A form suitable for direct propaganda

 At the novel's conclusion [Zabiba and the King, Saddam Hussein], a people's council debates about what sort of ruler should follow the king. "We do not want our children and ourselves to be under the rule of some madman from among the children or grandchildren of this king, do we?" one representative asks, to laughter and applause. As it deliberates inconclusively, the council goes on to banish a Jewish citizen from the country, celebrate the army, and shower curses on "those who had gained their fortunes at the expense of the people."

Writing became a preoccupation as Saddam spent more time in relative isolation following the near-fatal assassination attempt against Uday. In 1998, Saddam ordered a poet who worked in the press office to tutor him for a month on the rules of poetry. Verse had deep roots and visibility in Iraqi and Arab culture, yet while Saddam did compose some poems, he seemed more attracted to the novel, a form suitable for direct propaganda. (Muammar Qaddafi had published a collection of short stories in 1993, so perhaps Saddam thought his lengthy novels would establish his superior credentials.) Crude and awkward as his allegories were, his writing did offer the private joy of composition, as Saddam worked through creative choices about how to render as literary types the dramatis personae of Baathist Iraq - devilish America, the wayward Kurds, despicable landowners. He weaved these allegorical figures into stories of love and war. Saman Majid came to think of his novel writing as "Saddam's secret garden."

- from The Achilles Trap, Steve Coll, p. 373

Memorable lines from Richard II

"My dear dear lord,
The purest treasure mortal times afford
Is spotless reputation."

"Call it not patience, Gaunt; it is despair."

"Never did captive with a freer heart
Cast off his chains of bondage and embrace
His golden uncontrolled enfranchisement
More than my dancing soul doth celebrate
This feast of battle with mine adversary."

"the sweet infant breath of gentle sleep"

"The sly slow hours shall not determinate
The dateless limit of thy dear exile."

"Must I not serve a long apprenticehood
To foreign passages and, in the end,
Having my freedom, boast of nothing else
But that I was a journeyman to grief?"

"O, but they say the tongues of dying men
Enforce attention like deep harmony."

"the caterpillars of the commonwealth"

"For God's sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings!"

"By heaven, I'll hate him everlastingly
That bids me be of comfort any more."

Plus ca change

 Whereas so much of the terminology of medieval history and criticism is the invention of the eighteenth century, the terminology of troubadour poetry is wholly contemporary. The worldly, witty, and self-conscious verse was discussed and evaluated by its practitioners and their circles. Poets wrote verses criticizing and satirizing each other and theorizing about their own poetry. Literary controversy developed, with songs exchanged like challenges. Should poetry be clear and accessible, easy to understand, and social in nature (trobar leu), as in the verses of Bernart de Ventadorn and Raimon de Miraval, or should it be personal, allusive, and difficult, making use of colored words with overtones and nuances, like the poetry of Arnaut Daniel (trobar clus)? Macabru boasted that he had written poems he himself could not understand.

- from The Knight in History, 56. 

Before pleasure has a chance

Analysis and understanding heighten appreciation. Sometimes, however, they obtrude: trying to force knowledge before pleasure has a chance. Pointing this out is not sentimental or anti-intellectual; on the contrary, the goal should be to encourage intellectual precision by putting it in a stringent, fitting relation to the actual experience of the poem. Well-meaning teaching can muddle that process by leaving out the experience. 

- Robert Pinsky, from Essential Pleasures, 4. 

Boys can't love

 James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937), the beloved Scottish playwright who created one of literature's iconic characters, Peter Pan, formed an unlikely friendship with Arthur Conan Doyle that survived many years and vast differences between two of the most popular writers of their time. 

Conan Doyle was a sportsman. Fond of skiing, he has been credited with introducing that vigorous activity to Switzerland. An aficianado of pugilism, he was praised for his skills as a boxer and wrote two books with boxing themes: Rodney Stone (1896), which focused on bare-knuckle fighting during the Regency era, and The Croxley Master: A Great Tale of the Prize Ring (1907), about a boxing medical student. Famously, Conan Doyle was asked to referee the racially charged Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries heavyweight championship fight in 1910. Johnson, the new champion, was an arrogant black man, so Jeffries, the old former champion, was called out of retirement in the interest of white supremacy. Conan Doyle declined the offer, stating that it was more likely to foster bigotry than combat it. 

Barrie, on the other hand, stopped growing when he was still quite small (5'3" according to his passport), was extremely introverted, and though he was married, his relationship was apparently uncomssumated. "Boys can't love," he explained to his wife. 

Nonetheless, Barrie and his friends, Jerome K. Jerome, Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse, and others, founded a cricket club, called Allahakbarries. Conan Doyle was the only member who could actually play cricket. 

- from Otto Penzler's introduction to J.M Barrie's Sherlock Holmes pastiche, "The Late Sherlock Holmes", in The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories. 

Always scribble, scribble!

"Dr. Donne's verse are like the peace of God; they pass all understanding."
- James I, on John Donne

"Reading him is like wading through glue."
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, on Ben Jonson

"I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand."
- Ben Jonson, on William Shakespeare

"Another damned thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?"
- The Duke of Gloucester, to Edward Gibbon

"I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, with, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer is...marriageableness...Suicide is more respectable."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, on Jane Austen

"Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs from the Chicago stockyards."
- H.L. Mencken, on Henry James

"He spares no resource in telling of his dead inventions...Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He splits infinitives and fills them with adverbial stuffing. His vast paragraphs sweat and struggle; they could not sweat and elbow and struggle more if God Himself was the processional meaning to which they sought to come."
- H.G. Wells, on Henry James

"Why don't you write books people can read?"
- Nora Joyce, to her husband, James Joyce

"Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me, and I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as "great literature" by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley's copulations or the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake."
- Vladimir Nabokov, on Ezra Pound and great literature

"I don't like him one bit. He was a poseur. He was married to this woman who was very pretty. My husband [H.G. Wells} and I were asked to see them, and my husband roamed around the flat and there were endless photographs of T.S. Eliot and bits of his poetry done in embroidery by pious American ladies, and only one picture of his wife, and that was when she was getting married. Henry pointed it out to me and said, "I don't think I like that man."'
- Rebecca West, on T.S. Eliot

"A Woollcott second edition."
- Franklin Pierce Adams, replying to Alexander Woollcott's boast, "What is so rare as a Woollcott first edition?"

"I don't like Salinger, not at all. That last thing isn't a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don't like it. Not at all. It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality, and it's so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemed so false, so calculated. I simply can't stand it."
- Mary McCarthy, on J.D. Salinger

- Excerpts from Fighting Words, ed. James Charlton

Method?

Prince Wen Hui's cook
Was cutting up an ox.
Out went a hand,
Down went a shoulder,
He planted a foot,
He pressed with a knee,
The ox fell apart
With a whisper,
The bright cleaver murmered
Like a gentle wind.
Rhythm! Timing!
Like a sacred dance,
Like "The Mulberry Grove,"
Like ancient harmonies!

"Good work!" the Prince exclaimed,
"Your method is faultless!"
"Method?" said the cook
Laying aside his cleaver,
"What I follow is Tao
Beyond all methods!

"When I first began
To cut up oxen
I would see before me
The whole ox
All in one mass.
After three years
I no longer saw this mass.
I saw the distinctions.

"But now I see nothing
With the eye. My whole being
Apprehends.
My senses are idle. The spirit
Free to work without plan
Follows its own instinct
Guided by natural line,
By the secret opening, the hidden space,
My cleaver finds its own way.
I cut through no joint, chop no bone.

"There are spaces in the joints;
The blade is thin and keen:
When this thinness
Finds that space
There is all the room you need!
It goes like a breeze!
Hence I have this cleaver nineteen years
As if newly sharpened!

"True, there are sometimes
Tough joints. I feel them coming,
I slow down, I watch closely,
Hold back, barely move the blade,
And whump! the part falls away
Landing like a clod of earth.

"Then I withdraw the blade,
I stand still
And let the joy of the work
Sink in.
I clean the blade
And put it away."

Prince Wen Hui said,
"This is it! My cook has shown me
How I ought to live
My own life!"

- Chuang Tzu, 369 - 286 BC, as quoted in Wherever You Go There You Are, Jon Kabat-Zinn

every Man must dance in Chains

Hath any Commentator well accounted for the Limitation which an antient Critic hath set to the Drama, which he will have contain neither more nor less than five acts? Or hath any one living attempted to explain, what the modern Judges of our Theatres mean by that Word low; by which they have happily succeeded in banishing all Humour from the Stage, and have made the Theater as dull as a Drawing-room? Upon all these Occasions, the World seems to have embraced a Maxim of our Law, viz. Cuicunque in Arte sua perito credendum est*: For it seems, perhaps, difficult to conceive that any one should have had enough of Impudence, to lay down dogmatical Rules in any Art or Science without the least Foundation. In such Cases, therefore, we are apt to conclude, there are sound and good Reasons at the Bottom, though we are unfortunately not able to see so far.

Now, in reality, the World have paid too great a Compliment to Critics, and have imagined them Men of much greater Profundity than they really are. From this Complaisance, the Critics have been emboldened to assume a Dictatorial Power, and have so far succeeded, that they are now become the Masters, and have the Assurance to give Laws to those Authors, from whose Predecessors they originally received them.

...For these Critics being Men of shallow Capacities, very easily mistook mere Form for Substance. They acted as a Judge would, who should adhere to the lifeless Letter of the Law, and reject the Spirit. Little Circumstances which were, perhaps, accidental in a great Author were, by these Critics, considered to constitute his chief Merit, and transmitted as Essentials to be observed by his Successors. To these Encroachments, Time and Ignorance, the two great Supporters of Imposture, gave Authority; and thus, many Rules for good Writing have been established, which have not the least Foundation in Truth or Nature; and which commonly serve for no other purpose than to curb and restrain Genius, in the same Manner as it would have restrained the Dancing-master, had the many excellent Treatises on that Art laid it down as an essential Rule, that every Man must dance in Chains.

- from The History of Tom Jones, 186. The Latin phrase means "Anyone expert in his profession should be believed."

Literary history is an artifice

We envisage the literature of every century as a corpus of works grouped around a core of classics; and we derive our notion of the classics from our professors, who took it from their professors, who got it from theirs, and so on, back to some disappearing point in the early nineteenth century. Literary history is an artifice, pieced together over many generations, shortened here and lengthened there, worn thin in some places, patched over in others, and laced through everywhere with anachronism. It bears little relation to the actual experience of literature in the past.

- from The Forbidden Best-sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, Robert Darnton

That quiet rapture

I want that quiet rapture again. I want to feel that same powerful, nameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my books. The breath of desire that then arose from the coloured backs of the books, shall fill me again, melt the heavy, dead lump of lead that lies somewhere in me and waken again the impatience of the future, the quick joy in the world of thought, it shall bring back again the lost eagerness of my youth. I sit and wait.

- from All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque, 1928, pg. 171

Even in the endless stories about college professors or advertising writers or housewives

In comedy, heroes go through all the terrible things that we fear or face in our own lives - but they teach us to look at disaster with enough distance that we can laugh at it. In non-comic fiction, the hero shows us what matters, what has value, what has meaning among the random and meaningless events of life. In all stories, the hero is our teacher-by-example, and if we are to be that hero's disciple for the duration of the tale, we must have awe: We must know that the hero has some insight, some knowledge that we ourselves do not understand, some value or power that we do not yet have.

This is true even in that great bastion of extreme realism, the academic/literary genre (those who refer to their genre as "serious literature" - as if the rest of us are just kidding). One reason why the academic/literary genre usually reaches such a small fragment of the reading public is because in their pursuit of seriousness, they have beaten down the Romantic impulse wherever it rears its head. But the Romantic impulse is still there. Even in the endless stories about college professors or advertising writers or housewives entering midlife crises and trying to make sense of their senseless lives, the heroes always seem to face some uncommon problems, always seem to be extraordinarily contemplative and perceptive, always seem to reach a moment of epiphany in which they pass along a key insight to the reader. Despite their seeming ordinariness, these heroes always turn out to be extraordinary, once we truly understand them. ...

What really makes Loman [from Death of a Salesman] a figure of awe is that he expected himself and his sons to be great, that he measured himself against such high standards that, by trying to meet them, he became exactly the Romantic hero that Arthur Miller was trying to avoid. He was one of the knights of the round table who failed to find the Holy Grail - but he was nobly searching for it nonetheless.

- from Characters and Viewpoint, Orson Scott Card, 1988, pg. 96

The World of the Story

These stories [detective stories] develop a growing sense of discrepancy, of something wrong which may lead to something worse. In most pure detective stories, the very worst is averted through the efforts of the principal character, and evil is quelled and punished. But in stories of suspense the worst often occurs, and its fearful truth lights up the world of the story like nocturnal lightning.

...

[The crime genre] is a free form of popular art, and like any other popular art it exists to be enjoyed. Its value lies first in its style and strength as a story, then in its revelation of the shapes and meanings of life in all their subtlety and surprise.

...

A strong popular convention like that of the suspense story is both an artistic and a social heritage. It keeps the forms of the art alive for the writer to use. It trains his readers, endowing both writer and reader with a common vocabulary of structural shapes and narrative possibilities. It becomes a part of the language in which we think and feel, reaching our whole society and helping to hold our civilization together.

- a few thoughts on the crime genre from Ross Macdonald, from his introduction to Great Stories of Suspense, 1974.

Like the Dirac equation

"Roughly speaking, the scientist tries to name things and the artist tries to avoid naming things. ... The novelist...doesn't want to clarify and distill the meaning of [a concept such as] love so that there is only a single meaning, like the Dirac equation, because no such distillation exists. And any attempt at such a distillation would undermine the authenticity of readers' reactions, destroying the delicate, participatory creative experience of a good reader reading a good book. In a sense, a novel is not complete until it has been read. And each reader completes the novel in a different way."

- Alan Lightman, "Words," A Sense of the Mysterious.

"The past gathered out of the darkness where it had stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape. Tristan, Iseult the fair, walked before him; Paolo and Francesca whirled in the glowing dark; Helen and bright Paris, their faces bitter with consequence, rose from the gloom. And he was with them in a way that he could never be with his fellows who went from class to class, who found a local habitation in a large university in Columbia, Missouri, and who walked unheeding in a midwestern air."

- from John Williams' excellent Stoner (1965), pg. 16.

On the end of Hamlet

"Nothing is resolved: there has been only prodigal death, of which the required one - Claudius's - is without catharsis. We do not know who the Ghost was, or whether he is now at peace, or whether Gertrude knew about her second husband, or how else Hamlet could have fulfilled himself - only that we could have done no better with his difficulties than he has. Denmark, once powerful, has been reduced to a client of Norway - largely through the activities of Hamlet. But of course his meaning is not contained by these circumstances, far from it. His body is to be taken, in a final pun, 'to the stage', a place of display and honour, with a sense of permanence, facing the sky. As the play closes on a single half-line of practical instruction and the lights go down on Hamlet, the frailty of his life, the permanence of his spirit, and above all his extraordinary enquiries, begin their long ringing in the ears. "

- Michael Pennington, 1996, Hamlet: A User's Guide, pg. 150. An excellent, insightful book on the great play, written from an actor's perspective (and a good actor's one at that).

The lunatic fringe of Alexandrian pseudo-science...

"Greek literary studies today may with some justification be compared with a large, thriving, yet still half-unexplored colony. Look at the map. Here are the state highways, confidently marked in red, establishing communications from one boundary to the other: Homer, Aeschylus, Thucydides, Demosthenes, Plato. These roads, and the towns they serve - Homeric Society, the House of Atreus, Solon's Reforms, the Peloponnesian War, the struggle with Macedonia, the Theory of Ideas - we know and travel over regularly. Then there are the minor roads and less-frequented villages: Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, Polybius; Hellenistic culture, Alexandrian epic, Greco-Roman historiography. Finally there is the bush, where tenderfoots never venture at all, but where you may find the old professional diggers staking out their claims: Lycophron, Aeneas Tacticus, Diodorus Siculus, Cercidas, Parthenius, and never-dry watering holes labelled 'Unedited Papyri', 'Scholia', or 'Fragments'. Development, we hear, is going on; but the reports from upcountry are generally in code, and for restricted circulation only .

"This is a curious and not wholly beneficial state of affairs. The classical student's reading list is limited - necessarily limited, perhaps - to certain major authors of proven literary excellence; and he is seldom actively encouraged to forage for himself among minor eccentrics, deadbeat pamphleteers, or the lunatic fringe of Alexandrian pseudo-science. This at once distorts his overall picture of Greek civilization and literature alike. Skimming off the cream makes for indigestion; if there is one thing the Greeks have perenially suffered from, it is the deadening myth of perfection. A wider exploration reassuringly dissolves this illusion. ..."

- Peter Green, "The Humanities Today", 1960.

The streets were dark with something more than night.

"Looking back on his stories in 1950 he identified their main characteristic as the 'smell of fear' they managed to generate. In this, they echoed his own experience, for they were about 'a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night. The mystery story grew hard and cynical about motive and characters, but it was not cynical about the effects it tried to produce nor about its technique of producing them.' "

- The Life of Raymond Chandler, Frank MacShane

This Sublunary Maze

"Copernicus, Atlas his successor, is of opinion the earth is a planet, moves and shines to others, as the moon doth to us. Digges, Gilbert, Keplerus, Origanus, and others, defend this hypothesis of his in sober sadness, and that the moon is inhabited: if it be so that the earth is a moon, then are we also giddy, vertiginous and lunatic within this sublunary maze."

 - Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621.

Dea Moneta

"Our summum bonum is commodity, and the goddess we adore Dea Moneta, Queen Money, to whom we daily offer sacrifice, which steers our hearts, hands, affections all: that most powerful goddess, by whom we are reared, depressed, elevated, esteemed the sole commandress of our actions, for which we pray, run, ride, go, come, labour, and contend as fishes do for a crumb that falleth into the water. It is not worth, virtue (that's bonum theatrale [a theatrical good]), wisdom, valour, learning, honesty, religion, or any sufficiency for which we are respected, but money, greatness, office, honour, authority; honesty is accounted folly; knavery, policy; men admired out of opinion, not as they are, but as they seem to be: such shifting, lying, cogging, plotting, counterplotting, temporizing, flattering, cozening, dissembling, "that of necessity one must highly offend God if he be conformable to the world," Cretizare cum Crete [to do at Crete as the Cretans do], "or else live in contempt, disgrace, and misery." One takes upon him temperance, holiness, another austerity, a third an affected kind of simplicity, whenas indeed he, and he, and he, and the rest are hypocrites, ambidexters, outsides, so many turning pictures, a lion on the one side, a lamb on the other. How would Democritus have been affected to see these things!"

- Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621, p. 65.

If all be true that I have read

"If Democritus were alive now, he should see strange alterations, a new company of counterfeit vizards, whifflers, Cuman asses, maskers, mummers, painted puppets, outsides, fantastic shadows, gulls, monsters, giddy-heads, butterflies. And so many of them are indeed (if all be true that I have read). For when Jupiter and Juno's wedding was solemnized of old, the gods were all invited to the feast, and many noble men besides. Amongst the rest came Chrysalus, a Persian prince, bravely attended, rich in golden attires, in gay robes, with a majestical presence, but otherwise an ass. The gods, seeing him come in such pomp and state, rose up to give him place, ex habitu hominem metientes [measuring the man by his garb]; but Jupiter, perceiving what he was, a light, fantastic, idle fellow, turned him and his proud followers into butterflies: and so they continue still (for aught I know to the contrary) roving about in pied coats, and are called chrysalides by the wiser sort of men...."

- Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621, p. 53.