Translating Culhwch and Olwen, final thoughts.

And as long as he lived, she was his only wife

 

I love this story, I have known it for decades. I wouldn’t like to live in it.   

Translating it, I have become very pro-giant and sympathetic to boars and witches. I doubt this was the storyteller’s intention, although he obviously admired a good horse and dog, and knew the boar was a worthy opponent. 

 

The material probably felt archaic when it was written down. Throughout the story there is an indifference to suffering, stripped of all pretence of ideological or theological justification. In a world of talking animals and men who have been punished by being turned into animals, the distinction between humans and other animals is slight. Twrch Trywth, the great boar, and his piglets are as brave and as admirable as the heroes who hunt them. Men kill without remorse or compassion. They throw their lives away with flamboyant indifference. To get two strangers into bed, the death toll is enormous and nobody questions this, at any point in the story. 

 

Those outside courtly society; giants and witches, or those in possession of desired objects, are there to be used, exploited, and killed. The powerful will take what they want or need. They might ask first, but ‘no’ is never a safe option. 

 

It's a story, nothing more or less. But perhaps the storyteller understood that stripped of pretence, this is the way the world has always worked. He doesn’t condone or condemn. He reports. Ysbadadden, shaved and about to die, speaks the truth. Culhwch has earned nothing; learnt nothing. Without Arthur, he didn’t have a chance. 

‘And that’ says our author, ‘is how Culhwch won Olwen.’ 

 

Jeremy Hooker, Diary of a stroke. Shearsman (2016)

Jeremy Hooker, Diary of a stroke. Shearsman (2016)

 

Memory, narrative and identity. 

 

Are your memories like the panel of a cartoon, that’s been torn from the rest of the strip? A scene from a film where the credits have gone missing? Vague images glimpsed from the wrong angle, a collection of shade and colour and movement? What happens to them when you try to put them into words and tell them to someone who wasn’t involved? 

 

Beyond the obvious idea that writing memory is always a work of reconstruction, there is the lurking problem that although the event can be described in words, the writer is on the outside looking in. Whatever emotion that incident evoked at the time, or no matter how important it seems in retrospect, it slips away or is distorted in the attempt to write it. 

 

Freud claimed that some of his patients could not ‘narrate themselves into coherence’. And what is a memoire, if not a retrospective rearrangement of events to produce a coherent character who shares a name with the narrator? 

 

But the key term is ‘narrate’. We all have memories. But putting them into words, even for the most eloquent, is never straight forward.

 

The English poet and critic, Jeremy Hooker suffered a stroke in July 1999, and kept a journal of his experience, first in hospital then when recuperating, until his return to work in January 2001.

 

As the book progresses  the entries integrate record, observation and memory and gently develop into a memoire of his early years. The awareness of the problems of writing memory make this book far more interesting than a well-written memoire would be on its own. 

 

The book begins with short entries which record the world of the hospital, his return home, and his adjustments to a body that was no longer to be taken for granted. The entries record encounters with friends, old and new which provoke reflection, and Hooker, refusing to sentimentalise, is candid about himself and his life. However the book turns on his unexpected desire to write about his past. 

 

‘Since lying in hospital I have thought that I would like to write something-call it a memoire or autobiographical sketch-about my childhood…. I doubt I could do it formally since it would confront me with problems of public persona & literary occasion-problems in my own mind about my ‘rights’ as an author.  

What I might do , though, is give way to the impulse when it occurs and use this journal space , in which I feel most free as a writer, to sketch a memory or an impression. (P.93. November 10.)

 

For a writer who had refused the ‘confessional’ and ‘autobiographical’ in his own poetry the desire was not straight forward. How to avoid what he had called ‘the sludge of nostalgia?’ More significantly,  if a memory is a first person narrative, the writing of it becomes tangled in problems of subjectivity. In a previous essay, Hooker had reflected on ‘the lyric I’ and written ‘quite simply, I might look at a tree or any living thing and know its reality would always be beyond my words’. The past may be factual. But in narrating it, it becomes a thing, to be described, ‘to be always beyond words.’  

 

In the same essay he wrote:

 

…’One problem with Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as originating in emotion recollected in tranquillity is it’s tacit assumption of a stable ego in the act of recollection’. Against this he juxtaposes D.H. Lawrence’s ‘ If I say of myself, I am this, I am that!-then, I stick to it, I turn into a stupid fixed thing like a lamp post. I shall never know wherein lies my integrity, my individuality, my me.’

 

Comparing such disparate figures as Keats, and David Jones, he wrote: ‘Each involves self or soul as more process than fixed identity, as something one works with and realises in the making’.    

A memoir is not just a straight forward account of past events. It is the construction of one possible version of a life, a fixing of identity in retrospect. In Hooker’s case, an activity qualified by a critical awareness:

 

‘It seems to me that a lot of ‘inner experience’, offered as the subject of poetry, isn’t interesting. For a start it tends to be conventional, with more sameness (but less common depth) than its advocates are prepared to allow. The individual is a bourgeois concept , a commercial asset in a society given to buying and selling ‘lifestyle’ products. The person by contrast turns away from convention and instead of idolizing the psychological, as though it were a precious private property, is sensitive to the unique and relational aspects of human being.’ (p. 81. October 24)

 

He is therefore, wary. If our past is something we narrate into coherence, then what is a genuine memory? How much of our idea of our past is constructed around  stories other people have told us, or photographs we have seen. How do we know our memory isn’t a story we have told ourself so often we now accept it as something that ‘really did happen’.  In retrospect do we freight incidents and people with a significance they didn’t have at the time? 

 

One of his memories is off sitting in a car, waiting for his father, and sketching what he could see outside the window. The image becomes a symbol of what he’s not trying to achieve.

Often the memoire seems to the writer, looking out at a world that is ‘over there’, as if the world was a painting without people. Or that what mattered was his or her reflection in the glass. ‘But what I want to see is the life  out there, not my face reflected in the glass, or an empty landscape, but the quickness and the plenitude in this common place.’ 

 

 

As with Hooker’s other Journals, his reading and reflection are contained in the diary. During the period covered in Diary of a Stroke, he was also working on Imagining Wales and these two books complement each other. Imagining Wales is the publicly endorsed critical approach, Diary of A Stroke  contains a personal response to these writers that is no less interesting. For readers of his critical work, the journal references provide a perspective on these authors: these writers give him a way of orientating himself, or navigating his way through the experience. It is a model of literate critical reading in the best sense, of taking what can be learnt from books and folding them into his life.  

 

Hooker’s long engagement with the work of John Cowper Powys, David Jones and Richard Jeffreys, provide threads through the journal. Two of those writers  provide unusual models  for anyone writing about his or her past. In his Autobiography Powys carefully manufactured a version of himself. It’s an astonishing performance but he left his biographers the task of untangling the fact from fiction. Jefferies’s Story of my Heart is an autobiography mostly lacking in the kind of dated events one might expect. Hooker’s approach is less programmatic, more conventional but no less interesting

 

If you take into account class, geography and time, most childhoods, barring traumatic events, are similar. Like it or not, we are cliches. What makes Diary of a Stroke more than just an eloquent record of memory and recovery is Hooker’s reluctance to simply record his past. There’s an honest tension between the desire to write about memory; the critical sense that self-revelation is usually not that interesting to a third party, and an awareness of the technical difficulties of writing about the past that elevates the book above the merely self-referential and provides a stranger with much to think about. 

Translating 'The Mabinogion'. The story teller's strengths and weaknesses

Plodding onwards, now in Ystoria Gereint Uab Erbin,  I am still in awe of the story teller’s skill. 

He walks such a fine line between a minimalist narration that would be the envy of Raymond Carver and notes for a story he hasn’t written.  

 

Here’s the incident that kick starts the story ‘Gerient Son of Erbin’. The quotes are taken from Sioned Davies' impressive translation.

A forester has approached Arthur at the feast, and after the formal greetings:

 

‘Tell us your news’ said Arthur.

‘I will Lord,’ he said. ‘A stag have I seen in the forest and I have never seen anything like it.’

‘What is it about it for you never to have seen anything like it?’ said Arthur

‘It is pure white, lord, and it does not walk with any other animal out of arrogance and pride because it is so majestic. And it is to ask you advice lord, that have I come. What is your advice in the matter?”

‘I shall do the most appropriate thing,’ said Arthur, ‘and go and hunt it tomorrow at dawn; and let everyone in the lodgings know that, and Rhyferys (who was a chief hunstman of Arhtur’s) and Elifri (who was the chief squire) and everyone else’.

 

The speech isn’t ‘described’. The same verb is used every time. The speaker is identified, but how he (or she in other instances) speaks is left to the audience. ‘Tell us your news’ said Arthur. Bluntly? In a resigned tone? In an authoritarian manner? 

It’s up to you. 

 

At times there is no need to indicate who is being spoken to. ‘Let everyone know’ is obviously not addressed to the forester. But ‘Arthur turned to his court officials and said’ would be redundant. 

 

There’s no description of what’s happening in the background during the conversation either. Nor is there any description of Arthur’s reaction, but I think you can hear him lean forward, suddenly paying attention at ‘I have never seen anything like it’. And you can hear the courtiers nearby voicing their approval when after ‘the most appropriate thing’ Arthur says ‘I will go and hunt it’. 

 

The style invites the audience in and asks it to participate, but also gives it the freedom to make it its own. 

 

I like this very much. It reminds me of the best of the traditional ballads, where everything that isn’t essential has been stripped out. You could argue that it produces too much ambiguity? Is Arthur bored or annoyed or excited? And the answer is probably that it’s not as important as what he says. You could argue that the style is the product of an exterior world, and we live in one that likes to pretend it has access to intention, character and emotion. And a great deal of modern fiction is based on the convention that the writer not only can but in some ways is obliged to tell you what the character/s is/are thinking. But it’s one of literary fictions more dubious charactersitics.

 

I'm at the editing end of the current writing project.  The next part of A Presentment of Englishry is almost finished. I’m weighing up how much I can cut out. I’d like to follow the medieval method, but I suspect most modern audiences would not be happy with such a minimalist approach. 

 

On the other hand. 

 

I’m not so enamoured by the story-teller’s habit of describing what people are wearing. This happens to a greater or lesser extent across all the stories I’ve translated so far, and I’m beginning to assume there will be curly auburn hair, tunics and surcoats, brocaded silk and boots of Cordovan leather. 

 

 

The Forester who speaks above is described as:

 

A tall auburn haired lad, wearing a tunic and surcoat of ribbed brocaded silk, and a gold hilted sword  around his neck, and two low boots of Spanish leather about his feet.

 

60 lines later, Gereint is described on his first appearance in almost identical terms, when he’s seen by Gwenhwyuar and her maid as they are trying to catch up with Arthur and the hunt. 

 

A young bare-legged, auburn-haired noble squire with a gold hilted sword on his thigh, wearing a tunic and surcoat of brocaded silk with two low boots of Spanish leather on his feet and a mantle of blue purple over that with a golden apple in each corner.   

 

You’d be forgiven for thinking the story has just got interesting and the forester is riding after Gwenhwyuar. Instead it’s an encounter with one of the story teller’s limitations. 

 

But they tend not to outweigh his strengths. 

Buchedd Beuno: The Life of Saint Beuno.

 Buchedd Beuno: The Life of Saint Beuno. Edited by Patrick Sims-Williams for the Dublin institute of Advanced studies. 

 

This was in the box of DIAS Medieval Welsh Texts I bought. I knew nothing about Beuno or his life, but it offered a break from working through stories from The Mabinogion.

 

I knew from reading Gerald of Wales that early Medieval Welsh saints are not to be trifled with. Beuno curses people who offend him or act badly, sometime bringing about their deaths, other times family misfortune. He also has the ability to stick severed heads back on decapitated corpses. 

It’s been a very enjoyable few weeks in his company.

 

What I admire most about the life is the absolute minimalism of the story telling. 

Here’s one episode; paraphrased, though my paraphrase is not much shorter than the text itself.

 

A young man, a workman, visits the court at of Ynyr of Gwent. He’s so good looking and well-mannered that everyone assumes he’s a noble. The King’s daughter falls for him so badly that she doesn’t want to live without him. The King, noticing this, decides the best course of action is to marry them before anything else can happen. So they are married.

 

Instead of living happily ever after, the happy couple set off for the young man’s home, with gold and silver and fine horses. But the young man has no home. When they stop to rest, the exhausted princess falls asleep. He is overcome with shame at the thought of his ‘homecoming’. His solution is to kill the princess while she sleeps and take off to the another royal court, where he uses the gold and silver to buy the office of steward.

 

Shepherds find the girl’s body and tell the Saint. He immediately goes with them, and reunites head and body. The princess is offered a choice: go home or stay here and serve God. She chooses the latter. Her brother turns up, and when she refuses to go home with him, he asks the saint to accompany him to the royal court to retrieve the gold and silver and horses. But when he arrives and sees his sister’s killer, he rushes at him and cuts his head off.

 

The king is outraged, and tells the saint that either he restore the dead man to life, or the brother dies. The saint does this. (This is the third time he’s done this in the story, but the first time when it’s not righting an obvious injustice.) The king apologises. The brother and sister and ex-husband disappear from the Saint’s story.

 

So much is left unsaid in the narrative especially at the beginning. Was the young man on the make? Does he pretend to be someone he isn’t or does he find it impossible to correct everyone’s mistake? When his new wife asks him, where do you come from, who are your family…how did he reply? Where did she think they were heading to when he ‘took her home’? How did she feel when she realised her head and been removed and then replaced? 

 

By leaving it unsaid: it’s all there? Reading the story, there's a compelling invitation to speculate. But while it would be tempting to rewrite the story and fill it out, that would destroy the effect. 

The Legendary History of Britain: St Germanus of Auxerre and how the process worked

If we think of medieval writers as first and foremost, writers, facing writing problems, and dealing with their problems within the framework of their understanding of narrative, the results can be illuminating. Rather than looking at theories of practice, one can observe practice at work. 

From Gildas to Bede to Nennius, from Nennius to Geoffrey to Wace, from Wace to Laȝamon, the Legendary History can be imagined as a Work in Development, with successive writers shaping the material. It’s not the same as successive versions of history, with each one getting closer to ‘the truth’. It’s a developing narrative where what controls the development is how the writers understood the art of storytelling. 

While Saint Germanus of Auxerre plays a very brief role in Vortigern’s story, the incident illustrates how The Legendary History worked as a process. It also suggests something positive about Laȝamon as story teller.

First the history, the problem and the process, then the result, because one of the more startling moments in Vortigern’s story, or in the whole of Laȝamon's Brut,  occurs when Vortigern’s son, Vortimer, meets with the Saint and delivers a speech that is probably Lawman’s invention. 

Who was Saint Germanus of Auxerre?

St Gemanus of Auxerre is an historical character. He’s as real as anyone can be in the fifth century. There’s more evidence for his existence than there is for Vortigern, Hengist or Arthur (which isn’t saying much). One commentator even extends that list to include Saint Patrick#. 

He visited Britain, from Gaul, in the early fifth century to combat the Pelagian heresy, possibly twice, at the request of the British church. While there he did not meet anyone called Vortigern, but he did lead a British force to victory over a mixed army of Picts and Saxons. Modern historians debate the reality of a second visit, and contest the plausibility of the ‘Alleluia Victory’, but the majority accept the historical reality of the Saint. His life was written in the late fifth century, and there are independent chronicle references to his visit, placing the first one in or around 429. He died on the continent before 450.

A writing problem.

Imagine you’re writing The Legendary History. Germanus presents you with three problems.  

1)    The purpose of the visits 

2)    The timing of the visits

3)    The visits are too well known to ignore.

1)    The purpose of the visit was simple: to combat the Pelagian heresy. There is no suggestion that the visitors were also asked to combat Paganism, or back sliding Christians. And there is no mention of any King. 

2)    The problem of timing is equally simple. Germanus visited in 429. According to Bede’s calculations, the Saxons (Hengist and Horsa) don’t arrive until 449/450.  

3)    In his note on this incident in Laȝamon, Madden pointed out that Geoffrey of Monmouth simply couldn’t leave such a famous figure out of the narrative. Bede tells the story of the visit at length, in his History of the English Church and People. It takes him five chapters (17-21) in book one.  Vortigern is nothing more than a name, Arthur isn't even that. 

Germanus later appeared in Nennius (though ‘Nennius’ may have got his saints confused). He tries to convert and redeem an incestuous Vortigern and failing, prays him to death. 

By this point Germanus’s story had already slid into the world of folk tales. His miracles have become less Bede’s muted proof of the saint’s holiness and more the extravagant actions of a powerful magician. 

Germanus, therefore is a fine example of what happens when you try to reconcile the legendary history with Bede, or the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle let alone with ‘history as we define it. Quite often, you can’t.

But if you take up the challenge to incorporate this incident into the narrative, then you have to try to make it meaningful within the narrative.

The process.

Madden may have been right, and Geoffrey may have felt that Germanus had to be in the story. But Geoffrey’s treatment is almost dismissive. And his placing of the incident doesn’t make a lot of sense.

He knew why Germanus had come to the country. ‘It was in this time [Vortigern has just married Rowena] that St Germanus, the Bishop of of Auxerre came, and Lupus Bishop of Troyes, with him, to preach the world of God to the Britons; for their Christian faith had been corrupted not only by the pagans but also by the Pelagian heresy, the poison of which had affected them for many a long day. However, the religion of the true faith was restored to them by the preaching of these saintly men. This they made clear almost daily by frequent miracles, for through their agency God performed many wonders which Gildas has described with great literary skill in his treatise.’ P160 

The throw away reference to ‘Gildas’ (he means the text we ascribe to Nennius) might be sarcastic as the miracles in the Historia Brutonum are exaggerated. But Just as Geoffrey has removed the incest motif in Vortigern’s story, he has left out the Saint’s dramatic role in Vortigern’s end. If Geoffrey knew the Britons had asked for help he doesn’t mention it. The incident is pointless in this version. It’s wedged between the wedding of Vortigern to Rowenna and evidence of Hengist’s growing influence over Vortigern.  It could be cut out and the story would not be affected.

But the narrative is already exerting its pull. There’s nothing in Bede, or the life of Saint Germanus, about combating paganism. The theological enemy is heresy. But If St Germanus arrived after Hengist, and if Hengist was corrupting the Britons, then it’s logical that the saint would need to do something about that. It’s also logical, in narrative terms to get rid of the saint as the divine killer of Vortigern. For Geoffrey’s narrative, it’s necessary for Aurelieus to kill Vortigern. And the incest motif can be dropped as well. 

The Variant version of the Historia, which is probably Wace’s source, moves the story to later in the narrative, after Vortimer has defeated Hengist and become King. And this might suggest the Variant is later than the Vulgate rather than earlier. If Geoffrey, for all his narrative sense, moved the incident earlier he was having a bad day.

Perhaps the Vulgate’s writer could not understand why Geoffrey had a holy man sorting out the church under such an unholy King.  But the move makes narrative sense. Having got rid of Hengist, his legacy has to be erased. 

The Variant is just as confused as to what the Saint was doing. In this version, the saints (plural) have come to stamp out ‘the Arian or Pelagian heresy’ as well as the impact of Hengist.    

Either Wace doesn’t understand Geoffrey’s reference to Pelagius, or the Variant’s ‘Arianism and Pelagianism’; he thought it uninteresting, or it just seemed out of place. Germanus is sent by ‘Saint Romain ‘ (Sainz Romainz) which looks like a dramatic misreading of ‘the roman pope’. Religion is restored and the people returned to the faith. However, even though the faith is restored, ‘Hear what devilry was perpetuated’.

Lawman must have picked up on the potential significance of the episode for his portrayal of Vortimer. He will expand it in a surprising way (see next post) giving the episode a significance it does not have in his sources. 

The initial narrative problem is one of chronology and it is simply ignored. It is impossible to   reconcile Bede and Geoffrey, and since Wace is committed to following Geoffrey, or the Variant, or both, he didn’t need to waste time in the attempt. 

It’s easy to forget a medieval author had very limited access to information. It wasn’t possible to ‘evaluate the sources’ as a modern student learns to do. Once the incident becomes embedded in the story, the process begins which sees the incident changing as the writers make it fit into the narrative and answer the question:  Why are you telling us this?  

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For Laȝamon's answer, see next post. 

The Sunlit Zone by Lisa Jacobson. A review of sorts

So I’ve already moaned about the pre-publicity for The Sunlit Zone, by Lisa Jacobson. Three meaningless statements, which have now morphed into the blurb on the back cover and seem to suggest the publisher is not interested in attracting anyone’s attention to this book,  which is a pity.

To sum up the blurb,  The Sunlit  Zone is apparently “A risk taking novel in verse with pure poetry in which romance joins hands with science and takes to the water.”

But “novel in verse” implies a narrative, and the minimum information a prospective buyer might want would be characters, plot and setting.  Imagine putting The Da Vinci Code, The Brothers Karamazov and The Story of O down on the table and saying: “three novels in prose, and that’s all the information you need, so pick one.” 

A first person female narrator relates her autobiography, alternating between Present tense (2050/51) and her past (literally from the act of her conception in 2020 . Ab Ovo in deed).  In doing so she comes to terms with her twin sister’s death, her awkward relationships with her friends and family, the ghostly boyfriend who returns, and after the father’s death and her mother’s art exhibition, finds happiness and,  if not love,  then satisfying sex with the no longer ghostly boyfriend.  Coherence is primarily the fictional narrator’s autobiography. 

It’s set in a faintly dystopian future Australia with many technical widgets and gadgets and cloned whales and other mutant sea creatures.

There’s nothing here that wouldn’t attract the average reader of modern prose. The publishers could have put tongue firmly in cheek and promoted it as Sci-Fi Chick-Lit (although that would have been unfair).  It feels like a softer version of some of the stories Ellison was publishing in the Dangerous Visions series, or Ursula Le Guin’s writing for adults. Or, stripped of the SF trappings and closer to home, like Stephen Herrick’s  ‘A place like this’.

There’s nothing here in the poetry either to alienate a prose reader. No Post Modern Avant-Garde experimental Language games. (This is neither criticism nor praise, just a comment)  The story is told in a series of tightly controlled stanzas, almost all of which are end stopped.  The result is that the text mimics a rhythmically organised speaking voice,  though the formal quality of the stanza shifts the voice away from the impression of a natural speaker which can sometimes be produced in good first person prose. The sections alternate between the now of telling and past phases of the narrator’s life.   

 Although lacking the pace of  The Monkeys’ Mask or the technical virtuosity of ‘Freddy Neptune’,   the rhythmic control  keeps the story moving.  Whether or not it’s “Pure poetry” depends on your definition of that vacuous term.  As Clare Kinney pointed out, narrative poetry has to negotiate two binaries: Narrative/Poetry and Narrative/Lyric. Modern readers (and critics) tend to assume narrative will be in prose.  ‘The Sunlit Zone” doesn’t dissolve the binaries but tends to sit firmly on the narrative side of both of them.  Pace is perhaps won at the cost of the absence of the kind of  image or phrase that might make a reader pause and reread it. Whether that means the book won’t reward rereading is no more an issue than it is with any other narrative.

Is it risk taking? Perhaps it is,  though if it is,  it’s a sad comment on modern poetry.  By narrating them; sex, birth, death, loss, family, develop contexts. The narrative returns the human subject and human concerns to poems in a way lyric poems on these subjects don’t.  It also takes the obvious narrative risk. Just as with any novel, if a reader doesn’t like the characters, or the plot, or the setting, he or she will stop reading.

But this book should attract a much larger readership than it is probably going to. It could escape the narrow confines of Poetry World and find a wider range of readers than the usual buyers of poetry books. 

Why Le Fanu was a genius.part two

Stoker pretends his heroes have altered nothing in their journals.
“there is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them.”

There is to be no retrospective rearrangement. This is one of the ways he ‘guarantees’ the “authenticity” of the story. Laura, however, is writing eight years after the facts she relates. The game allows her to tell us what she knew at the time as she unfolds the story, but it also allows her to have the benefits of hindsight.

And that’s exactly what she avoids. ‘Carmilla’ is in many ways much more opaque than ‘Dracula’. Exactly what her relationship to Carmilla was remains vague. It’s vague because Laura keeps it vague, but why she does so is what leaves the text open. The vagueness gives the story its slightly dream like or out of focus quality.
After eight years, what are her final words on the subject?

The following Spring my father took me on a tour through Italy. We remained away for more than a year. It was long before the terror of recent events subsided; and to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations-sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door.

“The light step of Carmilla” is suggestive; not only of familiarity, but of someone who listened eagerly and cared enough to distinguish footsteps so she could identify the ones she wanted to hear. ‘Ambiguous alterations’ are an apt description of her portrayal of Carmilla’s behaviour and her reactions to it. Throughout the story she alternates between fascination and repulsion. And then there’s “reverie” and ‘fancy’. A reverie is a waking dream but without negative overtones. What does she dream that leads to the sound of those familiar footsteps. And is she frightened or hopeful? It’s impossible to tell.

Something very strange happens towards the end of the story. For most readers it’s become obvious that Carmilla is a vampire, and she is the same young woman who destroyed the general’s ward. The general tells Laura what is obvious to everyone else:

"She called herself Carmilla?" asked the General, still agitated.
"Carmilla, yes," I answered.
"Aye," he said; "that is Millarca. That is the same person who long ago was called Mircalla, Countess Karnstein.
However, that night Laura can still record:
and I was glad, being unspeakably fatigued when we reached home. But my satisfaction was changed to dismay, on discovering that there were no tidings of Carmilla.

The story wraps itself up in a sudden orgy of explanations which might signal that Le Fanu had lost control of his material. But there’s enough evidence to suggest that Le Fanu knew he could play his narrator off against what she was narrating. When the Countess Karnstein’s tomb is found and opened and the body destroyed, Laura’s language becomes uncharacteristically factual. What she doesn’t say is louder than what she does.

The next day the formal proceedings took place in the Chapel of Karnstein. The grave of the Countess Mircalla was opened; and the General and my father recognised each his perfidious and beautiful guest, in the face now disclosed to view.

What follows is a series of declarative sentences with subjects like, the face, the body, her eyes, the flesh, the head. But who is this happening to? “The vampire”. A “guest” perfidious and beautiful. Nowhere in the description is Carmilla’s name mentioned. Either the thought of her friend being hacked , burnt and scattered is too much, or she is simply refusing to accept that the body in the box was Carmilla’s. It’s no wonder she’s still waiting for her step at the door.

In The Conclusion that follows Laura reverts to being vague.

I cannot think of it without agitation. Nothing but your earnest desire so repeatedly expressed, could have induced me to sit down to a task that has unstrung my nerves for months to come, and reinduced a shadow of the unspeakable horror which years after my deliverance continued to make my days and nights dreadful, and solitude insupportably terrific.

That “It” floats. What is the unspeakable horror? What happened when Carmilla stayed with her, or what was done to the Vampire’s body? ‘My Deliverance’ suggests she is saved, but from what? From Carmilla the vampire, or Carmilla the devoted friend? From being vampirised or from being in love with a vampire?
Before the reader can stop to ask, she breathlessly rushes on piling up bits of vampire lore and quaint antiquarian details. Hidden in the pile:
The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons. In pursuit of these it will exercise inexhaustible patience and stratagem, for access to a particular object may be obstructed in a hundred ways. It will never desist until it has satiated its passion, and drained the very life of its coveted victim. But it will, in these cases, husband and protract its murderous enjoyment with the refinement of an epicure, and heighten it by the gradual approaches of an artful courtship. In these cases it seems to yearn for something like sympathy and consent. In ordinary ones it goes direct to its object, overpowers with violence, and strangles and exhausts often at a single feast.

Is that the unspeakable horror? That what she took as genuine was something “resembling love”, “an artful courtship”; that the predator wanted sympathy and consent. Is Laura appalled at how close she was to being consumed or appalled that she was seduced by something that saw her as a meal? OR did she offer sympathy, consent, love even and regrets that Carmilla was taken from her?

She babbles on and “tidies up”, explaining the already obvious, but the narrative suspends the real questions and leaves them unanswered.
Would the sound of Carmilla’s “light footsteps” at her door terrify her or make her happy?

The story lives in an artful refusal to close.

Why Le Fanu was a genius.part one

In writing Dracula as a series of journal entries Stoker set himself two problems.
The first is that in a journal which has not been retrospectively tampered with, you can’t have prolepsis. Stoker handles this impressively and I think there’s only one place in the book where he slips up.

His other challenge is that he has focalised his story though the limited perspectives of the participants. Along with the problems of creating separate voices with differing attitudes and characters, he still has to find a way to give the reader essential information so the story can move forwards. When Harker records that Mina is growing languid and pale, and Mina records bad dreams and bad sleep, the reader knows Drac’s got to her, but since this is ‘revealed’ in a dramatic sequence later, the heroes seem slow in noticing the obvious significance of what they are recording. Stoker's clumsiness makes his heroes seem dim witted.

Le Fanu, on the other hand, exploits the problems a first person narrator creates for the writer, to create a character, Laura, not only in what she does in her story, but in the way she tells it.

We play the game: Laura, the narrator of Carmilla, is a real person, telling us about events that happened to her eight years ago when she was nineteen.

We know nothing about Laura except what she tells us. The paratext sets up expectations which the story seems to frustrate. All we are told about Laura is that she was: “a person so clever and careful ….. Much to my regret, however, I found that she had died in the interval.” Her narrative of events is described as being told with such conscientious particularity.

The Laura of the story does not seem clever. She goes out of her way to show she isn’t. I’d argue she is ‘careful’ in what she reveals. If the story exhibits “conscientious particularity” it does so in what the narrator hides and fudges. 8 years have passed since the story ends. We are explicitly told this is being narrated retrospectively at someone else’s request. But from the start of the story Laura exonerates herself and muddles the issues. She does it surreptitiously but consistently. She has two strategies that can be described as characteristics and once established are then exploited by Le Fanu at the very end of the story.

The first, used to exonerate herself and excuse her lack of comprehension, is her insistence on how isolated she and her father were. The isolation of the schloss is partly the trappings of the gothic story and serves its own function in the narrative but the geographical isolation bleeds into racial isolation, (her father is English) which exonerates her from not knowing the local stories about vampires, which would have rung the alarm bells much earlier. (Not that Laura has much to do with alarm bells). The geographical distance from “society” allows her to repeatedly tell her addressee that she has to accept Laura’s naivety as the result of her upbringing in such an isolated spot. Carmilla’s behaviour, beliefs, etc would be judged differently by a more worldly wise person. Though how such a person might have judged her is never clarified.

Her second habit is that when reporting what happens she relies heavily on phrases like “It appeared” or “apparently” or ‘what looked like” where straight description would be justified. For Laura, things aren’t simply what they are; they are always potentially something else. However, she never seems to want to cut through “appears to be” and reach “was”. Her description of Carmilla’s behaviour is therefore nebulous. Laura insists on its ambiguous nature. And given the fact that she has had eight years to think about it, she’s either very confused, or out to obfuscate.
Part two later.

set questions for "For all We Know" and "Quiver"

Questions for Quiver as a way of answering why I think it doesn't work.
(WHich I will try and answer later)

1) what is the narrator’s name
2) who is Mara and what is/was Mara’s exact relationship to Will and Nate?
3) Why has Mara been killed? In fact is it Mara or her twin who has been killed?
4) Who is the woman who looks like Mara (Twin or clone)?
5) How did Mara or the woman who looks like her have access to the narrator’s poems? What is the point of her having access to them?
6) What is the point of the long mythological piece?
7) Why was Mara/clone/Twin killed?
8) Who tries to Kill the narrator?
9) Why does mara/twin/clone kill Nate?
10) What is the point of all of this?

Why does my inability to answer these questions in any satisfactory way affect my response to the poem adversely when my inability to answer equally many questions raised by “For all we Know” is part of the pleasure of (re) reading that text?

shake hands with the devil#2

Blues Guitar players in the delta went to the crossroads at midnight and traded soul for the ability to play. If you were poor and desperate it seems like a reasonable deal. Though I’d stipulate that I had to sound so good people didn’t say: hey, you sound just like Martin Simpson….

The folk story versions usually have the clever peasant or the dumb peasant’s clever wife outwitting the devil. (Martin Carthy’s “devil and the feathery wife” being a fine example) http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~zierke/martin.carthy/songs/thedevilandthefeatherywife.html

But the literary paradigms are less interesting. Faust is simply greedy and we all know he’s going to get screwed at the end. He simply isn’t likeable and his actions are petty. There’s something adolescent about his bargain: Gimme Everything: NOW! (and why Helen of Troy? Leaving aside the problem of whether ideals of beauty in 13th century BC Greece are yours, after the novelty wears off how is Helen of Troy in a penthouse in Paris any better than Helen of Totnes in a bed sit in Brixton?) Anyway.

Enter Maturin. Another Irishman. The names dominate 19th century gothic: Maturin, Le Fanu, Stoker. The latter is the best known but the other two are as good as he is and Le Fanu is easily the better writer. Which raises the question: Why is Dracula so popular: the Wanderer is a more interesting character and Carmilla the better vampire story? And why did th eirish get so drawn to this genre?

There’s phds in there somewhere.

Anyway, Melmoth. The twist; the Wanderer can save himself if he can find someone else so desperate that they will take on his bargain. So Melmoth haunts mad houses and prisons, the starving and desperate, the love lost and forlorn… and everybody turns him down. Like stoker’s Dracula he is “off stage” for most of the narrative, and like Dracula, he gains in mystery and force from that. Like Dracula, the end is anti climatic.
The narrative progresses through a series of nested stories.

So first some attempt to set them out.
The frame itself is straightforward.
A) John Melmoth goes to his uncle’s house.
B) Uncle dies.
C) Jm inherits house. Stays there. Reads garbled narrative.
D) One stormy night watching a shipwreck he is rescued by the Spaniard, Moncada
E) Who tells him his story over a number of days.
F) The Wanderer appears, cuts short the story telling, and dies.

But in this are embedded other stories, each of which obviously pre-exists the main time frame.
(E) Moncada tells his own story up to the point where he is saved by the Jew and is asked to read another story.
E1Moncada beaks his own story, which is never resumed, to tell John Melmoth this story of Imalee up to her first death on the island. Then the story appears to break but actually continues. Imalee, now Isadora, re-encounters the Wanderer and their story continues up to the night of their “marriage” when the story once again breaks.
E2 Moncada, still narrating the story he read, introduces the story of Imalee’s father, Don Francisco’s, journey. Although ostensibly the same story as E1, the break is such that it becomes a separate sequence. This story is itself broken:
E3 The stranger at the inn tells Don F the story of Guzman and the Walbergs. The Don continues his journey, gets lost and meets the Wanderer..
E4 The Wanderer, in an attempt to save Imalee from himself, tells her father the story of the Mortimers, which itself is broken by
E5 The narrative of the priest who tells of Melmoth’s first death and hints at a Faust like bargain.
E4 finishes with the father missing the point.
E6 Because Imalee’s father is dense the Wanderer now tells the father the father’s story.
E1 resumes the night after the marriage and continues until Imalee’s death in the hands of the Inquisition.
F) Cuts short the story telling. The Wanderer tells in the present something of his story and the book comes to an end.

In terms of narrators and audiences it is superficially complicated; John Melmoth is Moncada’s audience, but in e2, 3, 4 and 6 the audience is her father. In e5 the story is told by the priest to Elaine in a story told by the wanderer to the father which is being told by Moncada to John Melmoth in a story written by Maturin to me……

Any singer in any bar, singing traditional songs.

The songs obviously pre exist. Not just the performance but my life time. Have pre existed for a century or two in some cases. And hopefully, the good ones will continue to exist, despite the often crude treatment they receive at my hands.

We are after all merely custodians, doing our best. In this and in so much else. Hopefully, leaving something worth passing on. Beyond fashion or style or commerce.

But the singer is erased in the song. There’s obviously an art involved but it’s the art of effacing self, allowing voice to becomes vehicle and letting the story unroll.

As soon as he or she starts to sing ”I had a first cousin called Arthur MacBride” that first pronoun swallows ego; the singer is leaning across a bar, or a table, or sitting in their rocking chair, telling some button holed wedding guest the story of that memorable encounter, not as an historian or a journalist, but as eyewitness and participant.

In payment for which the magical lift, and the chance to rise on the glorious defiance of that song’s conclusion.

In the traditional love songs, the singer once again disappears, becomes reconstituted as the space between the hand reaching out to the lover, and the lover who smiles in welcome: this most human of gestures endlessly repeated across time and space.

The details of the stories encode the feeling: specifics and universals inseparable: gesture, and thought, act and emotion polished and passed along.

Anyone who says the song is irrelevant because the maid laments for her Bonnie Light Horse man killed in the Napoleonic wars has missed the point. The roguish beggarman who rises after a night of enjoyable sex with the woman he’s tricked (who may not seem so admirable once the song has finished) finds his way into today’s papers: the young girl waiting for her lover to come home from the sea or from the wars becomes the man or woman whose partner has been posted to Afghanistan.

The song suspends judgement and leaves that to the audience.

It don’t need to be rewritten or updated. It don’t need to be “modernized or glamorized”. Just treated with respect and passed on.

Which raises the interesting question: how the hell to write poems that do that.

Hammering Le Fanu's Carmilla

Having watched two films that claim to be based on Le Fanu’s marvelous story, one so bad I've erased its name from my memory, I finally tracked down Hammer’s “The Vampire Lovers’ which is the first of their Karnstein trilogy and supposed to be a reasonably faithful rendition. It’s a good example of what happens when form, style and content get separated.

The ambiguity at the centre of Laura’s written narrative was always going to be vaporized in a film unless handled with care. But to switch, mindlessly, the first person narration, with all its carefully constructed ambiguities, for the flat third person stare of the camera, was guaranteed to kill what made the story interesting as a piece of writing.

So let us consider the erotic potential of a predatory lesbian vampire. Didn’t take long did it? For those who respond to that phrase with the same excitement as they would to ”the mould on last week’s custard” the repeated sight of the leading lady dropping her clothes at every possible opportunity is unlikely to cover up the holes in the plot, the bad dialogue or the generally crummy acting. Though you gotta love those painted castles with their slightly wrong perspectives on the painted backdrop. Unfortunately someone decided “predatory lesbian vampire” was a free ride to the box office, without actually stopping to think why or if or how that could be made unsettling or frightening or even interesting. Carmilla isn’t a “horror Story” as such. But it’s not Victorian porn either. “The Vampire lovers” isn’t a horror story either, rather a series of events that provide opportunities for actresses to get undressed.

Give the scriptwriter his dues, having decided his focus, he follows what’s left of the story. But his next mistake is to set everything out in chronological order. Le Fanu reveals his plot like a modern Asian horror film, so that the exposition is part of the climax. In terms of simplified sequence the written story goes: C.B.A.D. Not the Hammer version. B must follow A and be followed by C. Straightening out the chronology is a mistake. It’s now obvious from the start that Carmilla is a vampire and preys on young girls (we get the general’s story, B, in full before what should be Laura’s narrative C), and so Carmilla’s arrival at Laura’s schloss is no surprise.

The written story gains its effects because of the narrator’s inability to understand what is happening, (even though the reader sometimes does), her paradoxical attraction and repulsion to Carmilla, and the equal ambiguity of Carmilla’s feelings for Laura. Because it’s told first person we are positioned to share Laura’s confusion and much of the story doesn’t make sense to her until the end. But in the film there’s no mystery about Carmilla’s actions. Given the obvious desire to run with the sexual element the disturbing slippage in the story, where it’s never really clear what’s happening, is dispersed. In the film it’s made very clear exactly what is happening.

There’s some minor plot tinkering, some of it to acknowledge perhaps at least a hundred years of Vampire fiction between Le Fanu and the film. The only major additions are the governess’s switch from fat and old and friendly to young and pretty, the disappearance of the nanny, the introduction of the idiot butler, (who plays the policeman in part two?). The father’s absence which provides the governess with some small moral dilemma…and the murder of the doctor.

Oh and the compulsory “good looking” young man who can "save" Laura and reassert the hetro-normative discourse.(I never thought I’d get to use that phrase). Though why they change Laura's anme to Emma is indeed a mystery.