A Story that Might Be on the Move

Ho hum. Spring pollen has me committing so many of my energy-bearing resources to the struggle simply to stay awake that my ability to put two coherent thoughts together, much less post them, has been significantly impaired. But I did manage to finish the little two-novella collection I was reading by Gottfried Keller, The Banner of the Upright Seven and Ursula.

Zentralbibliotek Zürich

What a great read-- maybe because the initial feeling that you're entering into a world of old-school starched collars and self-conscious diction soon gives way to the sense that something transitional is going on here, and that Keller, trained as a painter and for a time, at least, into radical politics, probably wouldn't have enjoyed sitting around in stiff salons and drinking very proper tea. The author is considered a literary realist, but something about the first story, at least-- that vaguely transitional "something" I mentioned and that almost seems to catch a glimpse of modernism on the horizon-- keeps it from exemplifying that school.

(What follows are purely personal interpretations, which I know would be slammed by any literature scholar worth the name, but here goes.) Young Karl in "Upright Seven," for example, seems too tickledly detached from everything except Hermine, and the couple somehow too good-naturedly airy, or aware of the slight goofiness of their infatuation and situation, to fall in with the creations dreamed up by the Big Russians (except, maybe, for Chekhov). What really fascinates me about this story, though, is its ending. (Insert obligatory spoiler alert here.) Our young couple has finally overcome the objections of their fathers, and is sharing a happy post-proposal moment, when a former military colleague of Karl's shouts out to them in recognition. And then, "[t]he betrothed sat down on the steps at his feet and chatted with him for a full half hour, before they returned to the company."(1) End of story. This pair, who's been sneaking around and scheming ever since the tale began, and who's cocooned into a little universe all its own, suddenly pops out of it and goes to hang out with a guy Karl doesn't know all that well anymore. There's something-- I don't know what-- about the fact that it was a "full half hour," and not just a half hour, that's also contributing to my reaction of "Huh? Interesting." Sure, it would've been rude not to have acknowledged the sentry's presence, and the couple was probably bursting with eagerness to broadcast the engagement all over the place. But that apparent ability to snap out of one engrossing emotional situation, right into another, and thereafter to head back to the oldheads, is curious, even if young adults were probably just as flighty in their own way then as they are today.

Maybe I've undermined my own initial assertions about the tale's impatience with its assigned genre. Oh well. The only other observation I have is that with "Ursula," Keller managed to make a fictional account of mass Reformation nuttiness interesting-- maybe because he let the implications of religious upheaval play themselves out without really overtly discussing religion in general.

So: a short-ish review of a short-ish book. That seems appropriate for a Friday, especially one on which the ol' nasal passages are suffering fits of ticklishness. In that spirit, I'm setting down the metaphorical pen and going in search of some Kleenex.



(1) Gottfried Keller, "The Banner of the Upright Seven," in The Banner of the Upright Seven and Ursula, transl. Bayard Quincy Morgan (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1974), 67.

The Father of Analytical Psychology: What a Guy

How to sum up a really fantastic collection of C.G. Jung's writings? Overall, this volume, edited by Anthony Storr, gives the impression of a guy completely devoted to others' mental health, and to figuring out how best to achieve it, even if that meant risking the ridicule of scientism, via open-minded explorations of mythology and the psychological aspects of alchemy. I get a sense of a much more compassionate, curious, and humble individual than, say, Freud, and of a foundational figure who would probably bemoan the stats-laden and -dependent "behavioral sciences" we get to deal with today.

(Exemplary aside, re: an obsession with statistics: A few years ago, I got assigned to a miserable "research committee" headed by a statistics-worshipping chair. I told the woman she'd probably have to school me in some of her terminology, as well as explain to me why she was using only stats to address particular issues, since my philosophy-ethics-religion-literature background often approached the human condition in entirely different ways. She cheerfully said even I could make great use of statistics in pondering the state of the soul: "You can ask someone, for example, how many times he's read Dante's Inferno." Probably rudely, I replied, "Which would tell me nothing." Not that long before, a business prof had made a similar pitch to me, re: statistics' ability to be of use in existential investigation: "You can use them to keep track of church membership.")

Anyway, my only true beef with the guy's thought is centered around his assumptions regarding gender and its easy division into two clearly differentiated types. Given, from what I understand, what Jung defines as the anima/animus isn't prescriptively advocating for a particular idea of what a woman or man is, but instead, is a sort of historical "spiritual" conglomeration of assumptions about what constitutes "feminine" and "masculine"-- and so of course, each of these figures would largely be made up of baggage (whether well- or ill-founded) that's been carried through the collective unconscious since, essentially, the beginning of time. What I'm wondering is whether, according to Jung, as collective beliefs about the characteristics of biologically male, female, or other (a category not really extant at the time of his writings) are transformed, images and characteristics of the anima/animus are thought to change as well-- and whether, in the light of such changed beliefs, our psyches will continue to operate according to gender-based polarities, when such things grow ever less relevant or acceptable in the public sphere.

There's really too much in this book to explore in one post, and so I'll probably be coming back to it in the next few days and/or weeks. (I did go out and buy Answer to Job, and I'm particularly excited about it.) But far from being a lamentable state of affairs, the abundance, and potential overload, of so much rich material, is a real joy; I wish I came across such things much more often.

The Best Theologians Might Be Psychologists

Due to a ridiculous schedule that precludes writing anything of substance, I'll give an all-too-brief recommendation: read Carl Jung's exegesis of the Job story. It's the most insightful-- and hilarious-- deconstruction of the entire thing I've ever read, and that's coming from someone who's completed far too much graduate work in religion.

Behold, teasers:

"[Yahweh's] faithful servant Job is now to be exposed to a rigorous moral test, quite gratuitously and to no purpose, although Yahweh is convinced of Job's faithfulness and constancy, and could moreover have assured himself beyond all doubt on this point had he taken counsel with his own omniscience." (1)

"The plea of [Yahweh's] unconsciousness is invalid, seeing that he flagrantly violates at least three of the commandments he himself gave on Mount Sinai." (2)

William Blake

This whole analysis wonderfully brings out Yahweh's off-base argumentative approach to the entire situation, along with all the bluster and blindness involved: "... he comes riding along on the tempest of his almightiness and thunders reproaches at the half-crushed human worm: 'Who is this that darkens counsel by words without insight?' In view of the subsequent words of Yahweh, one must really ask oneself: Who is darkening what counsel? The only dark thing here is how Yahweh ever came to make a bet with Satan." (3) And: "Altogether, [Yahweh] pays so little attention to Job's real situation that one suspects him of having an ulterior motive... Job is no more than the outward occasion for an inward process of dialectic in God. His thunderings at Job so completely miss the point that one cannot help but see how much he is occupied with himself." (4)

Really, I'm going to have to go back and read this excerpt (it's part of the collection, The Essential Jung), as well as the whole damn book from which it came (Answer to Job), three or four times, probably gaining ever more enjoyment out of each subsequent reading. Who says psychology can't be downright and profoundly hilarious?


(1) "From Answer to Job," in Carl Jung, The Essential Jung, Selected and Introduced by Anthony Storr (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 310.
(2) 311.
(3) 312.
(4) 313.

A Curious Footnote Speaks Volumes (Maybe)

Sometimes, a translator's inner pedant escapes and just has to rear its little homunculean head. I found the tracks of such a creature in last night's reading of The Banner of the Upright Seven (by Gottfried Keller, translated in 1964 by one Bayard Quincy Morgan, apparently known in sporting fashion as "B.Q," and, I would assume, entirely comfortable with utterances such as "old chap").

Behold, at the bottom of page 41, the description of a dinner party receives the following note:
"Feminine readers may be interested in the cakes which Keller specifies, and which are as follows: Hüpli and Offleten, crisp brown cookies of flour, cream and sugar; both are very thin, but the former are rolled into small tubes, while the latter are flat and frequently stamped with a decorative pattern, or with the coat of arms of the family... [etc., etc.] TRANSLATOR."

Before examining the amazed guffaw that issued from yours truly, I first have to state that I love the biblical-style, all-caps-smaller-font signature B.Q. was granted here, much like THE LORD gets any time HE makes an appearance in Old Testament get-togethers.

But seriously, folks, "feminine readers"? 

Source: Motif Magazine

Yep, this was 1964, before the longhairs were running roughshod over innocent America and the women's libbers were trying to bring civilization to its unstockinged knees. But just a year earlier, Betty Friedan had published The Feminine Mystique. And here begins the wild speculation that was going through my head just a few hours ago: it's hard to believe something that made the splash Friedan's book did wouldn't have crossed the path of a well-informed Stanford Emeritus Professor such as our intrepid translator.

Maybe he and the publisher thought this little uproar was just a phase. (It's more likely they didn't think about it at all, in relation to the dumb footnote, but let's keep going, just for fun.) Morgan was in his eighties when Upright Seven came out; he was born in 1883, and I'm sure he'd seen enough to know that the world usually doesn't change drastically overnight, especially as the result of a book. But the way in which B.Q. assumed what sort of audience would (and would not) be interested in his footnote (especially when footnotes had thankfully been almost non-existent up to this point), and the way in which he addressed that audience, places him solidly in line with pre-Friedan attitudes.

Would there be something wrong with a man interested in knowing just what all these pastries were? If interested, would he be counted as "feminine"? Was Morgan using the adjective, not as an indicator of gender, but as a one-word label of bundled assumptions involved in a standard view of a particular gender? Did he use "feminine readers" in place of "ladies," for example, because he was aware that these days, only certain types of women-- those paragons of their "sex" still committed to the home and to "femininity"-- were remotely concerned with impressing the guests at their next dinner party?

I realize I've gone off on a zany tangent here that many will find ridiculous. But-- time for a little self-disclosure-- since I am a translator, I know 1) word choices loom incredibly large, whether bringing a text into another language or selecting the right phrasing for a margin note or clarification, and 2) my colleagues and I, at least, tend to make sparing use of footnotes. B.Q. had, so far, stayed true to point #2, and so I find it especially curious that he took the time here to seek out his lady friends, who, had they really been that interested in what was on Herr Frymann's table, probably would have done their own research.

And then: the text itself will bear with it its own date-stamp; how much do you, as a translator, want to 1) insert yourself into the text and/or 2) mark your own interventions with an additional era-indicator, thus (probably) leaving that much more excuse for someone else to come along and improve upon your own dated production?

I feel I've been a bit hard on ol' B.Q., who really was a mover and shaker in the world of translation, a world to which he was deeply committed. And I can at least recognize that his little comment was more apropos in the mid-'60s than it would be today-- and be thankful that, even though hearty strains of sexism still assume I'd rather be shopping and taking advice from The Millionaire Matchmaker, most people I know would laugh just as nuttily as I did upon reading that little gem at the bottom of page 41.

The Book Wins Out!

I'm über-glad I stuck with A Thousand Acres. The thing really picked up in the second half, and of course, the book was much better-- more nuanced; more willing to go more in-depth into more dark places; more cognizant of the resident seeds of evil hanging around in even the most lamblike of us-- than the movie. I was especially impressed with the way Smiley had the narrator grow up and out of her meek cluelessness, without feeling pressured to bring the story to a victorious, trumpets-and-sunshine end.

The one thing the movie adaptation did well? Cast Michelle Pfeiffer in the role of Rose. And I can't remember at all how the cinema version brought things to a close, but at least from what I recall seeing, Jessica Lange was also a good choice for Ginny, at least in pre-epiphany mode.

So: one more win for the book over the movie. While considering this competition, though, I was reminded of those rare times when each version of a story is equally as good as the other. I'm thinking about two examples in particular: 1) the account of Philippe Petit's high-wire walk between the Twin Towers in 1974. I first learned about it from the documentary that detailed it all, Man on Wire. Absolutely brilliant. It sent me straight to the protagonist's own written original, To Reach the Clouds. Even though I knew what would happen, and how, the latter had me biting my nails to the end.

2) The Harry Potter series is an entirely different animal for me, and constitutes one rare, collective instance where I'm content to let each genre exist as a set of completely unique products-- maybe because all of them were of high quality, and because, given the length of the later books, I was willing to allow for some excising in the later films.

That's all I have to say about that, though, other than the fact that I would like to check out Peter Brook's lengthy version of The Mahabharata. The time, though! There have to be five hours free somewhere...

When Cinema Gets to You First

Larry D. Moore CC BY-SA 3.0

Somehow, I was unaware that Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres contained the story it does. I'd enjoyed a book of the author's short stories, and so when I saw the novel at a book sale a while ago, I grabbed it. When I dove in last night, I suddenly became aware on page eighteen that I knew what this was going to turn out to be; in this case, I'd seen that movie before.

Probably because my sister had subjected me to the film at the same time she also sat me down in front of One True Thing, the two got jumbled in my mind, and the former took on the name of the latter. (I'm not sure what happened in the ol' mental nether regions to the Anna Quindlen tale so rudely stripped of its identity.) But now that I know what I'm dealing with, I'm not really excited about seeing this through, in spite of the fact that Smiley's a good writer. I'm trying to pump myself up with things such as reminders that Greek tragedy is really just the same stories everyone already knew down to the last detail, but necessarily shaped into something original by each successive playwright who took on some heroic tale or gods-ridden nightmare. And I love me some Aristophanes and Sophocles, so what's the problem here?

The probable problem is the fact that I saw the Hollywood version of whatever Smiley produced first, and most likely in much better fashion. And so, if nothing else, I'm going to read this thing through to the end, in an attempt to establish the authorial superiority of the original. (Let's hope it happens.) There's a nagging reminder, though, of films that in my humble opinion, won out over their written source materials: Gone with the Wind, Old Yeller, Where the Red Fern Grows, The Firm. (Those middle two hold tenuous places in this list, since I watched and read all available versions of each multiple times-- but, with the exception of some vague hunting episode in Red Fern, when I think of both today, all I can come up with are scenes from the movies.)

So: I'll do my best to keep Michelle Pfeiffer et al out of my head while reading. (Already, I'm picturing the father with features completely unlike Jason Robards', so I'm optimistic about the success of said aim-- but, while looking this thing up on IMDB, was amazed to find that Colin Firth has a significant part in the film. Nice going, crappy memory.)

The Clash of Genres

Courtesy erinc salor

Courtesy Library of Congress

A word of advice: it's sheer folly to think that, after having viewed a Werner Herzog production and listened to the master's inimitably styled homilies, you can then move directly on to reading Carl Jung without any side effects. Just try to take seriously any disquisitions on the anima/us, and not hearing it all pronounced with the former luminary's wonderfully particular accent-- try, too, not to feel as if you're being taken for some sort of intelligently conceived ride.

The latter impression may have had a lot to do with the fact that I'd been watching Incident at Loch Ness-- the epitome of just excellent foolery.