Zola’s Nana and the Conundrum of Sex Work

 

Though it engages Zola and Xenophon, this piece is really more about the nature of sexual relations than aesthetics.

 

     Surely in Nana (1880) Zola meant to portray the sordid degradation of the sex workers of his time, even those who populated the more luxurious regions of the demimonde, where salons were occupied by genteel and titled aristocrats as well as by a once penniless girl of the streets.  In this he was contributing to a growing literature of prostitution that included most of the prominent writers among Romantics, Realists, and Naturalists alike.  Among the many who depicted streetwalkers and courtesans were de Vigny in his novel Cinq Mars (1826), Hugo in Marion Delorme (1828), Dumas père in Filles, lorettes et courtisanes (1843) and La Dame aux Camélias (1848), the Goncourt brothers in La Lorette (1853), Eugène Sue in “La Lorette” (1854), Augier in Le Mariage d'Olympe (1855), Huysmans in Marthe (1876), and de Maupassant in “Boule de Suif” (1880). [1]

     Though Zola’s approach was sociological rather than moral, tracing Nana’s ruin to her dreadful childhood, her story very nearly fits the form of a medieval exemplum, so horridly does her beauty dissolve in the end into suppurating lesions.  The chance event of her illness reveals to the reader, though not to the lady herself, the vanity and destructiveness of her career as a courtesan.  Yet Nana herself, despite her ups and downs, her short-sightedness and extravagance, had largely maintained a good humor, while her lovers fall into hopeless perdition one after another in what must amount to the greatest career of romantic destruction prior to Dorian Gray (whose conquests are far more obscurely suggested).  Philippe Hugon falls into crime, Georges stabs himself, and Fauchery, Vandeuvres, and Count Muffat suffer financial collapse in the attempt to support her profligate spending, while Nana herself never realizes what she is doing and is brought low only by the random calamity of infectious disease.

     There can be, of course, no question of the fundamental power structure of the patriarchy represented in the novel’s social relations.  The men hold the money and the power and Nana, as she periodically reflects, has nothing but her magnificent body.  Still, the misery and distress she brings her devotees and the disasters they suffer contrast with her generally self-satisfied moods.  She sacrifices true love, perhaps, by cynically using each man she cultivates, and can experience only a cruel caricature of selfless affection in her attachment to Fontan who beats her when he is not simply cold and thoughtless.  Love appears in the narrative only warped by either financial or physical exploitation or hopeless and one-sided obsession.  With fearful concision, Blake knew almost a hundred years earlier in London that “the youthful Harlots curse” “blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.”  As the professional in Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale” (1930) admits, she can offer “Every love, but true love.”

     If love vanishes when it finds itself in the marketplace, what remains in its place may not be the “trip to paradise” Porter’s lyrics promise, but something more nasty all around.  The world of the Théâtre des Variétés with its titled boxholders may be unknown to the contemporary reader, but comparable phenomena are commonplace today.  One may imagine, without ever having witnessed, the scene in a self-styled “gentleman’s club” next to a truck-stop at an interstate’s exit.  The parallels with Nana’s world are unescapable.  There, daily, groups of men, with more or less furtiveness, sit with overpriced drinks and drop hard-earned dollars in sacrifice to the sexual charms of the performers whose talents, as in Nana’s case, are irrelevant, their nudity (or semi-nudity) being the commodity the customers purchase. 

     This is only the grossest example and it carries the comforting convenience that many can without difficulty avoid that smoky and dim-lit crowd.  Self-interested love may as well be manifested  in the youthful wife of an aging celebrity (or rich man), in a young man’s proclivity for pornography, or the nude scene propelling an actress’ career.  The ordinary course of erotic experience includes moments at least of many sorts, ranging from possessiveness and aggression through mutual respect and responsiveness and on toward self-abnegation and masochism.  In Nana’s world, though, only the ultimately unsatisfying extremes are possible.

     Without questioning the fundamental power relations at play or the oppressive sexism of the dominant ideology, the observer might wonder whether the men or the women are more brutalized in this unequal substitute for love.  Clearly both are denied a satisfying erotic life.  The objectification forced upon the woman descends no less decisively on the man.  Films like The Blue Angel and Of Human Bondage caricature the degradation of an exploitative affair with the man as victim, though the daily newspaper indicates that the reverse is far more commonly the situation.

     Nana’s social position is not entirely unlike that of the ἑταίρα if ancient Greece.   In Xenophon’s account Socrates visits Theodote, a celebrated courtesan, after hearing of her fabulous beauty.  Arriving at her home, he finds her posing for a painter, but when they can converse, Socrates poses her a question.  “Ought we to be more grateful to Theodote for showing us her beauty or she to us for looking at it?  Does the obligation rest with her if she profits more by showing it, but with us if we profit more by looking?”  Eliding the issue of actual sexual contact by describing only her role as the object of visual attention, he observes that “we already long to touch what we’ve seen and we’ll go away aroused and will miss her when we’re gone.  The natural consequence is that we become her adorers, she the adored.”  As she is “sumptuously dressed” and attended by “many pretty maids” in a “lavishly furnished” house, her advantage seems self-evident, and she concedes to Socrates, “Of course I ought to be grateful to you for looking.” [2]  

     Theodote was, of course, quite prosperous.  Her work occurred like Nana’s in a genteel aristocratic atmosphere, just as some women with “sugar daddies” might today mix in moneyed circles.   The answer to Socrates’ question would have been different had he been interviewing a common prostitute, a πόρνη, a word derived from πέρνημι meaning “to sell” and  associated with exploitation and slavery.  Poor, often literally a slave, lacking agency over her own life, such prostitutes resemble today’s street sex workers who are often addicts or victims of trafficking.

     The question that Socrates poses to Theodote ignores a third possibility, that of mutual affection, but that can hardly occur when sexuality is commodified.  Every economic bargain involves a balance of interests, and, when people are buying and selling, a marketplace can assure a modicum of what looks to both parties like “fairness,” but when love is for sale, it is either not really love or not really for sale.  If one party is more powerful, a price must be paid for cynically using another; the possibility of love vanishes altogether.

 

  

1.  Though never prosecuted in France, Zola was the occasion for several major censorship trials in the United Kingdom that ultimately ruined Henry Vizetelly, his publisher.  For a survey of the theme in visual art, see Hollis Clayson’s Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era.  Crane’s novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) developed an American Naturalism from the considerably more sordid circumstances of the Bowery.  The theme flourished in art movies after World War II in such features as Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (945), Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, Dassin’s Never on Sunday (1960), Godard’s Vivre sa Vie (1962), Pasolini’s Mama Roma (1962), Kurasawa’s Red Beard (1965), and Buñuel’s Belle du Jour (1967).

2.  Memorabilia (III, 11, 2-4) in the Loeb Library translation by E. C. Marchant and O. J. Todd, revised by Jeffrey Henderson. 

A Question about John Pomfret

 

Pomfret’s “The Choyce” is appended.  Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes, those in parentheses to lines of the poem.  I have here been somewhat casual with the proprieties expected in quasi-scholarly writing.  See note following the essay.  

 

     The novice world traveler is likely at first to make it a point to stop by those sites already over-familiar from a thousand pictures: the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, but later trips may turn to neighborhoods and parklands that attract fewer visitors.  The reader has a parallel experience.  One can only once read for the first time the Iliad or Quixote or Rabelais or Hamlet, and the experience is wondrous and staggering, yet, having encountered such grand prospects, one wishes at times to wander in less-frequented purlieus of literature where the pleasures may be less potent but offer instead a certain piquant novelty.

     A bookish flâneur, I sought just such a mental excursion by reviewing a few passages in what is surely one of the finest works of general applied criticism, Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets.  While his theory may be creaky, Johnson’s taste is generally on the mark, and, more than many old critics, he provides evidence for his reactions.  I determined to simply select at random a poet of whom I was wholly ignorant and have a look to see what Johnson saw in him (all fifty-two if Johnson’s choices are men).

    One of the poets whose names meant nothing to me, but whom Johnson considered important, drew my attention.  Johnson’s account of John Pomfret runs less than a page but includes a startling claim: “Perhaps no composition in our language has been oftener perused than Pomfret's Choice.”  Pronouncing a well-formulated dictum (as was his habit) that expresses skepticism of the poet’s worth, Johnson then declares “He pleases many; and he who pleases many must have some species of merit.”  Even the word “peruse,” the reader realizes, had been chosen to suggest a more casual engagement the reader requires from “great” literature. 

     Johnson’s observation about Pomfret’s popularity is substantiated by the fact that his works went through sixteen editions during the eighteenth century.  In a magisterial tone, Johnson accounts for the poet’s popularity by the patronizing comment that he “has been always the favourite of that class of readers, who, without vanity or criticism, seek only their own amusement.” 

     Johnson was not alone in feeling that the poet enjoyed more prestige than sophisticated readers would think he deserved.  In 1753 Theophilus Cibber noted those who held Pomfret’s work “in very great esteem” were specifically the “common” readers, “people of inferior life” who appreciate the fact that “there is little force of thinking in his writings” as that makes the poems “level to the capacities of those who admire them.” [1]  The ambiguity of Pomfret’s standing is evident in Southey’s question in 1807: "Why is Pomfret the most popular of the English poets? The fact is certain, and the solution would be useful.” [2]  Leigh Hunt’s “The Choice” (1823) imitates Pomfret, but Hunt opens by calling his model “trivial” and his poem “A pretty kind of -- sort of -- kind of thing.”

    The poem that “sort of” inspired Hunt was Pomfret’s most popular composition, “The Choyce,” a piece in  heroic couplets outlining an idealized life plan in retirement from London in  a country estate.   The poem had an impeccable pedigree, with influence from Horace, as well as sharing its theme with other respected poems such as Cowley’s “The Wish.”

    The sentiments Pomfret expressed in the poem were far from original; they emphasized moderation and temperance in all things, “not little, nor too great” (6), the old ideal of nothing in excess, μηδὲν ἄγαν as the oracle once put it.  [3]  the writer wishes only for what is “Useful, Necessary, Plain,” (10) which to him must include “a Clear and Competent Estate,/ That I might live Genteelly, but not Great.”  Eschewing “The needless Pomp of gawdy Furniture” he will feed on “healthful, not luxurious Dishes” .  Pomfret spends fourteen lines assuring his reader that he would  not drink too much (53-64).  Rather, he would enjoy books of “the Noblest Authors,” both ancient and modern, dispense charity so that “the Sons of Poverty” might not “Repine” “Too much at Fortune.”  He describes his chosen friends at length, using balanced  periods to reaffirm that they, too, follow “the middle way,” as they are, for instance, “Merry, but not Light” (82), “Close in Dispute, but not tenacious”(88), “Not Quarrelsom, but Stout enough to Fight” (93).  The reader feels something of the sensation of riding a see-saw.

     In an even longer passage (98-139), Pomfret describes his ideal female company, some “Modest-Fair” from whom he may obtain “Fresh Vital Heat” [3].  She, too, is the soul of temperance.

 

No Fear, but only to be proud, or base:

Quick to advise by an Emergence prest,

To give good Counsel, or to take the best.

I'd have th' Expressions of her Thoughts be such,

She might not seem Reserv'd, nor talk too much;

That shows a want of Judgment, and of Sense:

More than enough, is but Impertinence.        (114-120)          

 

In spite of her exemplary character, he would see her only “seldom” and “with Moderation,” “For highest Cordials all their Virtue lose,/ By a too frequent, and too bold an use” (137).

     With his strong allegiance to social norms, he is, of course, patriotic and willing to serve.

 

T' oblige my Country, or to serve my King,

Whene'er they call'd, I'd readily afford,

My Tongue, my Pen, my Counsel, or my Sword. (143-145)

 

     He anticipates preparation for death and the aid of “Some kind Relation” (157) to take over his affairs “While I did for a better State prepare” (159).  His life plan is so emphatically mainstream that he feels confident that, given the choice, “All Men wou'd wish to live and dye like me” (167).  Far from the Romantic idea of representing himself as a distinct and idiosyncratic genius, he is guided by the neo-Classical ideal familiar from  Pope’s Essay on Criticism: “What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd.” 

    While writers who retread familiar ground may expect, at least at first, a greater readership than those that strike out in new directions, it remains difficult to imagine a writer who so definitively fulfills every reader expectation, who affirms every received idea so perfectly as to become a veritable prince of mediocrity, yet this is Johnson’s explanation of Pomfret’s popularity.  By  definition the bulk of the writing of any age is fundamentally “ordinary,” yet some authors, it seems, please their readers by paradoxically excelling at ordinariness.  For over a hundred years Pomfret was praised and admired for his perfect rendition of the average, the expectable, reassuring readers of their perspicuity and good taste by endorsing their idées reçues.  While his secret for besting dozens of other predictable writers may remain elusive, once he had become popular, his position would naturally reinforce itself.  Just as some of today’s bourgeoises might show they are au courant having attended the most popular Broadway shows, in Pomfret’s day and for a good while after, they could do so by demonstrating familiarity with his work. 

     Some authors’ popularity is more easily explicable: Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, Allen Ginsberg, and Dylan Thomas were public characters who sometimes behaved extravagantly.  In a time when fewer people read poetry, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, and Leonard Cohen won fame by casting their poetry in the genre of popular music.  Perhaps the closest parallel to Pomfret’s celebrity may be found in writers like Edgar Guest, Joyce Kilmer, Ted Kooser, and Billy Collins [4] who have proven comforting and highly digestible to large numbers of readers.  Each of them, like Pomfret, satisfies readers by affirming the correctness of their preconceptions in easy and competent verse.

 

 

1.  Theophilus Cibber, “The Life of the Revd. Mr. John Pomfret,” in The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland vol. III.

2.  Robert Southey, Specimens of Later English Poets, I, 91.

3.  This passage of the poem proved controversial.  Johnson says that, just as Pomfret was about to assume an ecclesiastical “living,” a “malicious” informant delayed his departure, alleging that “The Choyce” suggested a mistress was preferable to a wife.  Remaining in the city to answer the charge, Pomfret (who was himself married) contracted smallpox and died. 

4.  A dramatic example is the synthetic Rumi composed using other English versions by Coleman Barks which proved immensely popular in the 1990s, offering contemporary Americans a Sufism in which they felt instantly at home..  

 

 

An apologia

     The modest liberties of tone I have here allowed myself may seem out of place in a commentary with any scholarly pretensions.  Academic essays are usually written in a rigid form, sometimes betraying an anxious effort to appear learned, sometimes to sound scientific.  Inspired once by a lecture from William Arrowsmith about a French T. S. Eliot poem which he cast as a dialogue among recognizable faculty types, published then as “Eros in Terre Haute: T. S. Eliot’s ‘Lune de Miel’”,  I once proposed a session of conference papers which had in common deviation from the standard thesis-proof format.  None were submitted. 

     I consider this piece pure recreation, though the reader might object that everything I write could be so described.  Opening with a reflection on tourism, I stroll off into a text of Dr. Johnson, finding my way then into Pomfret with divigations toward Horace, Cowley, and others.  To me the exercise constitutes a sort bracing mental dérive, to use the Situationist term.

 

 

 

The Choyce

 

If Heav'n the grateful Liberty wou'd give,
That I might chuse my Method how to live:
And all those Hours propitious Fate shou'd lend,
In blissful Ease and Satisfaction spend.
Near some fair Town I'd have a private Seat,
Built Uniform, not little, nor too great:
Better, if on a rising Ground it stood,
Fields on this side, on that a Neighb'ring Wood.
It shou'd within no other Things contain,
But what are Useful, Necessary, Plain:                            10
Methinks, 'tis Nauseous, and I'd ne'er endure
The needless Pomp of gawdy Furniture:
A little Garden, grateful to the Eye,
And a cool Rivulet run Murmuring by:
On whose delicious Banks a stately Row
Of shady Lymes, or Sycamores, shou'd grow.
At th' end of which a silent Study plac'd,
Shou'd with the Noblest Authors there be grac'd.
Horace and Virgil, in whose mighty Lines,
Immortal Wit, and solid Learning Shines.                           20
Sharp Iuvenal, and am'rous Ovid too,
Who all the turns of Loves soft Passion knew:
He, that with Judgment reads his Charming Lines,
In which strong Art, with stronger Nature joyns,
Must grant, his Fancy do's the best Excel:
His Thoughts so tender, and exprest so well;
With all those Moderns, Men of steady Sense,
Esteem'd for Learning, and for Eloquence:
In some of These, as Fancy shou'd advise,
I'd always take my Morning Exercise.                                   30
For sure, no Minutes bring us more Content,
Than those in pleasing useful Studies spent.
I'd have a Clear and Competent Estate,
That I might live Genteelly, but not Great.
As much as I cou'd moderately spend,
A little more sometimes t'oblige a Friend.
Nor shou'd the Sons of Poverty Repine
Too much at Fortune, they shou'd taste of Mine;
And all that Objects of true Pity were,
Shou'd be reliev'd with what my Wants cou'd spare;        40
For what our Maker has too largely giv'n,
Shou'd be return'd in gratitude to Heav'n.
A frugal Plenty shou'd my Table spread,
With healthful, not luxurious Dishes, fed:
Enough to satisfy, and something more
To feed the Stranger, and the Neighb'ring Poor.
Strong Meat indulges Vice, and pampering Food
Creates Diseases, and inflames the Blood.
But what's sufficient to make Nature Strong,
And the bright Lamp of Life continue long,                          50
I'd freely take, and as I did possess
The bounteous Author of my Plenty bless.
I'd have a little Cellar, Cool, and Neat,
With Humming Ale, and Virgin Wine Repleat.
Wine whets the Wit, improves its Native Force,
And gives a pleasant Flavour to Discourse;
By making all our Spirits Debonair,
Throws off the Lees, the Sedement of Care.
But as the greatest Blessing Heaven lends
May be debauch'd, and serve ignoble Ends;                       60
So, but too oft, the Grapes refreshing Juice,
Does many mischievous Effects produce.
My House, shou'd no such rude Disorders know,
As from high Drinking consequently flow.
Nor wou'd I use what was so kindly giv'n,
To the dishonour of Indulgent Heav'n.
If any Neighbour came he shou'd be free,
Us'd with respect, and not Uneasy be,
In my Retreat, or to himself, or me.
What Freedom, Prudence, and Right Reason give,       70
All Men, may with Impunity receive:
But the least swerving from their Rules too much;
For what's forbidden Us, 'tis Death to touch.
That Life might be more comfortable yet,
And all my Joys refin'd, sincere and great,
I'd chuse two Friends, whose Company wou'd be
A great Advance to my Felicity.
Well born, of Humours suited to my own;
Discreet, and Men as well as Books have known.
Brave, Gen'rous, Witty, and exactly free                         80
From loose Behaviour, or Formality.
Airy, and Prudent, Merry, but not Light,
Quick in discerning, and in Judging Right;
Secret they shou'd be, faithful to their Trust,
In Reasoning Cool, Strong, Temperate and Just.
Obliging, Open, without huffing, Brave;
Brisk in gay Talking, and in sober Grave.
Close in Dispute, but not tenacious, try'd
By solid Reason, and let that decide;
Not prone to Lust, Revenge, or envious Hate;              90
Nor busy Medlers with Intrigues of State.
Strangers to Slander, and sworn Foes to spight,
Not Quarrelsom, but Stout enough to Fight:
Loyal and Pious, Friends to Caesar true
As dying Martyrs to their Maker too.
In their Society I cou'd not miss,
A permanent, sincere, substantial Bliss.
Wou'd bounteous Heav'n once more indulge, I'd chuse
(For, who wou'd so much Satisfaction lose,
As Witty Nymphs in Conversation give)                      100
Near some obliging Modest-Fair to live;
For there's that sweetness in a Female Mind,
Which in a Man's we cannot find;
That by a secret, but a pow'rful Art,
Winds up the Spring of Life, and do's impart
Fresh Vital Heat to the transported Heart.
I'd have her Reason, and her Passions sway,
Easy in Company, in private Gay.
Coy to a Fop, to the Deserving free,
Still constant to her self, and just to me.                   110
A Soul she shou'd have for great Actions fit,
Prudence, and Wisdom to direct her Wit.
Courage to look bold danger in the Face,
No Fear, but only to be proud, or base:
Quick to advise by an Emergence prest,
To give good Counsel, or to take the best.
I'd have th' Expressions of her Thoughts be such,
She might not seem Reserv'd, nor talk too much;
That shows a want of Judgment, and of Sense:
More than enough, is but Impertinence.                   120
Her Conduct Regular, her Mirth refin'd,
Civil to Strangers, to her Neighbours kind.
Averse to Vanity, Revenge, and Pride,
In all the Methods of Deceit untry'd:
So faithful to her Friend, and good to all,
No Censure might upon her Actions fall.
Then wou'd ev'n Envy be compell'd to say,
She goes the least of Womankind astray.
To this fair Creature I'd sometimes retire,
Her Conversation wou'd new Joys inspire,               130
Give Life an Edge so keen, no surly Care
Wou'd venture to assault my Soul, or dare
Near my Retreat to hide one secret Snare.
But so Divine, so Noble a Repast,
I'd seldom, and with Moderation taste.
For highest Cordials all their Virtue lose,
By a too frequent, and too bold an use;
And what would cheer the Spirits in distress,
Ruins our Health when taken to Excess.
I'd be concern'd in no litigious Jarr,                          140
Belov'd by all, not vainly popular:
Whate'er Assistance I had power to bring
T' oblige my Country, or to serve my King,
Whene'er they call'd, I'd readily afford,
My Tongue, my Pen, my Counsel, or my Sword.
Law Suits I'd shun with as much Studious Care,
As I wou'd Dens, where hungry Lyons are;
And rather put up Injuries, than be
A Plague to him, who'd be a Plague to me.
I value Quiet, at a Price too great,                           150
To give for my Revenge so dear a Rate:
For what do we by all our Bustle gain,
But counterfeit Delight for real Pain.
If Heav'n a date of many years wou'd give,
Thus I'd in Pleasure, Ease, and Plenty live.
And as I near approach'd the Verge of Life,
Some kind Relation (for I'd have no Wife)
Shou'd take upon him all my Worldly Care,
While I did for a better State prepare.
Then I'd not be with any trouble vext,                  160
Nor have the Evening of my Days perplext.
But by a silent, and a peaceful Death,
Without a Sigh, Resign my Aged Breath:
And when committed to the Dust, I'd have
Few Tears, but Friendly, dropt into my Grave.
Then wou'd my Exit so propitious be,
All Men wou'd wish to live and dye like me.

Playing Cards

 

     The deck of playing cards has an elaborate structure, capable of communicating a symbolic code, just as a language does.  The suit and rank of each card define a specific position in the grid, resembling in this way the coordinates of a mapping system.  Games and techniques of divination are both based on the random selection of certain cards or groups of cards with which value or other specific significance is associated. 

     Some structural characteristics are undeniable, chief among them the four suits and thirteen ranks [1].  An initial division produces the colors, red and black.  Each of these then splits again, producing the four suits which show only a small deviation through the centuries and the countries of Europe, where, doubtless due to increased trade with Egypt and the East, they had first appeared shortly before the Renaissance.

     Considered diachronically, a session with playing cards, whether recreational or fortune-telling,  presents a sort of table model of fate, in which each player receives a certain destiny in the deal.  In a worthwhile game, the player’s outcome will depend in  part on skill just as in cartomancy the subtlety of the practitioner is often decisive.  Receiving a strong or weak hand parallels being born into affluence or poverty, health or disability, though a vulnerable position can sometimes come out ahead through bluffing or other strategy.  Fortune-telling differs only in that the implications are made explicit with the occult practitioners  defining the specifics they find implied by a particular array of cards.  Like a life, the game or the session with a “reader/advisor” has a beginning and an end with victories and defeats between.  The cards allow players to experience a variety of such brief imaginary lives recreationally or, if the players are gambling, with some real consequences reflecting the symbolic ones. 

     Synchronically, the array of possibilities in a deck of cards is designed as a universal symbolic system, like the catalogue of possibilities available in the divination tools offered by astrology, I Ching, the Ifa oracle, and the like.  The more elaborate mahjong set of tiles evolved from playing cards, with possibilities far beyond a simple set of dominos.  [2]  Many have noted the numerological correspondence of playing cards with the passage of a year: fifty-two cards and fifty-two weeks, four suits and four seasons, thirteen of each suit and the thirteen lunar months, two colors corresponding to night and day, yet these associations are in general an indication of their encyclopedic comprehensiveness rather than a specific and determined signification.   To some the suits possess differing inherent worth.  For instance, in bridge the lowest is clubs, followed by diamonds, hearts, and spades.

     The face values playing cards are fixed, representing an increasing series from two to ten, then ascending further through the face cards.  The ranks prima facie indicate a differentiation in worth, and the face cards clearly refer to the stratification of feudal society, with the numbered cards representing the lower tiers of society.  The deck then forms an image of “the great chain of being” or scala naturae, as it was more commonly called in Latin. [3]  The deck arrived in Europe from the Mamluk Sultanate where the face cards were all  male, with an “under-deputy” (thānī nā'ib) in the place now occupied by the queen, a pattern reflected in the German decks with an “Obermann” and a lower status Untermann)..  In some Italian decks the place is held by a knight (cavallo).

     In some games, of course, and in particular when using the cards to tell fortunes, every rank must have associated meanings.  Any number of modern occultists have specified such adventitious significance.  For instance, one popular book, written seventy-five years ago yet currently available at Wal-Mart and Target, says that the three indicates happiness, the seven spirituality, and the nine humanitarianism. [4]  All codes, however, of this sort are arbitrarily assigned.  This very susceptibility to a variety of interpretations indicates the cards’ underdetermination, allowing the same deck to be used in  an endless variety of ways.  Specific cards share with Symbolist images a fruitful imprecision conducive to a broad range of interpretations.

     The four suits have varied surprisingly little since they came to Europe from the Mamluk Sultanate in the fourteenth century.  Originally the suits of the Mamluk cards were cups, coins, swords, and polo-sticks.  Virtually all suits since have been minor variations of these four.  The swords, in Spanish espadas, became spades, the cups turned to hearts, the coins to diamonds, and, since polo was not a significant game in Europe, the last suit was changed to lances or clubs.  The familiar English set corresponds closely with the suits used in early fifteenth century France, while the Tarot suits are closer to the Muslim model.  Arriving in Britain through Belgium In the passage from Belgium to England the French suits piques (pikes), as coeurs (hearts), carreaux (tiles, “lozenges”), and trefles (clovers)  became the modern hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs.  In Spain and parts of Italy and France the naibi  deck [5] came into use using cups (copas), coins (oros), swords (espadas), and clubs (bastos), the only difference being that in Italy the clubs are ceremonial batons, whereas in Spain they are crude cudgels like Hercules carried.  In Germany and other parts of central Europe the suits are leaves (Grün, Blatt, Laub, Pik or Gras), hearts (Herz or Rot), bells (Schelle, Schell or Bolle) and acorns (Eichel or Kreuz),

     The most profound explanation of the origin of the playing card suits was suggested over a hundred years ago by Jessie Weston. [5]  She argues that the suits correspond as a group to both the treasures of the Tuatha de Danaan and the objects displayed in the Grail castle.  Links between the magic objects of ancient Celtic lore [6] (the Sword of Nuada, the Lia Fáil or Stone of Destiny, the Spear of Lugh, and the Cauldron of the Dagda) and the numinous objects seen in the Grail castle (the Grail itself -- either Cup or Dish, the Sword, the Stone, and the Lance) certainly have remarkable similarity to the naibi suits (cups, swords, coins, and clubs), but Weston felt that both were themselves developments of a more archaic significance.  To her behind the set are elemental sexual symbols through which people sought to encourage abundance and fertility through a ἱερός γάμος, a sacred marriage, that ensures the continuity of life. 

     For her the suits evolved from a pair of sexual symbols, doubled then to make four; lance and sword are clearly the male components, dish and cup the female.  While Weston and others of the Cambridge group doubtless over-emphasized the centrality of re-energizing the “spirit if the year,” the religio-magical motive of  promoting the fruitfulness of the earth and the prosperity of the human community is evident world-wide.

     The origin of the images and their later resonance and reception need not be consistent.  In fact, the durability of a symbol may well benefit from its underdetermination.  A great many interpretive schemes have been applied to them, but all of these are secondary, afterthoughts in a way to the original promotion of life for which they were first intended.  Sometimes the red cards were associated with beneficence and the black with threats.  To some the suits suggested the four elements, to others the cardinal directions.  They have been associated as well with the social classes: hearts (once cups or chalices) suggesting the clergy, spades (once swords) indicating the nobility, diamonds (once coins) for those engaged in commerce, and clubs (once crude wooden ones like Hercules’) for the peasantry. 

     Specific figures from history and legend were sometimes identified with individual cards: the king of spades being pictured as the Biblical David, that of hearts as Charlemagne, diamonds as Julius Caesar, and clubs as Alexander, thus encompassing the known world with the lands of Jews, Franks, Romans, and Greeks.  The queens were identified with Athena (spades), Judith (hearts), Jacob's wife Rachel (diamonds), and Argine, an anagram for regina (clubs), while the jacks were Charlemagne’s knight Ogier (spades); La Hire, a general in the Hundred Years’ War (hearts), the Trojan Hector (diamonds); and Lancelot or Judas Maccabeus (clubs). 

     The significance of the cards is determined strictly by the rules of the game.  Thus queen of spades in the game of hearts is undesirable, trumps in bridge make a good hand, and any two pair will beat a couple of aces in poker.  The flow of the arrival of such cards, meaningful only within the compass of a game, constructs an experience resembling the recognition of motifs in a musical composition, a fugue or  symphony, but there is an important difference.  Every note of The Well-Tempered Klavier is intentional, chosen by Bach, whereas the cards should appear without any conscious design. [8]  The loss in “beauty” due to chance composition is compensated by the fact that the card table more nearly replicates the unpredictability of life itself.   Apart from dependence on chance, the play of the game brings good or ill or middling fortune just as in life.  The value of speculating on the cards of one’s fellow-players likewise resembles the prudent conduct of worldly affairs in which the estimation of the power of rivals may be relevant.  

    The card game is wholly ludic, just for the fun of it, like the delights and disappointments vicariously undergone by the film viewer.  Yet a hand in cards is marvelously abstract, given meaning only by the specific terms of a given game.  Adeptness at the manipulation of symbols is the most distinctive human characteristic, doubtless the source of our species’ success, if success it be, and playing cards allow people to develop, but more importantly, to relish this skill in concert with others.  Dog owners cannot doubt that a dog in play, exercising canine athletic and perceptual abilities, is having a grand time.  A table of suburban bridge players may be doing very much the same in human terms.

 

 

 

1.  I say nothing about the Tarot since, in spite of enthusiasts fond of claiming ancient and exotic origins for the deck, these have been shown to be a variation of the older deck.  In spite of its portentous images, the Tarot deck was developed in fifteenth century Italy for the game trionfi and exclusively used for games until several hundred years later when its use in divination began.

2.  The first references to Chinese card-like game pieces called pái (牌) (a term that could apply to either tiles or cards) date from the ninth century C. E. describing the use of inscribed paper “leaves” and dice in a board game.  Playing cards are known there from circa 1200 C. E.

3.  See Arthur O. Lovejoy’s classic study The Great Chain of Being.  For an early exposition of the scala naturae, ranking animals by their apparent complexity, see Aristotle’s Historia Animalia.

4.  Edith Randall and Florence Evylinn Campbell, Sacred Symbols of the Ancients: The Mystical Significance of the Fifty-two Cards (1947).  Randall and Campbell mention as their source Olney Richmond who claimed to revive a 20,000-year-old tradition in Chicago in 1888. 

5.  The word naibi, of Arabic origin, was used in the original statute mentioning cards in fifteenth century Florence and it is used yet today of the Spanish deck, the baraja Española.

6.  In Ch. 6 of Ritual to Romance (1920).  While it is true that Weston ‘s readership is the result of T. S. Eliot featuring her in the footnotes to The Waste Land and that the Cambridge School as a whole has lost authority, her work, like that of Jane Harrison and Frazer himself, is replete with fruitful observations.  The fact that Weston was susceptible to the occultists of her day whom she liked to think the latest in a lineage descending from ancient esoteric masters does not invalidate her every conclusion.  Even the connections she traces between the treasures of the Tuatha de Danaan, the Grail objects, and the suits is also unnecessary to accept her fundamental idea that spade, hearts, diamonds, and clubs have sexual connotations.  

7.  The treasures appear in an interpolated recension of the legendary Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Taking of Ireland), the same passage introduction, interpolated in the introduction of Cath Maige Tuired (The Second Battle of Mag Tuired), and in "The Four Jewels", a later, short text in the Yellow Book of Lecan.

8.  Some works of Cage, Stockhausen, and other aleatory composers constitute at least in part an exception. 

The Framing of Brontë’s The Professor

 

Endnotes are in brackets.  References in parentheses are page numbers is the readily accessible Penguin edition edited by Heather Glen.

 

     Charlotte Brontë’s earliest work for publication The Professor remained unpublished until after the author’s death.  Perhaps the most prominent difference between The Professor and Villette, which she wrote next using portions of the earlier story, is the shift from a male to a female narrator, but the two works begin with markedly different perspectives as well.  Whereas the later novel opens with Lucy Snow’s first-person adolescent reminiscences, the first chapter of the earlier work, titled “Introductory,” covers similar ground, but in the form of a letter.  Both novels, however, end using the device of a slip in the narrative voice from past to present tense.  The Professor has been taken by some critics to be a premature false start as Brontë developed her professional writing skills, and the unusual device employed in the first pages of the book has been called “clumsy and artificial” and “an early gaucherie” by critics. [1]

     The opening letter might seem a vestige of the epistolary practice of Richardson and Smollett.  In earlier novels the pretense of the letter form supports the historicity of the text, reinforced by the reduction of some place names to initials as though to protect the characters’ privacy.  While a few novels like Robinson Crusoe that adopted the pose of recording literal truth were actually accepted by some readers as fact, once the device became familiar, it had the dialectic effect of representing a known literary artifice depicting lived reality, thus suggesting truth and falsity at once. 

      Yet Brontë’s use of this device has peculiar characteristics.  She would have the reader believe that Crimsworth came across the copy of a letter when he simply “found” it in his desk, and that this discovery of an aborted memoir led him to complete the story. 

     The fact that the letter was written, not received, by the persona telling the story shifts the reader’s perception more directly on its author.  Few enough people maintain copies of their own correspondence that this presentation alone draws attention.  Charles, the intended recipient of the letter, never appears at all, and the letter was never delivered as thee writer’s old schoolmate had moved.  Why had the narrator felt drawn to send an account of his life to this long-ago “acquaintance,” as Crimsworth calls him?

     One effect of this device is to emphasize the focus on the protagonist whose ego is a primary theme Brontë is to develop.  The letter is a curious document.  Though the point of the letter is to renew a relationship with an old schoolmate, it opens by declaring that neither of the two had been popular, Charles “sarcastic and cold-blooded,” and William “not strikingly attractive.”  Though exclusion by others might make the basis for the two outsiders to ally, Crimsworth says he cannot understand what “animal magnetism” joined them.  What is more, he declares that he felt (and presumably feels) himself superior.  He has no interest in the affairs of his correspondent.  “What you have been doing I know not, but you shall hear “how the world has wagged with me” he says imperiously.  The solipsistic letter goes on to detail his rebellion against the injustice he suffered at the hands of his brother.

     He notes at the end of the “Introductory’ chapter that, having leisure in  retirement, he had, apparently motivated by generosity, intended to describe his life for the “private benefit” of his acquaintance Charles.  Frustrated in that goal, he determined that his tale would have value “for the public at large,” in particular for the use of other educators for whom his experience, he believes, will prove instructive.  The presumption is palpable.

     The persona considers the account of his career a sort of self-help book, inspiring others to rise through discipline and work to affluence.  In this partial truth the tale bears some resemblance to the stories of Horatio Alger heroes and the deserving waifs of Charles Dickens, though in these cases the heroes’ ascents often depend on providentially charitable patrons, while William Crimsworth has only his own ambition.  Thus he represents a model of a kind of Calvinist capitalist, prospering through self-denial and looking out for the main chance.  Though his story is in part a guide to overcoming obstacles and climbing the economic ladder, Crimsworth is, as a recent editor noted a “disquieting” hero. [2]  While his calculating moves do bring him success, he often appears as unattractive, selfish, or aggressive.

    He must, it seems, strive against the world to attain his own felicity, suppressing his own feelings in pursuit of his larger worldly ends.  This includes the rejection of his relatives who suggest for him a marriage and settled living, then after a time of his brother with whom his relations had always been prickly  but from whom he had accepted a position.  Seeking his fortune by himself in the world, he succeeds as a schoolteacher (in French a professeur) first with M. Pelet and then with Mlle. Reuter through his forceful manner with the students.  His “system” for instructing pupils he found to have “dense intelligence” and “feeble reflective powers” was to lower his expectations radically, but then, “having brought down my lesson to the lowest level of my slowest student’s capacity,” to become suddenly a “despot,” insisting on “submission and acknowledgement of error, or ignominious expulsion.” (98)

     Even his love affair with Frances Henri is described in the same manner.  He is the master; she the faithful server.  Even so, she is obliged sometimes to object, “Monsieur, vous me faites mal; de grâce lâchez un peu ma main droite.” She addresses him as Master.  To him “reproofs suited her best of all” (204).  He has no interest in her feelings; their relationship is plainly portrayed in physical terms of domination and submission.  “My arm, it is true, still detained her, but with a restraint that was gentle enough, as long as no opposition tightened it.”  His heart, he says, is wholly taken up with “its own content” which he finds “fathomless.”  (248-9)  The happy ending’s evidence of his success are the acquisition of a devoted wife and child, hard-earned, without a doubt. 

     The price, then of worldly success for this wronged orphan is to “resist” any “impulse” to be  “warmer” or “more expressive” (204), and to be governed instead by “perseverance and sense of duty.” (159)  The darker elements of his state of mind are suggested by Crimsworth’s xenophobia and contempt for Catholicism as well as, more deeply, his susceptibility to depression, or “Hypochondria” (254)    

     A similar tension is evident in the book’s other generic conventions.  The plot follows the form of classic comedy in that a couple overcome obstacles, marry, and find a settled and serene life.  Yet it is evident that the love portrayed in The Professor is flawed, though perhaps only because it is all too human.  From another angle, the story is about how to succeed in business, a story of a clever lad who through determined efforts of his own, accomplished much.  Yet the reader will wonder whether the stern pedagogy and cagey dealings with employers are really to be recommended.  An anodyne slogan like “Hope smiles on Effort!” elides the issue of what sort of effort. (206) 

     In spite of all the conventional paradigms of a hero’s path to love and worldly prosperity, Brontë claims that her book is straightforward, unadorned realism.   She opens a chapter with a declaration that could open a manifesto.  “Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of everyday life.” (186)  In the novel’s preface Charlotte, writing under her pseudonym Currer Bell claims, “I said to myself that my hero should work his way through life as I had seen real living men work theirs.” (37)  In the preface of 1851, she says, as an explanation of the sobriety of the story: “In many a crude effort destroyed almost as soon as composed, I had got over any such taste as I might once have had for ornamented and redundant composition, and come to prefer what was plain and homely.”  The spare style of realism established in the opening letter asserts the book’s veracity. 

     The slide into the present tense in the last  pages (from 288) has the effect of casting the concluding scene as constant, a “happy ever after,” as though nothing of significance would later occur. Such a coda resembles the way some pop songs, instead of ending with an appropriate musical phrase, simply fade to silence or a final movie shot that rises into the air over the last scene.  While marking the end of the work in a conventional and recognizable way, at the same time the concluding present tense adopts the pose of portraying a scene immediately before the observer’s eyes, leaving the reader poised in the end as in the beginning between realism and convention, symbolic commentary and bare facts.

     Both opening and closing of The Professor indicate the tension between natural and artificial.  The reader must wonder whether Crimsworth is seeking to “live his dream,” as a modern idiom would have it, to fully become himself and escape from the limitations of his birth, or whether his ambition has led him to make a tortured topiary of his soul, in the effort losing real love, and perhaps a genuinely successful classroom as well. 

     The framing of the story in fact highlights its difference from Villette.  The opening pages reveal a far less attractive protagonist than Lucy Snow.  Crimsworth’s asperities reappear in Villette, though transferred to M. Emanuel.  Though Lucy may seem more deserving, her love affair ends, at best, in separation and ambiguity.  The Professor concludes with images of connubial bliss (though the reader may suspect that the real picture is more complex), while Villette ends in a note of sinister foreboding with howling banshees signaling lethal storms.  In spite of the common ground of the plots and even of the language, the first two novels Charlotte Brontë completed are for the reader independent of each other in direction and theme, though, had The Professor been published, Villette would never  have been written.

  

 

1.  Carl Plasa,  “Charlotte Brontë's Foreign Bodies: Slavery and Sexuality in ‘The Professor,’” Journal of Narrative Theory, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Winter, 2000), pp. 1-28  “For many critics, the epistolary manoeuvre with which Brontë begins The Professor is both clumsy and artificial.”

2. Heather Glen in her introduction to the Penguin Classic edition.  Glen provides as well useful background on early nineteenth century self-help books.  

The Gypsy Gentleman [George Borrow]

 

     I was gazing over the last few decades’ self-help books and romances on the bookshelves of a nearby Salvation Army store when my eye was caught by the familiar form of a faded early Everyman’s library volume with handsome ornamentation on the spine, reminiscent of William Morris design.  It dated from 1906, the year that J. M. Dent launched this admirable series of classics costing only a shilling.  The title -- The Romany Rye -- was unknown to me and its meaning obscure, though the author’s name George Borrow seemed like one I had heard before.  His own story turned out to be at least as compelling as the narratives he put to  paper.

     George Borrow’s name has fallen into obscurity, yet during the Victorian Age he was a literary man of consequence.  His The Bible in Spain, recounting his activities distributing Protestant scriptures in Spain and including descriptions of the country in general as well as details about the Romani population [1], was a minor best-seller, going through six printings in a year.  He went on to write two novels which, while they were less popular than his book on Spain, were highly regarded for decades, entering the canon briefly before sinking into neglect.  His book Wild Wales contains much lore and careful (if Romantic) nature description, though Borrow repeatedly manages to maneuver the rhetorical spotlight onto himself.  He translated a sufficient quantity to fill sixteen volumes, including significant work from an astonishing range of languages, though much was unpublished in his lifetime.  He made so bold as to produce English versions of works in Danish, German, Old Norse, Russian, and Turkish, and a variety of other tongues, as well as translating the Bible into Manchu and a Gypsy dialect.  One book that did see print has the remarkable title Targum Or Metrical Translations from Thirty Languages (1835).  Meanwhile he also found leisure to research and publish six volumes of Celebrated Trials and Remarkable Cases of Criminal Jurisprudence from the Earliest Records to the year 1825.  

     He produced this remarkable literary output, in part the work of a non-university man seeking to support himself with his pen, at the same time as he devoted considerable enthusiasm to the cause of Protestant Christianity.   He acquired half his languages to assist in proselytizing and pursued converts in such unlikely places as Catholic Spain and Orthodox Russia.  His virulent anti-Catholic prejudices are evident in much of his work (as is his English patriotism), and his uncompromising evangelism led twice to his imprisonment.   

     Around the time of my copy’s publication, H. W. Boynton in The Atlantic called Borrow “a writer of unique genius,” adding that “that genius found, of course, its best expression in Lavengro and its sequel.”  To Boynton not only is “the charm of his mere style” “irresistible,” in addition “the peculiarity of the subject-matter” “will keep Borrow’s writings alive.”  He felt confident that “whatsoever books of the Victorian epoch are smothered and lost beneath the ever-accumulating mass of English literature, Borrow’s writings will be remembered.” [2]  In an introductory note that prefaced the 1893 edition  of Lavengro, Theodore Watts ventures to say that “there are passages in “Lavengro” which are unsurpassed in the prose literature of England—unsurpassed, I mean, for mere perfection of style—for blending of strength and graphic power with limpidity and music of flow.” He goes on to describe Borrow as “splendid,” “brilliant,” “classic,” and a “genius,” adding that “all competent critics” allowed Lavengro and The Romany Rye “to be among the most delightful books in the language.” A few years later Edward Thomas said, begging the question: “We to-day have many temptations to over praise him, because he is a Great Man.” [3]  And the Brittanica’s article yet today declares him “one of the most imaginative prose writers of the 19th century.”                   

     Though the only clues to ambivalence in Boynton’s praise are his use of the words “unique” and “peculiar,” the authors of many of the standard literary histories were more straightforward in qualifying Borrow’s place in Parnassus.  They are likely to use terms like “idiosyncratic” or, in a slightly more circumspect, phrasing: “No figure is more original than that of Borrow.”   Some prefer to provide an explicitly balanced judgement:  “There are dull stagnant places in his books, and there are passages aflame with genius.” Another notes circumspectly that “more than one of the publications of George Borrow are still held in honour by critics of eminence” due to their containing “enough of the genuine spice of free genius to overpower our sense of their eccentricity and offences against good taste.” [4]

     By 1912 opinion had shifted sufficiently that his first biographer speaks of him as passé.  “It was Borrow’s fate, a tragic fate for a man so proud, to outlive the period of his fame.  Not only were his books forgotten, but the world anticipated his death by some seven or eight years.” [5]  A review of another survey of the author in 1929 flatly calls him “one of the most pathetic failures” in letters whose writing “leaves much to be desired.” [6]

     From the start critics had puzzled over the genre of The Romany Rye.  They accurately noted its picaresque character, but devoted considerable discussion to the question of whether it and its predecessor Lavengro should be considered fiction or memoir.  Very little of either book, though, is devoted to the primary line of narration.  In The Romany Rye the love interest with Isopel is so discreet as to be almost vanishing, and she does indeed disappear early, only to bob up again at second-hand much later.  The reader’s interest is to be held by the story of the narrator’s acquisition and sale of a horse.  The animal is more or less forced upon the hero, for reasons that remain obscure, and the sale, though occurring in the midst of a variety of tensions, takes place without incident.  In the very last line, in a wholly unexpected turn, the narrator contemplates traveling to India, scattering the wispy fragments of a plot. 

     The Romany Rye clearly lacks the formal unity of a conventional novel.  The book does not fit the genre of autobiography as it provides no coherent pattern of a particular life.  Neither is it a proper travel book as the descriptions both of the Romani camp and of the countryside are for the most part vague or conventional or both.  At heart The Romany Rye resembles most those collections of odd stories midway between folk-tale and modern short fiction, the kind of tales in Canterbury Tales, the Decameron, Painter's Palace of Pleasure, or the Thousand and One Nights that replicated for a more literate age the archaic story-teller around a fire.  One speaker succeeds another, the Old Man, the Hungarian, the Postilion, the Jockey, and Murtagh all tell stories, and the sum of these together constitutes a significant portion of the book. 

     These inserted narratives have a miscellaneous character.  The tale of the old man robbed of his ass in  Chapter XXI resembles a folk-tale with its retributive justice and the concluding idyll of rural simplicity as the old man cultivates his garden to the humming of his bees.  The man in Chapters XXXII to XXXIV who becomes an aficionado of “crockery literature” is pure quaint picturesqueness as is the jockey’s knowledge of “coin sharping,” Hopping Ned and Biting Giles.  Borrow does not mind retooling old stories like the history of Hunyadi (Ch. XXXIX) and of Finn-ma-Coul (Ch. XLIV).  Yet these little divertimentos add up to very little. 

     Apart from included narratives, other sections are similarly irrelevant to any central plotline.  The Man in Black, whose discourse covers three chapters (II-IV) is a straw man for Borrow’s narrow-minded anti-Catholic prejudice.   Just when one might think Borrow might better be establishing the verisimilitude of his story, he features a caricature who talks as the most cynical priest has never done.  Other chapters are related in the voice of Ursula, the landlord, and the ostler, leaving very little spacet for the narrator’s own affairs.  It is as if the “novel” is composed in large part of filler material. 

    For today’s reader the book remains a curiosity.  If the style has little charm and the structure is almost arbitrary (it has been called “formless” [7]), the one-time popularity of The Romany Rye might be explained by its providing access to an exotic culture of which few Britons had experience as intimate at Borrow’s.  Yet, in spite of his adoption of the Romani, living and working side-by-side with them and learning their language, exceedingly little information about them finds a place in his book.  Apart from the use of some Romani words which provides a patina of authenticity and references to “dukkerin” (fortune-telling) and theft, he tells his readers virtually nothing about their beliefs and practices.   Significantly, the titles of both his novels , though couched, he tells his readers, in Romani dialect, refer to Borrow himself: Lavengro meaning “wordmaster” and The Romany Rye meaning the “Gypsy Gentleman.”  What appeals to Borrow’s readers is not the Romani vision of the world, which would require a fuller picture, but rather his own.  Bourgeois homebodies are engaged by the sensibility of this man who has chosen to live among the outcast, and this is perhaps the key to his charm. 

     The same critic who found Borrow’s work to lack structure also noted that he is “unique in English literature for the sense they convey of intimate contact with adventurous, lawless life.” [8]  The vagueness of the last three works is significant.  The reader is entertained not by becoming acquainted with Romani life in particular, but rather by imaginative intimacy with the “adventurous, lawless life” of a white Englishman.  While The Romany Rye certainly looks back toward picaresque novels, which regularly featured footloose heroes, it looks also forward to the twentieth century vagabond road books that hover between memoir and novel: London’s The Road, Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, and Kerouac’s On the Road.  Though at first glance the concluding resolution to go to India seems to come out of the blue, it is the clearest sign for a Westerner of daring adventure as much in Borrow’s time it seems as in the nineteen-sixties.

     Borrow might be considered a late Romantic gasp, a last Byronic hero, doing what his readers would not dare to do but about which they relish reading.  His  exoticism and counter-cultural enthusiasm rise directly from Romantic models.  He has the assertive ego of the nonconformist, the bluster of a mountebank, the theatrics of a man who likes the spotlight.  Childe Harold enjoyed a considerable audience, but he seemed to be putting up the highest existential stakes as his creator did in Greece.  In comparison with the profundity of Byronic alienation and anxiety, though, Borrow seems a mere entertainer, though with a similar self-absorption.  The Romany Rye wanders about, free of real risk or drama.  Arthur Compton-Rickett noted in 1912 that his persona regularly betrayed “a curious selfishness.”  His characters seem to “exist chiefly for his own curiosity and inquisitiveness.”  In Borrow the “human touch is markedly absent;” “not even Isopel could break down the barrier of intense egoism.” [9]

    In part the interest the book retains today derives from its prefigurations of modernity.  The book’s very randomness suggests later practices of conscious fragmentation and bricolage.  Borrow might be seen as a proto-hip character, anticipating an important twentieth century aesthetic category.  His indifference to social norms and his individualist adventuring make him seem a free spirit to readers in spite of his peculiarity, aimlessness, and vulnerability to depression which he called “the horrors.”

     He remains, diminished perhaps to a vanishingly minor figure, a fascinating curiosity, a pleasant read, a diverting story-teller, and, perhaps most important, a colorful character.  His breadth surely outshone his depth.  Though he vaunted his linguistic accomplishments at every opportunity, subsequent scholars have found his mastery even of German to be imperfect at best. [10]  His insouciance about form, his idiosyncratic attitudes, his very eccentricity constitutes his appeal. [11] 

     The fact that this book and its predecessor Lavengro were included in the Everyman’s Series indicates the regard of the literary establishment for Borrow as a modern classic a quarter century after his death. [12]  He had attained a position in the literary canon, albeit toward the margin, eliciting an oddly enduring but lukewarm appeal from both critics and common readers.  I consider my discovery of a copy of The Romany Rye a happy chance, unlikely to be repeated by future junk shop browsers, though it takes but a bit of imagination to envision the Gypsy Gentleman himself sifting through the old clothes and kitchen wares.

 

 

 

1.  Borrow translated the Gospel of Luke into Caló, a Gypsy dialect used in Spain and Portugal.    His first book The Zincali: or an account of the Gypsies of Spain (1841) described Romani life.   Romano Lavo-lil A dictionary of the language of the English Romanichal people (1874) has been found seriously defective by scholars.  Mérimée was influenced by Borrow in his depiction of Carmen.  The World Romani Conference has declared the use of the name “Gypsy” to be pejorative.  I use it in my title for historical reasons.    

2.  H. W. Boynton, “George Borrow,” The Atlantic, Feb. 1904.

3.  Edward Thomas, George Borrow: The Man and his Books, 1912.

4.  In order, the quotations are from Theodore Watts-Duncan in Ephraim Chamber’s Cyclopedia of English Literature 1901-3 edition in an article that runs over six double-columned pages; Émile Legouis’ History of English Literature (1926)  Andrew Lang, History of English Literature from Beowulf to Swinburne (1921), and Thomas B. Shaw. B., A History Of English Literature (1895). 

5.  John Murray, The Life of George Borrow (1912), Iv.

6.  Review of Samuel Milton Elam’s George Borrow, New York Times, July 7, 1929.

7.  George Sampson, “George Borrow,” The Concise Cambridge history of English literature (1965). 

  

8.  Sampson.

9.  Arthur Compton-Rickett, A History of English Literature (1912).

10.  Though, in the view of George Hyde, Borrow “produced some of his best poetry in his capacity as translator.”  See “’Language Is First of All a Foreign One': George Borrow as a Translator from Polish,” The Slavonic and East European Review Vol. 77, No. 1 (Jan., 1999). 

11.  The most comprehensive book on Borrow in the last generation is titled George Borrow: Eccentric (Michael Collie, 1982).  Shortly after Borrlw’s death a little feature in the New York Times (February 24, 1894) titled “The Eccentric Borrow” retells several stories of his odd behavior.  The writer explains Borrow’s  peculiarities as “those unaccountable fits to which men of genius . . . are often subject.”

12.  Lavengro had already been published in in the Oxford University Press World's Classics Series in 1904.

Morning Glories on the Make

 

     Why are flowers universally considered beautiful?  Though a functional part of nature, enabling sexual reproduction, flowers are favorite images in poetry and visual art in all parts of the world.  As compared with leaves or stems, they are, of course, showy things, with extravagant forms, colors, and even fragrances all of which are considered attractive.  Surely, for one who suspects that aesthetics derives from functional use, flowers may be significant to people’s survival, though they are rarely eaten, because they are the promise of fruit to come.   As the flowering parts are sexual organs, the plants, it seems, are flaunting their reproductive capacity in the most flamboyant display possible.  Flowers bring the pleasure of a reinforced confidence that nature is percolating with vigor throughout, and that, on the most basic level, dinners need never cease.  Their showy sexuality is the dynamo propelling fertility.  Unsurprisingly, flowers have become part of the imagery and the social practice of romantic love, from “I am the Rose of Sharon” to contemporary St. Valentine’s Day marketing.  In nature the flowers’ reproductive organs communicate with other flowers as well as with birds, insects, and humans.  The faith of the flower in a generation to come is expressed in overdetermination to the point of glory.  

     The birds attracted to this floral display have their own costumes and rituals to celebrate their own affairs.  Such behavior is familiar to everyone who watches nature films.  The inconvenience of the peacock’s magnificent tail is undeniable at all times when the bird is not engaged in courting.  The bowerbirds not only build elaborate structures; they decorate them with shiny or brightly colored objects and perform dance movements to attract females.  Male jumping spiders twist their bodies to display colored or iridescent hairs (the most spectacular is called the peacock spider) while hopping about seductively and singing in distinctive tones.  Some have areas of ultraviolet reflectance which they also flaunt just as some flowers attract bird visitors through similar ultraviolet flashes).  Even the ordinary house fly cavorts before his love object with the hope of soliciting the female’s cooperation.  Egg-laying is the functional goal of the blue-footed boobies’ dance, or the solemn movements of pirouetting sandhill cranes, or Costa’s hummingbirds swooping and diving and then suddenly flashing a startling display of radially symmetrical purple face feathers, yet what the animal does is only secondarily, one might say symbolically, related to reproduction, rather like human fetishes. 

     Nature employs symbols to perpetuate itself, and it infuses those symbols with ostentatious passion by using the brightest colors, the most inventive forms, the most conspicuous cues.  The birds are surely expressing enthusiasm; I suspect the flowers may be as well.     

     Reproduction is the Aristotelean final cause of all this folderol, but the practical seems all but lost in magnificent symbolic clothing.  If the drive to pass on their DNA is what leads animals and plants to express themselves so creatively, one might suspect a similar goal lies at the root of human art.  While it may be undeniable that many artists have successfully pursued sexual variety, it remains unclear whether they developed their skills in order to provide variety in the bedroom. 

     I once witnessed a festival in Ogwa in Edo State, Nigeria in which, accompanied only by percussion of a drum ensemble, individual young men took turns doing acrobatic dances not unlike breakdancing that surely were meant here not only to satisfy the local deities but also to impress the young women of their acquaintance.  Though such an outright connection is rare, to Freud not only art but energy in general originates in the libido.  In a classic essay in 1910 he argued that the work of Leonardo da Vinci was entirely the result of sublimation after he had recoiled in horror from his own sexuality. 

     But can it be called sublimation when so often eros is explicitly invoked in art?  Vast amounts of love poetry have been produced (though in volume it may yet be outweighed by religious poetry).  I once worked in a prison library where a book in high demand, kept safely behind the counter, was called Pearls of Love.  It was a collection of romantic poetry from which the inmates copied warm passages to include in letters to their lovers.  Were the countless sculptures of naked women from the Venus of Willendorf to Jeff Koons’ Woman in Tub created from purely aesthetic motives?  Would Venus look equally beautiful to an alien who reproduces through budding? 

     Most would agree that a hungry person is unduly influenced by circumstance, who quite sincerely, while salivating, thinks that a photograph of a beefsteak the most beautiful thing in the world.  One suspects that the judgement would not survive a good meal.  Yet eros can hardly fail to be present when one person regards a figure of another. 

    Some artists are emphatic.  Van Gogh said, “There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” To Klimt “all art is erotic” and those who most appreciate his work might be likely to agree, while Picasso is said to have oracularly declared “sex and art are the same.”  Matisse said in an interview that “Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love.”  A link between artistic practice and appeal as a lover is encoded in popular art as well including Burgess Meredith’s character in That Uncertain Feeling, Lute the “troubadour” in the comic strip Hägar the Horrible, and the macho posturing of heavy metal guitarists.

    Even if the theme of a poem, painting, dance, or tune has nothing whatever to do with love or sexuality, surely in art where the maker like a god shapes a small universe with a free hand such a fundamental human element of nature must be present.   Just as dreams often take a sexual turn, the fantasies that we have learned to project for each other’ amusement, our art, is inevitably lit with some level of erotic glow.  Every text has a sexual meaning, just as every text might be read psychologically, or metaphysically, or socially, or self-reflectively, yet, for most humans, the sexual interpretation may have a certain primacy, an inside track.  Perhaps among us hominids who like to think of ourselves as “higher,” just as among the birds and the bees and the flowering plants, art is a secondary sexual characteristic.