Boo...

Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society - Jean-Claude Schmitt, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (University of Chicago Press, 1998)

Why hello historical monograph. I carved out time to do a quick read (not quite a skim, but close) of this very scholarly work over the last few days. It exercised the muscles I developed in grad school the first time around, when I was reading at least 1000 pages weekly of history, philosophy, primary texts, etc. I was so good at reading for content and argument then. But in the intervening years, those skills have waned quite a bit.

But not so much that I couldn't get into the text. Schmitt is exploring the role of ghosts in medieval culture, primarily how they (or rather the way people talked about them) evolved. The church played a primary role, of course, but there was some amount of room for older traditions of the dead. Anyway, there was a lot of souls stuck in purgatory, asking those still living to do something (pray, make financial arrangements) to better their lot in the afterlife. And somehow there was a tie-in to the tradition of charivari, which was more typically related to marriages that threatened society in some way (widowers taking young wives, widows remarrying unexpectedly, cuckolding). But the point is clearly that ghosts exist because of the function they serve for the living.

As a fan of the social construction of pretty much everything, I am down with this. And it's convincing. And yet, as a believer in ghosts - or at my most skeptical, an agnostic - I find myself working facing a bit of a quandary. If ghosts manifest in response to social expectations and constructions, can they still have an objective reality? I vote yes, although I can't imagine Schmitt agrees with me.

Memories

In my last post, oh so long ago, I wrote about England - where I was making memories, to sound cheesy - and Peter Nadas - whose novel was about memories.

Returning to real life in Los Angeles meant that it was difficult to get through the last 200 pages, much harder than it was on an airplane. And because A Book of Memories is so disjointed, reading catch as catch can just made it even more confusing. But I finally succeeded. (The "I'm not going to sleep until it's finished" proclamation helped.)

What struck me about the three narrators is how well (and yet how poorly) they read other people. How everyday occurrences were charged with meaning. How openly they stated their flaws, and yet so often told something less than the truth. It's the kind of book that seems designed to come from a place like Communist Hungary, with a confused and complicated history, and where people were never quite in charge of their own destiny.

Some passages, beginning with a evocative depiction of falling in love:

We told each other stories, and even that would not be an accurate description of the feverish urging to relate and the eager curiosity to listen to each other's words with which we tried to complement the contact of our bodies, our constant physical presence in each other

and more:

Lovers walk around wearing each other's body, and they wear and radiate into the world their common physicality.

Greetings from Merrie Olde England!

First and foremost, helloooo from London. I have spent the week wandering about, doing a mix of touristy and non-touristy things. (Where does shopping at H&M fit in?) This morning, however, is about finding a coffee shop and reading my book.

What is my vacation book, you ask? Well, it's a tome: A Book of Memories, by Peter Nadas, a Hungarian writer. Originally published in the mid-1980s, it has that strange Eastern European intellectual coming to terms with a totalitarian regime by avoiding it sort of vibe. (See: Milan Kundera) Also like Kundera, Nadas is a very sensual and sexual writer. Memories is a mix of memoirs, which mix and intertwine until I sometimes am not sure who is talking. His main character, to this point, is a young writer who grew up in Stalinist and post-Stalinist Hungary, and is lately of East Berlin. He is beautiful and seductive, and emotional and sensitive and yet manipulative and almost sadistic. And sexually, it seems he is drawn to most everyone, and most everyone is drawn to him. Yet this doesn't come off as crude, as it might in other hands.

Nadas is a beautiful stylist, yet the prose can be difficult for an English-speaking reader. It is flowery, and looooong, which sentences extending for lines and lines, and paragraphs for pages. Plus, while not quite stream-of-consciousness, the narrators will break off on detailed tangents, and then return to their central narrative without missing a beat. (Whether the reader can do so remains to be seen.)

I marked a few passages from the first third of the novel, but most of them are either so long, or so unclear out of context, that I will limit myself to sharing just one:

Like every moment we want to be significant, this one, too, turns out to be insignificant; we have to remind ourselves afterward that what we have been waiting for so eagerly is actually here, has finally come, and nothing has changed, everything is the same, it's simply here, the waiting is over.

"How we read one another"

The above is the subtitle to Milan Kundera's essay in the January 8 issue of the New Yorker (not online). That's right, here it is, the 23rd, and I am both behind in my magazines and still haven't managed to pick up a book this year.

But the relocation of Erin's Library (and her cat and other possessions) has occurred, and I'm expecting reading to get back to normal soon.

Until then, I'm reading catch as catch can, and this evening came across this Kundera essay. He's an interesting guy, and I greatly enjoyed the novels (most of his Czech language ones) that I read while in college. Since he started writing in French, however, he's gotten strange(r) and his arguments less cohesive.

This piece is called "Die Weltliteratur" and deals with the creation of world literature, and the ways art and literature can be placed within the historical context of the culture in/for which it was written, or within the historical context of the art form itself, sans borders. Most people can only view their own culture's literature within the former; he argues for the importance of the latter.

Kundera analyzes the national/supranational debate from the standpoint of the Central European, who had to watch as his culture and nation (one of many within C. Eur.) struggled for autonomy. And as a history student of that region, I was most drawn not to his larger argument, but to his comparison of the people of the European powers to those of the European strugglers:

What distinuishes the small nations from the large is not the quantitative criterion of the number of their inhabitants; it is something deeper. For the small nations, existence is not a self-evident certainty but always a question, a wager, a risk [emphasis mine]