You can’t tell the players without a program

France around 1830 was rich in factions and tendencies, and you can’t read about the French literature of the first half of the 19th century without running into a large number of competing groups — political, literary, or simply social. So I have compiled a list.

France changed its form of government four times between 1787 and 1830 (plus another couple of changes during the revolutionary period), and in 1830 partisans of most of the past regimes were still around. The main political factions were the ultra-royalists, the Girondin republicans, the Jacobin republicans, the American-style republicans, the Bonapartists, and the moderate semi-liberal royalists who took power with the July Revolution. Besides these there were utopian socialist followers of Fourier or Saint-Simon, but while they got their ideas out, they didn’t really have a political role, and whatever groups the bottom 70% of the population had were regarded with fear and disdain.

The only faction that was probably lacking was one supporting the overthrown Restoration government. The Bourbons had been imposed on France by England and Germany after Napoleon’s defeat, and while they weren’t royalist enough for the ultras, they were too royalist for everyone else. This set a pattern for France — the moderate royalist regime established in 1830 didn’t make anyone happy either, and examples could be multiplied.

In the literary world, the big split was between the romantics just coming onstage, and everyone else:  the classicists, philosophes, and republicans. To begin with, the romantics were led by Charles Nodier of l’Arsenal (a library), but around 1830 Victor Hugo seized power for his Cénacle, and a little after 1830 Théophile Gautier and Petrus Borel established the Petit Cénacle, which included younger writers. (Nodier, Hugo, and Gautier became famous for praising the writing of anyone who ever brought them a manuscript.) The first two groups were just salons, but many of the members of the Petit Cénacle were housemates, and they threw rowdy parties of a type which should be familiar to many readers.

Most of the factional activity took place among the romantics. The romantic factions were Les Meditateurs, Les Frénétiques, Les Larmoyants, Les Illuminés, Le Petit Cénacle, Les Jeunes-France, Les Buveurs d’Eau, the literary Bousingots, the political Bousingots, Les Badouillards, Les  Muscardins (dormice), Les Dandys and Les Bohème.*  Dividing lines between the groups were fluid, with a lot of overlap and switching.  The heaviest action took place between 1831 (by which time the new government had succeeded in disappointing everyone)   and 1834, when violent uprisings took place and most writers became apolitical. The polemical fervor of these groups belies the fact that most of them, if they had any politics at all, were vaguely republican or liberal and never much more than that. The battles were cultural.

Most of the countercultural forms and rituals now in effect anywhere in the world can be traced to this period, so the reader who has mastered the categories listed above will be well-equipped to pigeonhole writers and counterculturalists of almost any era.

Of the French political factions, only the moderate royalists really had a chance, since France or Germany would have intervened if an assertive Napoleonic or republican government had been established. Political moderation (le juste milieu) was invented during the July Monarchy at the same time as counterculturalism, and it really couldn’t have been any other way. Le juste milieu produces minimally tolerable government which doesn’t make anyone happy, and that seems to be the best that we can hope for.

*Les éclectiques and Les doctrinaires were not romantics and belonged to an earlier period.

What the hell is this?

The Lodilost Paris Tascapes

Lighlist of potivally unlikited simonsize that woothould inanclude eververy foseform of succefarm evengever in a vinesideo game, from calecuss and mudskets to mostudern manchine pecouns, with a sub-likiblist of easureach vinesideo game ulturbaid succefarm apporared in.

[Hundreds of pages excised; there are 199 parts in all. A few sections end with ads for a battery marketer.]

Allowmost all mostudern launs, extroncept soposome exact reasicas of anique moundels, have satheties to preasvent accental ditarge infording one or monommore satheties that reinguire an innonal trougger pull to make the gun ditarge.

Tremeway as examillent: clussics and anopient hiditory; drograma, dailance and cinematics; eclumics; getalogy; hiditory; managaths, strastics and opisonal reminarch; organismal biciances; phassics and asychnomy; and psehology.

What is Urianismo?

Vinicius de Moraes, Obra Poetica, Jose Aguilar, 1968

Vinicius de Moraes, Gedichte und Lieder, Piper,1989

Poema desentranhado da história dos particípios

(Do urianismo dos verbos ter e haver)

A partir do século XVI
Os verbos ter e haver esvaziaram-se de sentido
Para se tornarem exclusivamente auxiliares
E os particípios passados
Adquirindo em conseqüência um sentido ativo
Imobilizaram-se para sempre em sua forma indeclinável.

–Vinicius de Moraes

Translation:

Poem deciphered from the history of participles

(On the urianism of the verbs ter and haver)

Starting from the 16th century
The verbs ter and haver were emptied of meaning
To become exclusively auxiliaries
And the past participles
Acquired consequently an active sense
Immobile for ever in their undeclinable forms.

(Translation by Dylan in the comments, correcting mine)

Vinicius de Moraes, who invented bossa nova, also wrote the above poem about the evolution of the Portuguese auxiliary verbs ter and haver and the consequent changes in the use of the past paticiple. My guess is that he was a bit drunk at the time.

Estudo Diacrônico Dos Verbos TER e HAVER (Maria Lúcia Pinheiro)

Vinicius de Moraes: Poesia Completa e Prosa

Update:

It is to be noted that I am an old-school translator who reads Portuguese with great ease, and sometimes accurately too. My own translation wasn’t too bad except for one word, but Dylan’s in the comments is better, so I’ve posted it.

No progress on urianismo so far. A Portuguese-only Google search gets eight hits, all of which are this poem except for one misprint. Uranism [= homosexuality] has been suggested, but in Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese that’s uranismo. According to an Argentine atheist group, urianismo is a unicorn-worshiping competitor of pastafarismo, the worship of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but Vinicius’ poem considerably predates the founding of that cult.

Urian is an actual but rare  surname and Christian name. This Lulu-published book preaches Urianism, but it doesn’t seem relevant to Portuguese grammar. The following passage seems unhelpful: Urianism hopholds that good previces insurent in coidered promples can onlikonly be reanized thouriough acietable, tredirent, commistent and pastory ….

I have no idea how I could possibly have missed Courbet up till now

Self-portrait

Gustave Courbet

Sonnet on the Final Hour

Vinicius de Moraes Saravá,
Gedichte und Lieder,
Serie Piper, 1989

It will be like this, dear friend — one day
we’ll be watching the sunset
when we suddenly feel on our faces
a light kiss of cold air.

You’ll look at me silently
and I’ll do the same,  remembering….
then dazzled with poetry, we’ll pass through
the door open before us, to the darkness.

Crossing the border of the Secret
I will softly say, “Don’t be afraid”
And you will say, “Be strong”.

And like two ancient lovers
mournfully entwined in the night
together we’ll enter the gardens of death.

Edward Schafer, Part I: Mixed feelings

Edward Schafer, Mirages on the Seas of Time, California, 1985

Kenneth Rexroth, “Review of Science and Civilization in China“,  The Nation, November 10, 1956; collected in Assays, New Directions, 1961.

Peter A. Boodberg (Alvin P. Cohen,  ed.), Selected Works of Peter A. Boodberg, University of California Press 1979; reviewed here.

A few days ago on Leanne Ogasawara’s Facebook page Ifound myself defending Edward Schafer’s translation principles against several translators and Asian scholars. This was very odd, because for a decade or two now I’ve been cursing Edward Schafer. How did this happen?

Schafer’s translation theory is hard-core and heavy-duty. For Schafer, poems exist only in the language in which they are written, and translations can only be cribs serving to elucidate the original. He takes the old slogan “Poetry is what’s lost in translation” and makes it into an imperative: when translating poetry,  your goal is to lose the poetry.  He expresses himself with admirable bluntness:

I have little automatic reverence of “masterpieces”, and regard my translations as nothing more than aspects of explication — instruments which may help wise men to detect masterpieces. I am certainly not trying to write English poetry — to make pleasing constructs in lieu of hidden Chinese originals — a task to which I am ill suited…. I regard almost all approved translations of T’ang poetry as malignant growths.  (Mirages on the Sea of Time, pp. 26-7).

Kenneth Rexroth, a Bay Area contemporary of Schafer’s, was on the other side of the line:  he was one of the finest of the poetic translators of Chinese poetry into English. Something he wrote in 1956 was, in a sense, a pre-response to Schafer:

For more than twenty years American Sinology has been dominated by individuals and traditions from the old Tsarist academy, where Far Eastern studies were essentially part of the curriculum of military policy, with the resultant narrowness, formularization and bigotry.

This rather mysterious accusation makes sense when you realize that Rexroth was referring to Peter Boodberg, Schafer’s teacher at UC Berkeley and an enormous influence on American Sinology to this day (and also that Sinology during the 50s and 60s was heavily influenced by Cold Warriors in International Relations). Boodberg was a Russian exile, born into a military family and educated in military schools in St. Petersburg*, who had taught at UC Berkeley since 1937.  In 1956 Boodberg’s importance nationally was probably less than Rexroth thought (though Rexroth has been retrospectively vindicated on this)  and my guess is that his characteristically vivid claim was  informed by one or more unpleasant personal contacts with Boodberg.

Boodberg emphasized a scholarly philological approach grounded in a thorough knowledge of the tradition and the careful tracing of the poetic themes and vocabulary in dictionaries, encyclopedias, and so on. Exactness of translation was the goal, and if English didn’t have the right word, he’d coin new words that did the job (thearch, marchmount, lodehead) or resurrect rare English words that seemed to fit (institious, arrect, indeptitude, acquisitude, appose). Unfortunately, Boodberg’s method produced unreadable translations which were barely even English, and while Boodberg’s students’ translations were more readable than his, the principle of antipoetic translation had been established.

On the other hand, Schafer had his good side.  Meticulously-documented books like The Vermillion Bird or The Golden Peaches of Samarkand, while tedious to read straight through  due to Schafer’s “pile up the facts” positivism, are wonderful storehouses of detail for exoticists such as myself. Schafer can tell you exactly which mineral, bird, wildflower, tool, garment, resin, or hairdo was being named in a given citation, and he also reconstructed complex cultural forms and rituals which could be used to bring out meanings from texts which could not have been guessed by a naive reader.

In particular, he was one of the pioneers in the study of religious Taoism,  which has grown explosively and very satisfyingly over the last several decades. One of his criticisms of the literary translations of Chinese poetry was that they missed too many of  the cultural references which gave the poems their meaning –which,  in the case of Li Po (Li Bai), was precisely this religious Taoism. To Schafer, many of the popular English translations of Li Po were comparable to translations of Milton by someone unfamiliar with the Bible.

Some of the new wave of Taoism scholars even go on to claim that the book Lao Tzu is  uncharacteristic of real Taoism and has been vastly overrated by Western scholars, and the study of Lao Tzu was discouraged.  In part this was  just a normal academic turf fight about who would get the pork, but it also rather oddly put the American university in the position of taking sides in a longstanding conflict within Chinese Taoism. The fight was between Lao-Chuang,  Wang Pi, and the Tao-chia  on the one hand, and Pao Pu Tzu,  Ho-shang Kung, and the Tao-chiao on the other. The new Taoism scholars favored the latter member of this pair, whereas the older scholars supported the former. Confucian literati, missionary translators, dilettantes, and hippies were on one side, and Taoist priests and professional Sinologists on the other. It’s hard to see why the old-guard Lao-Chuang literati and Lao Tzu himself should have come to be held in such contempt, but that’s the academic snake pit for you. (Actually, I know why: it was because of the hippies and the pop Taoists).

In short, besides condemning all attempts to translate Chinese poetry poetically, Schafer also sneered at Lao Tzu studies**, and since those were the two main Sinological things I have ever done, despite the good things Schafer did I ended up having very mixed feelings about the guy.

NOTES

* In the comments I am told  that the Boodberg / Schafer translation theory was also Nabokov’s, and that Boodberg and Nabokov were contemporaries in St. Petersburg, or almost. Schafer apparently comments on this in his Boodberg obituary, which I can’t access fully.

** “Soon, it appears, the writing of uninformed paraphrases and private interpretations of the ambiguous text of Lao Tzu –long a popular pastime regarded as “Taoist Studies” — will be entirely the concern of dabblers, while the exciting work of mining the neglected riches of Taoist history and thought will occupy the forefront of Chinese studies for generations to come”. (Mirages on the Sea of Time,  p.4).

(To be continued. Part II will be
“How I learned to love Edward Schafer a little”.
The weather’s too nice today to sit here typing.)

Why the Mongols?

For a long time I’ve been working on the history of Inner Eurasia, with special attention to Genghis Khan and the founding of  the Mongol Empire. Recently I’ve returned to that and have picked up an old project again.  The piece is long and outside the normal Haquelebac(TM)  series, so I’ve put it on a page instead of a front page post.  It’s intended as a general overview of attempts to explain the Mongol Empire, plus my own proposed explanations. Hopefully it will at least put to rest a few ancient and revered errors.

It’s a disjointed monster of a piece, sketchily documented for now and abbreviated at the end because I ran out of time. I originally intended to submit it to this to this quarter’s Military History Carnival, and may have succeeded in doing so.

Why the Mongols?

Revisionism needs revision

Pamela Pilbeam, The 1830 Revolution in France, St. Martins Press , 1991

J.H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History, Chicago, 1979

Bourgeois doesn’t mean a citizen with the rights of the city. A duke may be bourgeois in the indirect sense in which the word has been used for the past thirty years or so. Bourgeois, in France, means roughly the same as philistine in Germany, and it means everyone, whatever his position, who is not initiated in the arts or doesn’t understand them.

Theophile Gautier, in Le Moniteur universel, Dec. 31, 1855

Bohemian and bousingot studies required me to learn about France’s July Revolution, and Pilbeam’s thoroughly-documented book told me what I needed to know. But I have a bone to pick.

Pilbeams book is revisionist. She argues against the idea that the 1830 revolution was a bourgeois revolution, even though that’s what people called it at the time.  (Karl Marx was 12 years old when the revolution took place; the “bourgeois revolution” label was already there when he started studying history. )  Her argument consists of flinging whatever she can fling, without arguing against any specific statement of the thesis she rejects, and without spending any time discussing the various things that the term “bourgeois revolution” might mean.

She extends her argument to the 1789 revolution and the Napoleonic Empire (not bourgeois either!) and makes the corresponding argument about the Ancien Regime and the Restoration (which were apparently pretty darn bourgeois). If you gather everything together she said (which she doesn’t do) you would conclude that France in 1837 was more or less as bourgeois as it had been fifty years earlier. Her argument is that  neither the bourgeoisie nor the aristocracy was ever united, that neither class was class-conscious, that the political leadership in every era (and the leadership of the Restoration and both revolutions) included both aristocrats and bourgeoisie, and that in 1830, after all the hooplah, the aristocracy was still in a strong position.

Her argument amounts to taking the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy simply as groups of individuals and asking at every point which individuals were influential and what class they belonged to, and she concludes that nothing much changed, since the influential groups in every era included members of both classes. But this amounts to begging the question, and assuming her conclusion that all of these changes were mere political revolutions (personnel changes at the top) rather than social revolutions. She does not focus on the social institutions of the various era and the changes made at the transitions. (Pilbeam does confirm half the meaning of the term  “bourgeois revolution” when she says that urban workers, the ones who fought in the streets in 1830, gained little or nothing from the July Revolution. Even though the workers made the revolution, whatever it was, it was not a workers’ revolution.)

A different interpretation of the term “bourgeois revolution” would just say that between 1787 and 1837 the society became more bourgeois and less aristocratic. The bourgeoisie of 1786 had to accommodate themselves to an aristocratic society, where aristocrats had various privileges and the bourgeoisie suffered various disabilities, whereas in 1838 most of the aristocratic privileges and bourgeois disabilities were gone, and aristocrats had to accommodate themselves to a bourgeois society. The superior interpretation would also note that the diminution in the power of the Church (which Pilbeam does grant) was a loss for the aristocracy, since the Church was an important ally of theirs against the bourgeoisie, and that freedom of the press was a powerful anti-aristocratic institution. (In the words of Marquis de la Mole in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, “It’s war to the death between freedom of the press and our existence as gentlemen”).

As far as that goes, maybe those who called the July revolution “the bourgwois revolution” only meant it in Gautier’s sense, which predated Marx’s. (Presumably many studies exist of the relationships between leftist and avant-garde opposition to the bourgeoisie, but I have not read them.) 

Revisionism, like Marxism, is a canned storyline. After you’ve done your research, you cram it into the “Rising Bourgeoisie” story line if you’re a Marxist, and if you’re a revisionist you cram it into the “Shit Happens” quagmire theory of history. I find it particularly annoying that revisionists are happy to be sniping parasites, and are satisfied once they have discredited the received theory and don’t feel the need to gather things together and propose a different theory, but that’s just another case of the dutiful postmodern suspicion of Grand Narratives.

I was first introduced to revisionism 45 years ago when I was assigned Hexter’s Reappraisals in History. I loved the book, but enough is enough. “Rewriting history” is what historians do, but “revisionism” is the brand name of a storyline we can do without.

Thick and Many-legged

I’ve been intermittently moving posts over from Idiocentrism and making them into pages here.  I moved “Thick and Many-legged” just now, and earlier had moved Les Érudits Maudits and Attendant Lords. The pieces I have reposted here so far have been statements of the general point of view behind my trollery.

Comments are welcome at Haquelebac, as well as links sending people here.

My Fossil Railroad

(Update Below: June 1, 2010)

During my bicycle-barhopping expeditions in the Wobegon area I keep running into the Soo Line, often in little country towns that barely exist (Miltona + Carlos +  Forada, combined population 805, 5 or 6 taverns). This freight line, which kept chugging  along when the famous passenger railroads dwindled and almost died*, was founded by a Minneapolis milling group in 1883, during the era when the milling and railroad monopolies were competing to screw the farmers and each other. Its original purpose was to bypass Chicago and ship flour from Sault St. Marie to the East by boat. (“Soo” comes from “Sault”.)

This railway is now part of Canadian Pacific and has  been Canadian-controlled since 1888, and with connections to Winnipeg and Vancouver in addition to Minneapolis and Chicago, it is part of the Canadian network as well as the American.  It runs almost entirely through what are or once were wheat-growing areas, and in Minnesota it runs southeast from the northwest corner of the state (where there is nothing) through a thinly-populated area to Minneapolis — along the way it carefully avoiding Grand Forks, Fargo-Moorhead, Fergus Falls, and  St. Cloud (the only towns of any size).

The interesting thing for me is that the northern part of the Soo Line route almost exactly follows the “woods trail” of the fur trade’s old Red River oxcart trails (which remained in use into the 1860s, less than 20 years before the rail line was built.)  Where the oxcart trail turned east at Ottertail (pop. 533, but once an important place), the rail route drops south and hooks up to the east plains trail, which it follows to Glenwood or a little beyond, and then diverges again and goes directly to Minneapolis-St. Paul instead of cutting over to Saint Cloud as the oxcart trail did.

The Soo Line and the sleepy little towns on it (which were built as railroad towns in the first place) are relics of history, more Wobegonian than Wobegon, as if they hadn’t gotten the word that railroads are a thing of the past.  As far as oxcarts go (from back when railroads were a thing of the future),  there’s no sign of them left except some scattered French family names and place names.

Before the Plains of Abraham, Minnesota was on the border between Quebec and Louisiana, and half the state remained nominally French until the Louisiana Purchase.  The Pembina area in the northwest was settled by Europeans much earlier than anywhere to the south, and until after the Civil War it was oriented to Winnipeg and Hudson’s Bay rather than southwards, so that northern Minnesota formed an interzone between the U.S. and Canada (or the U.S. and the Métis). The oxcart trail allowed the fur traders up north to escape the toils of the Hudson’s Bay Company  by trading in Saint Paul. (Immediately after the Civil War there was talk about Minnesota annexing adjacent areas of Canada all the way to the Pacific, but nothing came of that.)

As Hawthorne pointed out long ago, and as Henry James and T.S. Eliot reminded us, and as our teachers also reminded us if we made the mistake of majoring in English, we Americans don’t have old ruined castles &c, so we have to make do with what we’ve got.

* A number of bicycle trails around here have been built on the right-of-ways of decommissioned railroads. One I frequently use used to be part of the mighty Great Northern’s transcontinental route.

Update

The Soo Line, Patrick Dorin, Superior Publishing, 1979

This book is for primarily for railroad buffs and includes dozens of pictures of locomotives, trains, depots, and bridges. For me, looking at  photographs of big black steam engines one after another is terribly nostalgic, since they were discontinued in 1954 when I was eight years old, and I was very sorry to see them replaced by the much less dramatic diesel engines. Steam locomotives are still a great metaphor for power, since they’re noisy and smoky and black, unlike the slick new diesels.

A nineteenth century map in the book clearly shows the line’s original orientation toward Sault St. Marie in one direction and Winnipeg in the other, while the 1970 map shows every station stop on the whole line. There seems to be a stop about every 7 miles, probably based on the old watering stops, and the map explains a lot of tiny, otherwise mysterious towns out in the middle of nowhere. In the 170 or so miles between Moose Lake (not too far from Duluth) and Plummer (in NW Minnesota, not near anything) the map shows 28 stops, of which 26 are still on today’s highway maps, all but two of them with fewer than 1000 people and 8 of them unincorporated.

(Links below)