Friday, November 05, 2010

A Short History of Fairy Tales



So, if you're curious to find out about fairytales - all the stuff the other so-called experts won't tell you, that is (i.e. that nobody really knows anything about them for certain - none of the things that matter, anyway: where they come from and why they're structured the way they are, for instance) - then come along to Objectspace on Saturday the 13th of this month to hear Bronwyn reading out some of the revisionist stories she's put together for this exhibition, and then me giving my own views on the subject.

And by the way, here's a link to the post on Beattie's Book Blog on the subject, as well as a review on The Big Idea.

As a kind of foretaste, here are some of the labels I've written for the book display which is also part of the show ...


Wall-Texts & Labels:




Nobody really knows when or where folktales first started to be told. Nor is it clear whether they began as popular versions of more sophisticated mythological or literary stories, or whether the influence was mainly the other way round. In any case, the first publications to draw on these no doubt already well-established traditions came into Europe from the East: The Fables of Bidpai, The Seven Sages, and The 1001 Nights. By the late middle ages, though, it was homegrown folklore that was being drawn on in such collections as the Lais of Marie de France or the Latin Gesta Romanorum.

The first compilations of stories which appear to preserve what we would now call fairytales in something resembling their original form are Giovanni Straparola’s Le piacevoli notti [Pleasant Nights] (1550-53) and Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone (1634-36).


Books included:

    Marie de France (late 12th century):

  1. James Reeves. The Shadow of the Hawk. Illustrated by Anne Dalton. London: Collins, 1975.

    Almost no biographical details about Marie de France have come down to us, but her name implies that she may have been a Frenchwoman resident in England. She wrote her twelve lais, or verse-stories, in the Norman-French dialect sometime in the late 1100s. The book included here is a modern prose retelling of some of her best tales by modern English poet James Reeves.

  2. Gesta Romanorum (late 13th-early 14th century):

  3. Tales of the Monks from the Gesta Romanorum. Edited by Manuel Komroff. 1928. New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1947.

    The medieval tradition of storytelling in Latin is represented here by this handsome reprint of the late 13th-century Gesta Romanorum [Deeds of the Romans], an anonymously-compiled edition of anecdotes and fables from a variety of sources, eastern and European. One of the most popular books of its time, it was probably intended mainly for the use of preachers, since a rather ponderous moral (omitted in this edition) was originally appended to each story.

  4. Giambattista Basile (c.1566–1632):

  5. Giovanni Batiste Basile. Il Pentamerone. Trans. Richard F. Burton. 1893. New York: Horace Liveright, 1932.

    Basile's collection of stories told in Neapolitan dialect, Lo cunto de li cunti, overo lo trattenemiento de peccerille [The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for the Little Ones] (1634-36) – also known as Il Pentamerone, or Five Days' Entertainments – is one of the first attempts to collect local folktales in something resembling their original form. This translation, by Richard F. Burton of Arabian Nights fame, includes Basile's versions of “Cinderella”, “Rapunzel”, “Puss in Boots”, “Sleeping Beauty”, and “Hansel and Gretel”.

  6. The 1001 Nights, or Arabian Nights' Entertainments (1704-1717):

  7. Laurence Housman. Sindbad the Sailor and Other Stories from the Arabian Nights. Illustrated by Edmund Dulac. 1907. New York: Weathervane Books, 1978.

    At almost the same moment as the submerged tradition of oral storytelling was being revived in France by Charles Perrault, the first versions of the Arabic Thousand and One Nights began to appear, heralding a positive avalanche of Oriental tales all over Europe: some original, some imitations. This is one of the many English versions of Antoine Galland's French translation, which appeared in twelve volumes between 1704 and 1717. Galland's tidied-up version of the stories does reflect the prudery of his times, but it also includes a number of new stories collected from Ms. and oral sources, among them “Sindbad," "Ali Baba” and “Aladdin”.



[Charles Perrault]


The Classic Collections (1):

Perrault


Charles Perrault (1628-1703):

In 1697, French aristocrat Charles Perrault published the book Histoires ou Contes du Temps passé [Stories or Tales of Times Past], with the subtitle Contes de ma Mère l'Oie [Tales of Mother Goose]. Or, rather, he didn't, since the book's title-page actually attributes it to his nineteen-year-old son Pierre (Perrault was 69 at the time). So who was the actual author? Nobody knows. It's assumed that Charles was the author and his son was credited instead simply because the tales had been told to him and his other siblings over the years, but that's pure speculation. It was a strange beginning to the career of the most influential book of fairytales ever published.

The eleven stories he recorded include “Sleeping Beauty”, “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Bluebeard”, “Puss in Boots”, “Cinderella”, and “Hop o' My Thumb”, as well as three told in verse: “Patient Griselda”, “Donkeyskin”, and “The Ridiculous Wishes”.


Books included:

  1. Charles Perrault. Contes de Perrault. 1697. Edited by Gilbert Rouget. Classiques Garnier. 1967. Paris: Editions Garnier Frères, 1981.

    This modern French edition of Perrault's original 1697 collection includes notes, variants, facsimiles, and a variety of other scholarly aids for the dedicated folktale researcher.

  2. Charles Perrault. Perrault’s Fairy Tales. 1697. Illustrated by Gustave Doré. 1867. Translated by A. E. Johnson. 1921. New York: Dover, 1969.

    This English translation of Perrault is remarkable mainly for its illustrations, Gustave Doré at his most tenebrous and disturbing. Dover Books of New York specialises in exact reprints of out-of-print material in inexpensive form.

  3. Шарль Перро. Волшебные Сказки. 1697. Adapted by M. A. Bulatov. Illustrated by G. A. V. Traigot. 1976. Leningrad: «Дет. Лит.», 1977.

    Few illustrators of Perrault can ever have been quite as dedicated as G. A. V. Traigot. This beautiful Russian translation of his fairytales came from the discard stack at Auckland public library, along with a number of other Russian fairytale books, as interesting textually as they are attractive artistically.

  4. Neil Philip (b.1955):

  5. Neil Philip. The Cinderella Story. Penguin Folklore Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989.

    Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de verre [Cinderella, or the little glass slipper] is one of the most widely-reported folktales in world culture. The version included in Perrault’s collection is undoubtedly the best-known of them, but Neil Philips’s fascinating book attempts to do justice to the almost bewildering number of variants of this story which have so far been collected.



[Margaret Hunt, trans. Grimm's Fairy Tales (1948)]


The Classic Collections (2):

The Brothers Grimm


Jacob (1785-1863) & Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859):

The Brothers Grimm were academic scholars whose principal interest was in the historical roots of German culture and language (their other works included dictionaries, grammars and technical works on German mythology and tradition). It would have greatly surprised them to find that they are now generally thought of as children's authors, and that the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, in its various editions, would go on to dwarf all their other achievements.

The first edition of their collection (1812-1815) contained a mere 156 stories; the seventh, in 1857, included 211, together with an immense mass of notes and variant versions (generally omitted from even the most "complete" English translations). In between these two dates the two brothers did a good deal of work on polishing and toning down the rawness of some of the versions they had originally included.


Books included:

  1. Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm. Kinder- und Hausmärchen: Ausgabe letzer Hand mit dem Originalanmerkungen der Brüder Grimm. 3 vols. Edited by Heinz Rölleke. 1980. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam Jnr., 1991.

    This set of miniature paperbacks includes not only the text of the final expanded edition of the Grimms' fairytales, but also the entirely of their notes and variants. An indispensable source for anyone who wants to return to the bedrock of these classic stories.

  2. Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm. Fairy Tales. 1812-1815. Translated by Edgar Taylor. Illustrated by George Cruickshank. 2 vols. 1823 & 1826. London: the Scolar Press, 1977.

    This modern facsimile edition of the first English translation of the Grimm's tales preserves the original text and ordering of the first German edition, and is thus of considerable scholarly interest in itself.

  3. Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm. The Annotated Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales. Edited & Translated by Maria Tatar. Introduction by A. S. Byatt. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2004.

    Maria Tatar's beautifully illustrated and exhaustively annotated selection from the Grimms' "wonder tales" provides a good starting point for anyone wanting to go beyond the bowdlerized texts familiar to us from childhood.



[Andersen with Duckling]


The Classic Collections (3):

Andersen


Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875):

Possibly the most successful, yet also the most eccentric and self-pitying literary genius of the Nineteenth century, Hans Christian Andersen is one of very few writers who can be said to have added to the corpus of genuine fairytales in their own right. His earliest publications in the genre – “The Tinder Box”, “Thumbelina” – were based on existing Danish folktales (hence their air of authenticity). As time went by, though, his stories became ever more personal and self-searching, culminating in such expressionist classics as "The Snow Queen" and "The Shadow".

He was also a talented artist, though. Wherever he went in the world – and he travelled obsessively in the middle to late portion of his life – Andersen impressed his audiences of children and adults with his ability to create intricate, haunting landscapes and portraits out of cut-out paper.


Books included:

  1. Hans Christian Andersen. Samlede Eventyr og Historier. Illustrated by Vilhelm Pedersen & Lorenz Frolich. Jubilaeumsudgave. Odense: Hans Reitzels Forlag / Flensteds Forlag, 1991.

    A modern Danish edition of Andersen's complete fairytales and short stories, including the original illustrations overseen by the author himself.

  2. The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen. Edited by Maria Tatar. Translated by Maria Tatar & Julie K. Allen. Introduction by A. S. Byatt. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008.

    One of the most beautiful books in the "annotated" series, Maria Tatar's selection from Andersen’s work tries to do justice to his complex and equivocal influence on world literature.

  3. Tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Translated by Naomi Lewis. Illustrated by Joel Stewart. 2004. Walker Illustrated Classics. London: Walker Books Ltd., 2009.

    This recent edition of Andersen’s most celebrated tales includes beautiful illustrations by Joel Stewart, as well as a competent translation by renowned British children’s author Naomi Lewis, who died recently at the age of 97.

  4. Beth Wagner Brust. The Amazing Paper Cuttings of Hans Christian Andersen. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994.

    Though they have occasionally been used to illustrate editions of Andersen’s stories, this book is the first comprehensive attempt to document this strange and unexpected talent of his.

  5. Kay Nielsen (1886–1957):

  6. Keith Nicholson. Kay Nielsen. London: Coronet Books, 1975.

    One of the greatest illustrators of the Golden Age, the Dane Kay Nielsen ended up, in later life, in California, where he designed the "Night on Bald Mountain” sequence for Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940). The selections in this book book – mainly from Hans Christian Andersen – can only do partial justice to the baroque elegance of his illustrations of fantastic literature in general.



[Iona & Peter Opie: The Classic Fairy Tales (1974)]


Other Collections


Perrault, the Brothers Grimm and Andersen remain the best-known authors and collectors of classic European fairytales. However, their works inspired a positive explosion of folktale collecting and publishing all around the world in the mid to late Nineteenth century. Governor Grey's various collections of traditional New Zealand folktales and songs are one case in point, but one should also mention here Afanasyev's Russian Fairytales (1855-67), Asbjørnsen and Moe's Popular Tales from the Norse (1859), and (of course), Andrew Lang's twelve-volume collection of colour-coded collections of fairytales, beginning with the Blue Fairy Book in 1889 and ending with the Lilac Fairy Book in 1910.

Perhaps the last great original collectors and compilers of European folktales were the novelist Italo Calvino, whose Fiabe Italiane [Italian Folktales] first appeared in 1956, and Katharine Briggs, whose exhaustive, yet fascinating four-volume Dictionary of British Folk-Tales was published in 1970.


Books included:

    Sir George Grey (1812-1898):

  1. George Grey. Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the Maori as Told by Their Priests and Chiefs. 1854-55. Ed. W. W. Bird. Illustrated by Russell Clark. Christchurch: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1965.

    Governor Grey’s influential collection of Māori legends and traditions, included here in an inexpensive modern reprint, represents only the tip of the iceberg of a colossal collection effort which would eventually turn into New Zealand’s largest single repository of Māori-language manuscripts.

  2. Joseph Jacobs (1854-1916)

  3. Joseph Jacobs. English Fairy Tales: Being the Two Collections English Fairy Tales and More English Fairy Tales. 1890 & 1894. Illustrated by Margery Gill. London: The Bodley Head, 1968.

    The few homegrown English folktales which could not be traced back to Perrault and Grimm long eluded collectors. Joseph Jacobs, an Australian scholar, published this beautifully accessible and poetic version of the ones he could unearth in the 1890s, together with two collections of Celtic fairytales (1892-1894).

  4. Peter (1918-1982) & Iona Opie (b.1923):

  5. Iona & Peter Opie. The Classic Fairy Tales. London: Oxford University Press, 1974.

    The Opies’ classic collections of children’s poems (most notably The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951)) and games (such as The Lore and Language of School Children (1959), together with its various sequels) have earned them a central role in the history of folklore. The Classic Fairy Tales is one of their most influential – and entertaining – books, still valuable after 35 years.

  6. Kathleen Lines (b.1902):

  7. The Faber Storybook. Edited by Kathleen Lines. Illustrated by Alan Howard. 1961. London: Faber, 1972.

    Kathleen M. Lines, a dedicated anthologist and expert on folktales and macabre fiction generally, here collaborates with British artist Alan Howard to provide a useful collection of modern and traditional stories.



[Joseph Campbell: The Hero's Journey]


Theorists


There are as many ways of understanding and interpreting fairytales and folk literature as there are readers of it. I’ve tried to include here some of the most famous and influential scholars who have contributed to our contemporary understanding of these stories. They include Stith Thompson, of the Aarne-Thompson motif index; Vladimir Propp, whose Morphology of the Folktale (1928) remains a classic in the field; Joseph Campbell, whose mythological readings of Grimm and the Arabian Nights have possibly been more influential than any others; and finally Bruno Bettelheim, whose 1976 book The Uses of Enchantment revolutionised understanding of the influence of fairytales on early childhood development.

Another distinguished scholar who should be acknowledged here is J. R. R. Tolkien, author of the Lord of the Rings, whose 1939 essay “On Fairy-stories” is one of the most delightful and idiosyncratic accounts of our abiding fascination with tales of fantasy ever written.


Books included:

    Stith Thompson (1885-1976):

  1. Stith Thompson. The Folktale. 1946. New York: The Dryden Press, Inc., 1951.

    The single greatest scholarly contribution to the field of folktale research to date is undoubtedly the Aarne-Thompson motif classification system. First published by Anti Aarne in 1910, it was greatly expanded by Thompson into the six-volume Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (1932–37). The idea of this system is to group stories according to their central motifs, each of which has an “AT” classification number, now (after successive revisions) numbering in the thousands.

  2. Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp (1895-1970):

  3. Vladimir Propp. Morphology of the Folktale. 1928. Translated by Laurence Scott. Introduction by Svatava Pirkova-Jakobson. 1958. Revised by Louis A. Wagner. Introduction by Alan Dundes. 1968. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.

    Propp’s formalist analysis of Russian folktales, first published in 1928, attempted to reduce their complex yet intensely repetitive plots to a series of essential narrative elements. The thirty-one narrative functions and eight basic character types identified by him greatly influenced the rise of structuralism, and continue to exercise a considerable influence on Narratology to this day.

  4. Joseph Campbell (1904-1987):

  5. Joseph Campbell. The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension. 1969. New York: HarperPerennial, 1990.

    Joseph Campbell's Jungian syncretism has, at times, incurred the criticism that it tends to block out the social and historical specificities of particular cultures. This wide-ranging collection of essays is, however, one of his most stimulating books. It includes his analyses of the Arabian Nights and Grimm's fairytales, together with a number of other thought-provoking excursuses on the roots of mythology and folk literature in general.

  6. Bruno Bettelheim (1903–1990):

  7. Bruno Bettelheim. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. 1976. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

    Bruno Bettelheim, a child psychologist who specialised in treating the child survivors of the holocaust, published this intensely controversial book in the 1970s. Rejecting contemporary condemnation of Grimm's fairytales for their violence and lack of social conscience, he argued for their precise and ordered role in formulating a child's view of the realities of the culture he or she will grow up to inhabit. Bettelheim’s now unfashionable Freudian viewpoint cannot rob this fascinating book of its status as a milestone in folktale studies.



[Jon Scieszka & Lane Smith: The Stinky Cheese Man (1992)]


Revisionists


The Beginning of the Women’s Movement and the growth of Feminist literary criticism in the 1970s opened the door to some startlingly original new readings of the fairytale canon. Some of the highlights from the past forty years of reading against the grain include English novelist Angela Carter’s anthologies and rewritings of classic fairytales; American Marxist scholar Jack Zipes’ attempts to re-evaluate the entire history of the folktale in Europe, culminating in his Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales (2000) and his Norton anthology The Great Fairy Tale Tradition (2001); and Harvard Professor Maria Tatar’s various volumes of illustrated and annotated Classic Fairy Tales.

A. S. Byatt, Joanna Russ, Marina Warner and Ursula K. Le Guin are just a few of the authors who have published interesting collections of modern fairytales, placing new emphases on traditional society’s ingrained assumptions about gender and politics.


Books included:

    Angela Carter (1940-1992):

  1. Angela Carter. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. 1979. Introduction by Helen Simpson. 2006. Vintage Classics. London: Random House, 2007.

    Angela Carter's collection The Bloody Chamber (which also inspired Neil Jordan's 1987 film The Company of Wolves), is probably the most influential revisionist retelling of classic fairytales to date. Carter had previously published a complete translation of Perrault (1977), and went on to edit two volumes of Fairy Tales (modern and traditional) for British Feminist publisher Virago.

  2. Jon Scieszka (b.1954):

  3. Jon Scieszka. The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. Illustrated by Lane Smith. Puffin Books. London: Penguin, 1992.

    This is a good example of the new, postmodern versions of traditional fairytales which now appear on a fairly regular basis. Polish-American writer Scieszka is a tireless campaigner for children’s literacy, and is concerned to provide them with the kinds of books that break down rather than reinforcing cultural and socio-economic divisions.

  4. Marina Warner (b.1946):

  5. Marina Warner. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. 1994. London: Vintage, 1995.

    Marina Warner's blend of wide reading and infectious enthusiasm has inspired her to write a number of books on folklore and popular culture. This one – together with its sequel No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (1998) – attempts to cram the whole gamut of oral folk culture into one breathless ride.

  6. Jack Zipes (b.1937):

  7. Jack Zipes. The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: Versions of the Tale in Sociocultural Context. London: Heinemann, 1983.

    For Jack Zipes, nothing about fairytales is ever simple and straightforward. His Marxist analyses of the societies that produced these tales, together with his constant sniping at the patriarchal values of late modernity, make his books a minefield of provocations against the traditional pieties.



[Jane Ray: The Twelve Dancing Princesses]


Miscellaneous Illustrators


The (so-called) “Golden Age” of book illustration ran roughly from the 1880s to just after the First World War, and included such luminaries as Edmund Dulac (1882-1953), Arthur Rackham (1867-1939), Kate Greenaway (1846-1901), Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966) and Howard Pyle (1853-1911). It’s impossible to do justice here to the innumerable artists who’ve published fairytale illustrations over the years, but here are some isolated highpoints from the tradition:


Books included:

    Jiří Běhounek (b.1952):

  1. Jiří Běhounek. The Nightingale: A Favourite Hans Andersen Story Retold for Young Children. 1971. London: Hamlyn, 1975.

    Czech artist Jiří Běhounek here plays a fantastic game with the Chinoiserie of Andersen’s famous tale. Is it meant as a critique or a celebration of the story?

  2. Anthony Browne (b.1946):

  3. Anthony Browne. Hansel and Gretel. 1981. Translated by Eleanor Quarrie. 1949. London: Walker Books Ltd., 2008.

    Anthony Browne’s version of this classic story is only one of the many illustrated versions of single Grimm stories available today in picturebook form.

  4. Lauren Child (b.1965):

  5. Lauren Child. The Princess and the Pea in Miniature: After the Fairy Tale by Hans Christian Andersen. Captured by Polly Borland. 2005. Puffin Books. London: Penguin, 2006.

    A somewhat revisionist modern take on Andersen’s misogynist original.

  6. Felix Hoffmann (b.1911):

  7. Felix Hoffmann. The Sleeping Beauty: A Story by the Brothers Grimm. Trans. Peter Collier. 1959. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.

    Swiss artist Felix Hoffmann is famed for his illustrations to a wide range of books, fairytale collections and others.

  8. Jane Ray (b.1960):

  9. Jane Ray. Snow White: A Three-Dimensional Fairy-Tale Theatre. London: Walker, 2009.

    British illustrator Jane Ray has more than 30 children’s books to her credit, as well as posters, greeting-cards and book covers. At art school she specialized in 3-dimensional design (ceramics, glass-blowing, furniture and jewellery) but she returned to illustration after graduation. The influence of this early training can be seen in this pop-up version of “Snow White”.



[Jane Ray: Snow White]

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Bronwyn's Exhibition Saturday Week


So this is just to let you know that Bronwyn's exhibition of Fairytale-related models and other paraphernalia will be opening next Saturday, 6th November, from 11-1 pm, at Objectspace in Ponsonby (at the far end of Ponsonby Rd, up where it joins K Rd).


[One Brown Box Invitation]

If you want to get a preview of what Bronwyn and Karl have been building out in the backroom, it'd probably be worth your while to take a look at Mosehouse Studio, Bronwyn's craft blog, where various secrets are revealed: I'd recommend this post on edible homes, as well as this one on the I Spy game she's setting up for the little ones.

And what's my part in the show? Why, books, of course. The plan is to have a selection of the canonical Fairytale collections laid out for the parents to leaf through while their kids are getting into the more interactive exhibits below. If you want to know more about my collection of such books, you could do worse than check out the page of my Bibliography blog devoted to Folklore & Fairy Tales.

But just as a teaser, here are various of the stories which Bronwyn and Karl are going to be weaving their magic around:

Arthur Rackham: Hansel and Gretel
(The Brothers Grimm)

Warwick Goble: Jack and the Beanstalk
(English Folktale)

Edmund Dulac: The Princess and the Pea
(Hans Christian Andersen

Margaret Tarrant: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
(The Brothers Grimm)

Kay Nielsen: The Twelve Dancing Princesses
(The Brothers Grimm)


... memory once interrupted, is not be recalled. Written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. Tradition is but a meteor, which if once it falls, cannot be rekindled.

- Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775)


I'll also be giving a talk on Fairytales as part of the exhibition programme, but more about that somewhat closer to the date ...

Monday, October 04, 2010

Johnsons or Shits


I've just been reading a very entertaining graphic novel (or series of comics brought to a premature end by lack of commercial success, if you prefer) called Outlaw Nation, by Jamie Delano. It elaborates on a concept of William S. Burroughs, which divides the population of the world into two groups: Johnsons and Shits. A bit of ferreting around on the internet brought up the following definition:

Burroughs first encountered the concept of the Johnson Family while still a boy reading the book You Can’t Win by Jack Black [no relation to the actor - Ed.]. First published in the 1920′s, Black’s autobiographical account of hobo life was immensely popular in its day. Burroughs describes the Johnsons in The Place of Dead Roads:
`The Johnson Family’ was a turn-of-the-century expression to designate good bums and thieves. It was elaborated into a code of conduct. A Johnson honors his obligations. His word is good and he is a good man to do business with. A Johnson minds his own business. He is not a snoopy, self-righteous, trouble-making person. A Johnson will give help when help is needed. He will not stand by while someone is drowning or trapped under a burning car.
In contrast to the honorable world of hobos and criminals, Burroughs describes a type of person known simply as a `Shit.’ Unlike the Johnsons, Shits are obsessed with minding other’s business. They are the town busy body, the preacher, the lawman. Shits are incapable of taking the honorable road of each-to-his-own. Burroughs describes the situation in his essay “My Own Business” thus:
This world would be a pretty easy and pleasant place to live in if everybody could just mind his own business and let others do the same. But a wise old black faggot said to me years ago: `Some people are shits, darling.” I was never able to forget it.

So what about it? Which one are you? A Johnson or a Shit? I came across what seems to me the perfect example of a literary shit the other day whilst idly clicking on links in other people's posts: British Historian Orlando Figes.


Here are some quotes from mini-reviews on Amazon.com of books by various of Figes' rivals:

Description by "Historian" of Molotov's Magic Lantern, by Rachel Polonsky:

"This is the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published … Her writing is so dense and pretentious, itself so tangled in literary allusions, that it is hard to follow or enjoy."

"Historian" described Robert Service's 2008 work Comrades, a world history of communism, as 'rubbish':

"This is an awful book. It is very poorly written and dull to read … it has no insights to make it worth the bother of ploughing through its dreadful prose."

And here's a little piece by the same reviewer about one of Figes's own books:

The Whisperers (2008) was "beautiful and necessary":

"A fascinating book about the interior lives of ordinary Russians … it tells us more about the Soviet system than any other book I know. Beautifully written, it is a rich and deeply moving history, which leaves the reader awed, humbled, yet uplifted … Figes visits their ordeals with enormous compassion, and he brings their history to life with his superb story-telling skills. I hope he writes for ever."

And who was "Historian"? Why, none other than Orlando Figes himself.

Yes, yes, very naughty, I hear you saying, but surely puffing your own books anonymously isn't that mortal a sin? Silly, yes ("I hope he writes for ever"), but hardly criminal. Fair enough. Putting up damning reviews of other people goes a bit further, but it's still not completely beyond the pale.

Attend the sequel, though. Some of Figes' victims began to suspect who'd really written these "anonymous" reviews, and even began to voice their suspicions. Figes immediately instructed his lawyer to threaten them with a libel suit.

When that didn't work (his footprints weren't particularly difficult to trace: "orlando-birkbeck" isn't that cunning an alias for a historian called Orlando who teaches at Birkbeck College, London), he then blamed his wife, barrister Stephanie Palmer, for the whole thing. "I've only just found out about this, this evening," as he said in a statement released through his lawyer a few hours after demanding damages from a prominent newspaper which had printed some information on the matter.

But after a week of questions and increasingly critical headlines, Figes today [23/4/10] revealed that he had been responsible for the comments.

A bit reminiscent of Richard Nixon, really. I didn't do it; well, actually, even though it looks as if I did it, it was actually my wife; well, no, it wasn't my wife, it was me, but I was perfectly justified in doing it; well, no, I did do it, and I wasn't justified in doing it, but it was because I was under a lot of pressure of the time and I'm very sorry so please go away and don't bother me any more ... Man up, Orlando. For a historian of the Stalin era you don't exactly exhibit that good old Mandelstam spirit.

Robert Service, one of the Russian historians defamed by Figes puts it rather succinctly in his quote for the Guardian article I got all these details from in the first place:
I am pleased and mightily relieved that this contaminant slime has been exposed to the light and begun to be scrubbed clean ...

That's what Burroughs means by a shit, I think: a petulant little whinging coward who cries like a baby and begs for mercy when he's found out, all the time sharpening the knife he's longing to plunge into you the moment you turn your back. More like Beria than a full-fledged monster such as Stalin himself ...

What about a Johnson, though?


[Mike Johnson: Travesty (2010)]


Funnily enough, that seems to be the main subject of Mike Johnson's novel Travesty, which appeared earlier this year from Titus Books, after what Mike described at the launch as an almost thirty-year gestation period.

Travesty is a very strange book indeed. It includes some (very striking) illustrations by Darren Sheehan, some of which are in strip-cartoon form, but doesn't seem otherwise to conform to the "graphic novel" genre. Why call it a graphic novel, then? Why not simply an illustrated (or even, in a rather more Blakean vein, an "illuminated") novel?

I think part of the answer may lie in the book's lack of a conventional, overt narrative drive. Nobody, I suspect, could help but find the various characters and settings interesting - poor burnt-out glow-addicted Harvey, Drunk Len, the sneaky double-dealing therapist Dr Reingold, and (best of all from my point of view) batty old "people's advocate" Dilly Lilly, trapped in her mountainous accumulation of old toys and teddy-bears.

But what's the point of them? They're all burnt-out, used-up human shadows, recycling old damaged neural pathways in some kind of semi-official holding-pen ("Travesty") threatened by the Lion King and his sinister allies named after old characters from Donald Duck (Chip 'n' Dale, the Beagle Boys, the Gladstone Ganders). And as the fog gradually envelops their clapped-out roach motel, the "rathouse", they're all gradually forced out onto the streets awaiting some wondrous (or horrendous) lolly scramble on the Day of Delights. And it seems that something apocalyptic has indeed been averted in the last couple of chapters, where Harvey gets it together sufficiently to complete the set of equations in his head.

But none of it's clear, exactly. All of it's told as though through a glass, darkly. And while it's hinted that Harvey's otherworldly saviour Hermes may simply have been sent by "Netlife, that vast illegal gambling operation on the blacknet where credits, zings and even souls are waged on how people behave":

Netlife is not above prodding things along when the show gets slow. Push the emotional infant, Harvey, out of his nest. Get cameras on him, take over Mercy's eyes, get the punters punting - build up the tension. .... Big bikkies riding on ever twist and turn. [p.231]

Travesty, then, "was caught up in Netlife in ways it did not understand."

Is Travesty, then, a huge gameshow run by net gamblers who prod it from time to time like children stirring up a big glass-fronted ant's nest? In one sense, yes, but it's not just that. Travesty can't be decoded as simply as The Matrix. Once you get behind the mask, you find the same confusions, the same infinite spectra of possibilities as in (so-called) "real life".

"I should like to live in a very much simpler world," Harvey says [p.196]

As Dr Reingold meditates on the (programmed) flirting propensities of his holographic secretary, as Nisa Michelangelo constructs his exact scale model (except in one respect) of Michelangelo's "David", we begin to see that the thing that holds these various levels of reality (or "virtuality") together is - as in the Christian cosmos of Dante's Divine Comedy - love, that Aristotelean "love that moves the sun and the other stars" (Paradiso, canto xxxiii, last line).

The book concludes with a series of meditations on works of art. Mercy, the holographic secretary, recites Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" to her master Dr Reingold (himself, one presumes, named after the central symbol in Wagner's Ring):

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

We leave him contemplating the "her impeccable thighs and the perfection of her smooth backside. Cold pastoral! Pit this against the living, sweating, stinking, bloody flesh whose privilege it is to know pleasure and death in equal measure." [p.238]

Nisa Michelangelo, the (alleged) reincarnation of the "real" Michelangelo, sees the huge erect penis of his redesigned "David" being shot off almost at the moment of its completion. Like any revisionist artist, though, he manages to tell himself that this reversion to the statue's original state is somehow for the best:

Looking at the statue now, he sees there is a kind of truth in the mutilation, the severance; the gunman might have taken aim with an artist's eye. All the upright virtue of the lost member is merely suggested now, not blatantly exposed. The mind may build its own addition where he imposed his; the severance itself speaks in resonances. [p.243]

It's an interesting place to end. The fascination of Travesty has lain all along in the parts rather than the whole. The world Mike Johnson constructs up so painstakingly is contradictory, partial, jerry-built to its very bones. But so's the one we live in.

Dilly Lilly's long crawl through the rat burrows that criss-cross her heap of toys is a kind of narrative tour-de-force which calls to mind some of the more extreme passages in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, but the tiny mutant rat she extracts, then nurses on her own blood comes from an even more extreme universe (reminiscent as it is of Philip K. Dick's apocalyptic masterpiece Dr Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the War). In his refusal to resolve his warring plotlines, to explain the tie-ins which unite all these various levels, Mike Johnson goes them both one better, though.

The mercy of that all-forgiving narrative plot-doctor, knotting up all the loose ends, is perhaps the last thing we must abandon before opening the doors of perception to see each thing "as it is, infinite."

Travesty, then, is (at any rate in conventional terms) a magnificent wreck of a novel. Make sure you unroll a thread behind you before you venture into its intricacies, though. This is the kind of book that might insist on reading you.

[William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93)]