"Elective Affinities" by Johann Wolfang von Goethe

Poor Goethe! When Italian students read "The Sorrows of Young Werther" they object that the plot is identical to Ugo Foscolo's "The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis", when it is in fact the opposite, the Italian writer having taken Goethe's Sturm und Drang masterpiece as a model for his epistolary novel. Moreover, when one decides to read Goethe's "Elective Affinities" (1809), in spite of having great expectations, for Goethe is one of the most celebrated writers of German literature,  the disappointment is overwhelming. The annoying perfection of the language, the falsified and timeless world where all the characters move as if inside a schematic, almost formulaic plot and the stultified, slightly unnerving story of adultery are the main letdowns of this overtly famous novella. Needless to say, the style is elegant and refined. Not a single word is out of place, which is also quite irritating.  

Only if you know Goethe enough, or if you have good intuition, you can come to the conclusion that all of this was made on purpose. The Arcadian, motionless environment where the characters live hints at their terrible boredom: Eduard and Charlotte, both at their second wedding, are an apparently happy couple. They spend their time tidying up the gardens, greenhouse, little cemetery and huts of their estate. When they decide to invite the Captain, a long-standing friend of Eduard, and Ottilie, Charlotte's adoptive daughter, things will never be the same. Relying on chemical reactions and theories, Goethe describes how certain people are supposedly meant to be mutually attracted according to chemical affinities. 

What one should have clear in mind even before starting to read "Elective Affinities" is that Goethe was trying to criticize, as harshly as he could, the Romantic movement (which he had contributed to shape, by the way). The saccharine nature of Eduard and Charlotte, always described as perfect creatures leading a perfect life in a perfect house without external intrusions, the controlled, artificial landscapes they create and the ubiquitous symbols and allegories hide sheer melancholy and the desire to push away death. When nature is not controlled it is destructive, so we tend to create artificial landscapes, that are pleasing for the eye, but that are really only clumsy attempts to make us forget that life has no meaning after all: we are all going to die and become a bundle of bones. In other words, for Goethe pretending to go back to classicism and to the Arcadia, trying to be closer to nature while experiencing melancholia was not a healthy way of experiencing life. Eduard and Charlotte try to fill up their lives with gardening and with extreme love passions, but strange deadly omens seem to haunt them. Goethe was and was not a romantic: he experienced dejection and depression, especially after the death of his friend and fellow writer Schiller. "Elective Affinities" can be read whether you like or do not like romanticism. It can be a painful reading, no doubts about that. Furthermore, it is a book that has many layers: on the surface it is about adultery, marriage and morality, but on another level, it reflects on life and death, metaphysical and existential questions, the relationship between science and human nature. 

If there is a conclusion to be drawn, "Elective Affinities" cannot be considered a fun and uplifting book to read. There are some gloomy (and potentially spooky) moments that will stay with you for a long time and raise many questions. Moreover it is rather difficult to catch all the allusions, allegories and symbols scattered in the book. You have the constant feeling that every object and every action has another meaning, but the whole design remains mysterious. In my own experience, it was very useful academically, but I cannot say that I enjoyed reading it. However, if you are ingenuous enough, you can end up appreciating the pastoral landscape and the cleverly trimmed plot, without having the sense of claustrophobia I experienced. If you are more sophisticated and better read than me, instead, you could actually delight in Goethe's allusions and criticism of the early-nineteenth-century zeitgeist.

African American theatre digest (1)

I have been reading some African American plays recently:

"Funnyhouse of a Negro" by Adrienne Kennedy

A girl called Sarah is alone in her room with her split personalities: she alternates between Queen Victoria Regina and the Duchess of Hapsburg, both white and aristocratic. Sarah is black and ordinary, she has conflicting thoughts about herself, her race, her father and her kinky hair. It is a spooky journey in Sarah's subconsious, thus it is the furthest thing from an uplifting and funny read one can think of.

It is an experimental play, without a clear plot, where one does not really understand what is going on. It is very disturbing and gloomy, not to mention enigmatic. Nonetheless, it needs to be mentioned that it dates from the 1960s, when African American literature had darker tones. The play is packed with symbolism and oppositions between black and white. The lights on the stage - spots of darkness and spots of light - are unnatural, as Kennedy states in the stage directions. This makes you think of the fact that blackness and whiteness are a construct.

“Topdog/Underdog” by Suzan-Lori Parks

The protagonists of this play, first staged in 2001, are two brothers, Lincoln (topdog) and Booth (underdog). They are called like the famous American President Abraham Lincoln and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Booth is a 3-card monte hustler, thus he is making money by tricking people, whereas his brother  is a president Lincoln impersonator (Lori-Parks got the idea from another of her plays where a black person impersonates Lincoln by wearing a frock and a top hat in the streets and letting people play at shooting him). 

Jokes are made about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, for example  Booth always mentions shooting people if they don’t do as he pleases (‘Anybody not calling me 3-Card gets a bullet’, p.24). The significance of a black person impersonating Abraham Lincoln is made clear by Booth : ‘You aint going back but you going all the way back. Back to way back then when folks was slaves and shit’ (p.27). President Lincoln is in fact remembered for ending slavery via the Civil War and was assassinated by a Confederate supporter, thus you can understand the irony of a black person impersonating Lincoln and getting shot at. Booth  also shoplifts, while Lincoln has stopped any illegal activity and has accepted a job where he is aware that he is being paid less than a white person would. Booth is the underdog, while Lincoln is the topdog, who has quitted the underlife. They are brothers who, like Cain and Abel, are destined to kill one another (their names are the result of their father’s idea of a joke), unless...


"For colored girls who considered suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf" by Ntozake Shange


This is a "choreopoem", meaning poetry dressed for the stage where the actors also dance. It is a brilliant idea and I'd love to see the movie it has been made out of it. The characters are seven women who are defined by the colour of their dress (Lady in Green, Lady in Red and so on). They recite poems, but the boundaries between them are not clear-cut. The seven women on stage relate their experiences and musings regarding abortion, domestic violence,   AIDS, womanhood and, of course, race. This play, first performed in 1975, was very successful and it was adapted in many countries of the world. It is my favourite of the three plays I am telling you about: some of the poems make you shudder. They are powerful, they have rhythm and life.
Quoting a newspaer article I found on the web: "Shange’s poetry isn’t stylish. It isn’t elegant, and god forbid if it should be structured. That’s establishment, powder-room, sentimental stuff. The beauty of her poetry is in the slap-like, rapid-fire sound of a language liberated from convention in the same way that Shange’s women are liberating themselves from society’s strictures and assumptions in front of your eyes". 

"Middlemarch" di George Eliot

Come accade a Dorothea Brooke, anch'io mi sono dovuta ricredere sulla natura di Casaubon. All'inizio del romanzo mi sembrava un uomo noioso ma tutto sommato innocuo. Dev'essere invece il personaggio più fastidioso, odioso e lugubre della letteratura inglese. Io lo metto in cima alla mia lista personale degli antipatici insieme ad Uriah Heep, quella canaglia che in “David Copperfield” mette sempre il bastone tra le ruote al protagonista. Mr. Casaubon è un uomo di mezza età che dedica anima e corpo allo studio e alla redazione di un testo – una “Chiave per Tutte le Mitologie” – che solo lui ritiene sarà fondamentale ed importante, tanto che nulla lo deve distrarre. Ne rimane affascinata la giovane Dorothea Brooke, che sceglie di sposarlo ritenendo che le offrirà gli stimoli intellettuali che sente di avere bisogno, sperando al contempo di contribuire alla redazione dell'opera di teologia. Ahimé, sarà solo una chimera, perché fin dalla luna di miele romana, durante la quale Casaubon si rinchiude in biblioteca, Dorothea si annoia e a ravvivarle un po' le giornate è solo il cugino di lui, il giovane e squattrinato Will Ladislaw, per cui Casaubon prova una forte antipatia e una fondata gelosia. 

Come tutto ciò andrà a finire lo possiamo dedurre facilmente, ma è soltanto perché questa è la trama “superficiale” del romanzo; è una specie di pretesto per parlare di molte altre cose. L'autrice, infatti, ci presenta il romanzo come uno studio della società nella campagna inglese negli agli anni venti e trenta dell'ottocento e lo fa attraverso una decina di personaggi e ad ognuno dedica un numero più o meno uguale di pagine (facendoci pian piano abbandonare l'idea che Dorothea sia la protagonista del libro). C'è, per esempio, Tertium Lydgate, proveniente da una nobile e ricca famiglia ma che ha avuto la sfortuna di scegliere la modesta professione del medico di campagna. La bellissima moglie Rosamond, borghese abituata al lusso e ai passatempi frivoli che Lydgate ha sposato nella convinzione che un uomo di scienza debba avere una moglie piacevole ma non particolarmente intelligente, non migliora la situazione disastrata delle finanze di Lydgate. Poi ci viene presentato il banchiere Bulstrode, zio di Rosamond, che nonostante si dedichi molto alla beneficenza non può annullare una macchia indelebile nel suo passato. A dimostrare come tutto nella cittadina di Middlemarch giri intorno ai soldi c'è anche lo sprovveduto Fred Vincy, il quale sperpera denaro con il gioco d'azzardo e contrae debiti, ma nonostante tutto spera di ottenere la mano dell'amica d'infanzia Mary Garth, che ha sempre amato.

C'è un po' di Jane Austen in tutto questo, ma anche molto di più. Come scrisse Virginia Woolf in un famoso saggio, non ci troviamo di fronte ad un romanzo d'amore o d'avventura ma, come era già successo in Russia, ad un testo dallo sguardo il più amplio possibile. Dalla posizione della donna all'interno della famiglia, all'ipocrisia dei politici ottocenteschi, fino ai miglioramenti nella pratica medica e all'ignoranza dei medici di campagna, George Eliot tratta moltissimi temi, e nessuno con superficialità.

All'interno di tutto ciò risulta in particolare evidenza il tema della disillusione, concepita come l'abbandono di uno stato mentale dominato dall'idealismo, dall'egoismo o dalla pigrizia, e i cambiamenti che giungono con la maturità e con una maggiore consapevolezza del mondo. Prima o poi tutti i personaggi del romanzo abbandonano un punto di vista miope o parziale. “Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings” (p.759) dice Dorothea verso la fine della storia, riflettendo sul modo in cui la vicinanza che inevitabilmente accompagna il matrimonio aveva paradossalmente messo un muro tra lei e Casaubon, impedendo una comunicazione chiara ed aperta. Dorothea abbandona l'idea di dover essere il lume di candela dell'anziano marito o l'unica fonte di luce per Middlemarch per via di quegli atti di beneficenza pensati per essere l'unica sua consolazione e felicità nella vita. Allo stesso modo, Lydgate abbandona le idee di gloria giovanili e invece di scrivere un trattato di medicina rivoluzionario, come avrebbe voluto in partenza, finisce per esercitare la professione in un luogo di villeggiatura, guadagnando quei soldi che gli servono per mantenere un tenore di vita adeguato. Il suo trattato di medicina, manco a farlo apposta, verterà sulla gotta, malattia dei ricchi. Persino Fred vedrà ridimensionarsi il suo sogno di diventare un proprietario terriero, ma in compenso ci guadagnerà l'amore di Mary. Ognuno, in altre parole, raggiunge non la felicità in senso stretto, ma una felicità relativa che in fin dei conti risulta essere quella più vicina alla realtà delle nostre vite.

“Middlemarch” è senza dubbio quello che si chiama un romanzo fiume. “There is too much of it” diceva Henry James, ed aveva forse ragione. Non siamo più abituati alla lunghezza e alla prolissità degli scrittori vittoriani. Tuttavia, dopo "Middlemarch" (che risale al 1870) abbiamo scoperto che il protagonista di un romanzo può non essere un eroe perfetto e virtuoso, ma che anzi ci possono essere più di un protagonista e che i romanzi non finiscono tutti con un “e vissero tutti felici e contenti” d'ordinanza. Consigliato a chi non si spaventa di fronte all'abbondanza di vita brulicante di Charles Dickens. Immaginatevelo solo in gonnella che scriveva con uno pseudonimo maschile. Il personaggio della prima moglie di David Copperfield che adorava il suo cagnolino e non era capace di tenere in ordine i conti, per dirne una, c'è tutto. 

'A Room of His Own' by Suniti Namjoshi

I just finished reading "Feminist Fables", a small book that elaborates on the most common fables from the point of view of women. I have already written about this little known author here. To show you how clever and yet so unpretentiously written they are, I'll report one of my favourites.

A Room of His Own

The fifth time around things were different. He gave her instructions, he gave her the keys (including the little one) and rode off alone. Exactly four weeks later he reappeared. The house was dusted, the floors were polished and the door to the little room hadn't been opened. Bluebeard was stunned. 'But weren't you curious?' he asked his wife. 'No', she answered. 'But didn't you want to find out my innermost secrets?' 'Why?' said the woman. 'Well' said Bluebeard, 'it's only natural. But didn't you want to know who I really am?' 'You are Bluebeard and my husband.' 'But the contents of the room. Didn't you want to see what is inside that room?' 'No,' said the creature, 'I think you're entitled to a room of your own.' This so incensed him that he killed her on the spot. At the trial he pleaded provocation.

Questo libro è stato tradotto, con il titolo "Fiabe Femministe", per Supernova. Di Suniti Namjoshi, in traduzione italiana con testo a fronte, è disponibile anche "Istantanee di Caliban. Sycorax", una raccolta di poesie che rivisita "La Tempesta" di Shakespeare, rendendo per esempio Caliban una donna-mostro (ma come cavolo si dice "she-monster" in italiano?) e riflettendo sulle questioni postcoloniali presenti nel testo.

“A Sin of Colour” by Sunetra Gupta

For some reason this novel comes with an endorsement on the front page which reads: “A young, true heir to Virginia Woolf”. I think this was tossed at random: Sunetra Gupta is a very good writer, but she does not resemble Virginia Woolf (and I hope the comparison was not made because one of the characters in the book commits suicide by drowning). I would more eagerly compare her with Anita Desai: they are both very careful about language, the effort being repaid by delicate and precise sentences, and their novels go deep in the exploration of the characters' interior life in ways that are never obvious. It is nonetheless an investigation that is profoundly different from Woolf's interior monologues: Gupta's style is clearer and lyrical in a simpler way. If I were to make a comparison with two famous painters, I would quote Gauguin for Gupta (resolute brushstrokes, plus profound existentialist and philosophical allusions) and Monet for Woolf (hazy landscapes and mostly confused, conflicted emotions). The characters' feelings in Gupta's novel are complex and even they sometimes cannot name and explain their emotions, but the author's intentions are always manifest.

“A Sin of Colour” tells the story of three generations, it starts in Calcutta just after the Partition and then goes on in Oxford, only to return to Calcutta in the last movement. I am using this term – movement – because the author obviously had a clear-cut idea of where the novel was going, relying upon structure and therefore giving to her story a feeling of harmony and cohesion that is not easy to find. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that Sunetra Gupta is a scientist as well as a writer and has to work with numbers and fixed rules. “The Sin of Colour” begins with an impossible and purely platonic love between a young man called Debendranath Roy and his sister-in-law Reba. In the background there is the family's big mansion, named Mandalay in homage to the country and the city where the Roys made their money by trading teak. If all this rings a bell, it is not by chance: the novel is in fact inspired by Daphne Du Maurier's famous novel “Rebecca”, but this is not the only allusion in the book. “A Sin of Colour” is in fact peppered with references to many works of literature, from Tagore's songs to “Jane Eyre” and Bertold Brecht. The main subject of the novel, for example, made me think of Satyajit Ray's film “Charulata”, which is in fact based on a story by Tagore. It does feel right to learn that the author also translated some of the poet's work. All the literature references in the book, it needs to be clarified, are never annoying. On the contrary, they are very cleverly employed to build a story that always feels true. All the characters, starting from Debendranath's niece Niharika, leave a mark on you. Even the dull, boring English aunt is described with care and wisdom.

All in all, this is a brilliant book, soulful and written with expertise. It flows slowly, but it is never boring. I strongly recommend this to anyone who is interested in good writing and good storytelling, but does not feel attracted to the exotic side of many Indian writers.

About the author: Sunetra Gupta was born in Calcutta in 1965 and raised there and in Africa. She is a Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford and is the author of five novels. “Memories of Rain”, her first work of fiction, has been awarded the Sahitya Akademy Award in 1996.

Il libro è stato tradotto in italiano con il titolo "La Casa dei Giorni Dorati" ed è pubblicato da Piemme.

Tranströmer and Mistry

As you may have read in the news, the Nobel Prize for Literature went to Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. While I hadn't heard of him before the announcement, I am happy that a poet has won (there aren't many poets among the recent laureates). The responses were mixed, but then they are every other year. Too many European laureates, some people says. He's just some obscure Scandinavian poet nobody was aware of, other people may say. I'll just link you to this article written by Tim Parks called 'What's Wrong with the NobelPrize in Literature'. It summarizes all my ideas on the prize: how can you award a prize that is supposed to be truly global when all the judges are Swedish academics? Of course the jury tried to send a red herring by awarding the prize to someone who writes in a minor language, Swedish. Of course, they were not bold enough to venture into kikuyu literature and this makes you think.

I think it is also nice to acknowledge that the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, which some people call the American Nobel, was awarded to Indian-Canadian writer RohintonMistry, which strangely enough I haven't read. He is a lot more famous than Tranströmer and writes in English.

Here you have the other side of the coin and the usual dilemma: is it better that those prizes be awarded to well-known writers who write in languages many people can read or is it worthwhile to dig for new talents in minor languages? And, above all, why do we care so much about these prizes? 

"War and Peace" by Lev Tolstoj (vol.2)

In the second volume of this almost never-ending and sometimes dragged on novel (come on, don't be shocked, Tolstoj really lacks in concision), you will find a lot of war and not as much peace. A great deal of pages are devoted to an important field battle and to the fire in Moscow, when the Russian army inexplicably left their capital city in the hands of Napoleon. In spite of this, there is still time to witness Count Pierre Bezukhov's life-changing experience as a war prisoner and his humanitarian experiments. This was my favourite strand of the novel: I could not help but feel sympathy for Pierre, in spite of his foolishness (at a certain point he starts believing that he is destined to kill Napoleon because of an obscure cabbalah-related calculation he has made). Natasha also changes a lot in this second volume and by the end of the book she is finally a woman. Prince Andrej, instead, ends up being almost the hero and his story line is harrowing but also uplifting. You could argue that “War and Peace” is, among many other things, a buildungsroman. I know that most scholars speak of it as the historical novel par excellence and I am not saying it is not that as well. Only, it is difficult to ignore that every character matures somewhere between page 1 and page 1425 and in order to do that each of them has to live through a war and several tribulations.

The primary intent of the book becomes clearer than ever by the end of the book. The last thirty pages of “War and Peace” are actually an essay, pure non-fiction inserted in a novel. This of course makes you think. More than a family saga, “War and Peace” is the medium employed by Lev Tolstoj to write about history. Tolstoj believed in fatalism and thought that revolutions and wars did not happen because of the ambition and desire for power of single leaders. In Tolstoj's world, great men – Napoleon first of all, but also Kutuzov or Murat – are only one of the many factors that make what we like to call “history”. A part of me would like to say that Tolstoj's attempt in these last thirty pages to explain how history works was a failure: instead of showing us what history is and how it works through the characters in the book, Tolstoj ends his novel with an essay, departing from the narrative texture never to return to it. Nonetheless, it is quite possible that this was perfectly acceptable in the 19^th century when Tolstoj wrote the book and I must confess that his opinions (and his metaphors to explain how he thinks history functions) are alluring to say the least. However, I found the philosophical parts slightly redundant. 

"War and Peace" is an old-fashioned novel, this I can say without feeling guilty. It has become a classic, not only of Russian literature, but of world literature. It is vast and contains many things. It can provoke frustration ("is this book ever going to finish?") or admiration ("how can Tolstoj describe the world so well?"), but surely you cannot dismiss it very easily. It makes you keep thinking about what you have read. In other words, you feel its weight even after you've finished it.