William Faulkner has been compared to Dostoevsky. This is not unjust, but the world of Faulkner is so physical, so carnal, that next to Colonel Bayard Sartoris or Temple Drake, the explicative murderer Raskolnikov is as slight as a prince in Racine. . . . Rivers of brown water, crumbling mansions, black slaves, battles on horseback, idle and cruel: the strange world of The Unvanquished is a blood relation of this America, here, and its history; it, too, is criollo.
There are books that touch us physically, like the closeness of the sea or of the morning. This—for me—is one of them.
[1938] [EW]
Lady Murasaki, The Tale of Genji
The publishers of the Orientalist Arthur Waley have gathered into a single serviceable volume his now-famous translation of Murasaki’s Tale of Genji, which previously was barely available (or unavailable) in six onerous volumes. This version may be characterized as a classic: it is written with an almost miraculous naturalness, and what interests us is not the exoticism—that horrible word—but rather the human passions of the novel. Such interest is just: Murasaki’s work is what one would quite precisely call a psychological novel. It was written a thousand years ago by a noble lady in the court of the second Empress of Japan; in Europe it would have been inconceivable before the nineteenth century. This is not to say that Murasaki is more intense or more memorable or “better” than Fielding or Cervantes; rather that she is more complex, and the civilization to which she belonged was more refined. To put it another way: I don’t claim that Murasaki Shikibu had the talent of Cervantes, but rather that she was heard by a public that was far more subtle. In the Quixote, Cervantes limits himself to distinguish ing day from night; Murasaki (The Bridge of Dreams, chapter X) notes in a window “the blurred stars behind the falling snow.” In the previous paragraph, she mentions a long bridge, damp in the mist, “that seems much farther away.” Perhaps the first detail is implausible; the two together are strangely effective.
I have mentioned two visual details; now I would like to note a psychological one. A woman, behind a curtain, sees a man enter. Murasaki writes: “Instinctively, although she knew quite well that he couldn’t see her, she smoothed her hair with her hand.”
It is obvious that two or three fragmentary lines cannot take the measure of a novel of fifty-four chapters. I dare to recommend this book to those who read me. The English translation that has inspired this brief insufficient note is called The Tale of Genji; it was also translated into German last year (Die Geschichte vom Prinzen Genji). In French, there is a complete translation of the first nine chapters (Le roman de Genji, 1928) and a few pages in Michel Revon’s Anthologie de la litérature japonaise.
[1938] [EW]
The Literary Life: Oliver Gogarty
Toward the end of the civil war in Ireland, the poet Oliver Gogarty was imprisoned by some Ulster men in a huge house on the banks of the Barrow, in County Kildare. He knew that at dawn he would be shot. Under some pretext, he went into the garden and threw himself into the glacial waters. The night grew large with gunshots. Swimming under the black water ex ploding with bullets, he promised the river that he would give it two swans if it allowed him to reach the other bank. The god of the river heard him and saved him, and the poet later fulfilled his pledge.
[1938] [EW]
Edward Kasner & James Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination
Looking over my library, I am intrigued to find that the works I have most reread and scribbled with notes are Mauthner’s Dictionary of Philosophy, Lewes’ Biographical History of Philosophy, Liddell Hart’s History of the War of 1914-1918, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, and Gustav Spiller’s psychological study The Mind of Man, 1902. To this heterogeneous catalog (not excluding works that are mere habits, such as G. H. Lewes) I predict that the years will append this charming book.
Its four hundred pages lucidly record the immediate and accessible charms of mathematics, those which even a mere man of letters can understand, or imagine he understands: the endless map of Brouwer, the fourth dimension glimpsed by More and which Charles Howard Hinton claims to have intuited, the mildly obscene Moebius strip, the rudiments of the theory of transfinite numbers, the eight paradoxes of Zeno, the parallel lines of Desargues that intersect in infinity, the binary notation Leibniz discovered in the diagrams of the I Ching, the beautiful Euclidean demonstration of the stellar infinity of the prime numbers, the problem of the tower of Hanoi, the equivocal or two-pronged syllogism.
Of the latter, with which the Greeks played (Democritus swears that the Abderites are liars, but Democritus is an Abderite; then it is not true that the Abderites are liars; then Democritus is not lying; then it is true that the Abderites are liars; then Democritus lies; then . . .) there are almost innumerable versions which do not vary in method, though the characters and the story change. Aulus Gellius (Attic Nights V, chap. 10) resorts to an orator and his student; Luis Barahona de Soto (Angelica, Canto XI), to two slaves; Miguel de Cervantes (Quixote II, chap. 51), to a river, a bridge, and a gallows; Jeremy Taylor, in some sermon, to a man who has dreamed a voice revealing to him that all dreams are meaningless; Bertrand Russell (Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, 136), to the sum total of all sum totals which do not include themselves.
To these illustrious perplexities I dare add this one:
In Sumatra, someone wishes to receive a doctorate in prophecy. The master seer who administers his exam asks if he will fail or pass. The candidate replies that he will fail. . . . One can already foresee the infinite continuation.
[1940] [SJL]
Edward Shanks, Rudyard Kipling:
A Study in Literature and Political Ideas
Impossible to mention the name of Kipling without bringing up this pseudo-problem: should art be a political instrument or not? I use the prefix pseudo- because those who bludgeon us (or amuse themselves) with such a foolhardy inquiry seem to forget that in art nothing is more secondary than the author’s intentions. Let us imagine that, around 1853, Walt Whitman had been motivated not by Emerson’s ebullient doctrine but by the somber philosophy of Schopenhauer. Would his songs be much different? I think not. The biblical citations would maintain their fundamental bitterness, the enumerations would display our planet’s appalling diversity, the Americanisms and barbarisms would be no less apt for complaint as they were for joy. Technically the work would be the same. I have imagined a counterproposal: in any literature there are famous books whose purpose is imperceptible or dubious. Martin Fierro, for Miguel de Unamuno, is the song of the Spanish fighter who, after having planted the cross in Granada, went to America to serve as advance scout for civilization and to clear the road to the wilderness; for Ricardo Rojas it is “the spirit of our native land;’ and also “an elemental voice of nature”; I always believed it was the story of a decent countryman who degenerates into a barroom knife-fighter. . . . Butler, who knew the Iliad by heart and translated it into English, considered the author a Trojan humorist; there are scholars who do not share that opinion.
Kipling’s case is curious. For glory, but also as an insult, Kipling has been equated with the British Empire. The partisans of that federation have vociferated his name as well as the ethics of “If,” and those pages cast in bronze which proclaim the untiring variety of the Five Nations and the glad sacrifice of the individual to imperial destiny. The enemies of the Empire (partisans of other empires) refute or ignore it. The pacifists counter his manifold work with Erich Maria Remarque’s one or two novels, and forget that the most alarming news in All Quiet on the Western Front—the discomforts of war, signs of physical fear among the heroes, the use and abuse of military jargon—is in the Barrack-Room Ballads of reprobate Rudyard, whose first series dates from 1892. Naturally, that “crude realism” was condemned by Victorian critics, and now his realist successors will not forgive its sentimental features. The Italian Futurists forget that he was the first European poet to celebrate the superb and blind activity of machines. . . .81 Whether
detractors or worshipers, they all reduce him to a mere apologist for the Empire, and tend to believe that a couple of simpleminded political opinions can exhaust the analysis of the diverse aesthetics of thirty-five volumes. The error of so dim-witted a belief is exposed by merely alluding to it.
What is indisputable is that Kipling’s prose and poetic works are infinitely more complex than the theses they elucidate. Compared with “Dayspring Mishandled,” “The Gardener,” and “The Church That Was at Antioch,” the best of Maupassant’s stories—”Le lit 29,” we could say, or “Boule de Suif”—is like a child’s drawing. The related circumstance that Kipling was the author of children’s stories and that his writing always obeyed a certain verbal restraint has obscured this truth. Like all men, Rudyard Kipling was many men (English gentleman, Eurasian journalist, bibliophile, spokesman for soldiers and mountains), but none with more conviction than the artificer. The experimental artificer, secret, anxious, like James Joyce or Mallarmé. In his teeming life there was no passion like the passion for technique.
Edward Shanks (the author of forgettable poems and a mediocre study of Poe) declares in this book that Kipling ended up hating war and predicting that mankind would eliminate or reduce the State.
[1941] [SJL]
Arthur Waley, Monkey
Arthur Waley, whose delicate versions of Murasaki are classic works of English literature, has now translated Wu Ch’eng-en’s Tale of Journeys to the Western Lands. This is an allegory from the sixteenth century; before commenting on it, I would like to examine the problem or pseudo-problem that the genre of allegory poses. We all tend to believe that interpretation exhausts the meaning of a symbol. There is nothing more false. I will take a simple example: the prophecy. Everyone knows that Oedipus was asked by the Theban sphinx: What is the animal that has four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening? Everyone also knows that Oedipus responded that it was a man. But who among us does not immediately perceive that the bare concept of man is as inferior to the magical animal that is glimpsed in the question as an ordinary man is to that changeable monster, seventy years to one day, and an old man’s staff to a third foot? Symbols, beyond their representative worth, have an intrinsic worth; in riddles (which may consist of only twenty words) it is natural that every characteristic is justifiable; in allegories (which often surpass twenty thousand words) such rigor is impossible. It is also undesirable, for the investigation of continual minute correspondences would numb any reader. De Quincey (Writings XI, 199) states that we may attribute any speech or act to an allegorical character as long as it does not contradict the idea he personifies. ‘‘Allegorical characters,” he says, “occupy an intermediate place between the absolute truths of human life and the pure abstractions of logical understanding.” The lean and hungry wolf of the first canto of the Divine Comedy is not an emblem or a figure of avarice: it is a wolf and it is also avarice, as in dreams. That plural nature is the property of all symbols. For example, the vivid heroes of Pilgrim’s Progress—Christian, Apollyon, Master Great-Heart, Master Valiant-for-Truth—maintain a double intuition; they are not figures who may be exchanged for abstract nouns. (An insoluble problem would be the creation of a short and secret allegory in which everything one of the characters says or does would be an insult; another character, a favor; another, a lie; etc.)
I am familiar with an earlier version by Timothy Richard of the novel translated by Waley, curiously entitled A Mission to Heaven (Shanghai, 1940). I have also looked at the excerpts Giles includes in his History of Chinese Literature (1901) and Sung-Nien Hsu in the Anthologie de Ia litterature chinoise (1933).
Perhaps the most obvious characteristic of Wu Ch’eng-en’s dizzying allegory is its panoramic vastness. Everything seems to take place in a detailed infinite world, with intelligible zones of light and some of darkness. There are rivers, caves, mountains, seas, and armies; there are fish and drums and clouds; there is a mountain of swords and a punitive lake of blood. Time is no less marvelous than space. Before crossing the universe, the protagonist—an insolent stone monkey, produced by a stone egg—idles away centuries in a cave. In his journeys he sees a root that matures every 3,000 years; those who find it live 370 years; those who eat it, 47,000 years. In the Western Paradise, the Buddha tells him about a god whose name is the Jade Emperor; every 1,750 kalpas this Emperor perfects himself, and each kalpa consists of 129,000 years. Kalpa is a Sanskrit term; the love of cycles of enormous time and of unlimited spaces is typical of the nations of India, as it is of contemporary astronomy and the Atomists of Abdera. (Oswald Spengler, as I recall, stated that the intuition of an infinite time and space was particular to the culture he called Faustian, but the most unequivocal monument to that intuition of the world is not Goethe’s wandering and miscellaneous drama but rather the ancient cosmological poem De rerum natura.)
A unique characteristic of this book: the notion that human time is not commensurate with that of God. The monkey enters the Jade Emperor’s palace and returns at dawn; on earth a year has passed. The Muslim traditions offer something similar. They say that the Prophet was carried off on the resplendent mare Alburak through the seven heavens, and that in each one of them he talked with the patriarchs and angels who inhabited it, and that he crossed the Oneness and felt a chill that froze his heart when the hand of the Lord clapped him on his shoulder. On leaving the planet, the supernatural hoof of Alburak had smashed a water jar; the Prophet re turned before a single drop of water had spilled. . . . In the Muslim story, the time of God is richer than that of man; in the Chinese story it is poorer and protracted.
An exuberant monkey, a lazy pig, a dragon of the western seas turned into a horse, and a confused and passive evildoer whose name is Sand embark on the difficult adventure of immortality, and in order to obtain it practice fraud, violence, and the magic arts; such is the general plot of this allegorical composition. It should also be added that this task purifies all of the characters who, in the final chapter, ascend to the Buddhas and return to the world with the precise cargo of 5,048 sacred books. J. M. Robertson, in his Short History of Christianity, suggests that the Gnostics based their divine hierarchies on the earthly bureaucracy; the Chinese also employed this method. Wu Ch’eng-en satirizes the angelical bureaucracy and consequently the one of this world. The genre of allegory tends toward sadness and tedium; in this exceptional book, we find an unrestrained happiness. Reading it does not remind us of El Criticón or the mystery plays, but rather the last book of Pantagruel or The Thousand and One Nights.
Wonders abound in this journey. The hero, imprisoned by demons in a metal sphere, magically grows larger, but the sphere grows too. The prisoner shrinks to the point of invisibility, and so does his prison. In another chapter there is a battle between a magician and a demon. The magician, wounded, turns into four thousand magicians. The demon, horribly, tells him: “To multiply yourself is a trifle; what is difficult is putting yourself back together.”
There are also humorous moments. A monk, invited by some fairies to an atrocious banquet of human flesh, pleads that he is a vegetarian and leaves.
One of the last chapters includes an episode that combines the symbolic and the poignant. A real human, Hsian Tsang, guides the fantastic pilgrims. After many adventures, they arrive at a swollen and dark river tossed with high waves. A boatman offers to carry them across. They accept, but the man notices with horror that the boat has no bottom. The boatman declares that since the beginning of time he has peacefully carried thousands of generations of humans. In the middle of the river they see a corpse being pulled along by the current. Again the man feels the chill of fear. The others tell him to look at it more carefully: it is his own corpse. They all congratulate and embrace him.
Arthur Waley’s version, although literarily far superior to Richard’s, is perhaps less felicitous in its selection of adventures. It is called Monkey and was published in London this year. It is the work of one of the very few Sinologists who is als
o a man of letters.
[1942] [EW]
Leslie Weatherhead, After Death
I have recently compiled an anthology of fantastic literature. While I admit that such a work is among the few a second Noah should rescue from a second deluge, I must confess my guilty omission of the unsuspected major masters of the genre: Parmenides, Plato, John Scotus Erigena, Albertus Magnus, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Francis Bradley. What, in fact, are the wonders of Wells or Edgar Allan Poe—a flower that visits us from the future, a dead man under hypnosis—in comparison to the invention of God, the labored theory of a being who in some way is three and who endures alone outside of time? What is the bezoar stone to pre-established harmony, what is the unicorn to the Trinity, who is Lucius Apuleius to the multipliers of Buddhas of the Greater Vehicle, what are all the nights of Scheherazade next to an argument by Berkeley? I have worshiped the gradual invention of God; Heaven and Hell (an immortal punishment, an immortal reward) are also admirable and curious designs of man’s imagination.
The theologians define Heaven as a place of everlasting glory and good fortune and advise us that such a place is not devoted to infernal torments. The fourth chapter of After Death denies such a division between Heaven and Hell, which, it argues, are not topographical locations but rather extreme states of the soul. This concurs fully with Andre Gide (Journal, 677), who speaks of an immanent Hell—already confirmed by Milton’s verse: “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell”—and partially with Swedenborg, whose unredeemable lost souls prefer caverns and swamps to the unbearable splendor of Heaven. Weatherhead proposes the thesis of a single heterogeneous world beyond, alternating between hell and paradise according to the souls’ capacity.