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I am taking a course called Exploring Science Fiction and the teacher has asked us to read and write about a sci-fi novel that was written by an author who wasn't well known for writing science fiction. (The example given was Kurt Vonnegut.) Who would you choose? Thanks, B.P. Portland, Maine
I would choose Mikhail Bulgakov's The Fatal Eggs. You have probably never heard of the Russian-born novelist so I will save you the effort of clicking over to Wikipedia. Bulgakov was born in Kiev in 1891. He started out his professional career by studying medicine. He served briefly in the first World War. Afterward, he tired of medicine and switched to journalism. This is when he also started writing, first plays and short stories and then novels. Now, we don't have much time and there is a lot to say so allow me to list the most pertinent reasons for choosing The Fatal Eggs as your book.
1.The Fatal Eggs tells the story of Professor Persikov who discovers a new form of light ray which accelerates growth in primitive organisms. Through a series of twists and turns, the State comes to take possession of the light ray and the result is the unleashing of an army of mutant snakes, ostriches, and crocodiles on Russia. In addition to functioning as a straight sci-fi tale, the book also serves as a political allegory, revealing a portrait of Stalin's Russia that is controlled by chaos, confusion, and chance. And while the prose reveals the author's disgust with the Russian revolution and Stalin's regime, the book still manages to crackle with black humor. Never was a hen vomiting blood made so amusing.
2.Reading The Fatal Eggs gets you one step closer to reading Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, arguably the most important Russian novel of the 20th century. Most people have to wait till college or later to discover Bulgakov's great satirical novel. Master and Margarita features two somewhat parallel storylines, one of them concerning the story of Satan and his retinue coming to Moscow. The second storyline tells the tale of Pontius Pilate as he meets and condemns to death Jesus Christ. This truncated description probably makes no sense but trust me, you need to read this book.
3.By buying The Fatal Eggs you are supporting Hesperus Press. Hesperus Press is a small publishing house that is committed to publishing works written by the greatest American and European authors, works “unjustly neglected or simply little known in the English language.” The Hesperus Press edition of The Fatal Eggs features a foreword by novelist Doris Lessing.
So there are some reasons for choosing Bulgakov and his short novel. By the way, you should suggest to your professor that he or she switch the assignment around and have you write about a non science fiction book written by an author who usually writes sci-fi. Philip K. Dick's The Transmigration of Timothy Archer would make a great pick for that assignment. Best of luck!
My girlfriend and I are putting together a sort of retro time capsule for her mother's birthday who turns 63 next month and we were wondering what was the most important book or books to come out in 1944?
1944 was indeed a rich year but I think the two most important novels to come out were Somerset Maughm's The Razor's Edge and Thomas Mann's last installment on the Joseph series, Joseph and His Brothers.
The Razor's Edge is the story of Larry Darrell, a young American who sets out on a spiritual odyssey after returning from World War I where he witnessed much death and carnage. What he saw in the war has changed him forever and we follow Darrell as he searches for enlightenment. His search takes him to India where he connects with a holy man, Shri Ganesha, who helps him achieve enlightenment.
Maughm was 70 when the book was published but it's obvious that he is far from past his prime with this, his first book about Americans. Even though, at the time, Maughm remarked that “I don't think that one can ever really know any but one's own countrymen. I do not pretend that the characters are American as Americans see themselves; they are American seen through an English eye.”
In June of 1944 came the final volume of Thomas Mann's masterpiece Joseph and His Brothers. The tetralogy was comprised of Joseph and His Brothers, Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt, and Joseph the Provider. When the first volumes of the Joseph series were published, novelist Willa Cather characterized their “dreamy indefiniteness...the story has almost the movement of grazing sheep.”
When Joseph the Provider was released, Time magazine remarked that “the deliberateness, digression and slow tempo are more marked in [this volume] than in the previous volumes. It is the most difficult reading of all the Joseph books.” Perhaps so, but anyone who made it through Mann's Magic Mountain knows that it pays to stick with his ponderous texts.
These would be my choices for the two most important novels of 1944 although I am sure there were many others. Happy Birthday to your girlfriend's mother!
Here is Part 2 of the Aristophanes/Socrates answer.
So, we were talking about comedy. But just what is comedy anyway? Again, returning to the OED, comedy is a “stage play of a light and amusing character, with a happy conclusion to its plot.” This definition however functional, explains little about why comedy is funny or what it is that makes people laugh. While a complete ananlysis of the structural components of comedy would fall outside the scope of this column, belonging more to the field of psychology than literature, it seems safe to say that two of these are animosity and incongruity.
One finds many instances of comedic animosity in the dialogue of Aristophanes Frogs. One is these types is a topical animosity that functions in ways altogether unlike anything in attic tragedy. Tragedy draws primarily on mythology and other stories that resonate with, but are still removed from, the everyday. Old Comedy, on the other hand, laughs at comptemporary figures both large and small. It is easy to see in this topical animosity a social function that allows the audience to reexamine the societal norms that are being made fun of. In the following passage, which occures shortly before the contest between Euripedes and Aeschylus is introduced, we see the chorus leader bashing a well-konw political figure:
Chorus leader: “And if I'm any judge of human character, and the fate it's likely to produce, then for Kleigenes (that sly baboon, our little Baron of the Bathhouse, who had us pay top price for soaps, adulterated with cheap ingredients from Kimolus) time's running out, as well he know – which never stopped the weakling from carryng a stick to fend off muggers, wheresoe'r he goes.”
In this way, Aristophanes is able to utilize a comic animosity that is ripped from the headlines of the day. This would have resonated directly with the audience, allowing them a different persepctive from which to view the leading members of their society. By creating a new vantage point from which to view society, Aristophanes is not just addressing the nature of human foibles but the very structure of the polis itself. For what was the Athenian city-state if not its citizens? Here we have Old Comedy interacting with themes equal in gravity to what tragedy deals with. Sophocles Antigone features Creon, King of Thebes, battling with Antigone over the right to bury her traitorous brother, Polynices. At issue is who should be obeyed, the gods who insist on burial for all humans, or Creon, who forbids the burial of a traitor within the city walls. While the themes and approach of Antigone are different than Frogs, both dramas interact, to varying degrees, with the notion of the polis.
Well, we are all out if time and we didn't get to incongruity. It shouldn't be that difficult to see how incongruity functions in comedy or Aristophanes. Just think of the beginning of Frogs, which features Dionysus trying to impersonate Heralces, the mightest of Zeus' sons, in drag. Funny stuff.
For a Classic Literature class, I have to write a final paper on either Sophocles and tragedy or Aristophanes and comedy. We have read Frogs, Wasps, and Lysistrata for Aristophanes and the 3 Theban plays for Sophocles. I am thinking about choosing Sophocles. Which would you pick? Thanks, C.I., San Diego, CA.
That's an easy one although the answer may stretch beyond my 500 word limit. I would pick Aristophanes every time. One reason is that most of your classmates will probably choose that Sophoclean hat trick of tragedy – the 3 Theban plays (Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus). Before we look at what you might write about, let's look at why most of your classmates will pick Sophocles.
The dramatic genre of comedy with its base absurdities and its vulgar rhetoric seems to stand in direct opposition to tragedy with its heroic figures and its noble ideas. The very words we use to describe comedy and tragedy reveal our prejudices. Looking at the OED, we find that Attic comedy was comprised of three stages: Old, Middle, and New comedy, the first two being known for their “largely farcical or burlesque...character.” Comedy is to be funny and light. Tragedy, on the other hand, is lauded for its “serious or sorrowful character.” Tragedy is epic, comedy is not. That makes tragedy easier to write about or so they'll think.
We see further evidence of comedy's inferior reputation in Aristotle's On Poetics in which the author claims that “comedy...is an imitation of what is inferior to a greater degree, not however with respect to all vice, but the laughable is a proper part of the shameful and the ugly. For the laughable is a sort of mistake and ugliness that is painless and not destructive, such as for instance the laughable mask is something ugly and distorted, but without causing pain.” OK, the translation is a bit shaky but you see what he means. Just look at the words chosen: inferior, shameful, ugly, mistake, distorted. And Aristotle is not alone is his appraisal of the low art of comedy. For even when comedy was performed at the Dionysa festival (introduced around 486 BCE, some fifty years after tragedy was first performed at the festival), it was performed dead last, after the tragedies and satyr plays.
So there is a quick look at how tragedy and comedy were perceived historically. But despite this, or maybe because of it, I think it's easy to see how one could craft an argument suggesting that Old Comedy dealt with the same high themes of civic importance found in tragedy. Further, it would seem that comedy achieves this, not is spite of, but rather through two key components of comedy, animosity and incongruity. One need only take a close look at Aristophanes Frogs to see examples of this. We will look at that very thing when we return on Friday.
Until then, here is some reading suggestions:
Aristotle. On Poetics. Trans. Seth Benardete, Michael Davis. South Bend: St. Augustine's Press, 2002.
Cartledge, Paul. Aristophanes and His Theater of the Absurd. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press.
Recently, my class and I were discussing who was the greatest Modernist author. Who would you vote for? Thanks, E.J. Raleigh, North Carolina
Well, I couldn't really say who was the best. I tend to not think of writers in terms of 'best' with its implied good/bad dichotomy. I do have my favorites from that time period – Beckett, Dos Passos, Ford, Waugh. But since this Thursday is the birthday of one of my favorite authors, I shall offer up that madam of modernism, Virginia Woolf, as this week's “my favorite modernist author”. Woolf was born on January 25, 1882.
My favorites from her novels are Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. These two novels alone provide more beauty, tragedy and sense of life than many other artists entire works. Both novels are about time and both are about the conflict between life and death. Both also invite multiple readings as they continue to expand the more time you spend with them.
In Mrs Dalloway (published in 1925, the same year as F.M. Ford's No More Parades), Woolf creates nothing less than a new reality through which we experience Clarissa Dalloway, her love and her hatred. Something that doesn't get talked about enough is the biting humor of Dalloway. To cite but one example, the scene involving Miss Kilman with her clumsy cause-oriented sexuality and Elizabeth Dalloway, the teenage beauty who is as desirable as she is clueless, is still as funny and awkward as it was when I first read it ten years ago.
One element of To the Lighthouse (published in 1927, one year after Kafka's The Castle) that I most enjoy is the author's treatment of time. The book moves in and out of an awareness of time that is more connected to the interiority of the characters than it is the clock. One single melancholy afternoon occupies more than half the book. Daydream acknowledgements of the inevitable destructiveness of time are rendered in minute detail while the deaths of central charcters are related in a series of brackedted asides. Woolf writes about time and what it means to us with the same vitality and imagination as Proust or Mann.
Virginia Woolf was a true artist. In addition to her novels, she was a book reviewer and essayist. She contributed regularly to the Times Literary Supplement. She also founded (with her husband) Hogarth Press which published Freud's writings in English translation. I have yet to encounter a single sentence of hers that was not worth reading. Unfortunately, Woolf was bipolar and psychiatry at the time provided little comfort for her condition. Fearing another onset of the illness, Woolf weighed herself down with stones and drowned in the River Ouse on March 28, 1941. She was 59.
I just finished reading Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders for an AP English class. I took lousy notes and now I can't remember how many times she was married and how many kids she had. Can you help?
The short answer is that Moll Flanders had twelve children by six different men, five of which were husbands. So there you go - 12 kids, 5 husbands. Here is how it happened:
Marries younger brother of the family she is staying with, has two children with him. He dies, she leaves the kids with the in-laws. Next, she marries a draper and has one child with him. Both the draper and the child die. Then she marries a well-to-do man, they move to Virginia and have 3 kids before she realizes he is her brother. Leaves him and the kids in Virginia and sails back to England. She then begins a six year relationship with a married man whose wife is institutionalized. Has 3 kids with him but only first one survives. He finds God and ends the affair. She leaves child with him. Next, it's James she marries but they are forced to separate when they each discover how poor the other one is. Sells the child she had with James to a 'caretaker' for 10 pounds. For her final marriage, she picks the man who has been investing her small 'fortune'. They have 2 children and he dies. Then there follows about 100 pages of whoring and petty thievery before Moll Flanders is caught stealing and sentenced to hang. She has her sentence commuted to transportation, reconnects with James and they sail off to Virginia for many years of colonial bliss. The end.
That aside, it is tempting to read into your question that the book bored you as this is what “took lousy notes” often means. I almost agree with you. There is much to find fault with in this book as well as this period: Defoe's phony introduction, his repackaging as instructive the merely salacious, usage of the English language that results in things like 'durst' and 'honestest'. But don't be too quick to judge. There is much about the novel that makes it unique. It has a very 'American' feel to it despite the fact that it predates America as we know it by over 50 years. It's almost as if its Greek tragedy supersized – an abundance of Greek tragedy wedded with an over-indulgent Americanish appetite.
Also interesting is the book's popular culture relevance. There was a film version made in the late 1990's. The movie claimed to be based on the book. That may be, although I am not sure what book they were talking about. It's certainly not Defoe's book as the movie bears no resemblance to it. Oddly, the space Moll Flanders occupies in our collective pop-culture psyche also bears little resemblance to the book heroine. She is known as a whore but she was actually more of a thief than a whore. She slept with men without being married to them. Today, we would just call her a woman. Towards that end, in 2004 the Observer magazine conducted a poll in which Moll Flanders was named the literary character most fancied by men, beating out such luminaries as Lara of Doctor Zhivago, Scarlett O'Hara, and Bridget Jones. Forget the whole Madonna/whore debate, it would appear that what men really want is child-bearing hips and a fine eye for muslin.
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