noble lovers define the standards to which their listeners aspire in the very moment of their hearing.  The truths they convey are not like the incidents recorded in annals; rather they are what seemed the timeless truths of human life.  For her as for Aristotle, poetry is something more “philosophical,” that is, reaching toward the truth and thus more “serious” and more worthy of attention [9].  

 

 

 

1.  See Walter Haug, Vernacular Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: The German Tradition, 800–1300, in its European Context (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, Series Number 29) who says Chretien’s Erec et Enide is "the first vernacular romance of the Middle Ages which may be described as fictional" (p. 91), as earlier epics were presumed to be historical.  For other discussion of the issue see Hans Ulricht Gumbrecht, “Wie fictional war das höfische Roman?,” Heinrich and Iser, eds., Funktionen 433-40 and Klaus W. Hempfer, “Some Problems Concerning a Theory of Fiction(ality),” Style Vol. 38, No. 3, German Narratology II (Fall 2004).

2.  “Ki Deus ad dune escïence/ E de parler bone eloquence” (“He to whom  God has given knowledge and the ability to speak with skill” [1-2].) 

3.  Quant uns granz biens est mult oïz,

Dunc a primes est il fluriz

E quant loëz est de pluzurs,

Dunc ad espandues ses flurs. (5-8)

 

4.  Des lais pensai, k’oïz aveie. (33)  

 

5. Ke pur remembrance les firent/ Des aventures ki’l oïrent.” (35-6)

 

6.  Jadis suleient par pruësce,

Par couteisie e par noblesce,

Des aventures qu’il oient,

Ki a plusurs gens avenaient,

Fere les lais pur remembrance. (Equitan, 3-7)

 

7.  Ki divers cuntes veut traitier

Diversement deit comencier

E parler si rainablement

K’il seit pleisibles a la gent.   (Milum, 1-4)

 

8.  Bone e nest a oïr la note. (Guigemar, 886)

 

9.   “Poetry is thus more philosophical and more serious than history, since poetry is more concerned with the universal and history with the particular.”  (διὸ καὶ φιλοσοφώτερον καὶ σπουδαιότερον ποίησις ἱστορίας ἐστίν: ἡ μὲν γὰρ ποίησις μᾶλλον τὰ καθόλου, ἡ δ᾽ ἱστορία τὰ καθ᾽ ἕκαστον λέγει.)  (Poetics, Bk. IX.)