The Heptameron, Marguerite of Navarre
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| Marguerite, from a drawing held at the Bibiotheque Nationale. |
A sixteenth century collection of tales, written by a French princess and published after her death in one form or the other. Over seven days - Hepta/Emera - a collection of French nobles stranded by floods in a monastery tell each other tales. The Heptameron was unfinished on Marguerite's death: it was meant to last ten days - as Boccaccio's Decameron - and features ten storytellers. The Anglophone reader will automatically look to Chaucer, but there are a few essential differences. The storytellers are not travelling, there is no landlord of The Tabard to issue prizes and corral pilgrims (one of the French nobles is older and a sort of first among equals, but it's not the same), the story tellers are all of the same social rank (unlike Chaucer's mix: Knight, Reeve, Miller, Prioress, Cook, Pardoner...) and all the stories are of love and lust.
It's also worth noting that all ten storytellers tell tales on each day. These run from two to fifteen pages long in a Penguin paperback edition (there is a version on Project Gutenberg), so they don't outstay their welcome. Each story is dissected and discussed by the listeners afterwards, and we get a growing sense of their characters - from the stories they tell, from how they react to the stories of others, from the rivalries and alliances made over the seven days. There are five men and five women among them. The ladies are Parlamente, Oisille, Longarine, Ennasuitte and Nomerfide; the gentlemen Hircan, Geburon, Simontault, Dagoucin and Saffredent. Some of them appear to be virtuous or vicious souls from the beginning - but all of them reveal something slightly further by being pushed and prodded by the exchange of ideas. High ideals begin to look a little shabby, or (eventually) naïve. Cynicism is revealed to be at least consistent and resolute, even when to a character's detriment. For characters who aren't actually doing much, they reveal a fair amount of themselves.
As for the stories themselves, they are a mix. There are tragic affairs, bedroom farces - and tales of adultery and betrayal. The sensibilities of the Early Modern reveal themselves, and interactions range from true love to seduction to coercion to deception to outright rape. Friars are especial targets for scorn and are held up as perilous to be around women. It's tempting to put this down to the Reformation - which Marguerite was around to see and take part in - but I would avoid doing so: firstly, because it is only Marguerite's daughter Jeanne III who becomes a Calvinist (and gives us Henri IV, who knows what Paris is worth) and secondly because the Decameron and Canterbury Tales alike have their share of less-than-pious monks, despite being a century or so before Luther.
More vital are the clashes between male and female virtue - between the urge for conquest and the desire for purity - and all the consequences this has for devout Christians. The behaviour of monks is distressing because of the stated ideals of monks. Jacques Barzun's opinion is stated in From Dawn to Decadence.
It has been called "a masterwork of pornography" and it is certainly erotic: all are stories about the tricks and turns of love affairs, mostly illicit, But the porn-monger of today would look in vain for the physical exploits that have become commonplace in high and low fiction.
...her stories praise in all sincerity love and chastity. ... Toward the end of [the Heptameron] she verges on a sombre naturalism in which love is till a force but the erotic disappears.
I suspect I would tell most people to read Chaucer first, but this is certainly something to pick through - especially if you like the ideas of the storytellers slowly revealing more of themselves. If you are after more information - or just comparing the jottings of a random blog with another source - then I would look to French Wikipedia before English. (Or just go to In Our Time.)
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The Adventures of Telemachus, François Fénelon (as translated by Tobias Smollett)
A 1699 work of fiction about Bronze Age Greeks translated by an Englishman in 1776.
Telemachus, you may remember, is the son of Odysseus. He's a young man in the Odyssey, with a kingdom to save and a father to find. His teacher was Mentor - and yes, that does appear to be the origin of the word.
François Fénelon was, among other things, Archbishop of Cambrai and tutor to the Duc de Bourgogne. He had been made the latter rather unexpectedly by Louis XIV - for he had manifested Jansenist and Quietist sympathies for a good chunk of his career. As part of the young Duke's education he wrote The Adventures of Telemachus (hereafter Télémaque to distinguish character and book). This fits neatly into the gaps of the Odyssey, and shows Telemachus on several journey (Crete, Cyprus, Tyre, Egypt, southern Italy) seeking his father - in the company of Mentor, who is in fact Athena in disguise. Telemachus assists in several campaigns, is frequently praised, is taken as a slave, condescended to by Egyptians, rejects vice and learns many important lessons.
Télémaque is unashamedly didactic. This is part of the appeal: it is being very obvious indeed about what it wants you to think. Even considering Smollett's translation work, this drips of the Baroque. The leafy Sylvan settings, the long speeches, the Classical figures put to Christian moralising - it feels like every chapter could be painted on a palace ceiling. Of course, this probably doesn't recommend itself much to a modern audience as literature. The 'first novel' is one of those things that can be debated to death, but this feels oddly unlike a novel for something written after Don Quixote.
It's also worth noting that Télémaque was remarkable popular, in part for how often Mentor goes on about the need for a King to make firm allies, not embark on wars of conquest, heed advisors and be faithful to his wife. Barzun (again!) refers to the
'picture of the government [Fénelon] thought France should have: a limited monarchy with a written constitution, representative assemblies, and a strong aristocracy discharging important duties. There should be equality before the law, public education, the mutual independence of church and state: the liberation of agriculture and trade from oppressive burdens.'
He also mentions that 'Télémaque is a classic, which until lately French children made to read.' One can see why: it's a perfect work for introducing the period, it's apparently quite good French prose, there's a good obvious story of the author managing to vex the king and the lessons Fénelon imparts probably fit quite well with a vision of French Republican virtue.
Should you read this if you are not one of the (presumably very many) French schoolchildren that read this blog? If you are interested in the period, you might care to read a few chapters. It fits well with the Rest of All Possible Worlds. However, this may be a work more of France than of 'the Republic of Letters'.
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Crimson Tide (1995, dir. Tony Scott)
Rewatched after many years, having first caught it on my grandmother's television. Turns out I remember it pretty well!
Anyway, it's a submarine drama. Have they received the orders to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike, or haven't they? Aboard the USS Alabama, Gene Hackman ('Captain Frank Ramsey') and Denzel Washington (his XO, 'Lt. Cmdr. Ron Hunter') will dispute this fact.
This uses the enclosed spaces and social structures of military life really well. The repetition of the missile drill scenes and the confirmations of codes works to lay out the mechanics and areas where tension can build. The fact that all the officers have to mess together regardless of how much they like one another helps; that everyone shuts up while Gene Hackman is talking - even just socially - helps.
Gene Hackman's quite fun in this. As a rare combat veteran in the US Navy of the 1990s (no idea how true that is to life) he's apparently given a lot of leeway by his commanders, and is so is given a fairly free, ungrudging obedience by his men. He smiles, he carries a little dog around, he spouts bombast and knows he's spouting it - he grins crookedly in Denzel Washington's face. He's no Bligh or Queeg, but clearly he's not so many inches from a tinpot tyrant. But more to the point, he thinks that he needs to be - baiting and drawing on his XO in conversation, testing the line in order to reinforce it. Hackman could feel on the verge of caricature, but it's more a matter of a man twisting ever more and more to fit his chosen social niche.
It makes him a good foil for Washington, and (to some degree) a more interesting person than pillar of morality Ron Hunter. Fragments of Tarantino's comic book trivia in his dialogue only goes so far.
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Worldbuilding & Woolgathering and
The Wizards & the Warriors (1986) and
The Wordsmiths & the Warguild (1987)
I recall the names of Hugh Cook's series from the back pages of other Corgi Paperbacks. The W__ & W___ format of the titles probably made me roll my eyes a bit even then, but I can vaguely recall wondering what a Weaponmaster would be, and how a coherent work of fiction with twenty protagonists could (The Wormlord, the Wazir, the Weaponmaster....) could reliably function. As far as I know, there was no conscious influence on the name of this blog (the above subtitle was irresistible).
Anyway, in the wake of the False Machine two-part review of all ten of the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness - and with a lucky second-hand find I elected to record some thoughts on the first two, The Wizards & the Warriors (1986) and The Wordsmiths & the Warguild (1987).
For those after a fairly quick introduction to the series, I could do worse than point you towards these two summaries with a smattering of comment by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
>>LANGUAGE AND LAUGHTER
Wizards... feels like the most familiar territory. Evil wizard steals dangerous mystical artefact, good wizards and assorted fighters pursue him. The book starts fairly abruptly, with brief profiles of the main characters in the first few chapters to bring you up to speed. There are ancient wizards with significant powers, mystically named orders, castles vaster than even the Romantic dreams of the 19th century could produce, lots of slightly baggy detail about trade languages and nations. It feels a lot like you're stepping into any instance of Tolkien-imitating material from the late 20th century. (The second paragraph on Wikipedia denies that the Chronicles are High Fantasy; true enough, but they pretty clearly want to be taken for it initially - although I stop short of calling them parody or satire).
I think this is to some degree deliberate. First, because Cook wanted to sell fantasy novels in the 1980s - and we have his own account that Wordsmiths... at least was written at the request of the publishers. Second, he probably quite liked coming up with words and deploying them in long flowing passages - or indeed, short ones. (The sun, naturally, says "Zaan." Injured legs go Balder-shalder-tok.) Third, there are these long passages of trade goods or instruments or what have you which keep knocking you off balance and away from any assumption that this is your world.
Fourth, he's being comic. This passage is from Wordsmiths...; it is situated at a party with young lovers, which is a fairly traditional topic for comedies.
...the music escalated to a stormburst crescendo. A thrum began to gallop, a kloo honked harshly, a krympol crashed and scattered, a skittling nook began to campaign against the skavamareen and a plea whistle hooted.
This sounds silly, and invites us to laugh - softly - at the young couple and the situation around them.
Fifth, Cook knew he was walking into stereotypical waters (if the above passage was in a Star Trek novelisation, you wouldn't blink. If it was in a parody of a fantasy novel, you wouldn't blink). This XKCD comic sums up the attitude.
"Don't laugh, gamos,' said the old man, naming Day with the Galish word for a female horse, which was unpardonably vulgar.
Clumsy? Deliberately so?]
>>TOO MANY COOKS
After finishing Wizards.... something crept into my mind from 1984. The Black Company, a dark fantasy series by the American author Glen Cook. I've seen it called or associated with the beginnings of Grimdark; I've only read the first book (The Black Company). A mercenary unit takes on service for a dark empire, that feels quite Mordor-ish (minus orcs-proper, but with plenty of Nazgul types). They are a fairly brutal and unpleasant lot, but there's a vein of loyalty and camaraderie - especially against the internal politicking of the empire that leavens this. The glimpses of ruthlessness by the resistance against them complicates matters further. It is occasionally observed at this point that Glen Cook was a veteran of the Vietnam War.
Anyway, Wizards... felt bleaker than The Black Company - or, rather, as bleak as I expected The Black Company to be. I think this is largely because everyone hates each other. That's a slight exaggeration, but are introduced in the first few chapters to to a wizarding master and apprentice who hate each other and a pair of warriors who hate the Prince they serve and are becoming increasingly caustic to one another. Memorable later is the sheep-rearing father who takes in his sons (a priest whose temple has been burnt down and a mercenary). He shelters them and feeds them, but really thinks very little indeed of them, and isn't shy of showing it.
Even the humble, practical wizard Miphon presumably spends the first half of Wizards... really frustrated with his magical colleagues (and knows that he can't fulfil the mission without them - he might not be frustrated by his own powerlessness to a point of mania, but it isn't a comfortable state of affairs. The Miphon who helps win the day is a different man to the Miphon of the first half-dozen chapters). The hunter Blackwood may love his wife Mystrel dearly, but hates his rulers and is horrified by the warriors around him.
This changes slowly by the end - after much death, and harrowing journeys, and war.
>>BRITISHISMS
There are at least two on-the-nose (at least, on my nose) T.S. Eliot references in Wizards... and Wordsmiths... . Mystrel, wife of Blackwood comes from Little Gidding. At one point in Wordsmiths... the thunder says 'Gronnammadammadamyata', almost as in The Waste Land.
There is a reference to Ashmolean jade being traded on the Salt Road in Wizards.... . A character in Wordsmiths... is named Cromarty. There is a city called Runcorn. This sort of thing apparently doesn't stop (click the following link if you are unfamiliar with Liverpool).
Hugh Cook spent his first few years in England, but soon went to live around the Pacific - where he seems to have spent most of the rest of his live, living in Kiribati, New Zealand and Japan. What are we to make of these uses of British place names? Not too much, I think. The Little Gidding thing certainly doesn't apply that much thematically. I would just observe it as on of Cook's peculiarities.
>>WORDSMITHS GONE BEFORE
Wordsmiths.... traces the bumbling, occasionally heroic journey of the young man Togura Poulaan, son of the leader of the Warguild. A series of events leads to him losing his young love and being thrown into a quest on behalf of the Wordsmiths, who have a mysterious and highly unpredictable device of the ancient world that responds to language.
Togura goes through any number of distressing events, sometimes intersecting with the plot of Wizards..... until he returns home, to meet with further shocks and misadventures. The whole narrative, with the rube of a protagonist, manipulative scholars, unyielding patriarchs and episodes in remote communities feels rather like Jack Vance's Dying Earth in places - though Togura is a more charming prospect than Cugel ever was. Voltaire's Candide is probably another great comparison, though there's no real Pangloss equivalent.
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| [There is a passage attacking a certain flavour of anthropology that Voltaire might well back, of course.] |
Though there are other influences. The image of a petty king obsessed by breeding pigs and his obese, terrifyingly strong daughter with her vast appetites might come right out of Rabelais. Though if it were ever accurately put to screen, it would only bring to mind South Park. (Conceivably, Pasolini in full-bore Decameron mode could also successfully portray it).
There's also a few lines of pure bureaucratic legalese that might have come out of any number of British comedies - and contrast the squalor of the town with the political ambitions of its rulers. The line about 'a special tax on Barons' might have come out of the mouth of an Oliver Postgate character.
As you may have gathered, there's something frothier and lighter in Wordsmiths... than Wizards.... (with some notable exceptions - the cult in the ruined city, for instance). I certainly read it quicker.
>>AM I GOING TO CONTINUE WITH COOK?
Well, I think I'd like to read The Women and the Warlords as Cook's planned second book. I would definitely like to read The Worshippers and the Way for comparison purposes with Punth. But that may take a while.
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Last year I reviewed and praised Dave Greggs's Investigating Censor. There is a new edition - the 'Steppe Cataphract Edition' available (hot off the digital presses!) on Itch.io. This incorporates some of the extra adventures he wrote after the first edition, as well as acknowledging my review work and feedback. If you think this makes anything I write on the subject now tainted by proximity......well, maybe, but that's been the case since I wrote The Cape of Four Pleasances (which I ought to compile into a PDF sometime soon).
Anyway, there's also a new adventure, titled Impermanence.
This is a useful new adventure - largely, I should say because it offers an example of a different tone. The opulent splendour and violence of general IC fades a bit into the background in Impermanence. Indeed, there's an extent to which it feels more - well - hardcore.
The Investigating Censors are deployed to a section of the coast called the Fringe of Moments. They are given a sumptuous welcome, intended to deploy them against the current rulers' enemies. There's an element of paranoia that develops from this, with not only hidden (and distressing) Ultracarcerist dens, but also human-puppeteering parasites. (Perhaps I've been thinking too much on Alien.) Environmental touches - like a silk palace suspended over a pitch-black mysterious chasm - add to this.
Certain elements - as the parasites and the chasm - are carefully left unexplained. There's a predicted order of events (which is very carefully not a railroad) which laves out any dead ends or potential backwater encounters - but that's easy enough to pull together from the base game.
In any case, the atmosphere and imagery, especially the Jade Sword Saint and the Cargo Labyrinth, work beautifully. There's a sense that even the supernatural powers on your side, or that oppose the Cult of Protection, won't quite heal the Fringe of Moments. It may even harm. (There's some slight alteration to the details of the High Dreaming Citadel that helps this.) This brings to mind - in a good way - Qelong.
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Garamondia have just put out an index after 150 posts. It's quite a collection for a little over a year's work and an excellent place to start an archive binge.
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