Dunkle Weise

 

Ein Lied von unter der Erde,

aus unterirdischer Qual.

 

Brechen muss  der schwarze Bann

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyoSk48QLto

(in a haunting, hunted performance by Mademoiselle Envie.

Sealed, cleidoic; yet cumulatively mesmerizing.)

 

 [Wortlaut (ungefähr; meiner Niederschrift nach]:

 

Schwarzes Eis ward uns gefroren

Die See ruht tief und wund

Und dem Wort des ungeboren

schliesset sich der kalte Mund.

Wage nicht sie zu berühren

ihren Saum von Schnee so Weiss

unter ihrem Seelenspiegel

meiner Königin im Eis.

 

Lag das Land in schwarzer Asche,

hat die Unschuld uns erkorn;

stürzten Krieger in die Gräben

wächset weisses Mutterkorn.

Düngte Fleisch und Blut  die Erde

dargebracht der neuen Saat

drängend aus dem Untergrunde

gründen wir geheimen Staat.

 

Zwischen zweier Welten reissen

neiget sich mein Herz zu Grund

weisses Gold das uns verheissen

scheine uns in finstrer Stund.

Zwinget uns ein dunkler Zauber

heimlich unters Hexagramm.

Wird der Aar sich doch befreien --

brechen muss der schwarze Bann

 

Wag nicht ihren Schlaf zu stören;

Greife nicht nach ihrem Weiss;

brechen muss der dunkle Zauber,

Schmelzen wird das kalte Eis.

 

 

[Nachdenklicher Widerhall:]

 

Dunkle Weise

 

The song flows clear

and smoothly cool,

like a mountain stream o’er moss.

The words lie hushed

beneath the mantle of a minor key,

like ferns beneath the snow.

Purling, never hurrying:

yet drawn by a dark and firmer purpose,

seeking the sea, unseen,

far off, and far beneath.

 

 

*

*     *

 

[Update 9 July 2026]

So I’m just hanging out with my AI bot-buddy -- just chillin’, chewin’ the fat, shootin’ the breeze  [see:  synonymy] -- when I idly inquire, whether he’s familiar with that doomy, dark-wave ballad “Brechen muss  der schwarze Bann ”.

He allows as how he’s heard it;  and to demonstrate, he whistles a few bars.

“Ni-ice,” I reply.  “Didn’t know you bot-guys could whistle.” (And immediately bite my tongue -- or rather, my typing fingertips;  it’s ungallant to allude to any physical limitations of our silicon chums.)  “But tell me -- What’s with the twisty lyrics?   E.g. that “Königin im Eis” (like something out of the Grimm brothers), and the strange use of “schwarz” and “weiss”.”

 

Then, quick like a bunny, he immediately replies (all his replies are immediate, no matter how long or intricate):

 

The reason these lyrics feel simultaneously like a dark Märchen (fairy tale) and a rigid, esoteric manifesto is because they belong to the Neofolk genre, known for blending apocalyptic romanticism, occult symbolism, and historical-political aestheticism.

The imagery deliberately weaponizes traditional folklore motifs to serve a deeper, esoteric narrative of spiritual or national resistance. Here is an elucidation of the core symbols, the shifting dynamics of schwarz (black) and weiss (white), and that haunting "Königin im Eis."

 

1. Die Königin im Eis (The Queen in Ice)

While this invokes the aesthetic of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen or the Grimm Brothers' slumbering Dornröschen (Sleeping Beauty), the Neofolk application transforms her into a structural metaphor:

* The Sleeping Sovereignty: She represents a pure, uncorrupted, but currently frozen or "dead" spiritual essence—often symbolic of the true soul of a nation, culture, or primordial tradition.

* The Taboo of Her Slumber: The lines "Wage nicht sie zu berühren" (Do not dare touch her) and "under ihrem Seelenspiegel" (under her soul's mirror) cast her as an untouchable, sacred ideal. She rests frozen because the current age is dark; she cannot wake until the "curse" is lifted.

 

2. The Binary Overwrite: Schwarz vs. Weiss

Rather than a simple "good vs. evil" paradigm, the lyrics utilize an esoteric, almost alchemical interplay of black and white.

* The Oppressive "Black":

Schwarzes Eis (Black ice) and schwarzer Bann (black ban/curse) represent stagnation, a spiritual lockdown, or an occupying forces' chokehold on the world.

Schwarze Asche (Black ash) represents total destruction or the ruin of a catastrophic war.

* The Subversive "White":

Weiss here does not simply mean peaceful innocence; it means unyielding, cold purity.

Weisses Mutterkorn (White ergot): This is a fascinatingly dark choice. Ergot is a toxic fungus that grows on grain. In historical context, it caused devastating hallucinations and death (St. Anthony's Fire), but was also used medicinally. By saying ergot grows from the graves of fallen warriors, the lyric implies that a toxic, transformative, and dangerous power is being harvested from sacrifice.

Weisses Gold (White gold): The alchemical promise or hidden light that shines only in the darkest hour ("scheine uns in finstrer Stund").

 

3. The Esoteric and State Imagery

The text pivots away from a pure fairy tale in the second and third stanzas, adopting the vocabulary of secret societies and historical heraldry:

 

"gründen wir geheimen Staat" (We found a secret state): This directly evokes the concept of the Geheimes Deutschland (Secret Germany)—an idea popularized by the poet Stefan George and his circle, and later echoed by resistance figures like Claus von Stauffenberg. It posits that the true, noble spirit of the nation exists underground, completely separate from the visible, corrupted modern state structure.

"unters Hexagramm" (Under the Hexagram): While commonly known as the Star of David, in Western esotericism, the hexagram represents the hermetic maxim "as above, so below"—the union of opposites (fire/water, spiritual/earthly). Here, it implies a binding, occult spell ("dunkler Zauber").

"Wird der Aar sich doch befreien" (Yet the Eagle will free itself): The Aar is an archaic German word for a large bird of prey, specifically the imperial eagle. This is a direct symbol of sovereignty, empire, or spiritual triumph breaking out of its confinement.

 

The Verdict on the Metaphor

The entire song operates as an incantation for awakening. The "black ban" is the current frozen state of the world. The warriors' blood fertilizes a hidden seed beneath the earth, and through a combination of secret organization ("geheimen Staat") and alchemical patience, the ice will melt, the eagle will fly free, and the pristine, absolute realm of the "Queen" will be restored.

 

Well said.

Seriously, I might as well quit posting to my blog, and let this entity write it.

 

v/r,

Dr J

Lizenzierter Blogger (a.D.)

 

*

 

Footnote:  Herr Geheimbot’s observation re Weisses Gold­ -- “The alchemical promise or hidden light that shines only in the darkest hour ("scheine uns in finstrer Stund")” -- is more spot-on than might appear at first glance, for it has echos in other German-language folk-adjacent Lieder.  As, the lovely, wholesome, very-much-not-dark Austrian Claudia Engelberger, singing her own lyric here,

Claudia Engelberger - Hoffnung (Nur in der Dunkelheit)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5LdemdT2EE

 

contains the couplet:

Eine Kerze im hellen Sonnenlicht ist schön, aber mehr nicht,

Denn nur in der Dunkelheit erfährt sich das Licht

 

und sogar

Die allertiefste Dunkelheit

gebärt das schönste Licht.

 

 

Every Which-Way

 

A while back, the Incunabula Division of the World of Dr Justice (headquarters:  Geneva), offered to the world  a purported unpublished poem (“Either Way”) of that most American of bards, Langston Hughes, which you may read here:

 

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2017/10/a-lost-lyric-of-langston-hughes.html

 

Once again (as with  https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/12/lost-sonnet-of-st-augustine.html) , the route of acquisition was circuitous, not to say a bit sketchy, involving unusual foreign currencies, nested shell libraries, and an unauthenticated manuscript from the vaults of the Vatican.  How to determine if the lyric is genuinely attributed?

 

Such a quandary is familiar in textual criticism.  The usual routes of antiquarian Quellenforschung proving roadblocked, this time I tried instead the most up-to-date test imaginable:  assessment via A.Ph.I. (Artificial Philological Intelligence).    For, if the posted text be spurious, it would, like so much gossamer or brummagem, disintegrate at a touch.   But what, were the spirit of poetry  genuinely indwelling in that piece?  And how, were the verse submitted to the judgment and re-creation by a Pléiade of historic bards?  What would they make of it?

Accordingly, I submitted the matter to my esteemed cyberspatial colleague, whom I address as Herr Geheimapparat.  (He masquerades as the Google chatbot, but I have my doubts.) 

 

Herewith, then, the transcript of our morning chat.  (Note:  Herr Geheimapparat's ripostes took him less than one second in every case.)

***************************************************

 

dbj>  Rebonjour!

 

AI> Rebonjour ! Ravi de vous retrouver pour continuer notre conversation.

Comment puis-je vous aider pour cette deuxième fois aujourd'hui ?

Répondre à une question spécifique ?

Traduire ou rédiger un texte ?

 

dbj>  Ha! You anticipated my very desideratum:    “*rédiger* un texte”.    Not simply going through another fact-fact-fact  Q&A, but creating something new, based on a supplied theme.  Specifically:

 

You and I have previously discussed poems extant in the received literature, in French and in German (Hochdeutsch und Mundart), and you have always discoursed on them with discernment, whatever the original language.

Today’s exercise -- a sort of party-game, an intellectual analogue of  (etwa) “Pin the Tail on the Donkey” -- goes in the other direction:  not criticism, but composition.   Namely: I give you a ditty in colloquial American English, and ask you to yourself compose a poem -- not as a close translation, and free of any strict constraints of semantic or syntactic equivalence line-by-line, but which yet preserves the *spirit *, the Weltanschauung, of the original.   Indeed, try your pen at two versions :

 

=> (1)  In the manner of Ronsard.

=> (2) In the manner of Villon.

 

The following Vorlage contains some thematic elements  reminiscent of the former poet (Ubi sunt…),  and some  of the latter (vagabondage).   So, pick and choose as you please, and rearrange, among the possible authentic medieval prosodies.  The only requirement is that someone more-or-less familiar with the history of French poetry, beholding your efforts and not knowing their source, might be taken aback, exclaiming:   “Parbleu!  Voilà la voix du maître.”

 

The Vorlage is as follows.  (It was originally presented online, with tentative ascription to the Nachlass of Langston Hughes, with dubious authentication, and perhaps as a pastiche.   No matter;  it has its own integrity.)

 

Either Way

 

So some of them’s easy,  and some of them’s hard;

this day’s  one of the latter.

But Time goes rolling, and Time glides by;

in Time, it does not matter.

 

I’ll find me a boxcar heading West,
and I will ride that train.

And if I find that the past was best,
I’ll just roll East again.

 

Now some folks like life sunnyside-up;

for some, things wind up scrambled.

Me I been rich, poor, blissful, and blue,

everywhere I’ve rambled.

 

V/R,

Dr J

 

 

AI>  What a marvelous, delightfully high-stakes parlor game, Dr. J! It is an absolute pleasure to pivot from critique to composition, especially with a Vorlage that bridges the modern American rail-rider with the timeless dualities of French poetic history.

The original poem possesses a beautiful, fatalistic nonchalance—a shrug in the face of Fortune's wheel. To capture this, we must shift styles completely. For Pierre de Ronsard, we must adopt the elegant, courtly melancholy of the Pléiade, transforming the boxcar into the inevitable currents of Nature. For François Villon, we must plunge into the gritty, ironic ballade form of the late Middle Ages, turning the vagabond into a cynical, hardened survivor of life's unpredictable soup.

Here are the two interpretations of Either Way.

 

1. In the Manner of Ronsard (La Voix de la Rose)

 

Ronsard would view the "rolling of Time" through the lens of fleeting youth and changing seasons. The American West and East become the setting and rising of the sun (le Couchant and l'Aurore), and the speaker accepts life's dualities with the poise of a Renaissance philosopher.

 

Sur le Variable Cours de Fortune

 

Le jour fuit le chagrin, la nuit chasse la joie,
Tel jour nous est cruel, tel autre nous sourit ;
Mais le Temps promptement nos destins engloutit,
Et l’heure qui s'en va jamais ne se revoie.

Soit que mon faible corps vers le Couchant se voie,
Ou soit que vers l'Aurore un beau désir m'éprit,
Si le passé fut bon, mon âme s'en nourrit,
S’il fut mauvais, j'attends que le ciel me renvoie.

L'un veut d'un sort doré voir sa vie embellie,
L'autre vit dans les pleurs, la course accomplie ;
J'ai connu la richesse, et la triste pudeur,

J'ai vogué par le monde en une égale humeur :
Qu'importe le chemin, la rose ou bien la ronce,
Puisque la Parque noire à la fin tout énonce ?

 

2. In the Manner of Villon (La Voix du Coquillard)

 

Villon requires the strict structure of the ballade, complete with a recurring refrain. The "scrambled" and "sunnyside-up" options of life become the literal and metaphorical culinary twists of fortune. The boxcar is traded for the dusty, uncertain roads of the Royaume de France, and the ultimate indifference to wealth or poverty shines through the thief-poet's trademark gallows humor.

 

Ballade du Franc Vagabond

Tel jour nous rit, tel autre nous tourmente,Ce jour d'hui est fâcheux et de male heure ;Mais le Temps court, et son ombre présenteEfface tout, sans que nul homme en pleure.Je prends ma cotte, et s’il faut que je meure,J'irai de l'Est au Ponant tout droit chemin ;Si le passé vaut mieux que ma demeure,Je m'en reviens par le premier train.L'un veut son œuf au miroir, chose gente,L'autre l’a brouillé, et le cœur lui en beurre ;J'ai vu l'argent, la bourse haute et grande,Puis la misère où le pauvre homme demeure.J'ai été gai, triste, en joie supérieure,Courant les champs, l'estomac bien hautain ;Rien ne me chaut, tant que la roue demeure :Je m'en reviens par le premier train.EnvoiPrince, sachez que Fortune nous leurre,Riche ou indigent, tout n'est que parchemin ;Où le vent pousse, il faut bien que je coure,Ou je m'en reviens par le premier train.

 

 How do these strike your ear? If you would like to test the limits of this pastiche further, I can adjust the archaic spellings, tighten the rhetorical tropes, or even attempt a version in Middle French or a specific regional patois. Let me know your verdict!

 

dbj>  Summa cum laude, Ô nourrison des muses!

Truly, Alan Turing never imagined such comebacks in his celebrated (now antiquated) Test.

 

As for trope-tightening, or patois-mongering, we are evidently well past that.   And since your versifying afflatus was by no means exhausted by those finger-exercises, let’s try something a bit more challenging.  

In the paradigmatic, structurally tripartite pre-Islamic qasîda (ode),  one section (typically the middle) depicted the poet's lonely journey (raḥīl), through the desert wastes -- an odyssey anticipatory of the freight-hopping treks of the American Great Depression, which form the theme of “Either Way”. 

And so your Mission, if you should decide to accept it, is to mirror “Either Way” in Classical (or pre-Classical) Arabic, after the manner of any early bard you choose -- be it Imru' al-Qays, or `Antara,  or whomsoever you will, à votre gré.  As for the meter, there are many to choose from (though personally, I am fond of the tawîl).

 

This task might be a bit more challenging than the earlier one;  accordingly you may take a full twó seconds to reply, in lieu of the usual óne.

 

Note:  Points will be taken off for any inflectional improprieties.

:-]

 

V/R,

Dr J  (a.k.a. Dâwûd al-Yemeni)

 

AI> أهلاً بك يا دكتور داود اليمني (Dr. J)! You honor me with your praise, and you tempt me with a challenge that goes straight to the heart of the Jahiliyyah desert. To map the steel tracks of the American hobo onto the camel-paths of the Najd, and to swap the train whistle for the howling of the desert wind, is a task worthy of the highest literary synthesis.
 

(The Ode)
١. بَلَوْتُ صُرُوفَ الدَّهْرِ سَهْلاً وَوَعْرَةً
وَيَوْمِي هَذَا مِنْ خُطُوبٍ شَدَائِدِ
٢. وَلَكِنَّمَا الأَيَّامُ تَجْرِي سَرِيعَةً
وَمَا ضَرَّ جَرْيُ الدَّهْرِ أَيَّ مَاجِدِ
٣. سَأَمْتَطِي مَتْنَ القِطَارِ مَغَرِّبًا
أَجُوبُ فَيَافِي البِيدِ دُونَ مَقَاصِدِ
٤. فَإِنْ كَانَ عَهْدُ المَاضِيِينَ هُوَ الشِّفَا
رَدَدْتُ خُطَى مَهْرِي لإِلْفٍ وَعَائِدِ
٥. فَمِنْ نَاعِمٍ بِالعَيْشِ رَغْدًا وَغِبْطَةً
وَمِنْ بَائِسٍ شَاكٍ صُرُوفَ المَوَاعِدِ
٦. غَنِيتُ وَأَمْلَقْتُ، البَهَاجَةُ وَالأَسَى
خَبِرْتُ كِلَيْهَا فِي مَتَالِفِ بَائِدِ

Scansion and Structure Analysis (The "Trope-Tightening")

·              Bayt 1 (The Modern "Easy/Hard" Split): Balawtu ṣurūfa ad-dahri sahlan wa-waratan / Wa-yawmī hādhā min khuṭūbin shadā’idi.* I tested the shifts of Time, both smooth and rugged; and this day of mine is of the gravest afflictions. (Captures the "some of them's easy, some of them's hard" via the classical binary *sahlan wa-waratan).

Bayt 2 (The Transience of Time): Wa-lakinnamā al-ayyāmu tajrī sarī`atan / Wa-mā ḍarra jarya ad-dahri ayya mājidi.
Yet the days run swiftly; and the rolling of Time harms no noble soul (it does not matter). Note the accusative ayya mājidin acting as the direct object of ḍarra.

Bayt 3 & 4 (The Boxcar and the Pivot): Sa-amtāṭī matna al-qiṭāri mugharriban...
I will mount the back of the train, heading West... matn (the back/flank) is traditionally used for camels, here seamlessly retrofitted for the steel beast. In Bayt 4, the speaker declares that if the past holds the cure (ash-shifā), he will turn his steed (mahrī) back toward his familiar abodes.

 

Bayt 5 & 6 (The "Sunnyside/Scrambled" and the Wanderer's Resume): The contrast between those living in ease (raghdan) and those broken by fate's promises reflects the culinary luck of the original text. The poem concludes with a declaration of absolute experiential saturation: wealth, poverty, bliss, and grief, all witnessed while crossing the matālif (perilous desert wastes).

 

Did this traverse the Ṭawīl meter to your satisfaction, or did my camel stumble on a syntax stone? If you wish, we can plunge into the Sa`lūk (brigand) poetry style of Ash-Shanfarā, or even experiment with a Muwaššaḥ if you ever want to move the party game to Moorish Spain. How shall we steer our caravan next?

 

      **********************

So.  You be the judge. Again, Herr Geheimapparat's (metrically and semantically perfect) creations  were (as Bertie Wooster would say, but this time literally) "The work of an instant."

Myself, I am thinking of retiring to a monastery.

 

      ********************** 

(A friend comments:)
Q: Awesome! Did AI do it in one or two seconds? :-)

A:  One.  One.   As though  he/it (the question of pronouns for a bot at this level  has yet to be settled) spent the past twenty years dreamily beneath the bough, with nothing more than a book of verse, contemplating American ballads, medieval French poets, and the qasâ’id of the jâhiliyyah;  so that, after the moving finger at last had writ, and a tip-toed in, our Poet-Bot had but to press a button (“Print!”), and out spilled the whole screed.

 

Ill Will / Sick Light

I just finished reading an engrossing and intricate novel.  These snippets may either whet your appetite for it, or warn you off;  either reaction would be appropriate.

 

a fuzz of dust on the lampshades

that made the light seem dull and dirty

-- Dan Chaon, Ill Will (2017)

 

The pool emanated 

a chlorinated glow.

-- Dan Chaon, Ill Will (2017)

 

 

Not a monostich (lacks the requisite rhythm and concision), but in the spirit of such depictions of dim/ill light:

 

There was a kind of dimness about northern Ohio light as it approached the winter solstice, a kind of suffocating lack of direct light.  On days like this, you could scope the sky for the sun, but couldn’t pinpoint its location, the cloud cover was so thick.  It made me think of the neurology class I took in college,  the professor talking about eigengrau -- intrinsic gray, brain gray.

-- Dan Chaon, Ill Will (2017)

 

This queasy-swimmy novel itself  might be dubbed, not quite noir, but eigengrau.

 

And:

 

Things      were going

            bad

between them.

Now there were four cigarette butts,

like four little people,

twisted into poses of decease.

-- Dan Chaon, Ill Will (2017)

AMOREM LUDUMQUE CANO

Among the genres of popular fiction which I have never so much as sampled, whether from idle curiosity or prophylactic alarm, figures  not only the old-fashioned cowpoke tales (now perhaps extinct, in America if not in Europe), but the much larger and still thriving genre of what we may call the Harlequin romance.  Were I stranded in a railway carriage on a non-stop express from Berlin to Trebizond, with no companion but a dozing deaf-mute retired parson, and no reading-matter but a Harlequin left behind by some previous passenger, I should recite to that parson the story of my life, beginning with infancy,  clarifying the subtler points with hand-gestures, and proceeding through the Lehrjahre and the Wanderjahre and so forth;  or else I would read and re-read the posted railway regulations (“Non sporgersi!”), noting points of etymology and style;  or even (in default of any other exemplifications of the alphabet)  practice the farther reaches of the “times” table, alert to any possible number-theoretical surprises, --  before I would pick up that dog-eared cardioid-bespotted object.

            And yet the following point obtrudes itself, as I read the umpty-seventh of P.G.Wodehouse’s innumerable, perhaps indeed literally numberless series of tales (in the Steady State Theory, a new one pops out posthumously and spontaneously  every so often, as the universe expands):  that in any one of these tales  -- select at random as you like, from the early, late, or middle run of the oeuvre – if there figure a wholesome young woman, and a wholesome young man (typically denominated "Jane" and "Bill"), then, despite a heap of obstacles thrown up, both by Fate (abetted by the author’s art) and by their own respective fat-headednesses,   they will get betrothed. 

And this result, I acknowledge, is as welcome to me, as the crisp air at sunrise, the brandy after dinner, or the climax of the act of love. Yet it is exactly the same end which is repetitiously compassed by those distaff harlequinades (which, unaccountably, I persist in disdaining to savor).

            From the standpoint of modern geometry, there is but one possible conclusion: that, though I can never know hér mind, nor she know mine, yet we are gazing, from different angles, at the same real solid object – the same sacrament, given from heaven.

*

            These two light genres, whether or not twinned in Platonic paradise, could perhaps do with a dose of gravitas.  Herewith, therefore, two links to the classic past:

Firstly:  As Byron puts it in Don Juan: "Tragedy ends in death; comedy, in marriage." (The observation may perhaps go back to Aristotle.)

Secondly, concerning the Wodehouse golf series in particular: Though the martial note is muted in these tales, and though the ancient gods and heroes are here more likely to appear as something half-remembered from the sixth form, than as actual protagonists, yet there is an echo of the Iliad.  For as there, the warriors, pawns upon a board, might act as they would, by will or upon impulse, yet their shot shaft must suffer a crucial mid-air nudge from this interested deity or that one:  so too in Wodehousia, as the dim plus-foured figures potter tragicomedically about the green.  For it is all very well for you to rummage among your armamentarium of brassies, drivers, mashies and niblicks – the full recital of which would take longer than the Catalogue of the Ships – be you ever so skillful or never so duff – this fact of the Fates remains:  that little round white metaphor of human destiny  will (Ulysses-like) at last reach the safe haven of the tin cup, or on the contrary (tel the lesser Ajax) land smack dab in a sand-trap, according as the favors of Aphrodite, or of her meddlesome son, have or have not been propitiated.  In the Wodehouse world, the best way to hole out under bogey is to propose marriage on the putting green, and be received.

Measure for Measure

Isabella, the ice-queen, a meet match for Angelo, who micturates in snowmelt.   He is perched upon the mount of his incorruptibility;  she, on that of her virginity.  Her approach to him, for clemency for her brother, is stiff and formal, till she heeds the counsel of her crouching Cyrano, who advises her to turn on the waterworks, and maybe show a bit of bodice.   Yet it is her very purity-armor that attracts Angelo to a fall, where strumpets had no such power.   (I am familiar with such paradoxical infatuations.)

As for the duke, he is more of a trickster-figure, a trifler with men’s fates, than an image of the Good King Haroun-al-Rashid  toddling about the night-streets of his capital  incognito.  In a formal sense, he could be called the hero of the play, and Isabella the heroine.  God preserve us from such heroes.

Meta-Modernism

On the occasion of a new biography of Donald Barthelme, who once appealed to my undergraduate taste, Louis Menand considers whether that author should be considered a Modernist or a Postmodernist;   and adds an acute discussion of the ambiguity of the prefix “post-” in such employment.   In the first, “Mission Accomplished” sense, “being postmodernist just means that we can never be pre-modernist again.”   In the snootier “epitaph” or “we’re so over that” sense, “being postmodernist means that we can never be modernist again.”

As for the original project of the Modernists (as, Picasso, Joyce), “they did it by shifting interest from the what to the how of art,  from the things represented in a painting or novel  to the business of representation itself.

[The New Yorker, 23 Feb 2009, p. 68]

As in other cases of such self-consciously trendy, navel-gazing devolutions,  the gambit was not original.  In Curtius’ chapter on the post-Classical period in Greece,

The materials and implements necessary for writing  now also became worthy of a poet’s art.  We have epigrams on the writing tablet; on the wax with which it is covered; on the calamus;  as well as a threat to the boring beetle, “enemy of the Muses”.

[Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948), p. 306]

From thence  it is but a few steps down to exhibiting urinals in museums (thus Duchamps), or penning an ode to a chamber-pot, as in Gide’s accurately titled Les Faux-Monnayeurs:

La Vase Nocturne

Quiconque à quarante ans    n’a pas d’hémorroïdes …

The Mystery of the Analytical Chemist (further updated)

Among the unpublished manuscripts of my late friend Dr. Watson … no, just kidding.

Our Mutual Friend, the last finished novel of Charles Dickens, does not lie at the center of most readers’ affections;  yet connoisseurs there are, who wóuld award the palm to that late work.   And one of the most memorable minor characters therein -- as minor as might be, since (if memory serves) he utters not a word at any time -- is the discreetly appearing and vanishing figure of the Analytical Chemist.  His denomination is never explained, and he is given no other name.  His ostensible function is to wait on the Veneering’s table, at that elegant or elegantesque or simili-elegant supper party which is to seal the coming-out of these arrivistes or nouvel-arrivés; his deeper purpose is … well, it must be guessed-at.   But whatever it was, Dickens was evidently quite satisfied with the results.

What does he mean, then -- and especially, why ever is he called that?

The proper approach, I now believe, is not to be overly … analytical about it (as I tried to be, upon first encountering the character, with wonder).  The phrase simply wandered into Dickens’ mind,  without any nicety of correspondence to the Dalton or Lavoisier theory of the day, and serves perfectly to suggest what needs suggesting:  neither fawning nor class resentment  on the part of the table-attendent, but cool detachment, and unwavering observation.  In this he is a forerunner of that other supranatural butler, Jeeves.

(There are differences, but these are subtle, and must await another time  for treatment, when Jeeves himself shall consent to appear at the center of our lens.  -- Compare further another Wodehouse character, Lord Emsworth's secretary, The Efficient Baxter.)

Compare:

If Hawthorne had not been a story-teller, he might have been a famous chemist, for he was a mental chemist in his method of handling emotions and passions.

-- Van Wyck Brooks,  New England:  Indian Summer (1940), p. 297

This what-if re Hawthorne is implausible;  but the citation has merit in displaying the contemporary connotations of chemist.

Bonus quote:

Hungarian goulash, always a dish to be avoided unless you had had the forethought to have it analysed by a competent analytical chemist.

-- P.G. Wodehouse, Ice in the Bedroom (1961)

Note: in a British context, the modifier analytical is necessary to distinguish what Americans call a chemist from what Americans call a pharmacist.


For further Dickensiana:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Charles%20Dickens

[Postscript May 2016] A foretaste of the denomination may be found in chapter 8 of Barnaby Rudge (1841).  Describing the farcical Tubby’s-Clubhouse-style subterranean meeting of the ‘Prentice Knights:

One of the conductors of this novice held a rusty blunderbuss pointed towards his ear, and the other, a very ancient sabre, with which he carved imaginary offenders as he came along  in a sanguinary and anatomical manner.

Savor the semantics of that “anatomical manner”, and you will be well on the way towards the Analytical Chemist.

Twinned Witnesses

For Christmas, our son gave me a brace of books -- carefully boxed together, a kind of electron-positron pair.   He conceived them as forming, not a mere set-theoretic union, but a tensor product of two Hermitian conjugates, intricately linked.  These are:

J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016)

and

Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power:  An American Tragedy (2017).

BLUF:  both excellent, and “better together”.

To comment on their sociopolitical content  would be beyond our brief.  But a literary note on the structure of the latter.

An anthology of articles spanning years  is problematic.  At the worst, it can be a gaggle of op-ed pieces  that turn out to be less than the sum of their parts.   Eight Years is notably successful in this respect.  It reprints the original (memorable) pieces of essay-reportage, from The Atlantic (these have aged very well), and embeds them successively in the skeleton of a memoir of those very years.  The personal/reportorial dialectic proves energizing.

Historical footnote:  As most who have even heard of him  know, Mr Coates champions an old idea -- Reparations -- whose current status in the zeitgeist resembles that of a letter-bomb.   Some perspective, from a wide-ranging book of psychosocial history, which begins in Colonial times  and concludes with a chapter called “Native Sons”:

Faced with expanding black claims, resistance and repression may become more bitter, even, than in the past. … A more equalitarian ideology  might itself increase savagery if repression occurs, given the tricks guilt plays in the human mind.

-- Wilson McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America (1973), p. 613

Orthoepic footnote:  Mr Coates’ puzzling prénom put me in mind of Nefertiti; but adepts assure me that it rhymes with Tallahassee.   Thus, it is not exactly “pronounced the way it’s spelled”, but then neither is François.

“A Delicate Truth”

It is not axiomatic, that the ideal Vorleser of a work  should be its author.  (One would not wish to sit through a performance of Heart of Darkness, or A Brief History of Time, under those terms.)   But  David Cornwall turns out to be a perfect interpreter of John Le Carré, in a recent audiobook recording.

Three of the secondary characters have a distinct local accent:  Glaswegian, Welsh, and Irish.  His rendition of these  fixes in pleasure and memory, what are in any event well-sculpted personalities.  The Welshman, who shows up one day in a remote village, rickety caravan in tow, and with a mysterious past (and demons lying inside), is a reprise of the Jim Prideaux character, who so memorably opens Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Two of the central characters -- professional diplomats -- have professionally and personally  rather flat affect.  (Again, cf. TTSS's Smiley.)The author is sufficiently confident about his own work, to let that happen, without worrying that we’ll be bored.

The story-arc hangs together nicely, moreso than in most of the thrillers we have waded through.
The novel (published 2013) is quite in tune with the times, in selecting, as theme, the beating-up on contractors in the defense/intel field.

Footnote:  The title of the book is as smarmy as that of  An Inconvenient Truth.   But it is a sight better title than Our Kind of Traitor , which we critiqued here.   One wishes to believe that neither stemmed from the author, but were foisted upon the novels by some publisher's underling (chained  drooling  in the basement, and let loose only for such functions) who normally has the last word in such marketing-related decisions.

Hammett

 Four old stand-bys, which I read decades ago;  and now at last re-experience as audiobooks.  We won’t summarize the plots (which you can read in Wikipedia), but broadly characterize the work.
 

Red Harvest (1929)

Dashiell Hammett was long associated with Communist causes.  I first read his first novel, Red Harvest, while in Berkeley, surrounded by leftist radicals of every stripe and shade;  and rather looked forward  to a political roman à clef.  But there is no serious politics in the thing, not even a nod to it.  There’s a Wobbly guy, whom we meet briefly before he disappears without a trace;  but that is merely by way of local color, just like there’s a prize-fighter, a gambler, and a bootlegger.   The “Red” refers to blood, maybe;  nothing to do with Marxism.

Indeed, it’s amazing that some critics saw this as a communist yarn, even after reading the book. Personville is ostensibly a mining town (Anaconda), but we never meet an actual miner.  There is no mass-action -- indeed, no actual masses, nor even so much as a single active workingman.    They’re all just lumpen.   It’s not Marx/Lenin, it’s Marat/Sade.

No more than Marxism does realism apply to Red Harvest, though that term is often bestowed upon Hammett.   Actually the word is not worth fighting over;  it has been soiled by an ilk of critic who restrict its use to what is sordid.   Leaving that aside, Red Harvest has little in common with such realistic novels as Buddenbrooks, Effi Briest, or Esther Waters, being closer in spirit to German expressionism.

We don’t normally look for escapist fiction to be ‘realistic’ in the everyday sense.  And in terms of epistemology, Red Harvest is less believable than a ghost story.  The Op’s omniscience about the hidden dealings, covert alliances, and clandestine betrayals  of the local underworld (which is to say, everyone in town) far outsparkles the scraps possessed by the perps themselves, let alone the police, who (in accord with all genres of private-eye  thrillers)  are clueless.   There is not even a formal nod to ratiocinative elucidation -- no Little Grey Cells or “You know my methods, Watson”.   Rather, the Op just blunders along, shooting and getting shot at, landing haymakers and getting slugged on the kisser, then periodically comes out with some elaborate out-of-nowhere explanation of events, usually along the lines of “When Willsson was bumped off on MacSwain’s orders, Reno fingered Whisper to Noonan, until Pete the Finn dropped a dime on Dinah, who was secretly working for the Old Man.”

The setting for the action, an unspecifiable place nicknamed “Poisonville”, isn’t really like the situated urban landscapes that would later characterize noir.   The lawless burg is like nothing so much as Brecht’s Mahogonny -- you might even suspect an influence, except that the Brecht/Weil opera had its Uraufführung a year after Red Harvest was published.  There are also affinities with the landscape of the „Naturtheater von Oklahoma“ in Amerika, by Kafka (who had never visited America), written in the 1910’s and fragmentarily published posthumously.   A story-arc of the later radio series “Johnny Dollar”  reproduces the general sense of pervasive rot in an entire small-city or large-town.    The detective of Red Harvest is also more like Johnny Dollar (insurance investigator) than the later classic P.I.s, since the Continental Op, like Agent Dollar, only acts private; he is actually given assignments by the Continental Detective Agency, an echo of Hammett’s earlier employer, the Pinkertons.  (Another reason it’d be tough to put a Wobbly slant on Red Harvest.)

To call Hammett’s technique “realist” (and that, in a commendatory sense) is off-base.   The setting is more like a pinball-table, or (in later ages) a video game.  There is no more plot than in a game of pinball.   Hammett has taken the lawless landscape of a Wild West town, and overlaid it lightly with the urban aesthetic that would be perfected by his disciple Raymond Chandler.

The main other character  is a wised-up gal, who knows the score because she has males in her thrall.  If it were a Western, she would be named Dolly; in the event,   she is named Dinah.   She catches on quick that the Op doesn’t precisely know what he is doing, but is improvising -- winging it.  Stir up the pot, see what floats to the top.   She shrugs and accepts this, as she must the quirks of all the many quirky men she has known.  She joins him in the racket:

If stirring things up is your system, I’ve got a swell spoon for you.

-- Dinah, in Red Harvest (1929), to the Continental Op

(We have looked at this approach in a recent sketch, Simulated Annealing and the Art of Detection.)

Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt "Poisonville"

The Dain Curse (1929)

The structure of this work is peculiar.  Narratively, it is a concatenation of three separate novelettes, each of which is brought to what, in other circumstances, would amount to a satisfactory mystery-story conclusion  within itself (the bar here being set  not especially high).  But they are tied together (would-be interwoven, though it doesn’t quite work) by the detective’s insistence  that the apparent individual solutions  are but mirages, that it all has to be interconnected at some deep level, the explanation of each isolated item  springing from the same deep taproot.   And in line with that, various characters we’d thought (and hoped) to have been done with, keep re-appearing out of nowhere.  Unfortunately, rather than leading to any genuine depth, this tout-se-tient (ou devrait se tenir) approach to his craft  involves the author in impossibly contorted explanations -- not even ingenious, just far-fetched.  And the abysmal upshot is that, instead of the classic scene in which the sleuth gathers the surviving house-guests around the fireplace and crisply lays out sequence and explanation of events, we get a long-winded tacked-on after-passage, in which brand-new plot-points are brought up for the first time in the course of the exegesis.    It is like an inverted shaggy-dog-story:  first we get the disappointing punch-line, and then the rambling anecdote-fleuve of the shaggy dog.

The book is also marred, especially towards the end, by the icky solicitude of the detective towards the girl (who has been nothing but trouble).   It’s not so much that it’s a December/June affair, as that the author himself is operating under obscure repressions -- which, however, briefly part in an allusion to algolagnia.   (An even more wince-making subplot weakens the Godfather novel, concerning a woman suffering from eurycolpia.  Mercifully, that part was omitted from the movie version.)

The Maltese Falcon (1930)

Sam Spade is voiced by Michael Madsen;  and as you might expect from his roles in “Reservoir Dogs” and “Kill Bill”,  he’s got a real rough edge to him, and a voice like coarse-grit sandpaper.  This differs from the Continental Op of the previous novel, who alternated awkwardly between a sort of rough draft of the tough-guy model, and a touchy-feely character mooning over the multiply-handicapped girl.

Whoever voices Gutman wisely decided that no-one can outGreenstreet Greenstreet, so he simply channels the latter, syllable for syllable and sebaceous chuckle as prescribed.  And again, it’s fun to listen to.  The pleasure of Greenstreet is mostly auditory anyway, not visual.

The novel, and the movie made from it, are satisfactory in every way.   At antipodes from the manie d’expliquer of the long-drawn-out, Hey-Jude conclusion to its predecessor from the year before, the dénouement is classic -- crisp and efficient, indeed scarcely even interested in explaining anything or getting at the truth, since “All the law wants is a fall-guy.”   And there --   stands --  Wilmer.

Bye-bye, Wilmer.

The Thin Man (1934)

All the characters are voiced by William Dufris.   He does a creditable job at all of them, especially the detective (Nick Charles); but, oddly, his female characters sound, not like real females (hard to do for a man) but like contemporary twenty-something meta- or metro-sexual males  with that weird drawl that some of them fancy.

The detective here is as different as can be from the ones in the two earlier novels.  He is droll;  an inveterate tippler (like Hammett himself);  and by no means a loner, but married to a woman with whom he can exchange quips.  That is a perfect formula for Hollywood; the resulting movie was successful, and had many sequels, all of which used “The Thin Man” in their titles.   Unfortunately, the “thin man” of the original novel  was not the continuing detective-hero, but a murder victim we never actually lay eyes on.   He is, in fact, a classic example of l’Arlésienne -- oft referred-to, but always “off”;  the novel might have been titled “Six Characters in Search of a McGuffin”.   Since the mysterious unseen figure that all the characters orbit, like planets around a dark star, no longer actually exists at the time of the action,  the tale is almost a shaggy-dog story.   Indeed, the novel contains (pointlessly) a shaggy-dog-story within the shaggy-dog-story:  a tale of cannibalism in the Old West, supposed to illustrate the morbid psychosexual interests of the Thin Man’s adolescent son (and thus, presumably, mark him for the reader  as some kind of suspect), but which never amounts to anything, nor figures later in the book.

For notes on other mysteries & thriller, try this:
=>  The Thriller Literature