Dangerous Liaisons and manipulation

1/ In some blog post about Don Quixote, I have noted that Shakespeare and Cervantes are both fascinated by disguise, pretence, and manipulation: if Shakespeare’s plays are full of actors (like Viola, Rosalind, Imogen) and playwrights/ theatre directors (like Iago or the Duke in Measure for Measure), Cervantes’s world is populated with storytellers (almost everyone in Don Quixote), who can be self-creators (like Don Quixote) or pranksters. 

What about the manipulators in Dangerous Liaisons—Merteuil and Valmont? I would say they are actors (in general, but especially in Merteuil’s handling of Prévan and Valmont’s acting towards Tourvel) and theatre directors (the way Merteuil and Valmont engineer the plot of Cécile and Danceny, especially when Merteuil adds conflict and drama) and self-creators (Merteuil writes in letter 81 “I am what I have created”). The two of them constantly compare their little games to theatre; Merteuil says she’s an actress and a writer. 

Here’s Valmont: 

“What more does one have in a larger theatre? Spectators? Ha! Just wait, I shall have plenty of them. Though they may not see me at work, I shall show them the finished product. All that will remain for them to do is admire and applaud.” (Letter 99) 

(translated by Helen Constantine)

Nobody would want to encounter a Valmont or a Merteuil in real life, but in literature, isn’t it fascinating to watch them?  

I especially like that Laclos adds the little Prévan plot. Up to that point, there have been 2 plots going on at the same time—the Cécile and Danceny plot, and the Valmont seducing Tourvel plot—which have started to drag on for a bit—then Laclos gives us the Prévan plot. Now that is fascinating! Before that point, Valmont has dominated the book, utterly thrilling as he switches between different voices for Merteuil, Cécile, and Tourvel. Now is Merteuil’s time to shine. And shine she does. 

2/ I would say that over the past few years, the most striking and compelling female characters I’ve come across in novels are Sử Tương Vân (Shi Xiangyun) and Vương Hy Phượng (Wang Xifeng) in Cao Xueqin’s Hong lou meng (Hồng lâu mộng by Tào Tuyết Cần), Becky Sharp in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and now Merteuil in Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons. Sử Tương Vân (Shi Xiangyun) is the odd one out, delightful and lovable like Shakespeare’s Rosalind and Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet and Tolstoy’s Natasha. 

The other three are manipulative, chameleon-like, immoral, deceitful, and yet utterly bewitching. 

Interestingly enough, I note that they’re all written by male writers. When I think of attempts by George Eliot (Middlemarch, maybe Daniel Deronda) and Edith Wharton (The Custom of the Country), I think they don’t quite succeed—those characters seem real enough, but they don’t bewitch. Jane Austen’s Mary Crawford is much better in comparison—so charming that many impressionable readers out there miss the entire point of the book—but she is not on quite the same level as Becky Sharp or Merteuil, is she? Lady Susan is more manipulative, but that’s quite a thin novel—I have always wished Austen had done something more with that character. 

To go back to Dangerous Liaisons, Laclos’s other female characters are also very good. One reads War and Peace and wonders how Tolstoy enters the mind of a 16-year-old girl in love (Natasha). One reads Dangerous Liaisons and asks the same question about Laclos and 15-year-old Cécile. He depicts well the pure innocence and naïve enthusiasm of a young girl raised in a convent and without experience, without making her sound sappy. 

Tourvel is even better. We don’t even need Valmont’s discovery of her copy of his letter to know—as we read between the lines—that for some time she has fallen for him. 

3/ Dangerous Liaisons has a good structure. Two significant things happen around the mid-point of the novel.

One is—shall I be nice and not reveal the spoiler?—what Valmont does to Cécile. He is the devil. 

His letters to Merteuil afterwards fill me with disgust, especially when he says he has been telling Cécile false stories about her mother: 

“For the girl who does not respect her mother will not respect herself.” (Letter 110)

The other thing is Tourvel’s departure, and the start of her downfall. 

Look at Valmont’s immediate reaction upon finding out she has run away: 

“What strange power draws me to this woman? Are there not a hundred others clamouring for my attention? […] Why chase after the one who flees from us and neglect those who offer themselves? Ah why? I do not know, but I feel it most grievously.” (Letter 100)

In the first half of Dangerous Liaisons, Merteuil and Valmont pull all the strings; in the second half, they slowly and gradually realise they’re not quite the puppeteers they think they are.

In other words, as Valmont turns more demonic in the second half, he also becomes more human. 

Dangerous Liaisons and the epistolary novel

As I’m enjoying Les Liaisons dangereuses or Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (translated by Helen Constantine), I’ve been thinking about the epistolary form. Sometimes it’s rather clumsy and awkward, like The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Frankenstein too, I think. Sometimes it works quite well, like Dracula (series of documents in different forms) or The Moonstone (witnesses’ statements). The epistolary form can show different—and clashing—perspectives, like Lady Susan or The Lady in White.

But it’s in Dangerous Liaisons that I can see the author exploit the full potential of the form. We see the clashing perspectives. We read the sender’s words and imagine the receiver’s reaction, and if there is a second reader, also imagine the effect on them. We see the lies, the manipulation, the face-saving untruths. We read between the lines and examine the layers of meaning. We get different voices from different characters, but sometimes the same character—such as Valmont—can also put on different voices and play roles. We watch the schemer lay out her plan and embark on her project. We see the manipulator at work, as he explains his tactics and manoeuvres his way into a virtuous woman’s heart.

I think of Mansfield Park, for example. Jane Austen focuses on Fanny Price—she writes in the third person but always focuses mainly on one perspective in the 6 novels. It would be interesting, would it not, if we could enter the Crawfords’ minds, as Henry plays games with both Maria and Julia and also wants to capture Fanny’s heart but ends up falling for her, or if we had access to Maria’s thoughts, as she cheats on her dull husband with the charming Henry.  

In Dangerous Liaisons, we have two characters—Valmont and Merteuil—who are more evil, more demonic, more dangerous than the Crawfords. And it’s—should I say this?—thrilling to watch these manipulators at work! 

With Dangerous Liaisons, I have a situation similar to Anna Karenina: I watched multiple film adaptations before reading the book.

The 1988 American film: the film’s good; Glenn Close’s brilliant; but to this day, I still don’t understand how John Malkovich could have been cast as the irresistible womaniser. I don’t mean Valmont has to have good looks. Handsome and sexy are two different things. In the general sense, not in the should-be-cast-as-Valmont sense, Vincent Cassel is not handsome, but he is hot; Henry Cavill is handsome, but not charismatic; Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch aren’t particularly good-looking, but they’re charming. No disrespect to his acting skills, but I have never thought John Malkovich has the seductive qualities to play Valmont, I don’t buy it. 

Cruel Intentions: I frankly don’t remember the film, but it has always fascinated me that Les Liaisons dangereuses is moved to a modern setting and it works. 

Untold Scandal: I don’t remember the film (what’s up with my memory?), but I remember liking it. Bae Yong-joon is a heartthrob in East and Southeast Asia—he should be convincing as Valmont—I can’t remember. But again, it’s intriguing that Les Liaisons dangereuses is transported to South Korea and it works. 

Let’s hope I’ll have something more interesting to say about Laclos’s novel.

A few films I watched recently

Perfect Days (2023): 

I have never been fond of films in which nothing happens. It’s got a critics’ score of 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, and audience’s score of 89%, so it’s clearly a matter of temperament. Or maybe people are hardcore Wim Wenders fans. Or maybe they really like Japan. 

Kōji Yakusho plays a public toilet cleaner who listens to Lou Reed on cassettes, reads William Faulkner, looks at trees, takes B&W photographs, and dreams. Will something happen between him and the co-worker? Will the co-worker’s girlfriend do something? Will we discover the secret tic-tac-toe player? Will someone appear and stir up his life? Will something happen with the niece? Will we learn more about his past? Will we discover why he’s cleaning toilets? I kept wanting something to happen, but nothing did. It’s a slice-of-life of film and Kōji Yakusho is indeed very good, but it’s perhaps a matter of temperament that I want some conflict, some mystery, some dramatic interest. It has none. 

I did, however, enjoy the music. 

The Sound of the Mountain (1954): 

Why is Naruse not as well-known as Ozu or Mizoguchi outside Japan? I wondered. His name is not mentioned. His films are hard to find. I’m not comparing him to Kurosawa, the most Western of Japanese directors, influencing Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Sergio Leone, and many others, but my impression so far—I have watched this one and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs—is that at his best, Naruse isn’t inferior to Mizoguchi or Ozu. His films treat the same themes: selfish and cruel or sympathetic but ineffectual men, suffering women, generation gap, social changes, conflicts between parents and children… He has the same subtlety, the same sympathy and compassion, the same talent for getting great performances out of actors. Why then is he neglected?  

I like Naruse’s adaptation a lot more than Kawabata’s novel. Part of it is because the novel focuses on the perspective of the father—the passive, tactless, ineffectual father, who keeps thinking about breasts, even his own daughter’s—whereas the film can eschew all that and depict the sad lives of all the women in the film (it is probably for the same reason I prefer the adaptation of Woman in the Dunes to the book).

Another reason is that the characters in the book are a bit blurry—with a few exceptions, I’ve got the impression that characters in Japanese novels don’t have the same complexity and vividness as in Western novels, but tend to more blurry or more impressionistic—but that’s not the problem for the film as we all see them from the outside anyway. But at the same time, we have the actors’ performances—we see the pauses, the hesitation, the meaningful glances, the understanding smiles, the looks of reproach, the expressions of pain, and so on. This is my favourite Setsuko Hara performance: the perfect, childlike, lovable wife, who always smiles then suffers in silence. 

La chimera (2023): 

It’s been over a week and I still can’t put into words why I like this film so much. No, I don’t even know why I like it so much. Perhaps it touches something deep inside me. Perhaps it captures something—in images and music—that I can’t express in words. 

What Happens in Hamlet: John Dover Wilson on Hamlet

Every time I revisit a Shakespeare play or read a new piece of criticism, I see something new. His plays are so rich, so complex, so endlessly fascinating. Let other minds dwell on conspiracy theories and other trivia, I can just ponder over these plays for the rest of my life. 

1/ Unlike other critics I have read (such as Tony Tanner, G. Wilson Knight, or A. C. Bradley), John Dover Wilson places lots of importance on Claudius’s usurpation and Hamlet’s loss of the throne, which I think is an interesting point. Indeed, why does the throne go to the brother rather than the son? Hamlet mentions an election—is the tedious old fool Polonius part of the council that kicks out Hamlet? 

Wilson doesn’t mean that thwarted ambition is the only or even chief cause of Hamlet’s depression—he does talk at length about shock, disappointment in his mother, disillusionment with love and everything, the weight he has to bear, and so on and so forth—but he is saying that it’s a mistake to ignore Hamlet’s loss of the throne.

Once we think of that aspect—especially Claudius’s usurpation—we see everything in a different light, such as that exchange between Hamlet and his old friends Guildenstern and Rosencrantz. 

“GUIDENSTERN Which dreams indeed are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.

HAMLET A dream itself is but a shadow.

ROSENCRANTZ Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow.

HAMLET Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and outstretch’d heroes the beggars’ shadows. Shall we to th’ court? for, by my fay, I cannot reason.” (Act 2 scene 2) 

2/ Like A. C. Bradley (and unlike G. Wilson Knight), John Dover Wilson sees Hamlet as noble—what would be the tragedy if Hamlet were not a noble character? (This is why I don’t like Andrew Scott’s performance). 

Then why, one must ask, does the sweet prince treat Ophelia like a whore? I think Wilson’s reading that Hamlet overhears Polonius saying “I’ll loose my daughter to him” makes perfect sense: she has abandoned him, she has offered him no consolation in time of crisis and anguish, and worse, she has agreed to be used as bait for his enemies to spy on him. 

His reading of Hamlet’s scenes with Ophelia, especially the nunnery scene, is also very good. 

3/ I like his reading of the play scene. Wilson thinks Shakespeare includes a dumb-show in order to tell the whole story to the audience, because later, when the actors reenact the murder, the play would be interrupted. 

Then why does Claudius not react till later? Isn’t the dumb-show enough to let him know Hamlet has known the truth? 

I think Wilson has argued rather convincingly that Hamlet does not plan the dumb-show himself—that he only adapts The Murder of Gonzago and inserts a speech—and he is extremely irritated with the insertion of the dumb-show (“the players cannot keep counsel; they’ll tell all”). 

As for why Claudius doesn’t react till later, Wilson argues that he, distracted by other things and more interested in plucking out the heart of Hamlet’s mystery, doesn’t watch the dumb-show (hence “Have you heard the argument? Is there no offence in’t?”).

So far, my interpretation has been different, with influence from my friend Himadri (Argumentative Old Git): Claudius sits through the dumb-show, pretending to notice nothing—one may smile and smile and be a villain—but it is too much when it comes to that moment because Hamlet is not only revealing that he knows the truth, he is also threatening the king—look, in the play, the king is not murdered by his brother, as Hamlet’s father is killed by Claudius, but he is killed by his nephew—that is a threat.

But Wilson does address the threat, the double meaning of the play, and the way the play would appear to the court, and his interpretation makes sense, with good arguments. 

4/ John Dover Wilson has a section about the contradictions in Horatio, which I didn’t notice, even after 3 readings and 2 performances (but then, who cares about Horatio? that’s my excuse). 

Next time, I’m going to have to pay more attention to Horatio.  

5/ The chapters about the reception of the play at court, Gertrude’s reaction, Hamlet’s delay, and the conversation between Hamlet and Gertrude are full of interesting insights. 

John Dover Wilson argues, part of the reason Hamlet is paralysed from taking any action is that he has the heavy and complicated task of avenging his father but protecting his mother—her life and her name—what is he then meant to do? I have always thought Hamlet has more hate for his mother than for Claudius—he is more obsessed with her frailty, her incestuous sheets—he has to tell himself not to kill her. So Wilson makes a good point that after the play, rather than focusing on killing Claudius, Hamlet seems occupied with thoughts about Gertrude. 

I also like what he says about the scene in Gertrude’s bedchamber. Wilson destroys some critics’ nonsensical idea that the Ghost is only a figment of Hamlet’s imagination, a sign of his madness—Shakespeare has taken care to make it clear to the audience that the Ghost exists—but why does Gertrude not see him? And why does the Ghost appear in the bedchamber in the first place? 

His interpretations—I’m not telling you—make sense. 

6/ There are also lots of other fascinating points in the book—the funeral scene, Hamlet’s nobility, his change of mood, the fencing scene, Osric’s complicity, etc.—but I will not write everything down. You have to go read the book yourself. 

What Happens in Hamlet is a very good book. An excellent book. Makes you think and rethink about every scene in the play. 

PS: I just created a separate tag for Hamlet on the blog as I keep writing about it. Go back and see. 

On films and rewatchability

Here are two questions:

1/ What makes a film rewatchable, or not rewatchable? 

2/ If a film is not rewatchable, does it mean it’s not truly great? 

Or slightly rephrased: if you like a film and never want to see it again, do you really like it? 

Except for the weirdos who watch everything only once, I think we all have experienced revisiting a film we once liked and wondering what we had seen in it (off the top of my head: American Beauty, Edward Scissorhands)—I’m not talking about that. 

I’m also not thinking of films the enjoyment of which depends heavily on the twist (such as Bong Joon-ho’s Mother), or on the unexpectedness, randomness of events (like The Discreet Charm of Bourgeoisie). 

The reason I’m asking the questions is this: why do I think very highly of certain films but never want to see them again? Is it a personal thing—because of the injustice in the ending, for example, and the anger it caused me and would cause me again—or is there something else, something lacking in the film itself? Like Million Dollar Baby. Or Mystic River. Or Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Or There Will Be Blood. Or Infernal Affairs. Or Dancer in the Dark. Or Dogville. Or Nymphomaniac. Do you experience something similar, or am I strange? Clearly it’s not because I can’t handle something bleak or tragic, having seen Persona 3 times, Cries and Whispers 3 times, Sunset Boulevard probably 3 times, Ace in the Hole 2-3 times, Nights of Cabiria twice; read King Lear and Othello multiple times.  

Perhaps I don’t feel like watching Dogville or Nymphomaniac again because I don’t like the vision of life and humanity, because the films lack balance. Perhaps I don’t feel like watching Mystic River, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, or Infernal Affair because there’s such a strong sense of injustice, because the truth is never discovered, whereas the main character of Sunset Boulevard chooses to be a mensch and makes the right choice before the tragic ending, and the anti-hero of Ace in the Hole in the end realises what he has done. I’m thinking out loud. Perhaps it’s a me thing. Or perhaps these films don’t provide catharsis.

Let’s have a discussion. 

The Mad Fox and Kwaidan: 2 Japanese films and artifice

Yesterday I watched The Mad Fox, which turned out to be one of the most arresting and beautiful films I’d ever seen.

Don’t you just love it when a film plays with colours? 

The Mad Fox has some plot elements reminiscent of Ugetsu monogatari, but its embrace of artifice and use of colours make me think of Kwaidan, in some way. But it is different: The Mad Fox shows strong theatrical influence—it is in fact based on a bunraku play—one may even say that the film is a mix of theatre and cinema, combining the sets and masks and other artifice of theatre with cinematic language. 

A refreshing change after all the naturalistic films I have seen. 

I wonder if the film had any influence on Kwaidan, which came out 2 years later.

Flying fires in The Mad Fox: 

Flying fires in Kwaidan: 

But Kwaidan goes much further in its artificiality, its heightened artificiality. It is unlike anything I have ever seen, and it is one of my favourite Japanese films. 

If only filmmakers play more with stylisation!

Does anyone know other films—preferably Japanese—which are highly stylised/ do something similar? 

Exemplary Novels, the last 8 tales—is Cervantes a one-book wonder?

This is the Edith Grossman translation of Novelas ejemplares (my post on the first 4 stories). 

5/ “The Novel of the Glass Lawyer”: 

Ah, a madman! This must be Cervantes’s specialty. At first it took me some time to re-adapt to Cervantes after Chekhov—Cervantes also took a while to set things up—but afterwards, what a delightful story! Here is a man who gains wisdom in madness, like Lear. More than the protagonists of previous “exemplary novels”, he is a memorable character, combining the madness and knowledge of Don Quixote and the wit of Sancho Panza. 

Tomás Rodaja in his madness believes himself to be made of glass, and is known as Vidriera. 

“A wasp once stung him on the neck and he did not dare brush it away for fear he would break, but even so he complained. One man asked him how he felt the wasp if his body was glass. And he replied that the wasp was probably a gossip, and that the tongues and mouths of gossips were enough to shatter bodies of bronze, let alone glass.”

“The Novel of the Glass Lawyer” is the second best tale in Exemplary Novels.  

6/ “The Novel of the Power of Blood”: 

If you read this tale as a realistic story, and think of the moral aspect, it’s going to be hard to stomach. The only way to approach it is as fairytale, but even then it’s difficult. The 17th century is a foreign country indeed.

(On a side note, I am so done with the theme of the woman’s honour in Spanish literature). 

7/ “The Novel of the Jealous Extremaduran”:

Cervantes is trying me again. 

““This girl is beautiful, and according to the appearance of this house, she cannot be rich; she is a child, and her youth can assuage my suspicions. I shall marry her, keep her in seclusion, train her to my habits and customs, and in this way she will have no tendencies other than those I teach her…”” 

Like Genji and Murasaki. 

The speaker, Felipo de Carrizales, is the jealous Extremaduran of the title. By my calculations, he is 68, though confusingly near the end of the story, he says he’s nearly 80. The girl—wait for it—is 13-14. 

Did I mention I was ill last week? This wasn’t helping. 

The jealous man imprisons his young wife Leonora in the house, giving her no view of the streets and allowing her to go nowhere but to Mass. Except for the black eunuch at the gates, everyone else in the house is female—apart from seeing her parents at Mass, all her companions are the duenna, the maidservants, and the (female) slaves.   

“Whoever thinks he is more perceptive and circumspect can tell me now what other precautions for his security old Felipo could have taken, for he did not even consent to having any male animal in his house. A tomcat never chased the mice, and a male dog was never heard barking; all the animals were of the female gender. By day Felipo would think, by night he did not sleep; he was the night watch and sentry of his house, the Argos of what he loved dearly. No man ever passed through the door to the courtyard; he did business with his friends on the street.”

Most of the story is enjoyable as one watches the young and handsome Loaysa break through the fortress, with his musical talent and his wit, to get to Leonora. Carrizales is a tyrant! But one reads the ending and again thinks, with vexation, that the 17th century is a foreign country. These novelas are ejemplares apparently because there are some moral lessons, or at least they reflect the moral standards of the day, but the moral values of 17th century Spain are rather dubious, if not downright revolting.  

(It also didn’t help that on 30/7, the same day I read these two morally disturbing tales, I watched The Ballad of Narayama from 1983, one of those films that made me feel like I needed a good long bath afterwards). 

8/ “The Novel of the Illustrious Scullery Maid”: 

Cervantes seems fascinated by the act of transforming, of reinventing oneself: 

“Here it is: we now have—may it be the right time to recount it—Avendaño turned into a servant named Tomás Pedro in the inn, for that is what he said his name was, and Carriazo, with the name of Lope the Asturian, turned into a water carrier; metamorphoses worthy of being placed ahead of those by the sharp-nosed poet, Publius Ovidius Naso.”

Looks like I will have to read Ovid—Shakespeare loved Ovid after all. 

This story also has a pair of friends, but Avendaño and Carriazo are not interchangeable like Rinconete and Cortadillo: both come from rich families but Carriazo is an experienced rogue, drawn to adventures and tuna fishing; Avendaño just steps out in the world and finds himself enamoured of Costanza, the scullery maid. 

If I’m allowed to be a bit petty, I’d note that the ending rather goes against the point about female autonomy that Cervantes makes multiple times throughout Don Quixote. But overall, I enjoyed this story. It’s got a few tropes of Romances, but Cervantes is inventive and a great storyteller—he’s good at captivating the reader’s attention. 

9/ “The Novel of the Two Maidens”: 

Guess what this one is about. Correct! A woman’s honour. Or rather, two women’s honour. 

The one interesting thing I have to say is that clearly Shakespeare and Cervantes are both inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but if Shakespeare is generally more interested in disguise, acting, and manipulation, Cervantes is generally more fascinated by the act of renaming and reinventing oneself, though this one is an exception. In this tale, Cervantes largely still refers to Teodosia as Teodosia whilst she’s in disguise as Teodoro (a man), whereas in “The Glass Lawyer”, “The Illustrious Scullery Maid”, “Rinconete and Cortadillo”, and of course Don Quixote, the narrator switches to the new names, the new identities the characters give themselves.  

This tale of Teodosia and Leocadia makes me think of the subplot of Dorotea and Luscinda in Don Quixote, though of course it is different—Cervantes is inventive with plot. The resolution, as in “The Jealous Extremaduran”, feels like an attempt to be “exemplary”, but one could say the untangling of the Marco Antonio – Leocadia knot is unexpected—at least to me. 

Without saying who’s who, so as not to spoil the ending, I’d say I feel second-hand embarrassment for one of the maidens. Before everyone! I just wouldn’t go out in public again if I were her. 

10/ “The Novel of Señora Cornelia”: 

Between the 9th and 10th tales, I took a little break and read “The Displaced Person”, the final story in Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories.

It feels very strange to jump from the 17th century to the 20th century, then back to the 17th, and find Cervantes still treating the theme of a woman’s honour. How many times are you going to do this, Miguel? I have nothing to say—it feels rather pointless a story. 

It is worth noting though that a) Cervantes portrays with sympathy and doesn’t seem to condemn the women who have premarital sex; and b) there is no Don Juan in Don Quixote and Exemplary Novels—the men are either one-time rapists or passionate men who have sex before marriage but do keep their vows.

11/ “The Novel of the Deceitful Marriage”: 

This tale is rather short and under-developed, but it is fascinating for a few reasons. First of all, after numerous strikingly beautiful, good, and chaste women, who all seem alike, we now encounter a woman who is not very beautiful and who turns out to be manipulative. Secondly, it leads to the next—and last—story. And thirdly, a character raises a question about truth and reliability, which brings it closer to Don Quixote. 

12/ “The Novel of the Colloquy of the Dogs”: 

Now this is the height of Exemplary Novels. The story is a conversation between two dogs, Cipión and Berganza— it is closer to Tolstoy’s “Kholstomer” than to Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, though Cervantes’s dogs are a bit more human than Levin’s dog Laska in Anna Karenina. 

Berganza talks about his life, about his different masters and diverse careers, thus painting a rather rich and vivid picture of Spanish society in the 17th century. Cervantes’s gift for dialogue, as we see in Don Quixote, is at full strength here. The brilliance and wit and humour of Don Quixote, the double layers of narration and stories within the story can also be found here. 

“CIPIÓN: You call gossip philosophizing? Well, well, well: applaud, applaud, Berganza, the accursed plague of gossip! Call it whatever you like, it will call us cynics, a word that means gossiping canines; and by your life, be quiet now and go on with your story.

BERGANZA: How can I go on with it if I’m quiet?

CIPIÓN: I mean just go straight ahead, without making the story look like an octopus with all the tails you keep adding to it.

BERGANZA: Speak properly; the appendages of an octopus are not called tails.” 

It is wonderful! 

So, is Cervantes a one-book wonder? Just so you get a clearer idea, I shall digress and say that Herman Melville, often assumed to be a one-book wonder, is not one—his novellas and short stories are magnificent, especially “Bartleby”, “Benito Cereno”, “Billy Budd”, and “The Encantadas”; his novels The Confidence-Man and White-Jacket are also brilliant, even if they cannot compare to Moby Dick (but what can?). Cervantes, I would say, has one masterpiece—the funniest and also saddest novel I’ve read—but if you are curious about his other works, “The Novel of the Colloquy of the Dogs” and “The Novel of the Glass Lawyer” are worth reading. 

Yorkshire Lavender [updated]

 Some photos of me in a lavender field outside York yesterday. 

The appeal of Chekhov

Nabokov says in Strong Opinions: 

“The word “genius” is passed around rather generously, isn’t it? At least in English, because its Russian counterpart, geniy, is a term brimming with a sort of throaty awe and is used only in the case of a very small number of writers, Shakespeare, Milton, Pushkin, Tolstoy. To such deeply beloved authors as Turgenev and Chekhov Russians assign the thinner term, talánt, talent, not genius. […] Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique, dazzling gift, the genius of James Joyce, not the talent of Henry James.” 

And yet: 

“Mr. Karlinsky has put his finger on a mysterious sensory cell. He is right, I do love Chekhov dearly. I fail, however, to rationalize my feeling for him: I can easily do so in regard to the greater artist, Tolstoy, with the flash of this or that unforgettable passage (“…  how sweetly she said: ‘and even very much’ ”—Vronsky recalling Kitty’s reply to some trivial question that we shall never know), but when I imagine Chekhov with the same detachment all I can make out is a medley of dreadful prosaisms, ready-made epithets, repetitions, doctors, unconvincing vamps, and so forth; yet it is his works which I would take on a trip to another planet.”

Nabokov makes a similar point in Lectures on Russian Literature: 

“Russian critics have noted that Chekhov’s style, his choice of words and so on, did not reveal any of those special artistic preoccupations that obsessed, for instance, Gogol or Flaubert or Henry James. […] Thus Chekhov is a good example to give when one tries to explain that a writer may be a perfect artist without being exceptionally vivid in his verbal technique or exceptionally preoccupied with the way his sentences curve. […] The magical part of it is that in spite of his tolerating flaws which a bright beginner would have avoided, in spite of his being quite satisfied with the man-in-the street among words, the word-in-the-street, so to say, Chekhov managed to convey an impression of artistic beauty far surpassing that of many writers who thought they knew what rich beautiful prose was.”

Unlike Nabokov, I do think Chekhov has genius—like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Gogol—whereas Turgenev has talent. But I too find it difficult to talk about Chekhov’s greatness, to rationalise my love for his writings.

When I read Alice Munro for the first time last year—a darling of Book Twitter, until the recent explosion—I enjoyed the stories a lot, but I remember thinking she’s very good but not Chekhov good. Alice Munro is also a subtle writer, writing about the lives of ordinary people and the little moments that are full of meaning. In a way, she should perhaps appeal more to me, writing about women, and she’s contemporary—TSK on Twitter said “being closer to us in time, her stories are fresher and more alive”—and yet I have never felt a connection with Alice Munro the way I feel about Chekhov (and now I clearly won’t). 

But it’s not just Alice Munro. I just love Chekhov more than any other short story writers; and in literature in general, I feel closer to Chekhov than anyone else, even Shakespeare and Tolstoy. 

Why? 

Part of it must be the authorial persona. Some writers—like Chekhov, Cervantes—have a more lovable persona than others—like Tolstoy, George Eliot. Tolstoy the artist may be able to depict a wide range of perspectives and inhabit the mind of more or less any character* but you can tell—you can feel on the page—that Tolstoy the man is judgemental. Same with George Eliot. 

It’s not that Chekhov doesn’t judge or doesn’t condemn. That is something people like to repeat when they talk about Chekhov, but all you have to do is to read “Ward No.6” or “In the Ravine” and you can see that isn’t true—Chekhov’s moral sense is clear, as he writes about people’s egotism, callousness, and cruelty to each other. But he is compassionate and humane. He makes us feel understood. He provides solace in moments of despair. 

He conveys, better than anyone, those brief moments of sadness that we sometimes feel. Take, for example, this passage from “The Beauties”: 

“I felt this beauty rather strangely. It was not desire, nor ecstacy, nor enjoyment that Masha excited in me, but a painful though pleasant sadness. It was a sadness vague and undefined as a dream. For some reason I felt sorry for myself, for my grandfather and for the Armenian, even for the girl herself, and I had a feeling as though we all four had lost something important and essential to life which we should never find again. My grandfather, too, grew melancholy; he talked no more about manure or about oats, but sat silent, looking pensively at Masha.” 

Later, in the same story: 

“On the platform between our carriage and the next the guard was standing with his elbows on the railing, looking in the direction of the beautiful girl, and his battered, wrinkled, unpleasantly beefy face, exhausted by sleepless nights and the jolting of the train, wore a look of tenderness and of the deepest sadness, as though in that girl he saw happiness, his own youth, soberness, purity, wife, children; as though he were repenting and feeling in his whole being that that girl was not his, and that for him, with his premature old age, his uncouthness, and his beefy face, the ordinary happiness of a man and a passenger was as far away as heaven....” 

(translated by Constance Garnett) 

I’m not a guard with a “battered, wrinkled, unpleasantly beefy face”, but I recognise that melancholy feeling.

This is why, when I feel down, I turn to Chekhov. 

Chekhov appeals to me also because he’s a humanist, and humane. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky constantly write about God and constantly wrestle with their faith; Chekhov doesn’t pretend to know the answers to any of those big questions, but he’s capable of depicting goodness without faith, and conveying—in life as well as in writings—a sense of purpose without religion. He also rejects ideology, and rejects extremes. 

If anyone asks who my literary heroes are, my immediate answer would be Chekhov. I might perhaps also mention Vasily Grossman or Primo Levi—it might be a bit too early to say—but my one literary hero would be Chekhov. 

What about you? Why do you like Chekhov? 

*: except Hélène. 

Chekhov’s “The Horse-Stealers” and some strange imagery

When people talk about Chekhov, they usually talk about him as a subtle writer, depicting with sensitivity and compassion ordinary people’s loneliness, regrets, and sorrows. People focus on his range of characters, his ability to convey the subtlest shades of emotions, and his scepticism of ideas and meaning.

As though there’s nothing interesting about his imagery.

But I have just read “The Horse-Stealers”, in Volume 10 of Constance Garnett’s 13 volumes of Chekhov, and look! 

“The wind howled in the stove; something growled and squeaked as though a big dog had strangled a rat.

“Ugh! the unclean spirits are abroad!” said Lyubka.”

This one is simple—someone like Flaubert or Flannery O’Connor might come up with a more unusual simile—but it does vividly set up the dark tone of the story, and “The Horse-Stealers” is rather dark.

““What a flame of a girl!” thought Yergunov, sitting on the chest, and from there watching the dance. “What fire! Give up everything for her, and it would be too little . . . .”

[…] The sharp tapping, shouts, and whoops set the crockery ringing in the cupboard and the flame of the candle dancing.

The thread broke and the beads were scattered all over the floor, the green kerchief slipped off, and Lyubka was transformed into a red cloud flitting by and flashing black eyes, and it seemed as though in another second Merik’s arms and legs would drop off.”

Yergunov yearns for Lyubka but she’s only drawn to Merik, one of the horse stealers, who treats her abominably. Then he finds that in the snowstorm, his horse has been stolen. 

“The snowstorm still persisted. White clouds were floating about the yard, their long tails clinging to the rough grass and the bushes, while on the other side of the fence in the open country huge giants in white robes with wide sleeves were whirling round and falling to the ground, and getting up again to wave their arms and fight. And the wind, the wind! The bare birches and cherry-trees, unable to endure its rude caresses, bowed low down to the ground and wailed: “God, for what sin hast Thou bound us to the earth and will not let us go free?”” 

Now that is a strange image. Those are the sentient trees that Tom (Wuthering Expectations) has written about. Tom has trained me to notice the trees. And huge giants in white robes! 

“He strained his eyes to the utmost, and saw only the snow flying and the snowflakes distinctly forming into all sorts of shapes; at one moment the white, laughing face of a corpse would peep out of the darkness, at the next a white horse would gallop by with an Amazon in a muslin dress upon it, at the next a string of white swans would fly overhead. . .” 

That is even stranger.

I should perhaps write more about this aspect of Chekhov. Wonderful writer.