We’ve
posted about “literary” fan fiction before- where fans take a classic book and
continue or add to the story using their own ideas and imagination.
But
every once in a while a classic tale can serve as the launching pad for a work
that becomes a classic in its own right. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea jumps off
the shoulders of Jane Eyre , J.M. Coetzee
re-imagines Robinson Cruso in his book Foe , while Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz
and Gildenstern Are Dead fleshes out
the lives (or imminent deaths) of two bit-characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet .
But
these classics-begotten-by-classics generally reach back in time quite a ways. You
don’t often see a serious author riff off of the work of a contemporary (And no,
Fifty Shades and Twilight
don’t count.) But it turns out Shakespeare,
of all people, wasn’t above it.
The
first English translation of Cervantes’ Don
Quixote hit England’s shores in 1612.
In it, you find the side-story of a ruined and ragged youth named Cardenio. A
year later, in 1613, a play by the name of “The History of Cardenio,” attributed
to Shakespeare, but now lost, made its London debut.
Blatant
opportunism? Or flattering fan-fic? Sadly,
we’ll never know.
Lest you think yesterday’s post was just an
excuse to engage in a little literary bathroom humor, we are adding some
additional color on the matter today (naturally!)
As our long-time
readers already know, we don’t need an excuse to delve into sophomoric topics-
we do that all the time. But many of you may not have realized that yesterday’s
passage from Don Quixote touches on an important Spanish cultural tradition.
Yes, we’re serious. See this article, for example.
Now, Sancho wasn’t
crapping in a crèche like your typical Caganer, but there’s no denying the
Spanish affinity for dropping a deuce into all sorts of situations- both
profound and profane. This is a nation that celebrates the birth of Christ with
a sewer snake and a people whose greatest insult is “I (obscenity) in the milk
of the whore that bore you.” So, why shouldn’t their rope cutting aficion
spread through its greatest literature?
Well, it should. And it
does. We should embrace it.
A
fantastic passage from the Quixote. In pitch darkness, DQ and Sancho are
stopped in their tracks by some ominous sounds that they will later identify as
fulling hammers. Sancho secretly hobbles his master's horse to keep him from investigating, and stands next to him holding the saddle, too afraid to move:
At
this moment it seems that either because of the cold of the morning, which was
approaching, or because Sancho had eaten something laxative for supper, or
because it was in the natural order of things—which is the most credible—he
felt the urge and desire to do what no one else could do for him, but his heart
was so overwhelmed by fear that he did not dare to move a nail paring away from
his master. But not doing what he desired to do was not possible, either, and so what he did as a
compromise was to free his right hand, which was clutching the back of the
saddle, and with it, cunningly and without making a sound, he loosened the slip
knot that was the only thing holding up his breeches, and when he did this they
came down and settled around his ankles like leg irons. After this he lifted
his shirt the best he could and stuck out both buttocks, which were not very
small. Having done this—which he thought was all he had to do to escape that
terrible difficulty and anguish—he was overcome by an even greater distress,
which was that it seemed to him he could not relieve himself without making
some noise and sound, and he began to clench his teeth and hunch his shoulders,
holding his breath as much as he could, but despite all his efforts, he was so
unfortunate that he finally made a little noise quite different from the one
that had caused him so much fear. Don Quixote heard it and said:
“What
Sound is that, Sancho?”
“I
don’t know, Senor,” he responded. “It must be something new; adventures and
misadventures never begin for no reason.”
He
tried his luck again, and things went so smoothly that with no more noise or
disturbance than the last time, he found himself rid of the burden that had
caused him so much grief. But since Don Quixote had a sense of smell as acute
as his hearing, and Sancho was joined so closely to him, and the vapors rose up
almost in a straight line, some unavoidably reached his nostrils, and as soon
as they did he came to the assistance of his nostrils and squeezed them closed
between, and in a somewhat nasal voice, he said:
“It
seems to me, Sancho, that you are very frightened.”
“Yes,
I am,” responded Sancho, “but what makes your grace see that now more than
ever?”
“Because
you smell now more than ever, and not of amber,” responded Don Quixote.
“That
might be,” said Sancho, “but it’s not my fault, it’s your graces, for choosing
the most ungodly times to put me through the strangest paces.”
“Take
three or four of them back, friend,” said Don Quixote without removing his
fingers from his nose, “and from now on be more mindful of your person and of
what you owe to mine; engaging in so much conversation with you has caused this
lack of respect.”
“I’ll
wager,” replied Sancho, “that your grace thinks I’ve done something with my
person I shouldn’t have.”
“The
less said the better, Sancho my friend,” responded Don Quixote.
--
from Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes
“Done
something with my person I shouldn’t have?” “Rid of the burden that had caused
him so much grief?” “The urge and desire to do what no one else could do for
him”… There are some classic euphamisms in there. It would be interesting to
compare the various translations.
No,
we’re not talking about the return of the Twinkie, though that’s great news,
too. We’re talking about Literary Death Match, the series of bookish bloodsport
title bouts that we began hosting last year to great acclaim and not a little
controversy (see here, here & here.)
We
haven’t been able to say why we halted the matches until now, but we’re proud
to announce this morning that a Federal Judge has thrown out the case brought by the North
American Broadcasters Association on behalf of our intrepid ringside reporter,
Kelly Wallace. Kelly was never a party to these vexatious proceedings, and she
joins me and the rest of our production staff in celebrating this welcome
victory.
Our
first match will pick up where we left off, with dramatic works by Fitzgerald
and Hemingway duking it out for Best Play by a Lost Generation Novelist. Look
for it sometime in the next few weeks. Tickets will go fast!
Time
to heave another month into the Shelf Actualization archives. Above are the
authors we covered this month, and below are the five most popular posts from
the last 30-ish days:
I
read and loved Nineteen Eighty-Four ,
and there’s no denying the lasting influence it has had on our culture. (A-hem!)
I’ve also read Animal Farm ,
and came away convinced that it, too, was an “important” book to have in one’s
arsenal of cultural touchpoints. But man, I don’t know that I enjoyed either
one of them as much as I enjoyed Down and
Out in Paris and London , Orwell’s very first book. DaOiPaL is a hilarious,
instructive and captivating read.
It’s
a non fiction account of the days Orwell nearly starved as homeless vagabond in
London, and as a lowly dishwasher in Paris’s seedy underbelly, and even though
there’s some controversy over how faithfully it records his actual personal
history, it’s a book that had me laughing out loud and cringing with disgust
pretty regularly.
You
can get a lot out of this book. There’s the “back-of-the-house” exposé of the luxurious Hotel “X” (later identified by his wife
as the famous Hotel Crillon) where Orwell goes all Upton Sinclair on the filthy
working conditions in Fancy French restaurants- a section that may just have
you dry-heaving by the time you’re through. There’s his political commentary
and ideas on how to improve England’s convoluted ‘Casual Workhouse’ laws, which
kept men constantly on the move and of no real use to anyone. But if I
recommend it for one reason, it’s for the vivid descriptions of the various
characters he meets along the way: Boris, the former Russian military officer
he’s attached to in Paris, Paddy the tramp he befriends while exploring
London’s underworld, but also the landlords, pawn brokers, scheisters and
criminals that add color to the narrative.
It can be sad sometimes to see a perfectly good word end up
helplessly trapped in a prison of cliched usages. Don’t know what I’m talking
about? How about a few examples? Think of the things that you’ve recently heard
described as scathing . Were they
rebukes or criticisms? I’ll bet they were. And what about utmost ? Have you come across anything utmost that wasn’t sincerity
or respect? I doubt it. And I think we can agree that few things are as ardent
as supporters, or as insurmountable as odds.
Gall and disaster have something in common: they are about
the only things that are quite frequently unmitigated
- just as false and obvious are all-too-often patently so. And is anything
as reckless as abandon? Perhaps endangerment, maybe
driving… but mostly abandon. Disregard comes in a number of forms, but none so
common as blatant . On the other hand, nothing is nearly so
rapier as wit. Intuition tells us that a tongue could be rapier, and that wits
could be sharp, but no, it’s sharp tongues and rapier wits until the cows come
home. And don’t let yourself be guilty of switching them around.
Speaking of guilt, do we assuage anything quite so much? We might appease,
alleviate or mollify lots of things, but guilt is about the only thing we
really assuage with any regularity. We condone a lot of
things, but so often we do so tacitly
. We also come to tacit agreements, but I can’t think of many other
places where tacitness comes to the fore (I didn’t even know tacitness was a word before I looked it up for this
sentence.) We never jockey for anything but position. Aspersions are only ever cast. Things are never engulfed in anything but flames. Intrinisic value. Abject failure. Unqualified success. Thinly veiled . I could go on and on. We don’t pique many things besides
interest or curiosity, and I can’t imagine whetting anything but an appetite, can you? Ah, except
maybe a metaphorical whistle, that is. But one thing's for sure: the only thing I ever extol
are virtues.
I’m afraid words like these are, if you’ll allow me one more
cliched pairing to drive the point home, inextricably linked. (Ah, the ‘meta’ cliched coupling if
there ever was one!) But like most inextricable links (they all are these days,
aren’t they?) these pairings are probably just easy and strong, and not actually
bonds from which their constituent parts cannot be extricated.
So I say extricate them. We should grant these words a life outside the cliches. If you love words, set them free.
And here's 80's Sting for a few words on the subject:
We’ve
covered Eudora Welty’s influence on a Grammy-winning album here. But she may
also have inspired the titles of a couple of famous plays, as well.
Arthur
Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” premiered in early 1949, thirteen years after
Welty’s short story “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” a story whose main
character is named Bowman. Bowman? Loman? Coincidence?... Yeah, probably. But
still, both have to do with man’s search for meaning and worth and
accomplishment in life, and both characters come up empty in their search and then die. So I’m
going to go ahead and say: DUN,
DUN, DUN!)
But
what about Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which premiered at
the end of 1947? The title makes an allegory of the streetcar label that marked
the line serving Desire Street in New Orleans. Did he come upon the idea on his
own? Mmmm probably, but take a look at this excerpt from Eudora Welty’s novel from
two years earlier, Delta Wedding :
“They
had fooled everybody successfully about their honeymoon, because instead of
going to the Peabody in Memphis they had gone to the St. Charles in New Orleans.
Walking through the two afternoons down streets narrow as hallways, they had to
press back against the curb, against uncertain dark-green doors, to let the
streetcars get through. The streetcars made an extraordinary clangor at such
close quarters, as they did in the quiet of the night, and some of them had “Desire”
across the top. Could that have been the name of a street? She had not asked
then; she did not much wonder now.”
I’m
going to go ahead and give her credit for that one, too. Call it penance for
this post.
