Not all messages are displayed:
show all messages (40 of them)
the chesterton element is a bit of a distraction tbh, i was just thinking “who else has taken a meta approach to the theory of fairy stories?”
and tbh i think the weakness of my... whatever it is.. too grand to call it an argument or theory... is well, don’t many fantasy stories do this to a degree? ie posit a relationship between the world of the reader, an internally representative world, and fantastic or fairy elements?
i would probably answer “maybe, but LitM more so”.
one common rule, which isn’t present in LitM, is the idea of “ageing out” beyond pubescence, eg Susan in Narnia, and... also Susan in Greenwitch. (making me realise it’s not a v common name any more). is that post LitM? (i can’t remember whether it’s present in the five children and it stories). in litm that childhood capability actually belongs to a period of history rather than a period of one’s life.
dow - hope mirrlees is a p interesting if minor figure.
lrb did this recently on her interesting and strange sounding poem Paris.
Great claims have been made for this little read poem. Julia Briggs, who produced a set of exhaustive and illuminating glosses reproduced in Faber’s centenary edition, described it as a ‘lost modernist masterpiece’. It has been called a precursor to and possible model for The Waste Land (in Paris the dead of the First World War people the city alongside the living, and it experiments with numbered explanatory notes); it has been called an example of the mythic method before Ulysses (it fuses classical ritual with the contemporary everyday); it has been called a model for Jacob’s Room (in its experiments with white space on the page), for Mrs Dalloway (as an account of a woman’s journey across a city in the course of a single day) and for Orlando (in its coded lesbian poetics). It has been celebrated as the first Cubist work in English, the first introduction for English readers to the typographic experiments and fragmentary collage of Cocteau, Cendrars and Apollinaire, and the prototype for modernist psychogeography.
‘A very self conscious, wilful, prickly and perverse young woman, rather conspicuously well dressed and pretty, with a view of her own about books and style, an aristocratic and conservative tendency in opinion and a corresponding taste for the beautiful and elaborate in literature’was Virginia Woolf’s view.
― Fizzles, Monday, 25 January 2021 09:05 (three years ago) link
Do you think LitM is somewhat unbalanced in its depictions of Fairy and non-Fairy? The dilemma of Dorimare, particularly as personified by Chanticleer, is expertly realised. Little is explicitly said against them, aside from the fact that they are missing the 'tragic sense of life' their world is happy and harmless enough. But Chanticleer is half aware that he is living in a dream, so cosy and cossetted that to wake up seems a nightmare:
But after he had heard the Note a more stay-at-home and steady young man could not have been found in Lud-in-the-Mist. For it had generated in him what one can only call a wistful yearning after the prosaic things he already possessed. It was as if he thought he had already lost what he was actually holding in his hands.
...
This nostalgia for what was still there seemed to find a voice in the cry of the cock, which tells of the plough going through the land, the smell of the country, the placid bustle of the farm, as happening now, all round one; and which, simultaneously, mourns them as things vanished centuries ago.
This is the best and most explicit diagnosis of his - and by extension Dorimare's - spiritual malaise:
For he realized at last that the spiritual balm he had always found in silent things was simply the assurance that the passions and agonies of man were without meaning, roots, or duration.
I've suffered similar feelings and while many of us may occasionally take consolation that our passions and agonies are as nothing when measured against the inevitable heat death of the universe, to fervently wish this is a sign of sickness, and the other symptoms can be serious, as we learn when Chanticleer wakes up and goes to rescue his children from Fairyland:
"Well, well," said Peter Pease, "I warrant it'll be the first time in the history of Dorimare that a man has loved his son well enough to follow him yonder."
It's an appalling state of affairs when no-one loves their children enough to follow them into and rescue them from danger.
Contrast all this with the depiction of Fairy. "fairy magic and delusion were for the cozening and robbing of man" writes Chanticleer's father, which is surely self-serving, but the book and the narrator go along with it completely. Why isn't Fairy drawn with the subtlety of Dorimare? You say the Duke was given to capricious largesse but appearing at a village wedding with a cart-load of wine and cakes and fruit seems poor compensation for raping and murdering his subjects. Obviously there's a parody of parental and societal disapproval of poets and narcotics (and fairy tales), the insistence that one must grow up to become a doctor or lawyer or dissolution will be the end of thee:
(Fairy fruit) had, indeed, always been connected with poetry and visions, which, springing as they do from an ever-present sense of mortality, might easily appear morbid to the sturdy common sense of a burgher-class in the making
But why don't we see things from the other side? Chanticleer's son is brought to near mental collapse by eating fairy fruit, the fairies are child stealers, their drug mules are murderers and their Duke is a tyrant - seems like the burghers are not wrong in their judgement.
― ledge, Monday, 25 January 2021 20:20 (three years ago) link