Pynchon's Indicative Naming: Onomatophobia? Onomatomania? Or None of the Above?
In June 1953, when Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. graduated from Oyster Bay High School, the yearbook editor noted Pynchon had the largest vocabulary in the class. By age 15, our boy-author was already a noticeable onomatophile, or, from the Greek, a lover of words. We don't have any evidence, but based on his earliest available writings, we don't think he suffered from the medical definition of onomatomania: "an abnormal impulse to dwell upon certain words and their supposed significance." Nor was there any mention in our reading that Pynchon may be an onomatophobe, or one suffering from "an abnormal dread of certain words." These medical-sounding definitions come from Stedman's Medical Dictionary.
In the less formal Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary, onomatomania is merely "the preoccupation with words," while onomatophobia is "the fear of hearing a certain word." These descriptors may or may not wiggle themselves into the lexicon of words about Pynchon's vocabulary. Since his earliest efforts, Pynchon has displayed a highly disciplined control over his choice of words, use of words, use of escalating or diminishing rhetorical registers, and rhetorical devices from the obvious hyperbole to the subtler enthymeme (a syllogism with one of the premises implicitly or purposefully withheld for the reader to infer, for example: "All men must die; Socrates is a man; therefore, ..."). All this started with his highschool newspaper "columns" (1952-53) and his collegiate short stories.
viernes, 17 de febrero de 2017
jueves, 16 de febrero de 2017
PROMETHEUS À LA MONTY PYTHON
If you are fond of Monty Python and/or edutainment, feel free to take a peek at this episode of Hercules (the animated series): it opens with Eric Idle telling the Prometheus story in an upbeat patter song with typically Disney visuals, which makes it my favourite retelling of the myth:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcTB2niMYlk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MXphXiXhjw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcTB2niMYlk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MXphXiXhjw
Prometheus, the most enlightened, was the brightest of the Titans,
saw us stumbling in the night, decided that we needed light!
He incurred the gods' revengeful ire for stealing their great secret fire:
up to heaven, one fine day, lit a torch from the sun and ran away!
He gave this gift so me and you could enjoy a summer barbecue,
so food is not a dreadful bore, we eat it cooked instead of raw! [···]
To pluck the harp and twang the lyre, and found the world's first Grecian choir,
map out the heavens, study Maths, come home and have a nice hot bath.
Our forefathers were overjoyed; the gods were fearsomely annoyed:
guess the pain they went and did to this prominent Promethean kid!
The punishment was grim and dire for stealing this great gift of fire;
they chained him to a rock -absurd!- pecked up by a giant bird...
Owch!
saw us stumbling in the night, decided that we needed light!
He incurred the gods' revengeful ire for stealing their great secret fire:
up to heaven, one fine day, lit a torch from the sun and ran away!
He gave this gift so me and you could enjoy a summer barbecue,
so food is not a dreadful bore, we eat it cooked instead of raw! [···]
To pluck the harp and twang the lyre, and found the world's first Grecian choir,
map out the heavens, study Maths, come home and have a nice hot bath.
Our forefathers were overjoyed; the gods were fearsomely annoyed:
guess the pain they went and did to this prominent Promethean kid!
The punishment was grim and dire for stealing this great gift of fire;
they chained him to a rock -absurd!- pecked up by a giant bird...
Owch!
And, pecked for all eternity, Prometheus alone
nailed to a rock for all to see; he is no Rolling Stone!
How could this kindly Titan giver live without his precious liver?
Every night, despite the pain, his liver would grow back again!
And every dawn of every morn, that eagle would return to pluck
his organ out and eat it up; oh yuck, oh yuck, what rotten luck!
nailed to a rock for all to see; he is no Rolling Stone!
How could this kindly Titan giver live without his precious liver?
Every night, despite the pain, his liver would grow back again!
And every dawn of every morn, that eagle would return to pluck
his organ out and eat it up; oh yuck, oh yuck, what rotten luck!
In the episode, as in the real-life myth, Hercules disposes of the eagle and sets Prometheus free. But the highlight is definitely Eric Idle's Prometheus song!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOgod-CbhGw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOgod-CbhGw
The most relevant fact to remember is that it's a Monty Python song (aside from being a Disney song), in fact, Idle himself wrote the tune AND the lyrics, makes it even better, with that typically Pythonesque brand of black humour. To make it even clearer, I first got to know the Prometheus story from its lyrics and visuals! Monty Python+patter songs+edutainment (as in the Oliver Cromwell and Milky Way songs)=always a winning combination.
miércoles, 15 de febrero de 2017
RITUALES CORPORALES DE LOS SOEPORUE
RITUALES CORPORALES DE LOS SOEPORUE
Traducido y adaptado por Sandra Dermark del inglés original, "Body Ritual among the Nacirema."
Febrero de MMXVII
La mayoría de culturas muestran una configuración idiosincrásica. Un único valor o patrón de cosmovisión a menudo deja huella en varios aspectos e instituciones de la sociedad en cuestión; ejemplos de este fenómeno incluyen los conceptos de "omote" y "ura" en la cultura japonesa o de la contaminación femenina en algunas culturas indígenas de las tierras altas de Papúa Nueva Guinea. Aquí, Sandra Dermark demuestra que las actitudes con respecto al cuerpo humano tienen una influencia ubicua y pervasiva en muchas instituciones de la sociedad soeporue.
Los antropólogos se han familiarizado tanto con la diversidad de maneras en que las diferentes clases de gente se comportan en situaciones similares que no es apto que les sorprendan incluso las costumbres más exóticas. De hecho, si todas las combinaciones de conductas posibles no se han encontrado en algún lugar del mundo, es lo normal que sospechen que tales conductas deben estar presentes en alguna tribu aún por descubrir. Este punto, de hecho, ya fue expresado con respecto a la organización de clanes a finales de los años cuarenta. A través de este cristal, las creencias y prácticas mágicas de los soeporue presentan aspectos tan inusuales que parece deseable describirlas como un ejemplo de los extremos que puede alcanzar la conducta humana.
Los rituales soeporue llamaron la atención de los antropólogos, en primer lugar, en la década de 1930, pero la cultura de este pueblo aún resulta bastante difícil de comprender. Son un heterogéneo grupo étnico euroasiático que reside en el territorio colindante al norte con los sápmi del Ártico, al sur con los tuareg del Sáhara, y al este con varias tribus nómadas de Asia Central. Se conoce poco de sus orígenes, aunque la tradición sostiene que llegaron desde oriente. Según la mitología de cada pueblo soeporue, su tribu fue fundada por un héroe cultural diferente: ejemplos se dan como el de Lebasi la Kath-o'lika, que envió grandes canoas a cruzar el gran charco de occidente y expulsó a los enemigos de la Fe de su territorio; Ovatsug Ofloda, que liberó a muchas gentes de la opresión extranjera, llegando a perecer lejos de su hogar en la gran batalla de Lytt-senn; o Ociredef el de Alta Talla, que acabó con la carestía entre los suyos introduciendo entre ellos un fruto subterráneo de allende el gran charco.
La cultura soeporue se caracteriza por una economía de mercado libre, que ha evolucionado en un hábitat natural próspero. Mientras estas gentes dedican la mayoría del tiempo a acciones con fin de lucro, gran parte de los frutos de su labor y una considerable porción del día están dedicados a la actividad ritual. El foco de esta actividad ritual es el cuerpo humano, la sombra de cuya apariencia y salud planea como preocupación dominante sobre la moral de las gentes. Aunque tal preocupación ciertamente no es un fenómeno inusual, los aspectos ceremoniales y la filosofía ritual asociados con ella son únicos en su especie.
El elemento fundamental en que está enraizado todo el sistema parece ser que el cuerpo humano es feo y que su tendencia natural es a la debilidad y a la enfermedad. Encarcelado en un cuerpo tan vulnerable, la única esperanza del ser humano es la aversión de dichas características mediante el uso de rituales y ceremonias. Cada vivienda cuenta con uno o más santuarios dedicados a tal fin. Los individuos más poderosos de la sociedad tienen varios santuarios en sus residencias, y, de hecho, la opulencia de las viviendas se mide a menudo en relación al número de tales centros rituales que posea la residencia en cuestión. La mayoría de viviendas soeporue son construcciones de arcilla y adobe, pero los santuarios de los privilegiados están tapizados con piedras preciosas. La mayoría de familias, más humildes, imitan a la élite aplicando placas de cerámica en las paredes y suelos de sus santuarios.
Mientras cada familia posee al menos un santuario de esta índole, los rituales asociados no son ceremonias familiares colectivas, sino que son privadas y secretas. Por regla general, sólo se habla de los ritos con los niños, y solamente durante el período en que están siendo iniciados en estos misterios. Sin embargo, conseguí establecer suficiente contacto con los nativos como para examinar estos santuarios y que me describieran los rituales.
El punto focal del santuario es una caja, o cofre, que se ha empotrado en la pared. En este cofre se custodian los conjuros y pociones sin los cuales ningún nativo cree que puede vivir. Estas preparaciones se adquieren de una serie de practicantes especializados. Los más populares de entre ellos son los hombres y las mujeres de medicina, cuya asistencia, en ciertos territorios, no puede conseguirse sino a cambio de sustanciosas ofrendas. Sin embargo, los hombres y mujeres de medicina no proveen de pociones curativas a sus clientes, sino que deciden cuáles han de ser los ingredientes y, a continuación, lo escriben en un arcaico lenguaje secreto. Tal escritura sólo es comprendida por los propios hombres y mujeres de medicina y por los herbolarios que, a cambio de otra ofrenda, proveen el conjuro en cuestión.
Los conjuros no son desechados después de haber hecho efecto, sino que son colocados en el cofre de conjuros del santuario doméstico. Ya que estos materiales mágicos son cada uno específico para un malestar determinado, y los malestares reales e imaginados de las gentes son muchos y muy diversos, el cofre suele estar lleno hasta rebosar. Los paquetes mágicos son tan numerosos que la gente olvida de cuáles son sus propiedades e indicaciones, y, por ende, temen volver a usarlos una segunda vez. Aunque los nativos no se expresan muy claro al respecto, sólo podemos asumir que la idea de retener los antiguos materiales mágicos es que su presencia en el cofre de conjuros, ante el cual se realizan los ritos corporales, protegerá de una forma u otra al creyente.
Bajo el cofre de conjuros hay una pequeña pila. Cada día, en sucesión, uno tras otro, cada miembro de la familia entra en el santuario, baja la cabeza ante el cofre de conjuros, mezcla en la pila diferentes clases de agua bendita y procede a realizar un breve rito de ablución. Las aguas benditas son canalizadas desde el templo de agua de cada localidad, donde los sacerdotes llevan a cabo intrincadas ceremonias para purificar ritualmente el líquido.
En la jerarquía de practicantes mágicos, en el rango inferior en prestigio a los hombres y mujeres de medicina, se hallan los especialistas cuya designación se traduce de mejor manera como "hombre o mujer de boca". Los soeporue sienten un horror casi patológico y una fascinación igualmente irracional por la boca humana, cuya condición se cree que ejerce una influencia sobrenatural sobre todas las relaciones sociales. Si no fuera por los rituales bucales, según creen, los dientes se les caerían, las encías les sangrarían, las mandíbulas se les desencajarían, y los amigos y las personas amadas les volverían la espalda. También creen en una fuerte relación entre las características orales y las morales: por ejemplo, hay un ritual de ablución bucal para los niños, que supuestamente mejora su vena moral.
El ritual corporal cotidiano que llevan a cabo todos los soeporue incluye un rito bucal. A pesar de que estas gentes son tan puntillosas en lo que respecta al cuidado de la boca, este rito incluye una práctica que sorprende al foráneo no iniciado, hasta el punto de causarle náuseas. Según fuentes fiables, he logrado averiguar que dicho ritual consta de la inserción de un pequeño haz de cerdas dentro de la cavidad bucal, junto con ciertos ungüentos mágicos, y, a continuación, se mueve el haz de cerdas dentro de la boca en una formalizada serie de gestos.
Además del rito bucal privado, la gente visita a un hombre o mujer de boca una o dos veces al año. Estos practicantes cuentan con una impresionante e imponente parafernalia, que consta de una serie de taladros, agujas, sondas y picanas. El empleo de estos objetos en el exorcismo de los males de la boca conlleva una prácticamente increíble tortura del suplicante. El hombre o la mujer de boca le abre las mandíbulas al suplicante y, empleando las herramientas antes mencionadas, agranda cualquier agujero que la caries y/o el desgaste haya/n podido causar en los dientes. Estos hoyos se rellenan con materiales mágicos. Si no hay agujeros de ocurrencia natural en la dentadura, se extraen grandes porciones de uno o más dientes para que pueda aplicarse la sustancia sobrenatural. Desde el punto de vista del suplicante, los propósitos de esta liturgia son de detener el desarrollo de las caries y atraer amigos. El carácter extremamente sagrado y tradicional de estos rituales es evidente dado el hecho de que los nativos vuelven a visitar a los hombres y mujeres de boca año tras año, a pesar del hecho de que sus dientes continúan desgastándose.
Se espera que, al llevarse a cabo un estudio exhaustivo de los soeporue, habrá una minuciosa investigación en torno a la personalidad de estos practicantes. A uno le basta con ver el brillo en los ojos de un hombre o mujer de boca, mientras clava una aguja directo en un nervio expuesto, para sospechar que subyace cierta cantidad de sadismo. Si esto puede comprobarse según el método científico, surge un patrón bastante interesante, ya que la mayoría de la población demuestra claras tendencias masoquistas. A esto se refiere, por ejemplo, un estudio de los años treinta que comenta una distintiva parte del ritual corporal cotidiano que sólo llevan a cabo los varones adultos. Esta parte del ritual incluye un rascado y laceración de la superficie de la mitad inferior del rostro con un instrumento afilado. También existen rituales especiales femeninos, llevados a cabo más o menos tres o cuatro veces al mes lunar, pero estos compensan la falta de frecuencia con un exceso de barbarie. Como parte de esta ceremonia, las féminas adultas se tuestan en hornos de cuerpo entero durante una hora. Las mismas féminas se hacen insertar gelatinas mágicas dentro de los senos, e incluso inyectar un líquido tóxico en el rostro. El punto teóricamente más interesante es el hecho de que lo que parece ser un pueblo preponderantemente masoquista haya desarrollado especialistas tan sádicos.
Los hombres y mujeres de medicina tienen un imponente templo, o latipsoh, en toda localidad sin importar el tamaño de ésta. Las ceremonias más complejas, que se requieren para tratar a los enfermos más graves, sólo pueden llevarse a cabo en estos templos. Dichas ceremonias no involucran sólo al taumaturgo, sino también a un grupo permanente de vestales y acólitos que se mueven tranquilamente por las salas del latipsoh ataviados con distintivos trajes y tocados.
Las ceremonias de latipsoh son tan drásticas que resulta fenomenal el hecho de que una buena proporción de los nativos verdaderamente enfermos que visitan estos templos se recuperen. Se sabe que los niños cuya indoctrinación no ha sido completada han resistido intentos de que los lleven a dichos templos, ya que "allí es adonde uno va para morir." A pesar de ello, los adultos indispuestos no sólo se muestran voluntarios, sino incluso entusiasmados, a la hora de realizar la prolongada purificación ritual; en ciertos territorios, si pueden permitírselo. En dichas regiones, no importa cuán grave el estado del suplicante ni cuán urgente la emergencia, los guardianes de muchos templos no admiten a los clientes si éstos no pueden entregar una cuantiosa ofrenda a los custodios. Incluso después de que uno haya conseguido y sobrevivido a las ceremonias, los guardianes no permitirán al neófito que deje el latipsoh a menos que este entregue otra ofrenda más.
Se despoja primero al suplicante, al entrar en el templo, de todas sus vestiduras. En la vida cotidiana, los soeporue evitan mostrar el cuerpo desnudo y sus funciones naturales. Los ritos de ablución, de egestión y de excreción sólo se llevan a cabo en la intimidad de los santuarios, donde están ritualizados como parte de las ceremonias corporales. Se desprende un shock psicológico del hecho que la intimidad corporal se pierde de repente con la entrada en el latipsoh. Para dar un ejemplo, un varón cuya compañera nunca le ha visto en el acto de excreción o de egestión se halla de repente desnudo y asistido por una vestal mientras lleva a cabo sus funciones naturales en un recipiente sagrado. Esta clase de tratamiento ceremonial se desprende de la necesidad del hecho que las secreciones son empleadas por unos adivinos para predecir el curso y la naturaleza de la enfermedad del suplicante. Por otro lado, las suplicantes en femenino, especialmente las heterosexuales, hallan que sus cuerpos desnudos son sujeto del escrutinio, de la manipulación y de la presión manual por parte de acólitos y hombres de medicina.
Hay otra clase de practicantes llamados escuchadores. Estos chamanes tienen el poder de exorcizar a los demonios que se alojan en las cabezas de la gente que ha sido hechizada. Los soeporue, cada vez menos pero aún así por lo general, creen que los progenitores hechizan e incluso pueden maldecir a sus hijos. Se sospecha particularmente que las madres echen maldiciones a los niños al enseñarles los secretos de los rituales corporales. El contrahechizo de los chamanes es inusual dada su falta de ritual. El paciente, así de simple, le explica al escuchador todos sus problemas y sus temores, empezando por las primeras dificultades que puede recordar. La memoria de la que hacen gala los soeporue durante estas sesiones de exorcismo es verdaderamente digna de elogio. No es inusual que el paciente lamente el rechazo que sintió al ser destetado durante la primera infancia, y hay incluso individuos que ven el comienzo de sus penas en el efecto traumático del propio nacimiento.
Para concluir, debemos mencionar ciertas prácticas enraizadas en la estética nativa, pero que también dependen de la pervasiva aversión al cuerpo natural y a las funciones físicas. Hay cada vez más ayunos rituales para que la gente gorda adelgace y cada vez más festines ceremoniales para que la gente delgada engorde. El rito de la inserción de gelatinas en el pecho, ut supra diximus (véase el párrafo sobre el masoquismo), se emplea para agrandar los senos femeninos si éstos son de tamaño reducido. El descontento general de las féminas de este pueblo está simbolizado por el hecho de que la forma ideal de senos, talle y caderas se halla virtualmente fuera del espectro de la variación humana. Algunas féminas, dotadas de un desarrollo mamario prácticamente extrahumano, son tan idealizadas y veneradas que llevan un cómodo tren de vida simplemente desplazándose de poblado en poblado y permitiendo a los nativos que las observen a cambio de un precio. Ya se ha hecho mención de las inyecciones de líquidos tóxicos en el rostro y de las sesiones de horneo que estas féminas llevan a cabo para considerarse hermosas (véase también el párrafo sobre el masoquismo), pero también cabe señalar que hay varones tan preocupados por el desarrollo de sus músculos como las féminas lo están por sus senos y caderas. Estos varones que se consideran constantemente faltos de vigor realizan intensas sesiones de actividad física ritual con el fin de desarrollar sus músculos de extremidades, tórax y abdomen. También hay varones dotados de un desarrollo muscular prácticamente extrahumano que llevan una vida privilegiada simplemente desplazándose de poblado en poblado y permitiendo a los nativos que les observen a cambio de un precio.
Ya se ha hecho referencia al hecho de que las funciones de excreción y egestión son ritualizadas, realizadas siguiendo una rutina, y relegadas al secreto. Las funciones naturales del aparato reproductor son distorsionadas de manera similar. El coito es un tabú como tema y está planeado y organizado como acto. Se procura evitar el embarazo mediante el empleo de ciertos objetos mágicos y limitando el acto del coito a ciertas fases lunares. Consecuencia de esto es el hecho de que la fecundación sea en realidad muy poco frecuente. Las féminas en estado se visten de cierto modo con tal de ocultar su condición. El parto tiene lugar en secreto, sin la asistencia de amigos o familiares, y la mayoría de féminas no dan el pecho a sus hijos, delegando esta tarea en sus compañeros varones y/o mediante el uso de un recipiente lleno de supuesta leche mágica, mezclada como ciertos polvos disueltos en agua, siendo la tapa del recipiente una réplica fiel del pezón femenino humano.
Cierto es que nuestra reseña de la vida ritual de los soeporue, por ende, ha mostrado que son un pueblo muy creyente en la magia. Resulta difícil comprender cómo han conseguido existir en nuestros días bajo la presión que se han impuesto a sí mismos. Pero incluso costumbres tan exóticas como éstas alcanzan un auténtico significado vistas con el cristal de la reflexión que nos provee Malinowski al escribir:
"Mirando desde una elevada altura, desde la seguridad de nuestras altas esferas en el mundo desarrollado, resulta fácil ver todo lo cruda e irrelevante que es la magia. Pero, sin su poder ni su guía, el ser humano primitivo no podría haberse hecho dueño de sus dificultades prácticas como ha hecho, ni podría haber avanzado hasta las fases más avanzadas de la civilización".
Traducido y adaptado por Sandra Dermark del inglés original, "Body Ritual among the Nacirema."
Febrero de MMXVII
La mayoría de culturas muestran una configuración idiosincrásica. Un único valor o patrón de cosmovisión a menudo deja huella en varios aspectos e instituciones de la sociedad en cuestión; ejemplos de este fenómeno incluyen los conceptos de "omote" y "ura" en la cultura japonesa o de la contaminación femenina en algunas culturas indígenas de las tierras altas de Papúa Nueva Guinea. Aquí, Sandra Dermark demuestra que las actitudes con respecto al cuerpo humano tienen una influencia ubicua y pervasiva en muchas instituciones de la sociedad soeporue.
Los antropólogos se han familiarizado tanto con la diversidad de maneras en que las diferentes clases de gente se comportan en situaciones similares que no es apto que les sorprendan incluso las costumbres más exóticas. De hecho, si todas las combinaciones de conductas posibles no se han encontrado en algún lugar del mundo, es lo normal que sospechen que tales conductas deben estar presentes en alguna tribu aún por descubrir. Este punto, de hecho, ya fue expresado con respecto a la organización de clanes a finales de los años cuarenta. A través de este cristal, las creencias y prácticas mágicas de los soeporue presentan aspectos tan inusuales que parece deseable describirlas como un ejemplo de los extremos que puede alcanzar la conducta humana.
Los rituales soeporue llamaron la atención de los antropólogos, en primer lugar, en la década de 1930, pero la cultura de este pueblo aún resulta bastante difícil de comprender. Son un heterogéneo grupo étnico euroasiático que reside en el territorio colindante al norte con los sápmi del Ártico, al sur con los tuareg del Sáhara, y al este con varias tribus nómadas de Asia Central. Se conoce poco de sus orígenes, aunque la tradición sostiene que llegaron desde oriente. Según la mitología de cada pueblo soeporue, su tribu fue fundada por un héroe cultural diferente: ejemplos se dan como el de Lebasi la Kath-o'lika, que envió grandes canoas a cruzar el gran charco de occidente y expulsó a los enemigos de la Fe de su territorio; Ovatsug Ofloda, que liberó a muchas gentes de la opresión extranjera, llegando a perecer lejos de su hogar en la gran batalla de Lytt-senn; o Ociredef el de Alta Talla, que acabó con la carestía entre los suyos introduciendo entre ellos un fruto subterráneo de allende el gran charco.
La cultura soeporue se caracteriza por una economía de mercado libre, que ha evolucionado en un hábitat natural próspero. Mientras estas gentes dedican la mayoría del tiempo a acciones con fin de lucro, gran parte de los frutos de su labor y una considerable porción del día están dedicados a la actividad ritual. El foco de esta actividad ritual es el cuerpo humano, la sombra de cuya apariencia y salud planea como preocupación dominante sobre la moral de las gentes. Aunque tal preocupación ciertamente no es un fenómeno inusual, los aspectos ceremoniales y la filosofía ritual asociados con ella son únicos en su especie.
El elemento fundamental en que está enraizado todo el sistema parece ser que el cuerpo humano es feo y que su tendencia natural es a la debilidad y a la enfermedad. Encarcelado en un cuerpo tan vulnerable, la única esperanza del ser humano es la aversión de dichas características mediante el uso de rituales y ceremonias. Cada vivienda cuenta con uno o más santuarios dedicados a tal fin. Los individuos más poderosos de la sociedad tienen varios santuarios en sus residencias, y, de hecho, la opulencia de las viviendas se mide a menudo en relación al número de tales centros rituales que posea la residencia en cuestión. La mayoría de viviendas soeporue son construcciones de arcilla y adobe, pero los santuarios de los privilegiados están tapizados con piedras preciosas. La mayoría de familias, más humildes, imitan a la élite aplicando placas de cerámica en las paredes y suelos de sus santuarios.
Mientras cada familia posee al menos un santuario de esta índole, los rituales asociados no son ceremonias familiares colectivas, sino que son privadas y secretas. Por regla general, sólo se habla de los ritos con los niños, y solamente durante el período en que están siendo iniciados en estos misterios. Sin embargo, conseguí establecer suficiente contacto con los nativos como para examinar estos santuarios y que me describieran los rituales.
El punto focal del santuario es una caja, o cofre, que se ha empotrado en la pared. En este cofre se custodian los conjuros y pociones sin los cuales ningún nativo cree que puede vivir. Estas preparaciones se adquieren de una serie de practicantes especializados. Los más populares de entre ellos son los hombres y las mujeres de medicina, cuya asistencia, en ciertos territorios, no puede conseguirse sino a cambio de sustanciosas ofrendas. Sin embargo, los hombres y mujeres de medicina no proveen de pociones curativas a sus clientes, sino que deciden cuáles han de ser los ingredientes y, a continuación, lo escriben en un arcaico lenguaje secreto. Tal escritura sólo es comprendida por los propios hombres y mujeres de medicina y por los herbolarios que, a cambio de otra ofrenda, proveen el conjuro en cuestión.
Los conjuros no son desechados después de haber hecho efecto, sino que son colocados en el cofre de conjuros del santuario doméstico. Ya que estos materiales mágicos son cada uno específico para un malestar determinado, y los malestares reales e imaginados de las gentes son muchos y muy diversos, el cofre suele estar lleno hasta rebosar. Los paquetes mágicos son tan numerosos que la gente olvida de cuáles son sus propiedades e indicaciones, y, por ende, temen volver a usarlos una segunda vez. Aunque los nativos no se expresan muy claro al respecto, sólo podemos asumir que la idea de retener los antiguos materiales mágicos es que su presencia en el cofre de conjuros, ante el cual se realizan los ritos corporales, protegerá de una forma u otra al creyente.
Bajo el cofre de conjuros hay una pequeña pila. Cada día, en sucesión, uno tras otro, cada miembro de la familia entra en el santuario, baja la cabeza ante el cofre de conjuros, mezcla en la pila diferentes clases de agua bendita y procede a realizar un breve rito de ablución. Las aguas benditas son canalizadas desde el templo de agua de cada localidad, donde los sacerdotes llevan a cabo intrincadas ceremonias para purificar ritualmente el líquido.
En la jerarquía de practicantes mágicos, en el rango inferior en prestigio a los hombres y mujeres de medicina, se hallan los especialistas cuya designación se traduce de mejor manera como "hombre o mujer de boca". Los soeporue sienten un horror casi patológico y una fascinación igualmente irracional por la boca humana, cuya condición se cree que ejerce una influencia sobrenatural sobre todas las relaciones sociales. Si no fuera por los rituales bucales, según creen, los dientes se les caerían, las encías les sangrarían, las mandíbulas se les desencajarían, y los amigos y las personas amadas les volverían la espalda. También creen en una fuerte relación entre las características orales y las morales: por ejemplo, hay un ritual de ablución bucal para los niños, que supuestamente mejora su vena moral.
El ritual corporal cotidiano que llevan a cabo todos los soeporue incluye un rito bucal. A pesar de que estas gentes son tan puntillosas en lo que respecta al cuidado de la boca, este rito incluye una práctica que sorprende al foráneo no iniciado, hasta el punto de causarle náuseas. Según fuentes fiables, he logrado averiguar que dicho ritual consta de la inserción de un pequeño haz de cerdas dentro de la cavidad bucal, junto con ciertos ungüentos mágicos, y, a continuación, se mueve el haz de cerdas dentro de la boca en una formalizada serie de gestos.
Además del rito bucal privado, la gente visita a un hombre o mujer de boca una o dos veces al año. Estos practicantes cuentan con una impresionante e imponente parafernalia, que consta de una serie de taladros, agujas, sondas y picanas. El empleo de estos objetos en el exorcismo de los males de la boca conlleva una prácticamente increíble tortura del suplicante. El hombre o la mujer de boca le abre las mandíbulas al suplicante y, empleando las herramientas antes mencionadas, agranda cualquier agujero que la caries y/o el desgaste haya/n podido causar en los dientes. Estos hoyos se rellenan con materiales mágicos. Si no hay agujeros de ocurrencia natural en la dentadura, se extraen grandes porciones de uno o más dientes para que pueda aplicarse la sustancia sobrenatural. Desde el punto de vista del suplicante, los propósitos de esta liturgia son de detener el desarrollo de las caries y atraer amigos. El carácter extremamente sagrado y tradicional de estos rituales es evidente dado el hecho de que los nativos vuelven a visitar a los hombres y mujeres de boca año tras año, a pesar del hecho de que sus dientes continúan desgastándose.
Se espera que, al llevarse a cabo un estudio exhaustivo de los soeporue, habrá una minuciosa investigación en torno a la personalidad de estos practicantes. A uno le basta con ver el brillo en los ojos de un hombre o mujer de boca, mientras clava una aguja directo en un nervio expuesto, para sospechar que subyace cierta cantidad de sadismo. Si esto puede comprobarse según el método científico, surge un patrón bastante interesante, ya que la mayoría de la población demuestra claras tendencias masoquistas. A esto se refiere, por ejemplo, un estudio de los años treinta que comenta una distintiva parte del ritual corporal cotidiano que sólo llevan a cabo los varones adultos. Esta parte del ritual incluye un rascado y laceración de la superficie de la mitad inferior del rostro con un instrumento afilado. También existen rituales especiales femeninos, llevados a cabo más o menos tres o cuatro veces al mes lunar, pero estos compensan la falta de frecuencia con un exceso de barbarie. Como parte de esta ceremonia, las féminas adultas se tuestan en hornos de cuerpo entero durante una hora. Las mismas féminas se hacen insertar gelatinas mágicas dentro de los senos, e incluso inyectar un líquido tóxico en el rostro. El punto teóricamente más interesante es el hecho de que lo que parece ser un pueblo preponderantemente masoquista haya desarrollado especialistas tan sádicos.
Los hombres y mujeres de medicina tienen un imponente templo, o latipsoh, en toda localidad sin importar el tamaño de ésta. Las ceremonias más complejas, que se requieren para tratar a los enfermos más graves, sólo pueden llevarse a cabo en estos templos. Dichas ceremonias no involucran sólo al taumaturgo, sino también a un grupo permanente de vestales y acólitos que se mueven tranquilamente por las salas del latipsoh ataviados con distintivos trajes y tocados.
Las ceremonias de latipsoh son tan drásticas que resulta fenomenal el hecho de que una buena proporción de los nativos verdaderamente enfermos que visitan estos templos se recuperen. Se sabe que los niños cuya indoctrinación no ha sido completada han resistido intentos de que los lleven a dichos templos, ya que "allí es adonde uno va para morir." A pesar de ello, los adultos indispuestos no sólo se muestran voluntarios, sino incluso entusiasmados, a la hora de realizar la prolongada purificación ritual; en ciertos territorios, si pueden permitírselo. En dichas regiones, no importa cuán grave el estado del suplicante ni cuán urgente la emergencia, los guardianes de muchos templos no admiten a los clientes si éstos no pueden entregar una cuantiosa ofrenda a los custodios. Incluso después de que uno haya conseguido y sobrevivido a las ceremonias, los guardianes no permitirán al neófito que deje el latipsoh a menos que este entregue otra ofrenda más.
Se despoja primero al suplicante, al entrar en el templo, de todas sus vestiduras. En la vida cotidiana, los soeporue evitan mostrar el cuerpo desnudo y sus funciones naturales. Los ritos de ablución, de egestión y de excreción sólo se llevan a cabo en la intimidad de los santuarios, donde están ritualizados como parte de las ceremonias corporales. Se desprende un shock psicológico del hecho que la intimidad corporal se pierde de repente con la entrada en el latipsoh. Para dar un ejemplo, un varón cuya compañera nunca le ha visto en el acto de excreción o de egestión se halla de repente desnudo y asistido por una vestal mientras lleva a cabo sus funciones naturales en un recipiente sagrado. Esta clase de tratamiento ceremonial se desprende de la necesidad del hecho que las secreciones son empleadas por unos adivinos para predecir el curso y la naturaleza de la enfermedad del suplicante. Por otro lado, las suplicantes en femenino, especialmente las heterosexuales, hallan que sus cuerpos desnudos son sujeto del escrutinio, de la manipulación y de la presión manual por parte de acólitos y hombres de medicina.
Hay otra clase de practicantes llamados escuchadores. Estos chamanes tienen el poder de exorcizar a los demonios que se alojan en las cabezas de la gente que ha sido hechizada. Los soeporue, cada vez menos pero aún así por lo general, creen que los progenitores hechizan e incluso pueden maldecir a sus hijos. Se sospecha particularmente que las madres echen maldiciones a los niños al enseñarles los secretos de los rituales corporales. El contrahechizo de los chamanes es inusual dada su falta de ritual. El paciente, así de simple, le explica al escuchador todos sus problemas y sus temores, empezando por las primeras dificultades que puede recordar. La memoria de la que hacen gala los soeporue durante estas sesiones de exorcismo es verdaderamente digna de elogio. No es inusual que el paciente lamente el rechazo que sintió al ser destetado durante la primera infancia, y hay incluso individuos que ven el comienzo de sus penas en el efecto traumático del propio nacimiento.
Para concluir, debemos mencionar ciertas prácticas enraizadas en la estética nativa, pero que también dependen de la pervasiva aversión al cuerpo natural y a las funciones físicas. Hay cada vez más ayunos rituales para que la gente gorda adelgace y cada vez más festines ceremoniales para que la gente delgada engorde. El rito de la inserción de gelatinas en el pecho, ut supra diximus (véase el párrafo sobre el masoquismo), se emplea para agrandar los senos femeninos si éstos son de tamaño reducido. El descontento general de las féminas de este pueblo está simbolizado por el hecho de que la forma ideal de senos, talle y caderas se halla virtualmente fuera del espectro de la variación humana. Algunas féminas, dotadas de un desarrollo mamario prácticamente extrahumano, son tan idealizadas y veneradas que llevan un cómodo tren de vida simplemente desplazándose de poblado en poblado y permitiendo a los nativos que las observen a cambio de un precio. Ya se ha hecho mención de las inyecciones de líquidos tóxicos en el rostro y de las sesiones de horneo que estas féminas llevan a cabo para considerarse hermosas (véase también el párrafo sobre el masoquismo), pero también cabe señalar que hay varones tan preocupados por el desarrollo de sus músculos como las féminas lo están por sus senos y caderas. Estos varones que se consideran constantemente faltos de vigor realizan intensas sesiones de actividad física ritual con el fin de desarrollar sus músculos de extremidades, tórax y abdomen. También hay varones dotados de un desarrollo muscular prácticamente extrahumano que llevan una vida privilegiada simplemente desplazándose de poblado en poblado y permitiendo a los nativos que les observen a cambio de un precio.
Ya se ha hecho referencia al hecho de que las funciones de excreción y egestión son ritualizadas, realizadas siguiendo una rutina, y relegadas al secreto. Las funciones naturales del aparato reproductor son distorsionadas de manera similar. El coito es un tabú como tema y está planeado y organizado como acto. Se procura evitar el embarazo mediante el empleo de ciertos objetos mágicos y limitando el acto del coito a ciertas fases lunares. Consecuencia de esto es el hecho de que la fecundación sea en realidad muy poco frecuente. Las féminas en estado se visten de cierto modo con tal de ocultar su condición. El parto tiene lugar en secreto, sin la asistencia de amigos o familiares, y la mayoría de féminas no dan el pecho a sus hijos, delegando esta tarea en sus compañeros varones y/o mediante el uso de un recipiente lleno de supuesta leche mágica, mezclada como ciertos polvos disueltos en agua, siendo la tapa del recipiente una réplica fiel del pezón femenino humano.
Cierto es que nuestra reseña de la vida ritual de los soeporue, por ende, ha mostrado que son un pueblo muy creyente en la magia. Resulta difícil comprender cómo han conseguido existir en nuestros días bajo la presión que se han impuesto a sí mismos. Pero incluso costumbres tan exóticas como éstas alcanzan un auténtico significado vistas con el cristal de la reflexión que nos provee Malinowski al escribir:
"Mirando desde una elevada altura, desde la seguridad de nuestras altas esferas en el mundo desarrollado, resulta fácil ver todo lo cruda e irrelevante que es la magia. Pero, sin su poder ni su guía, el ser humano primitivo no podría haberse hecho dueño de sus dificultades prácticas como ha hecho, ni podría haber avanzado hasta las fases más avanzadas de la civilización".
KUDOS FOR "REVELS AND RETALIATION"
DAVID’s review
Is the analysis focused on the reflection topic proposed for the assignment (comparing two of the three stories we read this week: “Tuesday Siesta”, “One of These Days”, and “Big Mama’s Funeral”)?
I would have thought Mamá Grande and the Thinkery offered little scope for comparison as opposed to contrast, until this review showed otherwise!
I would have thought Mamá Grande and the Thinkery offered little scope for comparison as opposed to contrast, until this review showed otherwise!
Is there enough information and/or are there enough quotations from the stories to support the analysis?
What was it Gabo said to Rabassa? - I feel as if I've endured a bout with the heavyweight champion of England! Maybe too much [hypotext - from which you could derive too much]. El despensero se acercó a Gerard. - Perdóneme, señor... pero es que ha muerto Tom Cribb – dijo. - Pero, ¿qué dice? – intervino Hornblower. No recordaba que hubiese nadie a bordo que respondiese al nombre de Tom Cribb... Ni tampoco conocía la razón por la cual un despensero debía dar parte a un teniente de la baja sufrida. (Hornblower en España, 167).
What was it Gabo said to Rabassa? - I feel as if I've endured a bout with the heavyweight champion of England! Maybe too much [hypotext - from which you could derive too much]. El despensero se acercó a Gerard. - Perdóneme, señor... pero es que ha muerto Tom Cribb – dijo. - Pero, ¿qué dice? – intervino Hornblower. No recordaba que hubiese nadie a bordo que respondiese al nombre de Tom Cribb... Ni tampoco conocía la razón por la cual un despensero debía dar parte a un teniente de la baja sufrida. (Hornblower en España, 167).
Is this assignment a reflection of a rigorous reading of the stories?
Nearly as many as Melquiades! I'm unfazed by the amount of homework set. Really enjoyed reading this!
Nearly as many as Melquiades! I'm unfazed by the amount of homework set. Really enjoyed reading this!
martes, 14 de febrero de 2017
THE FATAL FIRST GLASS
The most common narrative in temperance fiction begins with a young male who, in longing to exercise the privileges of adulthood and yearning for excitement, allows himself to be lured, usually by a "fast" young man, into a drinking establishment. The subsequent "fatal first drink" launches him into a downward spiral.
In temperance fiction, imagination and ambition were associated with strong drink. Imaginative and ambitious young men were thought to be particularly susceptible to drink's seductive powers. Finding their day-to-day existence boring and unfulfilling, they imagined the possibility of better lives and tried to make their dreams realities. Therefore, they were willing to take risks. Since this leading character was usually portrayed as a sympathetic and appealing figure, the author needed to take credibility to his decision to take that fatal first glass. That is, temperance writers needed to make drink attractive enough to have lured a good young man from the path of virtue without making the intoxication so attractive that the reader would want to follow him. Temperance writers generally acknowledged this dilemma by acknowledging liquor's initial attractiveness, but then going on to explain this attractiveness as a mask behind which the true horrible consequences lurked.
In depicting the moment of the "fatal first drink," and in exploring the relationship of the drinker to his drink, Victorian temperance writers participated in the wider cultural discussion about the nature of free will, as well as of moral responsibility for antisocial acts. Temperance novels and tales should be considered alongsides the many works of Victorian fiction that attempted to express and explore that moment at which a person was transformed from an average man or woman into a social monster.
Much as writers of seduction narratives depicted the seduced as innocent or nearly innocent victims of the seducers' wiles, so temperance writers held innkeepers and devious "fast friends" chiefly, or even solely, for the drinker's downfall. Taking advantage of the (nearly always male) leading character's weaknesses --his dream of achieving a more exciting and rewarding life than the one he knew, and his tendency to trust those who claimed to be working for his interest--, these men and women convinced him that drink would bring him closer to that idealized fantasy world of comfort, leisure, excitement, and elegance. Young women offering drink were always beautiful and always "bejewelled." Seduced by this promise of luxury and beauty that the victim had dared to hope would one day supplant, he took his first drink. The first drink often surpassed expectation. In Mary Chellis's fiction, Casper, a young art merchant, takes his first drink, which gives him "a feeling of exhilaration" that would soon bring him back for a second.
Temperance writers make it clear, however, that while a young man's curiosity and desire for excitement and/or change brought him to take his first glass, the violence and degradation that followed were out of his control. Significantly, given the contemporary (19th-century) debate of nature vs. nurture, temperance writers went to great lengths to depict the drunkard's progress not as a sin or failing on his part, but rather as a seduction and enslavement by liquor itself.
Once a young man had taken that fatal first drink, he was, in the logic of temperance fiction, absolutely powerless to resist future drink. Sometimes a tavernkeeper would covertly pour strong liquor in what was purportedly only lemonade or small beer, or drug a customer's glass of liquor, or even serve liquor to a customer who thought he was only drinking soda water.
Narrators, particularly those who were temperance reformers, often gave elaborate explanations of how a young man came to take his first drink. Generally he believed that, by drinking liquor, he could establish himself as mature, manly, and unafraid of the warnings of parents/guardians, wives/fiancées, siblings, and reformers. His decision to drink represented an attempt to escape the constraints of family and community opinion and to establish some degree of independence. Often, he combined this desire to escape family and communal restraints with an overly optimistic assessment of his own willpower, as he assured himself that he was in no danger of becoming a slave to alcohol, though he knew that others had.
Of course, temperance writers knew that, once he took his first drink, the young man would have within him a growing desire for alcohol. In an 1880 temperance hygiene book for children, Julia Coleman warned her readers that the danger of alcohol lay in its ability to "create such a craving in the drinker that he longs to be poisoned again." A female character in a temperance novel feared that while she herself had "no desire for alcohol, it may be that a single glass might arouse a demon in my breast which would not down at my bidding." Alcohol had the ability to create (or, more terrifyingly, arouse) a desire for itself within the drinker. However, if human seducers and alcohol itself were able to reshape, transform, and even create the (future) drinker's desires, it became very unclear to what extent those desires belonged to the drinker at all. Like accounts of sexual seduction and rape and/or abduction, stories of the drinker's seduction and coercion blended easily into one another.
The drinker's real problem, the seduction metaphor implied, was that he had become alienated from his own desires. Because the drinker's desires were wound up in the fantastic idealized images created by his seducers, they were, in an important sense, no longer expressions of his self, but rather of that of his seducers. Although they took care to establish the illegitimacy of the drinker's desires, the authors of temperance fiction often seemed simultaneously to empathize with those same desires. Some of these temperance reformers' most astute critics noted their seemingly paradoxical tendency to glamourize alcohol. In 1888, Edgar Watson Howe charged that temperance followers made strong drink appear exciting, talking "too much about the pleasure of strong drink, and of its pleasing effects," when in fact "the reputed pleasure in the cup is a myth [···] drinking is an evidence of depravity as plainly marked as idleness and viciousness." Howe found it strange that professed opponents of alcohol so often dwelled at such length upon alcohol's attractions.
Howe was on to something important. Temperance reformers often describe the pleasures of alcohol with striking enthusiasm or even longing. Mary Dwynell Chellis has a rare female drunken character explain her own former fascination with strong drink. Though, significantly, she tries to block the memory, she cannot. A collage of images come back to her: "brilliantly-lighted rooms; the flashing of jewels, and the gleaming of white arms; music, and the fragrance of flowers; the subtle fumes of wine, and whispered words of passion she but half comprehended." In another novel, Chellis has her own temperance-reformer character, her author avatar, acknowledge that "people sometimes crave sparkling stimulants that foam and flash before her; and when imbibed, quicken all the pulses of their lives."
The idea that alcohol increased desire and destroyed contentment remained prominent within the drink discourse through the progressive Victorian era.
There was a significant slippage, even in narratives produced by the most solid temperance supporters, between understanding strong drink as the cause of discontent and instability as its effect. Writers and tellers of such narratives often quite literally meant to convey that alcohol was the source of all social evils and that the individual's willingness to take a drink was the Achilles heel of his otherwise unassailable moral self. Yet many, perhaps even more, tellers of temperance narratives at time used alcohol and the "fatal first drink" as a sort of synecdoche or shorthand for a much more general process of embracing discontent. Drinking liquor, in this understanding, was a moment of discontent; a sign that the drinker had chosen to abandon comfort, home, and steady security in favour of risk and mobility.
To the extent that tellers of these narratives meant the "fatal first drink" more as shorthand for a process of discontent than as the literal cause of all the drinker's woes, they marked the drinker, even before he consumed his first drink, as "discontented," "ambitious," "fast," or "fanciful." When a temperance novel introduced a character as "a restless, ambitious boy," the readers knew that these were future drunkards. In William Constock's novels, one character agrees to take his fatal first drink out of a desire to remain on good terms with another man, who offers to help him out of a failing speculation. Narrators depicted the drinker, shortly after his consumption of his first drink, as engaged in multiple forms of risky behaviour, such as gambling and consuming other drugs. There was rarely a "fatal first dice throw" in these narratives. When there was one, it utterly lacked the weight of the "fatal first drink." The reader simply assumed that, having taken a first drink, the protagonist had completely given himself over to risk and chance.
Read literally, this narrative suggested that alcohol was fully responsible for the drinker's decline. Read as a synecdoche, however, the same narrative suggested that both his drinking and his decline were a natural result of certain related and preexisting character traits, such as discontent, ambition, and fastness.
Temperance writers acknowledged that there was a certain class of giddy and risk-taking young women who seduced men into taking their fatal first drink. Falling under the spell of such a seductress was parallel to entering the dangerous space of the pub.
Almost always, even those narrators employing the language of invasion imagined that the future drinker, through a somewhat voluntary act, opened himself to alcohol's attack. Once a young man had taken that fatal first drink, however, he was, in the logic of many temperance narratives, absolutely powerless to resist future drink. As one temperance physician wrote in 1882, "the smallest sip of the weakest form of fermented or distilled liquor has power to set in a blaze the hidden unhallowed fire." In most of the temperance narratives, the power of the first sip was equally strong even for those with "untainted" heritage.
By taking his first drink, the drinker put himself in the power of evil companions, and, perhaps more importantly, allowed alcohol to enter his body and begin to transform it. The alcohol coursed through his veins, unseating his reason and inspiring in him a thirst for more. It pervaded him entirely and wiped away any positive resolutions he may have had. In fact, ultimately, it wiped away the drinker himself. As one author describes, "there was not much left of him."
The physical bodies invaded by alcohol often were seen in a double character as both the victims and the perpetrators of the invasion. That is, invasion language all too frequently slid into seduction language. The seeming omnipresence of alcohol and the shifting of position between invader and invaded on the discourse of drink made the metaphor of invasion considerably more disturbing than comforting. As on the other levels of metaphorical invasion (and like vampirism, a close thematic relative), alcohol first had to be voluntarily admitted by its victim. He might choose to take a first drink because of social pressure, a desire for excitement, and/or overconfidence in his own powers of self-control. An 1872 textbook describes alcohol as "so seductive in its advances, so insidious in its influence, and so terrible in its triumph." Only after it had gained a foothold in an individual body did it reveal its true nature.
Belle Brain, in her 1897 handbook Weapons for Temperance Warfare [···] Among the excerpts to be read aloud was: "[···] only to pour down that 'raging Phlegethon of alcohol,' than which no river of the Inferno is more blood-red or more accursed." Here is a familiar pattern. Strong drink was worse than other devils because it was, as one 1894 pamphlet put it, a "liquid devil," polluting and transforming the bodies that consumed it. It "permeated" bodies, introducing the disturbing possibility that it could no longer be separated from them.
Alcohol was a particular type of transforming agent. Just as Dracula could not enter a home unless voluntarily admitted, so alcohol could not invade any body without some degree of consent.
Of course, the individual did, almost always, make a choice to take his "fatal first drink." In temperance novels, he often made the choice because of a desire for excitement and an insufficient respect for the advice of his betters. Even before he drank, the drinker --always carefully and repeatedly described as pure, perfect, and ideal-- possessed that one aspect of his character congenial to alcohol. Once he drank, of course, alcohol worked to weaken his will, particularly his will to cease drinking. If alcohol was an invader, one of the first things it did inside the body was to foment an insurrection. It transformed the will, creating an appetite for itself in the invaded body. Drinking, it was common to say in temperance circles, "dethroned reason." As the drinker drank more and more, he became "not himself." He behaved entirely differently than he would have behaved if he had been sober. Yet, if he was "not himself," who was he?
The phrase "dethroned reason," was potentially unsettling, for it suggested that reason was a monarch ruling over the rest of the body: an old metaphor but one not quite appropriate in a free Western world in the aftermath of revolutions. As one temperance physiologist puts it, alcohol released "the brutish part of human nature [···] The beasts of the menagerie may be no fiercer than before but they rage more violently and are more dangerous because the cages are open and the keepers are gone." He followed this wild animal analogy to a thinly veiled analogy to social class: "The lower passions being thus left without a master, the tendency to evil of every sort is greatly augmented." Put this way, intoxication begins to sound less like invasion and more like insurrection. Alcohol is not exactly causing the drinker to be something other than "himself"; it is enabling one part of him to revolt against its betters. As another physiology text explained, when one becomes intoxicated, "the hidden nature comes to the surface. All the gloss of education and social restraint falls off, and the lower nature stands revealed." In the late nineteenth century, poised between the faculty psychology of the early century and the Freudianism soon to come, the status of this repressed hidden nature, this beast within, had become increasingly uncertain. On one level, strong drink was an external force attacking a body that could be imagined as being somehow sound underneath the attack. That is, one could imagine extracting or driving out the invader to reveal a pure and whole body. On another level, though, drink was an infiltrating force not so much itself attacking the body as revealing the body's preexisting fissures and corruption.
Temperance advocates' metaphor of invasion, then, was entirely complicated. Certainly they continued, in many formats, to insist that the nation, the community, the home, and the body were essentially pure though temporarily invaded. However, they interspersed these repeated assertions with the metaphor was in tension. Drinkers, homes, communities, and nations were pure, yet there was something within them that caused them to allow alcohol to enter, and some part of their putatively pure bodies acted as a fifth column on behalf of invading alcohol.
At times, particularly when they insisted upon the metaphor of the perfect body, this characterization seems fairly accurate --both for temperance reformers and for their opponents. Taken as a whole, however, the discouse of strong drink was not a comforting discourse. Often it was too inconsistent and self-questioning to provide any answers, and often the implications of the invasion metaphor were deeply unsettling. Temperance reformers wrestled with the question of purity. They mobilized the potentially comforting metaphor of the pure body beset by external invaders, but they also insistently and continually undermined that metaphor by telling stories in which the invaded body was in some way identical with or sympathetic to the invader. Certainly it would have been possible for them to focus on hoary nativist arguments and to insist upon young humankind's pristine purity. By and large, however, temperance reformers did not take that path. If anything, they seem to have dwelled the most upon those things that rendered the metaphor of the invaded body most problematic, rejecting again and again the comfort it offered.
Temperance reformers were engaged in a process of constructing and destroying a metaphorical pure body. One of the most surprising things about the nineteenth-century discourse of strong drink is how subtly it changed from its early days in the 1830s through the end of the century. Even as they repeatedly told the same old narrative, drink debaters slowly reformulated it, negotiated its terms, and sought solutions to the problems it posed. After the mid-century's last liberal revolutions, as reformers began to tell the story through the language of invasion rather than that of seduction, they drew lessons from their own invasion accounts that they would apply to their reform tactics. If alcohol won men over not through its seductive influence but through its invasive coercion, and if it did so by storming through their bodies replacing their native desires and tendencies with artificial ones, then perhaps reforming women could win men back in a similar manner. More and more reformers, inspired by invasion language, called for women to leave the home, invade the male domain, and reclaim drunkards by force.
"Unlike most female-written fiction in the nineteenth century, temperance fiction does not end with the marriage of the heroine, but, instead, generally begins with the wedding,” and it is almost universally true that the temperance tale “explores the very real problematic circumstances women must face after the ceremony,” rather than the drama preceding the vows. The marriage in question begins as a happy, promising, and decidedly middle-class arrangement. The new husband has grand prospects: Smith’s Edward Middleton is a businessman and landowner, Stowe’s Edward Howard is, somewhat more vaguely, “first in the society in which he moved,” and the husband in T. S. Arthur’s “The Drunkard’s Wife” is Doctor Harper. Caroline Lee Hentz’s Mr. Franklin is even more considerable: “a member of Congress, a distinguished lawyer.” Consequently, the wife in each story has good reason to believe that her marital decision has been made wisely; she, her friends, and her proud parents expect domestic bliss to follow in turn.
Then, inevitably, come the bottle and the descent, usually traced through three tiers of depravity. First, the happy and prosperous family is unbalanced, but only slightly, by the introduction of “demon” alcohol. Importantly, the first drink is never entirely the husband’s fault; his essential goodness, despite the dark turns each narrative will take, is not at question.
In what I will call “domestic temperance” stories, the fallen husband begins as a paragon of bourgeois perfection, and never—even at his most degraded—entirely sheds a dimmed halo of his former goodness. Domestic temperance stories maintain continual hope for reformation, and so the drunkard retains enough humanity to warrant such an outcome. This narrative shaping begins early, as each story emphasizes the husband’s non-complicit or uninformed entrance into the dark night of spirits. In The Drunkard a begrudging lawyer, Cribbs, first leads Edward into the tavern and buys his first drink, feigning friendly collegiality. In “The Drunkard’s Wife” the doctor is offered “a good stiff glass of brandy” or wine when making house calls during winter, as a buffer against the cold. The first step is always minute and inadvertent (to quench his thirst, to warm himself from within -as a buffer against the cold-, as pain relief...), and the wife/fiancée bears it with only moderate concern, if she is concerned at all.
The first token of Redburn's descent into evil is his breaking of the temperance pledge. When he accepts grog to relieve seasickness, he wishes guiltily that "when I signed the pledge of abstinence, I had not taken care to insert a little clause, allowing me to drink spirits on the case of seasickness." But break the pledge he does, and, as he puts it, violating the pledge "insidiously opened the way to subsequent breaches of it, which carried no apology with them."
After his first sip of alcohol, Redburn is prepared to associate with drunken sailors and to accompany his friend Harry Bolton into a lavish den of iniquity.
Authors used images of strong drink to structure plots, to signal character types, to embellish a theme, to teach a lesson, and to promote a cause.
The nineteenth-century temperance tale enjoyed success by generally sticking to a formula: a young innocent boy [···] has his first drink of alcohol, [···]. Elaine Frantz Parsons identifies six key features of these narratives: (1) the young male protagonist is a particularly promising young man; (2) he falls largely or entirely because of external influences; (3) he is weak-willed and too eager to please his new friends; (4) his desire for drink overwhelms all else; (5) he loses his control over family, economic life, and/or his own body; and (6) if he is redeemed, it is through a powerful external influence.
In temperance fiction, imagination and ambition were associated with strong drink. Imaginative and ambitious young men were thought to be particularly susceptible to drink's seductive powers. Finding their day-to-day existence boring and unfulfilling, they imagined the possibility of better lives and tried to make their dreams realities. Therefore, they were willing to take risks. Since this leading character was usually portrayed as a sympathetic and appealing figure, the author needed to take credibility to his decision to take that fatal first glass. That is, temperance writers needed to make drink attractive enough to have lured a good young man from the path of virtue without making the intoxication so attractive that the reader would want to follow him. Temperance writers generally acknowledged this dilemma by acknowledging liquor's initial attractiveness, but then going on to explain this attractiveness as a mask behind which the true horrible consequences lurked.
In depicting the moment of the "fatal first drink," and in exploring the relationship of the drinker to his drink, Victorian temperance writers participated in the wider cultural discussion about the nature of free will, as well as of moral responsibility for antisocial acts. Temperance novels and tales should be considered alongsides the many works of Victorian fiction that attempted to express and explore that moment at which a person was transformed from an average man or woman into a social monster.
Much as writers of seduction narratives depicted the seduced as innocent or nearly innocent victims of the seducers' wiles, so temperance writers held innkeepers and devious "fast friends" chiefly, or even solely, for the drinker's downfall. Taking advantage of the (nearly always male) leading character's weaknesses --his dream of achieving a more exciting and rewarding life than the one he knew, and his tendency to trust those who claimed to be working for his interest--, these men and women convinced him that drink would bring him closer to that idealized fantasy world of comfort, leisure, excitement, and elegance. Young women offering drink were always beautiful and always "bejewelled." Seduced by this promise of luxury and beauty that the victim had dared to hope would one day supplant, he took his first drink. The first drink often surpassed expectation. In Mary Chellis's fiction, Casper, a young art merchant, takes his first drink, which gives him "a feeling of exhilaration" that would soon bring him back for a second.
Temperance writers make it clear, however, that while a young man's curiosity and desire for excitement and/or change brought him to take his first glass, the violence and degradation that followed were out of his control. Significantly, given the contemporary (19th-century) debate of nature vs. nurture, temperance writers went to great lengths to depict the drunkard's progress not as a sin or failing on his part, but rather as a seduction and enslavement by liquor itself.
Once a young man had taken that fatal first drink, he was, in the logic of temperance fiction, absolutely powerless to resist future drink. Sometimes a tavernkeeper would covertly pour strong liquor in what was purportedly only lemonade or small beer, or drug a customer's glass of liquor, or even serve liquor to a customer who thought he was only drinking soda water.
Narrators, particularly those who were temperance reformers, often gave elaborate explanations of how a young man came to take his first drink. Generally he believed that, by drinking liquor, he could establish himself as mature, manly, and unafraid of the warnings of parents/guardians, wives/fiancées, siblings, and reformers. His decision to drink represented an attempt to escape the constraints of family and community opinion and to establish some degree of independence. Often, he combined this desire to escape family and communal restraints with an overly optimistic assessment of his own willpower, as he assured himself that he was in no danger of becoming a slave to alcohol, though he knew that others had.
Of course, temperance writers knew that, once he took his first drink, the young man would have within him a growing desire for alcohol. In an 1880 temperance hygiene book for children, Julia Coleman warned her readers that the danger of alcohol lay in its ability to "create such a craving in the drinker that he longs to be poisoned again." A female character in a temperance novel feared that while she herself had "no desire for alcohol, it may be that a single glass might arouse a demon in my breast which would not down at my bidding." Alcohol had the ability to create (or, more terrifyingly, arouse) a desire for itself within the drinker. However, if human seducers and alcohol itself were able to reshape, transform, and even create the (future) drinker's desires, it became very unclear to what extent those desires belonged to the drinker at all. Like accounts of sexual seduction and rape and/or abduction, stories of the drinker's seduction and coercion blended easily into one another.
The drinker's real problem, the seduction metaphor implied, was that he had become alienated from his own desires. Because the drinker's desires were wound up in the fantastic idealized images created by his seducers, they were, in an important sense, no longer expressions of his self, but rather of that of his seducers. Although they took care to establish the illegitimacy of the drinker's desires, the authors of temperance fiction often seemed simultaneously to empathize with those same desires. Some of these temperance reformers' most astute critics noted their seemingly paradoxical tendency to glamourize alcohol. In 1888, Edgar Watson Howe charged that temperance followers made strong drink appear exciting, talking "too much about the pleasure of strong drink, and of its pleasing effects," when in fact "the reputed pleasure in the cup is a myth [···] drinking is an evidence of depravity as plainly marked as idleness and viciousness." Howe found it strange that professed opponents of alcohol so often dwelled at such length upon alcohol's attractions.
Howe was on to something important. Temperance reformers often describe the pleasures of alcohol with striking enthusiasm or even longing. Mary Dwynell Chellis has a rare female drunken character explain her own former fascination with strong drink. Though, significantly, she tries to block the memory, she cannot. A collage of images come back to her: "brilliantly-lighted rooms; the flashing of jewels, and the gleaming of white arms; music, and the fragrance of flowers; the subtle fumes of wine, and whispered words of passion she but half comprehended." In another novel, Chellis has her own temperance-reformer character, her author avatar, acknowledge that "people sometimes crave sparkling stimulants that foam and flash before her; and when imbibed, quicken all the pulses of their lives."
The idea that alcohol increased desire and destroyed contentment remained prominent within the drink discourse through the progressive Victorian era.
There was a significant slippage, even in narratives produced by the most solid temperance supporters, between understanding strong drink as the cause of discontent and instability as its effect. Writers and tellers of such narratives often quite literally meant to convey that alcohol was the source of all social evils and that the individual's willingness to take a drink was the Achilles heel of his otherwise unassailable moral self. Yet many, perhaps even more, tellers of temperance narratives at time used alcohol and the "fatal first drink" as a sort of synecdoche or shorthand for a much more general process of embracing discontent. Drinking liquor, in this understanding, was a moment of discontent; a sign that the drinker had chosen to abandon comfort, home, and steady security in favour of risk and mobility.
To the extent that tellers of these narratives meant the "fatal first drink" more as shorthand for a process of discontent than as the literal cause of all the drinker's woes, they marked the drinker, even before he consumed his first drink, as "discontented," "ambitious," "fast," or "fanciful." When a temperance novel introduced a character as "a restless, ambitious boy," the readers knew that these were future drunkards. In William Constock's novels, one character agrees to take his fatal first drink out of a desire to remain on good terms with another man, who offers to help him out of a failing speculation. Narrators depicted the drinker, shortly after his consumption of his first drink, as engaged in multiple forms of risky behaviour, such as gambling and consuming other drugs. There was rarely a "fatal first dice throw" in these narratives. When there was one, it utterly lacked the weight of the "fatal first drink." The reader simply assumed that, having taken a first drink, the protagonist had completely given himself over to risk and chance.
Read literally, this narrative suggested that alcohol was fully responsible for the drinker's decline. Read as a synecdoche, however, the same narrative suggested that both his drinking and his decline were a natural result of certain related and preexisting character traits, such as discontent, ambition, and fastness.
Temperance writers acknowledged that there was a certain class of giddy and risk-taking young women who seduced men into taking their fatal first drink. Falling under the spell of such a seductress was parallel to entering the dangerous space of the pub.
Almost always, even those narrators employing the language of invasion imagined that the future drinker, through a somewhat voluntary act, opened himself to alcohol's attack. Once a young man had taken that fatal first drink, however, he was, in the logic of many temperance narratives, absolutely powerless to resist future drink. As one temperance physician wrote in 1882, "the smallest sip of the weakest form of fermented or distilled liquor has power to set in a blaze the hidden unhallowed fire." In most of the temperance narratives, the power of the first sip was equally strong even for those with "untainted" heritage.
By taking his first drink, the drinker put himself in the power of evil companions, and, perhaps more importantly, allowed alcohol to enter his body and begin to transform it. The alcohol coursed through his veins, unseating his reason and inspiring in him a thirst for more. It pervaded him entirely and wiped away any positive resolutions he may have had. In fact, ultimately, it wiped away the drinker himself. As one author describes, "there was not much left of him."
The physical bodies invaded by alcohol often were seen in a double character as both the victims and the perpetrators of the invasion. That is, invasion language all too frequently slid into seduction language. The seeming omnipresence of alcohol and the shifting of position between invader and invaded on the discourse of drink made the metaphor of invasion considerably more disturbing than comforting. As on the other levels of metaphorical invasion (and like vampirism, a close thematic relative), alcohol first had to be voluntarily admitted by its victim. He might choose to take a first drink because of social pressure, a desire for excitement, and/or overconfidence in his own powers of self-control. An 1872 textbook describes alcohol as "so seductive in its advances, so insidious in its influence, and so terrible in its triumph." Only after it had gained a foothold in an individual body did it reveal its true nature.
Belle Brain, in her 1897 handbook Weapons for Temperance Warfare [···] Among the excerpts to be read aloud was: "[···] only to pour down that 'raging Phlegethon of alcohol,' than which no river of the Inferno is more blood-red or more accursed." Here is a familiar pattern. Strong drink was worse than other devils because it was, as one 1894 pamphlet put it, a "liquid devil," polluting and transforming the bodies that consumed it. It "permeated" bodies, introducing the disturbing possibility that it could no longer be separated from them.
Alcohol was a particular type of transforming agent. Just as Dracula could not enter a home unless voluntarily admitted, so alcohol could not invade any body without some degree of consent.
Of course, the individual did, almost always, make a choice to take his "fatal first drink." In temperance novels, he often made the choice because of a desire for excitement and an insufficient respect for the advice of his betters. Even before he drank, the drinker --always carefully and repeatedly described as pure, perfect, and ideal-- possessed that one aspect of his character congenial to alcohol. Once he drank, of course, alcohol worked to weaken his will, particularly his will to cease drinking. If alcohol was an invader, one of the first things it did inside the body was to foment an insurrection. It transformed the will, creating an appetite for itself in the invaded body. Drinking, it was common to say in temperance circles, "dethroned reason." As the drinker drank more and more, he became "not himself." He behaved entirely differently than he would have behaved if he had been sober. Yet, if he was "not himself," who was he?
The phrase "dethroned reason," was potentially unsettling, for it suggested that reason was a monarch ruling over the rest of the body: an old metaphor but one not quite appropriate in a free Western world in the aftermath of revolutions. As one temperance physiologist puts it, alcohol released "the brutish part of human nature [···] The beasts of the menagerie may be no fiercer than before but they rage more violently and are more dangerous because the cages are open and the keepers are gone." He followed this wild animal analogy to a thinly veiled analogy to social class: "The lower passions being thus left without a master, the tendency to evil of every sort is greatly augmented." Put this way, intoxication begins to sound less like invasion and more like insurrection. Alcohol is not exactly causing the drinker to be something other than "himself"; it is enabling one part of him to revolt against its betters. As another physiology text explained, when one becomes intoxicated, "the hidden nature comes to the surface. All the gloss of education and social restraint falls off, and the lower nature stands revealed." In the late nineteenth century, poised between the faculty psychology of the early century and the Freudianism soon to come, the status of this repressed hidden nature, this beast within, had become increasingly uncertain. On one level, strong drink was an external force attacking a body that could be imagined as being somehow sound underneath the attack. That is, one could imagine extracting or driving out the invader to reveal a pure and whole body. On another level, though, drink was an infiltrating force not so much itself attacking the body as revealing the body's preexisting fissures and corruption.
Temperance advocates' metaphor of invasion, then, was entirely complicated. Certainly they continued, in many formats, to insist that the nation, the community, the home, and the body were essentially pure though temporarily invaded. However, they interspersed these repeated assertions with the metaphor was in tension. Drinkers, homes, communities, and nations were pure, yet there was something within them that caused them to allow alcohol to enter, and some part of their putatively pure bodies acted as a fifth column on behalf of invading alcohol.
At times, particularly when they insisted upon the metaphor of the perfect body, this characterization seems fairly accurate --both for temperance reformers and for their opponents. Taken as a whole, however, the discouse of strong drink was not a comforting discourse. Often it was too inconsistent and self-questioning to provide any answers, and often the implications of the invasion metaphor were deeply unsettling. Temperance reformers wrestled with the question of purity. They mobilized the potentially comforting metaphor of the pure body beset by external invaders, but they also insistently and continually undermined that metaphor by telling stories in which the invaded body was in some way identical with or sympathetic to the invader. Certainly it would have been possible for them to focus on hoary nativist arguments and to insist upon young humankind's pristine purity. By and large, however, temperance reformers did not take that path. If anything, they seem to have dwelled the most upon those things that rendered the metaphor of the invaded body most problematic, rejecting again and again the comfort it offered.
Temperance reformers were engaged in a process of constructing and destroying a metaphorical pure body. One of the most surprising things about the nineteenth-century discourse of strong drink is how subtly it changed from its early days in the 1830s through the end of the century. Even as they repeatedly told the same old narrative, drink debaters slowly reformulated it, negotiated its terms, and sought solutions to the problems it posed. After the mid-century's last liberal revolutions, as reformers began to tell the story through the language of invasion rather than that of seduction, they drew lessons from their own invasion accounts that they would apply to their reform tactics. If alcohol won men over not through its seductive influence but through its invasive coercion, and if it did so by storming through their bodies replacing their native desires and tendencies with artificial ones, then perhaps reforming women could win men back in a similar manner. More and more reformers, inspired by invasion language, called for women to leave the home, invade the male domain, and reclaim drunkards by force.
"Unlike most female-written fiction in the nineteenth century, temperance fiction does not end with the marriage of the heroine, but, instead, generally begins with the wedding,” and it is almost universally true that the temperance tale “explores the very real problematic circumstances women must face after the ceremony,” rather than the drama preceding the vows. The marriage in question begins as a happy, promising, and decidedly middle-class arrangement. The new husband has grand prospects: Smith’s Edward Middleton is a businessman and landowner, Stowe’s Edward Howard is, somewhat more vaguely, “first in the society in which he moved,” and the husband in T. S. Arthur’s “The Drunkard’s Wife” is Doctor Harper. Caroline Lee Hentz’s Mr. Franklin is even more considerable: “a member of Congress, a distinguished lawyer.” Consequently, the wife in each story has good reason to believe that her marital decision has been made wisely; she, her friends, and her proud parents expect domestic bliss to follow in turn.
Then, inevitably, come the bottle and the descent, usually traced through three tiers of depravity. First, the happy and prosperous family is unbalanced, but only slightly, by the introduction of “demon” alcohol. Importantly, the first drink is never entirely the husband’s fault; his essential goodness, despite the dark turns each narrative will take, is not at question.
In what I will call “domestic temperance” stories, the fallen husband begins as a paragon of bourgeois perfection, and never—even at his most degraded—entirely sheds a dimmed halo of his former goodness. Domestic temperance stories maintain continual hope for reformation, and so the drunkard retains enough humanity to warrant such an outcome. This narrative shaping begins early, as each story emphasizes the husband’s non-complicit or uninformed entrance into the dark night of spirits. In The Drunkard a begrudging lawyer, Cribbs, first leads Edward into the tavern and buys his first drink, feigning friendly collegiality. In “The Drunkard’s Wife” the doctor is offered “a good stiff glass of brandy” or wine when making house calls during winter, as a buffer against the cold. The first step is always minute and inadvertent (to quench his thirst, to warm himself from within -as a buffer against the cold-, as pain relief...), and the wife/fiancée bears it with only moderate concern, if she is concerned at all.
The first token of Redburn's descent into evil is his breaking of the temperance pledge. When he accepts grog to relieve seasickness, he wishes guiltily that "when I signed the pledge of abstinence, I had not taken care to insert a little clause, allowing me to drink spirits on the case of seasickness." But break the pledge he does, and, as he puts it, violating the pledge "insidiously opened the way to subsequent breaches of it, which carried no apology with them."
After his first sip of alcohol, Redburn is prepared to associate with drunken sailors and to accompany his friend Harry Bolton into a lavish den of iniquity.
Authors used images of strong drink to structure plots, to signal character types, to embellish a theme, to teach a lesson, and to promote a cause.
The nineteenth-century temperance tale enjoyed success by generally sticking to a formula: a young innocent boy [···] has his first drink of alcohol, [···]. Elaine Frantz Parsons identifies six key features of these narratives: (1) the young male protagonist is a particularly promising young man; (2) he falls largely or entirely because of external influences; (3) he is weak-willed and too eager to please his new friends; (4) his desire for drink overwhelms all else; (5) he loses his control over family, economic life, and/or his own body; and (6) if he is redeemed, it is through a powerful external influence.
A FRENCH ROMANTIC'S VIEW OF OTHELLO
Quand paraît sur la scène la douce et pure Desdemona, quand Othello échange avec elle les transports d’une confiante tendresse, quand ce serpent d’Iago rampe autour de ces deux créatures si heureuses, si sereines à cette heure encore… quand déjà le venin, circulant dans les veines du More, enflamme son sang, fait jaillir l’éclair de sa prunelle et pénétrer dans son cœur le démon des vengeances… voyez, dans l’amphithéâtre, ces milliers de figures assises à la file les unes des autres, silencieuses, et comme privées de vie: ce sont les enveloppes corporelles, les cadavres terrestres… Pendant qu’étrangers au drame qui se déroule, ils chargent les gradins de leur masse immobile, les âmes s’en sont envolées: ardentes, agitées, tumultueuses, frémissantes d’horreur ou saignantes de pitié, elles errent en désordre sur la scène; elles s’épanchent en flots de malédictions sur Iago; elles crient au More qu’on l’abuse; elles entourent, elles enveloppent, elles protègent de tout ce qu’elles ont de compassion et d’ amour l’amante pure et menacée; et, par un frappant contraste, tandis que tout est repos et torpeur dans la vaste enceinte, tout est passion, mouvement, orage, dans l’invisible région où elles se pressent éperdues!
When the sweet and pure Desdemona appears on stage, when Othello exchanges with her his expressions of confident tenderness, when that serpent Iago slithers around such two fortunate lovers, still so serene at the time... when already the venom, coursing throug the Moor's veins, heats up his blood, makes lightning flash in his eyes, and lets the demon of vengeance enter his heart... see, in the theatre audience, those thousands of figures sitting in rows one next to another, in silence, and as if bereft of life: they are the bodily envelopes, the living dead still on Earth... Though strangers to the drama that unfurls before them, they have risen upwards from their motionless masses, their souls are spirited away: ablaze, stirred, uproaring, shivering with dread or bleeding with pity, they erratically wander on the stage, they vent out their anger casting waves of curses upon Iago, they scream to the Moor that he's being deceived; they surround, they envelop, they protect, with all the compassion and love they have, the pure yet menaced lady lover; and, what a stark contrast, as everything is repose and stupour within the vast half-circle of theatre seats, everything is passion, movement, storm, within the invisible region whither they have strayed!
Excerpt from La traversée, Rodolphe Töpffer, 1850.
Translated by Sandra Dermark, 2017.
When the sweet and pure Desdemona appears on stage, when Othello exchanges with her his expressions of confident tenderness, when that serpent Iago slithers around such two fortunate lovers, still so serene at the time... when already the venom, coursing throug the Moor's veins, heats up his blood, makes lightning flash in his eyes, and lets the demon of vengeance enter his heart... see, in the theatre audience, those thousands of figures sitting in rows one next to another, in silence, and as if bereft of life: they are the bodily envelopes, the living dead still on Earth... Though strangers to the drama that unfurls before them, they have risen upwards from their motionless masses, their souls are spirited away: ablaze, stirred, uproaring, shivering with dread or bleeding with pity, they erratically wander on the stage, they vent out their anger casting waves of curses upon Iago, they scream to the Moor that he's being deceived; they surround, they envelop, they protect, with all the compassion and love they have, the pure yet menaced lady lover; and, what a stark contrast, as everything is repose and stupour within the vast half-circle of theatre seats, everything is passion, movement, storm, within the invisible region whither they have strayed!
Excerpt from La traversée, Rodolphe Töpffer, 1850.
Translated by Sandra Dermark, 2017.
Desdemona, Desdémona - querida de Otelo en el famoso drama de este nombre, debido a la pluma del insigne poeta inglés Shakespeare. Al mismo drama alude todo este párrafo.
S'épanchent en flots de malédictions sur Iago, literalm. se desahogan en oleadas de maldiciones sobre Yago, se traducirá: se desahogan llenando a Yago de maldiciones.
Abuser, además de abusar, significa engañar.
SO NOW WE'VE REACHED THE FOURTH YEAR... (OR IS IT THE FIFTH?)
Well, let's say it's the fourth anniversary and count the initial year as zero. So that We Didn't Start the Fire filk gets one year of delay... but still, in preparation for the Kuvira filk that I mentioned in Tywin of the Lannisters... here is one related to this blog to celebrate its fourth anniversary (yes, another Alex H filk, larvae of all stages, adolescents of every gender)!
Sandra 'Lena Dermark, Miss
Written by idem eadem idem
on the 14th of February, 2017
How does an awkward loner,
daughter of a Swede and a Spaniard,
dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot of Spanish hinterland by destiny,
misdiagnosed, disabled,
grow up to turn on literature the tables?
The teenager who had grown up without a father
got a lot farther by working a lot harder,
by being a lot smarter,
by being a self-starter...
at fourteen, they said Asperger syndrome was what caught her!
And every day, while shallow classmates her watered with talk of
drugs and of sex, she struggled and kept her guard up;
inside, she was longing for something to be a part of;
our shero was ready to beg, steal, borrow, or barter!
Then a lot of things came, relatives had in state lain,
our gal saw her future drip-dripping down the drain...
had to struggle with sign errors and her wavering left brain,
so she wrote her first refrain, a testament to her pain!
Well, then word got 'round, they said: "This is for diversity!",
took encouragement to send her into university!
"Get your education, don't forget from whence you came,
and the world's gonna know your name!
What's your name, miss?"
"Sandra 'Lena Dermark, Miss...
My name is Sandra 'Lena Dermark, Miss...
And there are many things I may have missed,
but just you wait, just you wait..."
When she was two her father left, love grown cold, French leaving...
Four years later, see Sandra lonely, frightened and grieving,
afraid... at those nuns', Catholic, her angst thick...
and Sandra got better, out of that school real quick!
Moved into the Burrow; the only one who could talk on that side,
left her with a kind of certain pride, something new inside,
a voice saying: "SANDRA, YOU'VE GOTTA FEND FOR YOURSELF!"
Started retreating and reading every treatise on the shelf...
There would have been nothing left to do for someone less astute;
she would have stayed there among the mutes without daring yet to give a hoot!
Started learning, yearning, at high school at the Regiment,
with reality show and drug freaks, horny, b'low age of consent!
Cramming (cramming) for every book she can lay her hands on...
planning (planning) for the future, see her now as she stands on
her own two feet, finding her niche in the Net;
with Google, a new self will you get!
WITH GOOGLE, A NEW SELF WILL YOU GET...
(Just you wait...)
WITH GOOGLE, A NEW SELF WILL YOU GET...
(Just you wait...)
WITH GOOGLE, A NEW SELF WILL YOU GET...
WITH GOOGLE, WITH GOOGLE...
(Just you wait...)
Oh o-o-h, Sandra 'Lena Dermark, Miss,
(Sandra 'Lena Dermark, Miss,)
we're waiting in the wings for you;
(we're waiting in the wings for you)
you could never back down,
you never learned to rule your-
-SE-E-E-ELF!!
Oh o-o-h, Sandra 'Lena Dermark, Miss,
when your readership sings of you,
will they know what you overcame?
Will they know you rewrote the game?
The world will never be the same...
The blog is just uploaded now, see if you can spot it!
(Just you wait...)
Another schoolwork turned a hobby, now she's got it!
(Just you wait...)
Her friends and readers still increase, and no one has forgot it!
We wrote reviews!
We? We wrote stories!
We love high culture!
We've been Lemony...
And we've got... another year to give a shot it!
THERE ARE MANY THINGS I MAY HAVE MISSED,
BUT JUST YOU WAIT...
What's your name, Miss?
SANDRA 'LENA DERMARK, MISS!
Sandra 'Lena Dermark, Miss
Written by idem eadem idem
on the 14th of February, 2017
How does an awkward loner,
daughter of a Swede and a Spaniard,
dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot of Spanish hinterland by destiny,
misdiagnosed, disabled,
grow up to turn on literature the tables?
The teenager who had grown up without a father
got a lot farther by working a lot harder,
by being a lot smarter,
by being a self-starter...
at fourteen, they said Asperger syndrome was what caught her!
And every day, while shallow classmates her watered with talk of
drugs and of sex, she struggled and kept her guard up;
inside, she was longing for something to be a part of;
our shero was ready to beg, steal, borrow, or barter!
Then a lot of things came, relatives had in state lain,
our gal saw her future drip-dripping down the drain...
had to struggle with sign errors and her wavering left brain,
so she wrote her first refrain, a testament to her pain!
Well, then word got 'round, they said: "This is for diversity!",
took encouragement to send her into university!
"Get your education, don't forget from whence you came,
and the world's gonna know your name!
What's your name, miss?"
"Sandra 'Lena Dermark, Miss...
My name is Sandra 'Lena Dermark, Miss...
And there are many things I may have missed,
but just you wait, just you wait..."
When she was two her father left, love grown cold, French leaving...
Four years later, see Sandra lonely, frightened and grieving,
afraid... at those nuns', Catholic, her angst thick...
and Sandra got better, out of that school real quick!
Moved into the Burrow; the only one who could talk on that side,
left her with a kind of certain pride, something new inside,
a voice saying: "SANDRA, YOU'VE GOTTA FEND FOR YOURSELF!"
Started retreating and reading every treatise on the shelf...
There would have been nothing left to do for someone less astute;
she would have stayed there among the mutes without daring yet to give a hoot!
Started learning, yearning, at high school at the Regiment,
with reality show and drug freaks, horny, b'low age of consent!
Cramming (cramming) for every book she can lay her hands on...
planning (planning) for the future, see her now as she stands on
her own two feet, finding her niche in the Net;
with Google, a new self will you get!
WITH GOOGLE, A NEW SELF WILL YOU GET...
(Just you wait...)
WITH GOOGLE, A NEW SELF WILL YOU GET...
(Just you wait...)
WITH GOOGLE, A NEW SELF WILL YOU GET...
WITH GOOGLE, WITH GOOGLE...
(Just you wait...)
Oh o-o-h, Sandra 'Lena Dermark, Miss,
(Sandra 'Lena Dermark, Miss,)
we're waiting in the wings for you;
(we're waiting in the wings for you)
you could never back down,
you never learned to rule your-
-SE-E-E-ELF!!
Oh o-o-h, Sandra 'Lena Dermark, Miss,
when your readership sings of you,
will they know what you overcame?
Will they know you rewrote the game?
The world will never be the same...
The blog is just uploaded now, see if you can spot it!
(Just you wait...)
Another schoolwork turned a hobby, now she's got it!
(Just you wait...)
Her friends and readers still increase, and no one has forgot it!
We wrote reviews!
We? We wrote stories!
We love high culture!
We've been Lemony...
And we've got... another year to give a shot it!
THERE ARE MANY THINGS I MAY HAVE MISSED,
BUT JUST YOU WAIT...
What's your name, Miss?
SANDRA 'LENA DERMARK, MISS!
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