The Hare with Amber Eyes (Edmund de Waal, 2010).

This is not a review of Edmund de Waal’s excellent, absorbing non-fiction book, The Hare with Amber Eyes. Since I started writing reviews on this blog, I have mainly concentrated on works that are not particularly well-known (at least in the English-speaking world), but the commercial and critical success de Waal enjoyed with this book means that anyone wanting to read a review of it can easily find several to choose from, so I don’t see much need to add to those. What I want to do here, instead, is explore some questions that occurred to me while reading the book―questions that I don’t think have been adequately covered in the reviews I have read.

Tracing the history of a collection of 264 netsuke (small, finely carved objects serving as toggles in Japan from the 17^th century to the adoption of Western-style dress) acquired by the author’s ancestor, Charles Ephrussi, in the late 19^th century, de Waal relates how the collection was saved from the depredations of the Nazis thanks to the clandestine act of a loyal servant; after the war, the netsuke found their way back to Japan in the care of the author’s Uncle Iggie and his partner Jiro; after Jiro’s death, they were bequeathed to de Waal himself, who installed them in his house in London. Thus, while the riches, houses, paintings and objets d’art of the Ephrussi family, acquired during their rise from Odesa merchants to powerful European bankers, were largely dissipated by the middle of the 20^th century, the netsuke have remained within the family, safe to be passed on to the next generation (or so the reader might assume at the end of the book).

It was the following passage that prompted the thoughts that led to this blog piece:

‘Don’t you think those netsuke should stay in Japan?’ said a stern neighbour of mine in London. And I find I am shaking as I answer, because this matters.
  I tell her that there are plenty of netsuke in the world, sitting in velvet-lined trays in dealers’ cabinets off Bond Street or Madison Avenue, Keizergracht or the Ginza. Then I get a bit side-tracked onto the Silk Road, and then onto Alexander the Great’s coins still being in circulation in the Hindu Kush in the nineteenth century. I tell her about travelling with my partner Sue in Ethiopia, and finding an old Chinese jar covered in dust in a market town and trying to work out how it had got there.
  No, I answer. Objects have always been carried, sold, bartered, stolen, retrieved and lost. People have always given gifts. It is how you tell their stories that matters.

I find myself in almost full agreement with the sentiments de Waal expresses here. The neighbour’s moralistic sniffiness seems to arise dimly out of the foolish notion that every artistic or cultural object ought to remain within the culture that produced it―that every Peruvian sculpture ought to remain in Peru, that every Ghanaian painting ought to remain in Ghana, that every Iranian dagger ought to remain in Iran. This is nuts, of course, and de Waal’s answer to his neighbour aptly shows why―but it’s not a comprehensive answer, as de Waal knows. It can’t be enough to justify the British Museum’s retention of the Benin Bronzes or the Elgin Marbles by saying ‘well, things move around a lot’; the misappropriation or outright theft of such treasures cannot be softened by any number of display texts that ‘tell their stories’ in ways that superficially acknowledge the injustice while clinging tenaciously onto the spoils. Elsewhere, de Waal has said that there are clearly cases when Western collections should indeed return items; in an interview for the Daily Telegraph in 2020, he cites the Benin bronzes as ‘objects of colonial pillage’. It might seem simple enough to cover all bases by saying that pieces are held illegitimately when they have been acquired through plunder, chicanery, or exploitation, and that objects of special religious or cultural significance should also be returned, but that objects acquired openly and transparently, in the absence of abuses of power, can be legitimately owned by collections far removed from their source cultures. The netsuke in de Waal’s London home are not rare, they were not stolen, and there is no great campaign in Japan for them to repatriated, so while one may regret their being in private ownership rather than in a museum, there doesn’t, on the face of it, seem to be a good reason to conclude that they ‘belong’ more properly in Japan than in Britain.

And yet…

One of the best passages in de Waal’s book comes when the author’s aunt Elisabeth returns to Vienna after the war, seeking to discover what has happened to her family’s belongings (a not terribly successful mission, apart from the restored netsuke). With breathtaking cynicism, the Austrian government declared the country a victim rather than a perpetrator, sweeping aside the enthusiastic embrace of Nazism by the many Austrians who welcomed union with Germany. Returning Jews, on the other hand, were greeted with suspicion, as if their return to the country that had persecuted them was itself a form of vengeful persecution. An honest reckoning with the country’s wartime role and a restitution of property stolen from Jews were hardly at the forefront of the government’s agenda; instead, as de Waal curtly notes, the ‘democratic Austrian Republic established after the war gave an amnesty to 90 per cent of members of the Nazi Party in 1948, and to the SS and Gestapo by 1957’. Elisabeth later wrote a novel, The Exiles Return, which drew on her dispiriting experiences of returning to the city of her childhood. In this novel (unpublished at the time de Waal’s book first appeared, but now made available by the Persephone Press), a character who has snapped up a painting that once belonged to a deceased Jewish baron defends himself by saying that the painting was purchased ‘[a]ll quite openly, publicly and legally, you understand’. That phrase―openly, publicly and legally―is a moral dodge that serves as a convenient emollient to the pangs of conscience; it might also remind us that there may instances when art and artefacts are acquired, not through any obviously coercive or underhanded means, but in a manner that is not quite beyond reproach.

In de Waal’s book, one defeated nation is contrasted with another. Once the netsuke are returned to Elisabeth, she gives them to her brother Iggie, who takes them to Japan when he moves there as a businessman. De Waal relates how, in the aftermath of the war, impoverished families sell off their heirlooms for a pittance, which leads to a booming market in objects both genuine and fake. Soldiers and tourists buy antiques at bargain prices―openly, publicly and legally, perhaps, but not altogether ethically as they benefit from misery and uncertainty. Japan, de Waal writes becomes ‘a country to plunder, a country full of attractive objects […] Japanese stuff was so cheap, so abundant’. Among those taking advantage of this bonanza born of desperation is Iggie himself, who guiltily admits to having bought a Ming Dynasty bowl for some Lucky Strikes; the author does not spare his generally likeable uncle from his critique of the opportunistic acquisitiveness of Western buyers, even if Iggie goes on to develop a far deeper and more lasting relationship with Japan than followers of superficial fashion who fall for every touristic cliché about the country and its culture.*

The post-war trade in Japanese art is, in the book, paralleled with the earlier taste for Japonaiseries that became something of a frenzy in late 19^th-century France; it was in the midst of this frenzy that Charles Ephrussi purchased the netsuke, bringing them into the family. De Waal is even more stinging here about the rapacity of Western buyers than he is later about their 20^th-century successors. One of the most prominent dealers, Philippe Sichel, is frank about his indifference to Japanese life and society, intent as he is on making a killing through snaffling up lacquers, scrolls and carvings for sale in Europe at inflated prices. De Waal quotes Sichel as describing Japan as a ‘treasure trove’, with streets ‘lined with shops of curious, textiles and pawn goods’ and sellers willing to part with their prizes ‘for just a box of children’s sweets’―a set of circumstances that provokes in Sichel ‘the urge ‘d’évaliser le Japon’ – to plunder or rape the country’.** De Waal lays bare the callous and exploitative greed of men such as Sichel.

The stories of destitute daimyos selling their heirlooms, samurai their swords, dancers their bodies – and passers-by their netsuke – became a story of endless possibility. Anyone would sell you anything. Japan existed as a sort of parallel country of licensed gratification, artistic, commercial and sexual.

De Waal knows that Charles bought the netsuke as a group from Sichel, but there is much that is unknown about the purchase, not least how much Charles paid. More importantly, how Sichel acquired them is also unknown. How much did he pay? Presumably, it was much less than his selling price. Who did he buy them from? What did he know about them? At what point were these disparate objects incorporated into a single collection? Given this murkiness and the author’s clear distaste for Sichel’s commercial activities, it is striking that de Waal never really considers the possibility of some stain, however slight, attaching to his family’s continued ownership of the netsuke. He seems, at a few points, to teeter on the edge of considering such a possibility. An off-hand comment about Charles’s youthful ‘plundering of Italian art dealers’ might be a recognition of a tendency in his ancestor towards acquisition unhindered by scruple. Later, after describing the Ming bowl disreputably obtained by his uncle, de Waal wonders who had to sell it―i.e. what poverty-driven torments forced its Japanese owner to part with it? The Japanese owner[s] of the netsuke need not have been impoverished, but it seems likely that they were at least cheated by not being told of the value they would fetch in France. If we remember the phrase from Elisabeth’s novel, her ancestor Charles’s acquirement of the collection might well appear legal, but it is not so certain it can be called open and public; if the full phrase can be applied, at least a hint of Elisabeth’s acidity is surely warranted.

There is another factor, briefly alluded to by de Waal, but seemingly without awareness of its implications. I refer to the circumstances that led to the French passion for Japonaiseries becoming possible on such scale. De Waal notes in passing that ‘the Black Ships of the American Commodore Perry opened Japan up to trade with the rest of the world in 1854’ and, later, that the majority of the netsuke in the Ephrussi collection ‘were carved before the coming of Commodore Perry’. The event in question is a quintessential example of gunboat diplomacy: the use of American naval might to force the end of the Tokugawa shogunate’s policy of isolation. For more than two hundred years, Japanese interaction with other countries had been limited and foreign trade carried out under the strictest controls; Commodore Matthew C. Perry, arriving with warships and guns, swept all this aside without having to spill a drop of blood―the show of force was sufficient. The exposure of the government’s weakness was followed by years of violence that culminated in the downfall of the shogunate system and the return of the Emperor to political power; it was in the wake of this massive upheaval that the increase in exports that enabled French aesthetes to develop the cult of Japonisme took place. When Philippe Sichel began his plundering, he was taking advantage of a situation of rapid change, industrialisation, social reform and uncertainty. Of course, it can be argued that isolation under the shogunate was not the expression of the will of the people but the determination of a reactionary elite to cling onto its power (and isolationism had opponents within Japan), but that is beside the point. Japan’s participation in international commerce was enforced through the threat of military destruction; de Waal’s failure to mention this is a notable blind spot. Yes, more than twenty years separate Perry’s expedition and Charles Ephrussi’s acquisition of the netsuke, but as de Waal tells us, the vast majority of these netsuke were made before 1854 and were thus not made for export; the destitute daimyos and samurai selling off their belongings were made destitute as a result of the tumult that Perry initiated. Sichel profited from this tumult and Ephrussi satisfied his aesthete’s appetite for collecting on the back of Sichel’s profiting. If de Waal can quote with approval his aunt’s satirical skewering of the opportunistic acquisition of Jewish property and can chide Uncle Iggie for a not dissimilar display of opportunism, why is he apparently unable to acknowledge that Sichel’s undoubted opportunism implicates, to some degree, Charles’s purchase and thus his family’s continued ownership of the netsuke? Is such an acknowledgement made too painful by his attachment to the story he has to tell and by the sense of responsibility he feels as their current possessor?

There is a postscript. In 2018, de Waal gave the collection to the Jewish Museum of Vienna, on long-term loan―a return full of significance. Except the return was not complete, for 79 of the netsuke were auctioned off to raise money (nearly £80,000) for the Refugee Council. Both are handsome gestures, yet I cannot help but feel some regret that the collection has been separated like this. De Waal’s choice of museum implies a recognition that this group of netsuke has acquired a historical significance additional to the cultural and artistic worth they have as individual objects: the significance of being a surviving vestige of the possessions of a Jewish family once prominent in Viennese life before the Nazis drove them into exile―a significance diminished, even if only slightly, by their being broken up. Those 79 netsuke are now likely scattered forever, which must be felt as a loss. There is some irony in the fact that the man who told the story of these netsuke―who established, in the public consciousness, their significance as a collection―and who wrote of his great responsibility of being their owner should be the one to split them up. But how much should one complain about this? The remaining 185 are on public display in a most apposite choice of venue, where, according to de Waal’s stipulation, visitors are able to touch as well as view them. Moreover, de Waal, in his book, is very clear that the importance of art is not to be ranked alongside the importance of human lives; the fact that the netsuke survived the Nazis is of trivial importance when set against the memory of all the people who did not survive. The thought that refugees facing the most horrendous ordeals and vicious prejudice have benefited from a proportion of the collection being sold off is perhaps the most fitting tribute to the Ephrussi story.

*As a side note, it is interesting how de Waal portrays Japan in this section as a victim of imperialistic American insensitivity. Japan’s failure to acknowledge its responsibility for acts of the most appalling inhumanity has, in the long term, been more obdurate and damaging than Austria’s, but though de Waal views Austrian claims to victimhood with a jaundiced eye, there’s no hint of that in the way he writes about post-war Japan. Is it the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that makes the difference? Or a tendency to view Japanese imperial aggression as somehow less political and ideological than its Nazi counterpart?

**There seems to be a printing error here, as the word in Sichel’s Notes d’un bibeloteur au Japon is dévaliser, rather than [d’]évaliser (which means to evaluate). Perhaps this is particular to the Kindle edition.

The Black Dog (A.E. Coppard, 1923)

The name of Coppard rang just a few bells when I bought my old copy of The Black Dog about 25 years ago: short stories, mostly with a rural setting, acclaimed in his day, perhaps with some admirers still. The slim, vintage blue-bound volume looked very nice as an object my shelves―nice enough for me to think, whenever I cast my eye over it, that I ought to give it a read some day. A couple of duds notwithstanding, it’s a fine collection, quite varied; clearly, Coppard is worth further investigation. Rather than go through each story one by one, I’ll pick out a few recurring features and make some general observations on Coppard’s qualities as a writer. A few things crop up repeatedly, though none is to be found in all of the stories: a mordant sense of comedy, sometimes leading to grimly ironic endings; characters seeking to escape their unhappy or humdrum lives; an opening frame, in which one character narrates the story; characters misreading and misunderstanding themselves and each other (especially men misunderstanding women); a bitter sense of class antagonism.

Coppard apparently loved to regale an audience with a tale or two, and a story like ‘The Devil in the Churchyard’ is the type of thing one might imagine him recounting in a pub, drink in hand. The narrative frame is indeed set in a pub, with a garrulous thatcher rehearsing a comic yarn involving long-dead locals and saluting his listeners (and the reader) at the end with ‘Good health!’. This is Coppard at his most straightforward and lightweight; his sense of comedy shows more ambition in something like ‘Alas, Poor Bollington!’, in which the title character relates to Turner (a club acquaintance) the story of his unhappy marriage. The comedy of misunderstanding not only involves the total failure of husband and wife to understand one another, but also the inability of the husband to understand his own behaviour―in particular, his impulsive decision to abandon his wife at a hotel without telling her and then to emigrate to America. The wife’s unfounded suspicions of Bollington’s infidelity are cleverly mirrored by the unsympathetic attitude of his listener, who repeatedly rejects Bollington’s assertions of innocence and excoriates his behaviour (‘a positive ruffian’, ‘a great ninny’, ‘a perfect fool’). This choleric running commentary becomes somewhat self-referential when Turner decries Bollington’s narrative method, protesting against the delaying of an important piece of information; Coppard adds a nice bit of irony when Turner claims to have been ‘sweating with sympathy’ for Bollington―which is quite untrue. As in other stories in the collection, the humour has an underlying bleakness; the main character is left isolated and befuddled, the final words relegating him to the status of a ‘little old man’ (when he is ‘still on the sunny side of fifty’). An even better story, ‘The Wife of Ted Wickham’, also uses the frame device of a character recounting the narrative, though here the frame is limited to a single paragraph and the narrator tells the story to no-one but himself. This time, an unsatisfactory marriage is described by an outside observer, who pours scorn on the foolish self-abasement of a woman who subordinates herself entirely to the will of her domineering, contemptuous husband; gradually, it becomes the apparent that the narrator is swayed by his own contradictory feelings and his account may not be reliable. The opening sentence might serve as a partial expression of one of Coppard’s recurring thematic concerns: ‘Perhaps it is a mercy we can’t see ourselves as others see us’. The narrator is thinking of the title character here; whether he also has an inkling of the applicability of this idea to himself is something Coppard leaves unresolved. What the narrator leaves out is that, in addition to being unable to see ourselves as we appear to others, what we think we see of others is rarely accurate. You can see Coppard working out variations of this theme in other stories: ‘Huxley Rustem’, ‘The Fancy Dress Ball’, ‘The Handsome Lady’ and ‘The Black Dog’. The last two in that list are among the longer stories in the book (each is over thirty pages, while most others are under twenty) and among its finest. They both involve a man’s failure to comprehend or respond to a woman’s true feelings for him, but they complement each other in an inverse way: one man fails to see the hopelessness of his attachment to a woman with no real affection for him, while the other fails to pick up on the opportunity of love offered by a woman less emotionally constipated than he is; one story seems primarily comic at first, but includes an unexpected tragedy near the end, while the other appears to be headed for a melancholy conclusion, yet throws in some whimsical humour at the finish. These correspondences and contrasts make the stories seem like a pair, and, indeed, there are a number of other stories in the book (some of which had previously been published in magazines) that might be paired like this―whether by accident or design, I don’t know.

Both ‘The Handsome Lady’ and ‘The Black Dog’ display one of Coppard’s strongest characteristics as a writer, which is the expressiveness with which he writes about the natural world. The expressiveness is anchored to a solid base of observation and knowledge; not only the common names of various plants and animals abound, but also some obscure dialect words (I had to look up ‘kilk’, aka charlock, a kind of wild mustard). Animals are sometimes made to serve symbolic purposes, such as a wasp in ‘The Black Dog’ that crawls about on a little rock in a pool without thinking to use its wings―an analogue of the hero’s inability to realise that he can never find a permanent place in the life of the woman who doesn’t love him. In the hands of lesser author, such symbolism might be ruinously obvious, but Coppard avoids the pitfalls through the visual richness and rhythmic beauty of his prose. Here is a passage from ‘Mordecai and Cocking’, in which hares play a key symbolic role:

The doe shot away over the curve of the hill and was gone. She did not merely gallop, she seemed to pass into ideal flight, the shadow of wind itself. Her fawn body, with half-cocked ears and unperceivable convulsion of the leaping haunches, soared across the land with steady swiftness of a gull. The interloping hare, in a blast of speed, followed hard upon her traces. But Cocking’s hound had at last found the hare of its dreams, a nut-brown, dark-eared, devil-guided, eluding creature, that fled over the turf of the hill as lightly as a cloud. The long leaping dog swept in its track with a stare of passion, following in great curves the flying thing that grew into one great throb of fear all in the grand sunlight on the grand bit of hill.

One of the things that works so well here is the way that Coppard treats the animals not as just ordinary beasts, nor as just symbols in his scheme, but as beings whose form and identity become thrillingly unstable as they speed away, like creatures of folklore able to transform themselves into myriad forms. The doe seems like a horse (‘gallop’), a deer (‘fawn’, here meaning the colour, of course, but the animal association still holds) and a gull, as well something that surpasses the merely corporeal (‘ideal flight, the shadow of wind itself’). The unusual choice of ‘unperceivable’, rather than the more expected ‘imperceptible’, adds to the strangeness of what, objectively, is an ordinary rural scene, but here is rendered in almost hallucinatory terms. The compound adjectives Coppard piles on to describe the third hare give it a fantastical quality, which fits with its status as the hare of the dog’s dreams, and which culminates with its transmutation ‘into one great throb of fear’. The dog itself is linked with the hares through the word ‘leaping’, already used to refer to the haunches of the doe, as if there were some mysterious bond uniting hunter and hunted. The recurring ‘l’ and ‘d’ sounds emphasize this unity―all actions becoming one single breathless great action, one of life and death and terror being performed in an unpitying landscape that, from a more prosaically everyday human perspective, is merely pretty (‘in the grand sunlight on the grand bit of hill’).

When writing about nature, Coppard is a master of the unusual and vivid simile. In a forest plantation, for example, young oak trees have ‘stems slender as a cockerel’s leg’; a dull moon is ‘like a brass-headed nail stuck in a kitchen wall’; mist clings to the earth ‘as tightly as the dense grey fur on the back of a cat’ (all of these are from ‘The Handsome Lady’). In ‘The Poor Man’, another of the longer stories in the collection and also outstanding, there is the following passage:

The hanging richness of the long woods yellowing on the fringe of autumn, the long solemn hills themselves, cold sunlight, coloured berries in briary loops, the brown small leaves of hawthorn that had begun to drop from the hedge and flutter in the road like dying moths, teams of horses sturdily ploughing, sheepfolds already thatched into little nooks where the ewes could lie―Dan said―as warm as a pudding: these things filled him with tiny ecstasies too incoherent to transcribe―he could only sing.

This is the landscape as seen by the central character, Dan Pavey. The first simile here (hawthorn leaves like dying moths) is fanciful, poetic; the second (ewes lying as warm as a pudding) more homely, with the interruption stressing its colloquial quality. The yoking together of the poetic and the homely is just right for the character of Dan, who sees everything here as part of world intimately familiar and mundane, and yet who can experience it all as ‘tiny ecstasies’ beyond his powers to express verbally. Near the end of the story, after wrenching tragedy, he has a dream vision of this same landscape:

The wind seemed to flow in soft streams, rolling the lilac blooms. A small white feather blown from a pigeon on the church gable, whirled about like a butterfly. […] The country had begun to look a little parched, for rain was wanted―vividly he could see all this―but things were growing, corn was thriving greenly, the beanfields smelled sweet. A frill of yellow kilk and wild white carrot spray lined every hedge. Cattle dreamed in the grass, the colt stretched itself unregarded in front of its mother. Larks, wrens, yellowhammers. There were the great beech trees and the great hills, calm and confident, overlooking Cobbs and Peter, Thasper and Trinkel, Buzzlebury and Nuncton.

This vision of beauty, of a home country now denied him, of the once familiar made now otherworldly, shows the cycles of rural life so dear to Dan continuing without him, indifferent to his misery. The naming of the district villages calls back to the opening of the story, in which the same villages are listed, but in slightly expanded form and in a slightly different order; everything remains the same, the beauty persists, except that, for Dan, it no longer has the same meaning.

‘The Poor Man’ is one of several stories in the collection that express Coppard’s socialist antipathy towards the hierarchies of class. It can be seen as a companion story to ‘Mordecai and Cocking’, expanding the theme of the rural poor as hapless victims of inhumane elites and draconian authorities. The class condescension Dan Pavey rebels against is perfectly encapsulated in the snooty vicar’s approving story of a man who did nothing with his life outside work except play cricket, who never married and who had little money, but who died ‘a very happy, hearty, hale old man’―a shining model of just the sort of uncomplaining feudal servility the vicar would like to see Pavey emulate. ‘Tribute’ is a multi-generational saga of two families set in an industrial town, with one family growing richer and the other staying poor. Commonplace enough―except that the saga is distilled into six pages of pithy irony, not exactly subtle but of a pleasing causticity, maybe ideal for a magazine story. Illustrative of Coppard’s approach here is that the rich family is called Regent and the poor family is called Vassall. More artistically successful is ‘The Ballet Girl’, a delightful comic piece about a humble young clerk named Simpkins who finds himself briefly inserted into the society of feckless, privileged university students, including one who denounces spanners as ‘such dreadful democratic tools’; in this story, the fish-out-of-water fails to get what he wants, but wins a different kind of victory―a rare happy ending in this book.

Some random observations:

1) Although his reputation made as a writer of country tales, Coppard’s range is wide, and some of his best stories have quite different settings: ‘The Ballet Girl’, for example, or ‘The Tiger’, a marvellously wry melodrama that in plot and characterisation reads like an episode from Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus. There’s also the amusingly surreal dream story ‘Big Game’ and the farcical black comedy of ‘The Cat, the Dog, and the bad old Dame’, set in a town chemist’s shop. But it’s true that the weakest stories are those furthest removed from Coppard’s supposed forte: the tedious parable ‘Simple Simon’ and the over-extended Orientalist fantasy ‘Tanil’.

2) Coppard’s gift for rendering rural dialect is one of his great strengths, but when applied inexpertly to Irish speech patterns in ‘The Man from Kilsheelan’, it severely mars what would otherwise be a wonderfully entertaining yarn. Coppard travelled a great deal in Ireland and was a great admirer of Joyce, but he seems to have overestimated his observational and imitative talents when writing of a culture not his own; the story contains some hilarious moments, but the hilarity gives way in the end to exasperation with the insufferable stage-Oirish dialogue.

3) Coppard certainly has an odd way with names. Some of them are on-the-nose, such as Regent and Vassall in ‘Tribute’, or Pettigrove in ‘The Handsome Lady’, whose favourite place is a small wood and whose emotional horizons have become constricted by too-long residence in small-minded village society. Some are more ordinary: Dan Pavey, Pat Crowe, Henry Turley, Christine Horan. Others are plain weird: Mr Verryspice, Mrs Squance, Huxley Rustem, Bugloss, F.A. Zealander (aka Fazz), Faudel Scroope. The last-named is the vicar in ‘The Poor Man’. With ‘Faudel’, I suppose, Coppard might be wanting us to think of ‘fardel’ or burden, the vicar exemplifying the burden of the rich that working-class men like Pavey must bear; there may also be an etymological connection to the Anglo-Norman ‘faud/faude’, meaning sheepfold (the vicar as a overbearing shepherd restrictively penning in his flock, perhaps). ‘Scroope’ might have been chosen for its similarity to ‘scruple’, Scroope’s humbugging religious scruples being a source of Pavey’s troubles. ‘Scroop’ is also technical term given to the rustle made by silk or other fabrics treated with acid―a possible nod to the top-quality clothing available to a priest of independent wealth. More generally, ‘scroop’ can mean a harsh, grating sound, congruent with the vicar’s irritating personality. Scrope (pronounced ‘scroop’) is also an old aristocratic family name. Lots of possible significances, then―but the sheer outlandishness of the name all but overwhelms them.

Two ‘Hostess Films’ from the 70s: Heavenly Homecoming to Stars/별들의고향 (Lee Jang-ho, 1974) and Yeong-ja’s Heydays/영자의전성시대 (Kim Ho-seon, 1975)

The Korean Film Archive’s YouTube channel is an invaluable resource that makes a wide range of films available for free, with subtitles and often in HD or 4K. The quality of the films varies enormously. At the higher end of the scale are such superb works as A Hometown in Heart (1949), Mist (1967, previously reviewed on this blog), Mandara (1981) and The Power of Gangwon Province (1998). Other films have bored or repelled me so much that I switched them off after twenty minutes or so. The slew of films from the 1970s I recently watched includes several that do not lend themselves to simple praise or dismissal; the mixture of wild melodramatic excess, garish colours, wacky stylistic flourishes and bleak social criticism often made it difficult to decide whether what I was watching was good or not, but with even the weaker films, I was always engaged, sometimes fascinated. As someone who used to live in Korea, I was particularly intrigued by the portrayal of Korean society in the 70s―a decade that saw the authoritarian grip of military leader Park Chung-hee tighten until his assassination in 1979. We see limited evidence in these films of the economic advancement that the regime liked to boast of; instead, people’s lives are shown as constrained, awash with alcohol, bitterness and self-pity, and tending to desperate dissatisfaction.

A smash hit with audiences, Heavenly Homecoming to Stars is a grim tale of female suffering and male shittiness―presented, if not quite with restraint, then with a measure of sensitivity and overt artistic ambition that seeks to elevate its potentially trashy narrative (based on a serialised newspaper story) from the level of generic melodrama. Its central character, Gyeong-a (played by Ahn In-sook, who sadly left acting soon after this role), is depicted through her relationships with four different men: a young co-worker who seduces then betrays her, a seemingly stuffy businessman with a dark side, a brutish pimp, and a down-at-heel artist named Mun-ho who seems to offer a fleeting hope of happiness. It is the last of these (played by Shin Seong-il, one of the era’s most prominent leading men and a dab hand at playing seedy, woebegone drunkards) who is seen at the start of the film tearfully carrying Gyeong-a’s ashes through the snow as mournful music plays, so we know right away that a tragic ending is in store. The film does not trace Gyeong-a’s decline in linear fashion but uses flashbacks that allow us gradually to piece it together, minimising thereby some of the triteness that can attend tales of fallen women who tread the well-worn path from youthful innocence to drink-sodden misery. Lee’s visual palette uses lots of greys, browns, doleful blues and deep blacks to portray Seoul as a city of encompassing dreariness; the contrasting gaudiness of a few bar scenes presents a false, tawdry allure that entices and entraps Gyeong-a, whose brightly coloured outfits emphasise her vitality, but only to mark it for inevitable destruction. The other film I’ve seen by Lee, the unabashedly uncommercial and enigmatic The Man With Three Coffins (1987, also on Korean Classic Film), has some features in common with this one: a feeling of inescapable despair, a fragmentary narrative, off-kilter camera angles, highly stylised use of colour – but they are pushed to far bolder extremes. In this early work, more tied to commercial cinema, the grimness of Gyeong-a’s tragedy does not exclude a certain sense of comfort that comes with the familiarity of melodramatic conventions; films like this can decry social conditions without seriously entertaining the possibility of social change (of course, calls for social change would have been strictly regulated by the regime’s censors). The end of the film returns to Mun-ho carrying Gyeong-a’s ashes and the same mournful music from the beginning; at this point, you might feel as if you’ve taken a long, warm bath of luxuriant melancholy and that it’s all rather agreeable.

Mun-ho and Gyeong-a, early in their relationship

The vast drab extent of the housing blocks so characteristic of post-war Korea

Heavenly Homecoming to Stars is an early example of the ‘hostess film’―a genre focused on the hyper-melodramatic and titillating suffering of women forced by circumstance into becoming hostesses, or sex workers. Yeong-ja’s Heydays, released the following year, was also a big commercial hit and makes for an interesting comparison. Like the earlier film, it centres on a self-destructive protagonist’s loss of innocence and descent into hard-drinking, sexually commodified misery. The narrative is more linear (though not entirely so), the characterisation much broader, the storyline and emotions more goofily melodramatic―e.g. in the unintentionally(?) comic scene in which Yeong-ja loses an arm in a traffic accident. The ending is very different, and though it conforms to patriarchal expectations in some respects, it is also mildly surprising. Perhaps the most striking point of comparison, however, is the characterisation of the main male figures. Mun-ho, in Lee’s film, lives a disreputably raffish existence as a hard-drinking artist approaching his middle years; initially, he is presented as a rather pathetic arsehole who frightens Gyeong-a by bursting in on her as she takes a shower―not, as she understandably fears, with the intent of assaulting her, but to prank her with an act of drunken, obnoxious puerility. Later, however, he matures, sobers up and attempts to provide Gyeong-a with a measure of loving stability even as he seems to realise, deep down, that their paths are destined to separate. Far less sympathetic is the character of Chang-su (Song Jae-ho, resembling a miffed pygmy owl) in Kim’s film, who seems rather monstrous to a modern audience, though I’m not sure he was understood as such by the filmmakers. A pushy, obsessive creep, he has two missions in life: to save enough money to open a tailoring business and to rescue Yeong-ja (Yeom Bok-soon) from financial and moral ruin. Though he certainly does much that brings benefit to Yeong-ja, he treats her with an arrogance, contempt and male entitlement that extends to physical as well as emotional violence, revealing a streak of sadistic misogyny not just in the character, but also, perhaps, in the director (who also co-wrote the screenplay).

When they first meet, Chang-su is a young steelworker and Yeong-ja is a maid at the house of Chang-su’s employer. One meeting is enough to make Chang-su decide that he is going to make Yeong-ja his own; when she rebuffs him, he grabs hold of her and she has to slap him away; the children who look down on them from a balcony, laughing and waving, serve as a cue for us to regard the scene as comic. Chang-su’s ardour, which won’t take no for an answer, is the sign of a sincerity that proves the justness of his cause; if Young-ja cannot reciprocate his love, that is because she does not know as well as he what is best for her. This dynamic continues through the film, as Chang-su grabs, pushes and slaps Yeong-ja around in his efforts to reform her, only for these selfless acts of charity to be met with repeated betrayals as Yeong-ja obstinately refuses to live her life exactly according to Chang-su’s wishes. What’s fascinating is that Chang-su has his own patriarchal guardian angel, a Michel Simon type who, in a far more subtle fashion, tries to run Chang-su’s life even as Chang-su tries to run Geyong-a’s. Thus there’s a hierarchical line of attempted domination as a young woman is expected to defer to the will of a male contemporary, who in turn is expected to defer to the will of an older man. In each case, the mentor/guardian figure takes it for granted that he knows what’s best for his protégé; the latter cannot be trusted to live their life freely and to make their own decisions, therefore their rebellious insistence on autonomy must be curbed or sabotaged. In a film that casts a critical eye on the ruthless exploitation and crushing economic deprivation in Korean society, this allegiance to authoritarian values in personal relations sits rather oddly.

The film’s messy contradictions are shown in the opening sequence. A handheld camera prowls through some narrow back alleys at night; it’s a roundup and the point-of-view is that of a police officer, thereby placing the viewer in the role of participant in a mass arrest. Regardless of whether this places us as righteous defenders of morality or as oppressive agents of autocracy, the director makes sure to get in a few prurient views of lacy underwear and exposed flesh (though no breasts to trouble the censors). As the women beg and struggle, a male customer slips away, apparently not someone of interest to the law in this situation. When the camera arrives at Yeong-ja, the director opts for a freeze-frame of her holding her palm up in front of the camera; this gesture of resistance or pleading is prompted not just by the arrest itself, but metaphorically by the act of being filmed, for the camera has captured and exposed Yeong-ja in a moment of shame that is lingered on through the freeze-frame. A sleazy-sounding pop song starts playing and the title and credits appear in red font, matching the bright red that Yeong-ja is wearing (Kim often films her either wearing red or with red featuring prominently in the frame with her). Quick edits then cut back and forth between the freeze-frame, scenes of the women being taken to the police station, and close-ups of Yeong-ja from various points in the story that follows. The film begins with an undeniable verve that includes a strong dose of salaciousness and a sense that it’s more exciting that morally debased; when the next voice we hear is that of a senior police officer, we might think that his severe tones are used to tamp down on that verve and salaciousness, replacing them with the stolid correctness of traditional values. It is not, however, to the women that he is speaking, but to a group of young men, including Chang-su, who have been booked for fighting. The difference in the way the officer speaks to Chang-su and to the other, slightly younger men is revealing: to the former, a stern, fatherly admonishment, appealing to his respectable status as a Vietnam vet; to the latter, a contemptuous reprimand and a flick of the hand across the face. Upstanding masculine virtues are affirmed in accordance with social hierarchy; from the absence of any equivalent paternalistic words delivered to the women, we might infer that they are not deemed worthy of such attention, as if their status as sex workers renders them beyond hope of redemption. When Chang-su glimpses Yeong-ja among the arrested women, he manages to get her released by pretending they are related; any joy he might feel at seeing her for the first time since his return from combat, however, is tempered by the sight of what she has become. Her appearance (bright red coat, cheap wig, tongue sticking out, an arm missing) and manner (unapologetically coarse and childish) provoke in him a reaction of bewilderment, fascination, disappointment and revulsion―an uncertainty that has an analogue in the film’s ambiguity concerning its title character. Is Yeong-ja’s vulgarity repellent or spirited? Are her rebellious, mercenary vivacity and refusal to reciprocate Chang-su’s devotion the expressions of a false, distorted version of herself, which Chang-su must break down in order to salvage her true, nobler self (the self that came to the city solely to support her impoverished family)? Or is the hard, bright shell she wears simply a necessary means of survival, lying beyond Chang-su’s ability to comprehend? In this instance, to call the film uncertain and ambiguous is perhaps a kind way of saying that it’s muddled.

Yeong-ja and Chang-su get a good look at each other for the first time since Chang-su’s return

Both of these films offer critiques, however guarded and equivocal, of life under a dictatorship, but in each case the focus is slightly different. In Heavenly Homecoming to Stars, the main social ill that ultimately results in Gyeong-a’s destruction is the pervasive, pitiless misogyny with which men exercise their power over women. The four men that successively play a significant role in Gyeong-a’s life all bear, to various degrees, culpability for what happens to her; they each represent different aspects of Korean masculinity as it exploits, mistreats and crushes Korean womanhood in its pursuit of gratification and status. The upwardly mobile young colleague who deceives Gyeong-a and the strait-laced older businessman who marries her are particularly important to this aspect of the critique as they embody the embrace of conformity that makes wealth and high status possible. The businessman’s wealth suggests a life of acquiescence to the military regime and of benefitting from its pursuit of economic growth unfettered by concerns about inequality, while the younger man seems ready to follow a similar path. Men such as these use women like Gyeong-a for their own ends, only to discard them as soon as required by the dictates of social conformity. The modern, anonymous city―locus of regime-promoted urban development―offers such men ample opportunity to indulge their selfish desires at women’s expense, whether furtively in a back-alley love motel, or repressively in the isolation of a prison-like marital home. Only the mildly Bohemian Mun-ho might conceivably harbour a few politically subversive thoughts, and he is the only man to treat Gyeong-a with any real humanity.

The loveless marriage in which Gyeong-a finds herself imprisoned

Such a clear anti-misogynist stance is hardly possible Yeong-ja’s Heydays, in which a few scenes stressing the depravity of the men who treat Yeong-ja as only a means for sexual gratification are not enough to dispel the misogyny inherent in the film itself. Instead, the critique focuses on the characters’ financial struggles in a more explicit way than Heavenly Homecoming to Stars. Yeong-ja’s friend, who initiates her into the hostess life, repeats the word ‘money’ while doing her make-up in the mirror; in order to survive, sentimental scruples must be cast aside as impediments to the hardscrabble acquisition of cash. Chang-su is similarly forced to scrimp and save, for there’s no plum post awaiting the Vietnam vet after his return, only a sweaty job as an attendant at a sauna, forcing him to scrimp and save to realise his tailoring dream. Kim’s film depicts a Korea in which those near the bottom rungs of society must make an unstinting effort to stave off destitution while those occupying more comfortable position (such as the layabout son of the steelworks boss, who sports Western-style longish hair as a sign of his foreign-influenced decadence) are able to abuse those under them with no consequence. The indictment of social inequality―sanctioned by the Park administration in its drive for industrialisation and economic growth―is unmistakable, but it avoids pointing fingers directly at the government. As with the condemnation of authoritarian misogyny in Heavenly Homecoming to Stars, such criticism is indirect enough to avoid unpleasant dealings with the censors. The inevitability of the tragic ending in Lee’s film might also be a way of muting subversive tendencies as it leans towards ascribing her death less to the miserable social reality and more to a cosmic determinism (hinted at in the title), as if to say that for all the awful things done to her, Gyeong-a would have met the same fate without them. Yeong-ja’s Heydays is much inferior as a film and far more unpalatable in its regressive attitudes, but the ending, which avoids both false optimism and gloomy defeatism, might be said to strike a more progressive, even defiant note―not going so far as to envisage broad social change, but at least to hold up the possibility of individual survival, however precarious.

The power struggle between Chang-su and Yeong-ja played out through blocking

Cut-up poem (from an old Penguin translation of Sophocles)

A voice cried for pity
       the tearful bird,

entombed in stone,
       weeping ever in endless sorrow

always and always 
       new shapes of woe,
              like a savage creature
much wronged. . . .

Money for Old Pope

[A poem I wrote way back in 2010, now republished to mark Ratzinger’s death]

A lovely day, Holiness, don’t you think?
Here’s a nice cool cocktail for you to drink.
Have a chocolate tart, or a juicy pear.
Shall I fluff your cushion, adjust your chair?
I’ve got this soothing oil here; let me anoint –

Stop crawling, boy. Get to the fucking point.

Holiness, Signor Berlusconi sends greeting.

Ach! I hope he doesn’t want a meeting.
I cannot stand that tanned and toupee’d twat.
Remind me to arrange a concordat
With Iran; a fatwa should do the trick –
Get some wild-eyed nutjob to waste the prick.
His continued life, I cannot endure.

Such thoughts, your Holiness, are most impure.

You expect my mind to be without taint?
I’m the goddamn Pope, dumbass, not a saint!
Well, what does little Silvio want now?
I doubt it’s something the Church should allow.

A petition, your Grace, to effect a change –
Some doctrinal details to rearrange.
The Prime Minister admits to his vice,
But carnal misdeeds are so very nice.
He’s not an easy man to satiate;
His horde of harlots numbers eighty-eight,
Yet even these can’t satisfy his lusts
Or meet his burning appetite for busts.
But, reflecting on his mortality,
He’s been stirred by a strange morality.
Terror of hell now makes him palpitate;
He’s anxious to avoid a dismal fate.
For his ease of conscience to be ensured,
His adulterous past must be abjured.
Signor wishes to lead a blameless life,
Yet cannot rest content with just one wife.
Might he be permitted a couple more?
Monogamy, he claims, is such a bore.
Polygamy’s the answer, so he says,
But receives at present papal dispraise;
To amend this dogma is his request,
So that his many amours might be blessed.
Declare each Catholic female his spouse,
And all his conquests will be kept in-house.

Does he take me for a total duffer?
Of all the bullshit I’ve had to suffer,
This is the biggest pile of stinking crap
That’s been excreted on my ageing lap.
Why should I make this outrageous decree?

Signor offers a most substantial fee.

That puts the matter in a different light.
I’m not convinced it’s altogether right,
But sometimes intransigence must give way
When affluent fools are prepared to pay.

Your Grace is quite astonishingly wise.
But you’re looking tired; I’ll massage your thighs.

‘Dom Casmurro’: The Big Question?

My previous posts about Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis have avoided reference to the major plot developments that occur in the latter part of the novel; from here on in, however, I will be discussing the whole book freely, so if you haven’t read it, you may want to give this and following posts a miss. Even if, like me, you’re not normally bothered by the idea of spoilers, you might want to think twice before reading ahead here, as I found the cunning with which Machado springs his nasty surprises on the reader a fundamental part of what he’s up to (although I do wonder how the book is received by Brazilian readers; how much of the story do they know before casting their eyes on the first page?). In this post and those that follow, I will mostly refer to the protagonist of the action as ‘Bento’ and the middle-aged man who narrates the action as ‘the narrator’.*

So, from here on in, I’m going to assume that you know that Bento Santiago does indeed marry his childhood friend Capitu; that they have a son, Ezequiel; that their conjugal happiness is ruptured by the drowning of their friend Escobar; that Bento, suspecting his wife of infidelity, concludes that Escobar was Ezequiel’s true father; that, after contemplating first suicide and then murder, he sends his wife and son away to Europe. If we take his narrative at face value, the bitter solitude of Bento’s middle-age—his metamorphosis into ‘Dom Casmurro’—is thus explained by the crushing disillusionment caused by his wife’s betrayal; in this light, the novel appears as a mixture of prosecution of Capitu’s misconduct, justification of Bento’s response to it, and failed attempt to come to terms with the past, to make sense of an enigma that proves unsolvable. But even as this narrative takes shape, a counter-narrative also begins to emerge: that the narrator is mistaken or even lying; that Capitu was faithful all along; that it is Bento’s obsessive jealousy, bordering on madness, which leads him to turn his family away and condemn himself to the torture of living alone and unloved. This counter-narrative exposes the narrator as an unreliable figure whose cruel delusions and/or lies (they may not be distinguishable) are revealed when the reader treats the text sceptically and critically. Once these competing narratives are apparent, the novel then seems to revolve around the question of Capitu’s fidelity, with the reader tasked with choosing between two possible conclusions in the absence of a definitive authorial statement. I write ‘seems’ because Machado is not content with elementary ambiguities. Other interpretations are possible; it’s also possible that the whole question isn’t that important anyway.

It was fascinating to learn that for the first half of the twentieth century, Brazilian critics who wrote about Dom Casmurro accepted the narrator’s account almost without question; the idea that Capitu’s alleged infidelity might have been an error or an outright fabrication on the part of a pathologically jealous husband does not appear to have been given much consideration until the publication in 1960 of Helen Caldwell’s study The Brazilian Othello of Machado de Assis. Caldwell, the novel’s first English translator, proposed that Capitu, like Shakespeare’s Desdemona, is the innocent victim of her husband’s paranoia and that Bento is a kind of hybrid Othello/Iago figure who deceives himself with his overactive imagination.** For all its importance in the history of Machado studies, however, I found Caldwell’s book a chore to get through; not only does it exasperatingly refer to fictional characters using the past tense, as if they were real historical personages, it also distorts the novel by stressing one aspect of it to the exclusion of all else. In this, her tunnel vision is as restricted as that of R.L. Scott-Buccleuch, her successor as translator; it scarcely matters whether one calls Dom Casmurro a story ‘about’ jealousy (Caldwell) or adultery (Scott-Buccleuch), for in both cases so much of what makes it such a rewarding yet bewildering work is missed. In both cases, the focal point is the same, yet it is not clear to me whether the novel has a focal point at all.

The manner in which the narrator reveals the ‘truth’ about Capitu and Escobar is so peculiarly indirect, gradual and muddled that it might with equal plausibility be read as a sign of narratorial guile or guilelessness. Certain events prior to the marriage might be taken as foreshadows of what is later revealed (e.g., Capitu’s cunning in concealing their romance; José Dias’s insinuation that she is waiting for a local beau to marry her; the look she exchanges with a passing dandy on horseback), but the first hint of adultery that I detected is when Escobar changes some money that Capitu has saved into pounds sterling. When Capitu tells her husband what she has done, he is surprised, but apparently not troubled; readers, meanwhile, may be troubled by Capitu’s capacity for secret dealings with Escobar, who even visits her at home while Bento is out. The narrator does nothing to tip the wink here; there’s nothing to the effect of ‘this is where I first began to suspect’ or ‘this is perhaps where I should have begun to suspect’; he maintains a façade of innocence even though he is writing years after the event, in full knowledge of its significance to what he later discloses. In the next few chapters, there are further intimations that all is not well: Ezequiel’s remarkable ability to imitate Escobar, which Capitu condemns as a bad habit; Escobar’s presence at Bento’s front door when Bento returns from the opera unexpectedly; Dona Glória’s coolness towards her daughter-in-law and grandson. Again, the narrator gives little sense of Bento being aware at the time of an affair between his wife and best friend, nor does he make it clear to the reader that this is what he now thinks took place; while there is a reference in a conversation with Capitu to doubts croaking like frogs inside him, Bento does not accuse Capitu of anything at this point; the doubts appear to concern his mother’s odd behaviour. When, after Escobar’s death, Capitu gazes at his body in a way that suggests a widow looking upon the corpse of her husband, Bento suddenly suspects he has been betrayed, but even here, the narrator is not explicit about this suspicion. When Bento delivers Escobar’s eulogy, he struggles to hide ‘the truth’ from the mourners, but the narrator does not state plainly what that truth is. Seeking mental clarity as he ruminates in the carriage on the way back from the funeral, Bento concludes that he has been blinded by his ‘old passion’, but here, again, the narrator is unclear: does he mean the passion of his love or the passion of his jealousy? Is this the point at which the scales fall from the deceived husband’s eyes, allowing him to perceive Capitu’s faithlessness? Or does he (temporarily) decide that his natural jealousy has led him to read too much into a single look? Nothing is stated without ambiguity, which makes a mockery of the narrator’s claim to present things in a ‘logical, deductive order’. Indeed, before Escobar’s death, readers may be misdirected into believing that it is Bento who will commit adultery when he develops an attraction to Escobar’s wife Sancha. In any case, Capitu’s mysterious gaze at the dead man, however suggestive, is not conclusive; the crisis is postponed until Bento notices the growing physical resemblance between Ezequiel and Escobar. It is this resemblance that apparently convinces Bento once and for all that Ezequiel is not his son; it is when he relates this realisation in Chapter 132 that the narrator finally uses entirely unambiguous language to refer to the affair (‘my friend, my wife’s lover, Escobar’). But even as the narrative of a wife’s adultery and betrayal, hitherto only alluded to in semi-obscure fashion, is at last fully unveiled, Machado is also baring the counter-narrative of a husband’s jealousy and paranoia.

The main evidence that Bento for his wife’s infidelity is Ezequiel’s physical resemblance to Escobar—a resemblance that only becomes fully apparent to Bento after Escobar’s death, when Capitu herself draws his attention to it. Later, just as Bento’s resolve to separate from his wife and child is wavering, Ezequiel’s entrance enables Bento to quickly compare the boy with a picture of Escobar; this, together with a look on Capitu’s face that he interprets as a confession, are enough to remove all doubt. As prime evidence, this is not convincing, especially as one party is dead and only his image can serve as point of comparison. The narrator reminds readers of another striking resemblance between a living person and the image of a deceased one: Capitu’s resemblance to the portrait of Sancha’s mother. Though Bento recalls this purely coincidental resemblance just before Capitu agrees to a separation, the recollection does not prompt him to question his certainty that he has been betrayed; indeed, when he continues to brood on the past, he re-evaluates his memories, reading sinister cunning into episodes between his wife and Escobar where none had previously been apparent. ‘Now I remembered everything that at the time had seemed to be nothing’, writes the narrator, which is almost an invitation to the reader to ask whether that ‘everything’ is anything but a distortion of the past to make it conform to an idea.

The two narratives—the one of Capitu’s adultery and the one of Bento’s delusions—are, in their strongest forms, irreconcilable. Both cannot be true: either Ezequiel is Bento’s son or he is not. Readers are not necessarily limited to choosing between these two narratives, however. Weaker variations, unmentioned by the narrator, might also be possible: that Capitu remains faithful, but secretly desires Escobar (just as Bento conceives a momentary lust for Sancha, which he does not act on); that Ezequiel is Escobar’s son after all, but is the result of a brief dalliance rather than a prolonged affair; that Ezequiel is neither Bento’s nor Escobar’s son; that Bento, not Capitu, is the unfaithful one (with Sancha, or with another woman) and his accusations are just designed to conceal the truth. There isn’t any evidence to support these hypotheses, but if we decide that the narrator is utterly unreliable, to what extent are we bound to the evidence of his narrative? If nothing is knowable, then is one version of events as good as another? One particularly wild idea I entertained is that, rather than abandoning his plans to kill his wife and child, Bento really does go through with them; the whole story of their exile in Europe is a madman’s rewriting of history; the replica of his childhood home that he builds in middle-age exists only in his mind. Here’s another version: he murders his wife and child in cold blood, then concocts the story of sending them to Europe as a devious explanation of their absence. Or perhaps he just kills one of them and then gets the other out of the way by exiling them. I’m not arguing that any of these hypotheses ought to be taken seriously so much as suggesting that they can’t be entirely discounted; if we accept that much, then not only does the choice between a faithless Capitu and a deluded Bento no longer seem so starkly binary, but it also seems of diminished importance to our understanding of the novel.

There is another narrative for which there is rather more textual evidence: that Bento, perhaps without knowing it, is in love with his best friend. It’s always worth reminding ourselves, of course, that what might appear homoerotic to us as modern readers may not have been understood as such by readers and authors in the past; even today, there are societies in which close same-sex friendships can involve a high degree of physical intimacy that is not remotely sexual. There need not be anything erotic in the kind of embrace in which Bento and Escobar are observed in Chapter 94—but then what are we to make of the disapproval this gesture earns from the priest and other seminarians who witness it? The priest says that it is immodest; Escobar remarks that this is a rebuke made out of envy; he secretly grasps Bento’s hand and squeezes it so firmly that the narrator imagines that he can still feel it. Elsewhere, the homoeroticism is mixed up with other aspects of sexuality: voyeurism, jealousy, envy, egotism, displaced desire. The dream that the narrator recounts in Chapter 63 is a precursor to an incident that actually happens later on; in the dream, Capitu provokes Bento’s jealousy by chatting to a local beau, which anticipates the later episode in Chapters 71-73, in which Bento is made jealous by Capitu’s exchange of glances with just such a local beau. However, whereas in the later episode, it is Capitu who watches the parade of young men visiting their sweethearts while Bento looks up at her, in the dream, it is Bento who is looking at the young men. The later episode in begins with Escobar leaving Bento’s house; Capitu (who does not yet know Escobar) secretly watches the whole of their affectionate parting from her window and deduces that they must be very close friends. What Bento does not tell her is that he is disappointed when Escobar does not turn back to leave him with one last glance; it is while he is in this state of disappointment, looking up at Capitu, that he notices the lingering shared look between Capitu and one of the passing beaux—an elegant figure who is unnamed, but whose face is ‘not unfamiliar’ to Bento (recognised from the dream, perhaps?). So much is going on here. Both Capitu and Escobar disappoint/anger Bento by not making him the focus of their vision; the sense of betrayal that leaves Bento with a ‘burning heart’ is a double betrayal. The beau passes by just after Bento tells Capitu his friend’s name; this identification of Escobar with the young rider drops a hint of the future adultery storyline (a hint underscored by a reference to Othello). Is the narrator signalling to readers that it was a mistake for Bento to have been so upset by Capitu’s exchange of looks with the horseman when the real cause for concern should have been her voyeuristic observation of Escobar? Is there, at the same time, a touch of jealousy in Capitu’s behaviour? Does she recognise in Escobar a potential romantic rival?

Desires are similarly entangled in Chapter 118, when Bento mulls over the possibility of an affair with Sancha. It is Sancha’s ‘warm and imperious’ eyes that raise this possibility in Bento’s mind; she is excited by the idea of a joint trip to Europe. There is already something odd about the closeness of these two couples—a whiff of the perverse, even (the husbands plan an even closer union by pairing off their children). Might a sojourn in decadent old Europe provide opportunities for further intimacies? Strikingly, both Sancha’s and Bento’s eyes assume in this passage the quality of independent objects that move about the room and follow each other; when Machado writes ‘the four of them stopped and faced each other’, he means the two pairs of eyes belonging to Sancha and Bento, but the number also calls to mind the four members of the Bento-Capitu-Escobar-Sancha quartet. Just as Bento is contemplating this new attraction to Sancha, her husband announces that he is going to swim in the sea the next morning, though he knows it will be rough (fatally so, as it turns out). Escobar slaps his chest in a display of masculine strength and invites Bento to feel his arms, which Bento does, in an extraordinary act of substitution, ‘as if they were Sancha’s’. But what is being substituted here? Is Bento, denied the pleasure of feeling Sancha’s arms, using Escobar’s as an erotic substitute, or is the narrator, unable to admit to experiencing pleasure at feeling Escobar’s arms, using Sancha’s as a narrative substitute? Mingled with this desire (whether for Escobar or for Sancha or for both of them) is a feeling of envy, for Escobar’s arms are thicker and stronger than his own. As he leaves, Bento again tries to communicate to Sancha with his eyes; her response is to squeeze his hand hard, which recalls the similar scene between Bento and Escobar in the seminary (the words ‘modesty’ and ‘gesture’ serve as verbal echoes). Escobar’s exhibition of virility—so much in contrast to the slim, restless seminarist described in Chapter 56—raises further questions. Is he trying to intimidate Bento, to warn him off after noticing the interaction with his wife? Or is he offering himself as an alternative object of desire, reminding Bento of where his affections ought to lie? This open display and admiration of arms among the husbands is in pointed contrast to their wish that their wives wear long sleeves at balls so as not to arouse other men.***

The questions of Ezequiel’s paternity and Bento’s romantic affections are expressions of an anxiety about masculinity evident throughout the novel. Bento is sometimes presented as not quite ‘manly’: he is terrified of horses and mules as a child (a pointed contrast to the elegant rider with whom he suspects Capitu of flirting); his lover and then wife is, as the narrator writes, ‘more of a of a woman that I was a man’ (Chapter 31); he is inferior to Escobar in strength and swimming prowess; he is late (compared to Escobar) in producing an heir. Ezequiel himself is, as a child, far bolder than Bento, being prepared to chase away stray dogs and interested in violence and soldiering; the signs of an enterprising nature that Escobar sees in him might be taken as a sign of kinship. How significant is it that, even before his friend’s death, Bento keeps a picture of Escobar next to one of his mother at his beachside house? In the Matacavalos house (and in the later replica of it), Dona Glória’s picture is situated next to one of her husband—the unremembered father who, by dying, leaves José Dias and Uncle Cosme (neither of them conventional models of masculine virility) to serve as the two main male influences in his son’s upbringing. Does Escobar represent for Bento an ideal of manhood and paternity unavailable to him as a child? Does Escobar’s death bring Bento’s sense of masculinity to such a point of crisis that he can only resolve it by enacting the unlikely role of a stern avenging cuckold à la Othello? Perhaps it is little wonder that Machado’s early (male) critics took the narrator’s account largely at face value; had they taken the portrait of the protagonist as at all representative of respectable Brazilian masculinity, they might not have welcomed the questions they would then have had to face. If the narrator’s account goes unquestioned or if the difficulties it raises are too easily resolved, other problems (socio-political, psychological, philosophical, literary) either then do not arise or appear less prominent. This applies as well if we simplify the book into a tale of an honest wife wronged by a cruelly paranoid husband. This, it seems to me, is the role that Capitu’s fidelity or otherwise plays in Machado’s design: not as the central question to be definitively answered one way or another (it’s just fiction, after all), but as a catalyst for other, more interesting questions and considerations—for which this post has no room to examine.

* Some critics simply use ‘Dom Casmurro’ to refer to the narrator, while using Bento for the protagonist (and sometimes also Bentinho for his juvenile incarnation). This doesn’t seem satisfactory to me; I don’t think it’s helpful either to elide all distinction between the narrator and ‘Dom Casmurro’ (which is a nickname coined by someone else that the narrator adopts as a title) or to make the distinction between ‘Dom Casmurro’ and ‘Bento’ too clear.

** Brief accounts of Dom Casmurro’s critical history can be found in Paul B. Dixon’s Retired Dreams: Dom Casmurro, Myth and Modernity (1989) and James R. Krause’s Translation and the Reception and Influence of Latin-American Literature in the United States (2010). 

*** There are precedents for the open representation of same-sex desire in 19^th century Brazilian literature, as noted by John Gledson in his chapter ‘Machado de Assis and Graciliano Ramos: Speculations on Sex and Sexuality’ in Lusosex: Gender and Sexuality in the Portuguese-Speaking World (2002), ed. Susan Canty Quinlan and Fernando Arenas, pp. 12-34. Machado sometimes writes about sexual matters in Dom Casmurro with a surprising degree of candour—though with just enough ironic coyness to avoid censure from guardians of morality; see, for example, the veiled but unmistakable reference to wet dreams and masturbation in Chapter 58.

Still here…

This blog is not dead. It is simply that being a first-year teacher in the midst of a global pandemic exercises a bit of pressure on my time. I will finish my posts on Dom Casmurro when I can. In the meantime, here is a picture of some insects.

What Kind of Book is ‘Dom Casmurro’?

When I looked at two of the available translations of Dom Casmurro in my previous post, I suggested that the differences between them might be regarded as expressions of different answers to the question posed above. R.L. Scott-Buccleuch, in his rather cursory introduction, is quite clear on the matter, stating that the theme of Machado’s novel is… well, no, I’m not going to say what that theme is just yet, as it would mean giving away too much of the plot; that can wait for another post. A now out-of-print incarnation of the translation was furiously denounced when it was discovered that whole chapters had been omitted without acknowledgement or explanation; it seems impossible to conclude why this was done, since both Scott-Buccleuch and his previous publisher, Penguin, appear to have refrained from commenting on the controversy, but it is tempting, nonetheless, to consider it no coincidence that the surreptitiously excised material is, on the face of it, largely extraneous to what Scott-Buccleuch identifies as the novel’s theme. The theme places Dom Casmurro within a tradition of 19^th-century fiction well-known to readers of European and North American literature, who might not have the faintest notion of the literature of Brazil; viewed through this lens, the novel might even appear reassuringly familiar to such readers. No need to worry, then, if you know nothing of the Paraguayan War of 1864-1870, of the intricacies of Brazil’s slave economy, of the history of its royal family, of the peculiarities of its social structure, of the geography of Rio de Janeiro, because none of this is important to Machado de Assis, whose only concern was to write ‘a tale of suburban life’ whose setting ‘might well be a variation of Paris, Vienna, or London’. But Dom Casmurro will not stay confined within such a neat little box.

Before I consider how Gledson’s reading of the novel might have led him to produce such a different translation, I had better introduce it a bit more fully than I did in my previous book; perhaps this will give some idea of the inadequacy of Scott-Buccleuch’s characterization of it. The narrator is Bento Santiago, a middle-aged man living alone (apart from a single servant) in Rio de Janeiro towards the end of the 19^th century, in a house that is an exact replica of his now-demolished childhood home. Bored in his uneventful seclusion, he decides to write a volume of memoirs, selecting as a title his nickname, Dom Casmurro.* The story Bento tells begins in 1857, when he was fifteen and in love with his next-door neighbour, Capitu. The young lovers are divided by class, for while Bento is the son of a rich, slave-owning widow, Capitu’s father, Pádua, is a civil servant with a modest income, who bought his house with a share of a winning lottery ticket. The romance is threatened by a solemn promise made before Bento was born: after losing one son, his mother, Dona Glória, had promised God that her second, should he be allowed to live, would become a priest. The naïve, passionate yet also passive Bento and the far more practical Capitu strive to devise a plan to avoid his being sent to the seminary. Other important characters in this story include José Dias, an obsequious devotee of homeopathy who lives with Bento’s family, dependent on their generosity; Uncle Cosme, a corpulent lawyer with a love of cards and backgammon; Cousin Justina, a sharp-tongued widow; Capitu’s best friend Sancha; and Bento’s enterprising best friend Escobar.

So much for the plot and the characters. What makes a large portion of the book so enjoyable is the beguilingly Shandean narrator, who indulges in digressions, addresses his readers directly, peppers the text with ellipses (much as Tristram Shandy peppers his account with dashes), drops in abundant literary and historical allusions, claims forgetfulness, makes false starts, lays bare the mechanics of writing. Adolescent emotional excesses, religious hypocrisy, the petty absurdities of a class-bound, priest-riddled society: these are relayed with a wry irony that stops well short of scorn, so that the tone is generally polished and amusing, sweet yet ever so lightly cynical, with just enough eccentricity and playfulness to avoid being insipid. Here, for example, is Bento on a friend of the family, who has just been promoted to an important position in the Church, being congratulated by Capitu:

Father Cabral was in the first flush of glory, when the slightest congratulations seem like laudatory odes. The time comes when those who have been honored take this praise for granted, and accept it without acknowledgement, blankfaced. The excitement of the first moment is best; that state of mind which sees the bending of a tree in the wind as a personal homage from the world’s flora brings more delicate, more intimate sensations than any other. Cabral listened to Capitu’s words with infinite pleasure.

The image itself is hilarious enough; what makes it funnier is that the worldly pride of this elderly priest is described in the heady language of young love’s first stirrings, the sensation of a first kiss, at once carnal and innocent—the kind of language that Bento has already applied to himself, so that the humour works both ways. But not everything is as delightful as this kind of genial slyness. Slavery, poverty, avarice, sickness, death: at first, they seem peripheral, but their presence becomes more insistent. There are oddities of tone in Bento’s narration, strange fantasies, lacunae, evasions, which may seem merely eccentric early on, but which begin to promise a darker turn… and then, well past the half-way mark, it all goes completely haywire.

What does Gledson make of all this? In stark contrast to Scott-Buccleuch, the Paraguayan War, the slave economy, the politics and society of the Brazilian empire, and the geography of Rio de Janeiro are all very much relevant to his view of the nature of the book; accordingly, his translation is buttressed by detailed footnotes and a substantial introduction, as well as an afterword by João Adolfo Hansen. Contextual knowledge is deemed necessary, because Machado de Assis is, in Gledson’s eyes, essentially a realist author of works of trenchant social criticism—a surprising position, you might think, given Dom Casmurro’s narrowly subjective viewpoint, its formal tricksiness, its lack of direct political engagement (Bento professes a distaste for politics). In his introduction, Gledson points to Machado’s rejection of deterministic Naturalism as a spur to his turn away from the omniscient third-person narrator in favour of intricate experiments in narration—not as a repudiation of realism, but as a move towards a form of realism that embraces the narrator, ‘thoroughly grounded in his own physical and temporal environment’. The informed reader, attentive to the gaps between the narrator’s discourse and the author’s, is not restricted to the narrator’s view of that physical and temporal environment; the realistic social critique becomes visible once the reader realizes that the subjective experience of Bento Santiago (and of Bentinho and Dom Casmurro) is part of a much broader picture that includes slavery, gender roles, social inequalities, hypocrisy, religious cant, obsession with money, etc.

This is not the Machado de Assis fatuously saluted by Harold Bloom as ‘the supreme black literary artist to date’, whose ironical genius is blessedly autonomous ‘in regard to time and place, politics and religion’.** Neither is it the proto-modernist or proto-post-modernist Machado, the subtle rhetorician and metafictional trickster who anticipated Borges, Carpentier, Cortázar. When Alfred Mac Adam, one of Gledson’s critical opponents, cites Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right (1868-9) as a genuine realist novel—long, bursting with subplots and supporting characters, directly tackling pressing social questions, conveying ‘an overwhelming sense of totality’—as a contrast to Dom Casmurro, it might be seen as a somewhat facile ploy (look at these two completely different books and note how completely different they are), but it stresses the major problem for proponents of the realist Machado: if Dom Casmurro does indeed present a view of society, then why is it ‘so oblique as to be obtuse’?*** Much of the case for Machado as a social critic depends on allegory and analogy, some of which is so subtle and allusive that its recognition is scarcely possible without scholarly exegesis and the determined rooting-out of covert authorial intentions; hence the necessary apparatus of foreword, footnotes and afterword, without which the force and extent of the social critique might not be apparent to ordinary readers.

There is a problem, though, for those who would deny that Machado portrays a society, for while there is little in the way of thick description, there is an abundance of small, precise detail: names of streets, churches, suburbs; information about jobs and social status; the particulars of Dona Glória’s income; the names of even very minor characters. If Dom Casmurro is a text about language, an anti-realist exercise in formal experimentation uninterested in representing the world, why this superfluous profusion? Is it not a distraction? Not only that, but the allusiveness of the novel is not solely inter-textual; some of the references seem to have an extra-textual, social significance that is hard to dismiss, just as it is hard to dismiss the presence of pointed political allegory. The world keeps peeping through. Readings that are oblique are not necessarily unconvincing—but further discussion will have to wait for other posts, which will include information about the plot that readers who have not read Dom Casmurro may want to avoid. I’m not usually bothered by spoilers, as I don’t tend to read books primarily for their plots, but in this case I’m glad I didn’t know what lay ahead of me as I read, as it meant that Machado’s formal and conceptual brilliance struck me with all the more power.

 

 

* ‘Casmurro’ has a range of meanings that includes taciturn and stubborn. The character of the narrator has, in effect, three names that can be identified with particular periods of his life: Bentinho as a child and adolescent; Bento as a young man; and Dom Casmurro as a man in his fifties. For the sake of convenience, I will generally stick to using Bento. Although it might seem natural to use the name associated with the ‘author’ of the text (within the fiction, that is), to do so would be to give the book an inappropriate emphasis, for reasons that will be evident to anyone who has read it. No choice is completely satisfactory—and that includes the surname, Santiago—but Bento seems to me the least objectionable.

** This is from Bloom’s 2002 book Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, quoted on p. 150 of James R. Krause’s doctoral dissertation, available to read here.

*** See Mac Adam, Alfred (1999). The Rhetoric of Jealousy: Dom Casmurro. Hispanic Review, Vol. 67, No. 1, pp. 51-62.

Dom Casmurro (1899, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, translated by R.L. Scott-Buccleuch/John Gledson)

It was wonderful to read Dom Casmurro—wonderful to be charmed by its urbane, relaxed irony, and then thrilled by the audacious surprises it springs towards the end, when early impressions of the book are gleefully torn asunder. Bento Santiago, a solitary, middle-aged lawyer, recalls a youthful romance with his next-door neighbour, the practical and clear-sighted Capitu. The story recounts the lovers’ struggles against what appears to be the main obstacle to their happiness: a promise made to God by the boy’s pious mother that he be sent to a seminary and ordained as a priest. The mature Bento, who claims to be writing partly in order to cure his boredom, is a delightful and digressive narrator whose teasing sophistication undercuts the display of sentimental nostalgia without demolishing it. For much of its length, the novel is like a pleasant white wine sipped on a fine summer’s evening, with a few hints of bitterness (the presence of slavery, the dominance of the church, Bento’s own jealousy) to ward off excessive sweetness; but the bitter notes become more prominent, until they suddenly become overwhelming, and it’s no longer wine you’re drinking, but vinegar.

My satisfaction upon finishing the book was short-lived, however, for a few hours later I made the horrifying discovery that the translator, R.L. Scott-Buccleuch, had omitted nine chapters without explanation, provoking a storm of scholarly outrage; without those nine chapters, could I actually claim to have read the novel? I researched and weighed up the other options: a translation by Helen Caldwell from 1953 and one from 1997 by John Gledson. Commentary on Caldwell seemed to agree that her version was respectable but somewhat stodgy, so I ordered a copy of the Gledson and read it two weeks after I had finished Scott-Buccleuch. My appreciation for Machado’s brilliance was deepened by reading Gledson’s superior rendering; in this post I want to explore some of the reasons for its success.

As I read Gledson’s version one thing puzzled me: I did not seem to be encountering anything new and unfamiliar in terms of the book’s contents. I checked Scott-Buccleuch again; the supposedly missing chapters were, in fact, all present, so what was going on? The publication history offered a clue: the translation was first published by Peter Owen in 1992, before appearing under the Penguin Classics label in 1994; the copy I had was from 2016 (Peter Owen again), with a note to say that it was complete and unabridged. Had Scott-Buccleuch newly translated the previously missing material and silently re-inserted it? His introduction offers no information, and is completely silent on the controversy surrounding the earlier version. What is not clear to me yet is whether the 1992 version is complete; all the criticisms I’ve read of his earlier omissions refer to the Penguin translation. I would have to check a copy of the 1992 edition to be sure.

The chapters that Scott-Buccleuch excised are of little consequence for the plot—but conventional plot-based storytelling is hardly Machado’s chief concern. Their importance relates primarily to our understanding of the nature of the narrative. A religious poem composed by one of Bento’s contemporaries; an attempted sonnet by Bento himself, of which only the first and last lines are completed; a sexual fantasy; reflections on the narrator’s poor memory, on his reading habits, on nostalgia: all these things contribute to our sense of Machado’s authorial cunning and enrich our sense of the novel’s multiple ambiguities. So why cut them out? The chapters in Dom Casmurro are notably short, some of them consisting of a single brief paragraph; the abridgement would have had a negligible page-reducing effect. It does not seem to have been merely an error, as, from what I understand, not all of these chapters were excised completely; a few sentences were retained as if to paper over the cracks and disguise the act of removal. As neither Penguin nor Scott-Buccleuch appear to have explained themselves or responded to the criticism, motivations must remain mysterious for the present.

This murky affair aside, however, Gledson’s translation is clearly preferable. Gledson himself has pointed out his predecessor’s laziness and disregard for social specificity; a telling example is provided by Scott-Buccleuch’s rendering of the term ‘agregado’ as a ‘friend of the family’. The character to whom this applies, José Dias, is someone who lives with Bento’s family and depends on them financially; Gledson, by translating ‘agregado’ as ‘dependent’, gives a sense of José Dias’s particular social status that Scott-Buccleuch misses. Scott-Buccleuch’s slapdash imprecision is very much apparent if we compare the opening paragraph of each translation. Scott-Buccleuch’s is first, followed by Gledson’s.

One evening on my way home to Engenho Novo from town I met a young fellow on the Central Line train. He lived in the neighbourhood, and I knew him vaguely by sight. He greeted me, sat down beside me, talked about one thing and another and ended up reciting poetry. The journey was short, and his verses may not have been altogether bad. But it happened that I was tired, and I dozed off once or twice, causing him to break off his reading and put his verses back in his pocket.

One evening just lately, as I was coming back from town to Engenho Novo on the Central line train, I met a young man from this neighborhood, whom I know by sight: enough to raise my hat to him. He greeted me, sat down next to me, started talking about the moon and ministerial comings and goings, and ended up reciting some of his verses. The journey was short, and it may be that the verses were not entirely bad. But it so happened that I was tired, and closed my eyes three or four times; enough for him to interrupt the reading and put his poems back in his pocket.

Given Scott-Buccleuch’s demonstrated willingness to omit whole chapters, it should not be surprising to find less conspicuous omissions. Gledson retains the idea of the social gesture of raising one’s hat in greeting, a gesture appropriate to somebody the narrator often sees but doesn’t know very well; I don’t know Portuguese, but I would guess it corresponds to ‘que eu conheço de vista e de chapéu’ in Machado’s original. Scott-Buccleuch, replacing a gesture with an adverb, implicates by its placement not only the degree of acquaintance between the two men, but also the act of recognition, as if Bento were not able to immediately identify the young man’s face—a slightly different idea. Gledson also retains the twin subjects of the young man’s prattle (‘da Lua e dos ministros’), an intriguing pairing that might cause us to ponder the possibility of a connection between them. Is the young man a bit cracked? Is Bento having fun at his expense? Or are the moon and ministers simply the two things that stuck in Bento’s attention? Just this little phrase opens up a range of possibilities denied the reader by Scott-Buccleuch’s flavourless ‘one thing and another’. In Scott-Buccleuch, Bento dozes off once or twice; in Gledson, he closes his eyes three or four times; Machado’s ‘fechei os olhos três ou quatro vezes’ makes it pretty clear who is more accurate here. Fidelity to the original is not the only measure of a translation’s success, of course, and the difference in Bento’s reaction to the unsolicited poetry recital may seem minor; nonetheless, dozing off is a rather more obviously insulting action than closing one’s eyes, and so it creates a different impression of the offence the young man takes at Bento’s tiredness. The change from ‘três ou quatro vezes’ to ‘once or twice’ is hard to explain, and is not the only numerical inconsistency in Scott-Buccleuch; I can only assume that it is the result of a simple error that he gives José Dias’s age as about fifty-two, rather than fifty-five.

One very noticeable difference between the two translations is their treatment of the snippets of dialogue given to the slaves who appear from time to time. Scott-Buccleuch, perhaps out of a desire to avoid degrading minstrelsy, reduces the caricatured servility and makes no attempt to reproduce Machado’s colloquialisms:

 Outside, a black man, who had for some time been selling cocadas, coconut sweetmeats, stopped in front of us and said, ‘Senhorita, do you want some cocadas today?’
‘No,’ replied Capitu.
‘They’re very good.’
‘Go away,’ she said but not harshly.
‘Give me two,’ I said, reaching down to receive a couple.

Gledson, I think correctly, decides against this tidying up, and also sticks closer to Machado’s layout of the text:

We had gone over to the window; a black who for some time had been hawking coconut sweets, stopped in the street opposite and asked:
“Missy want coconut today?”
“No,” said Capitu.
“Coconut good.”
“Go away,” she replied, but not harshly.
“Give some here!” said I, putting my hand down to take two.

It is not stated whether this cocada seller is a slave, though he is portrayed in the same uncomplaining, deferential way that other minor characters who are definitely slaves are portrayed. Corrosive, fraudulent nostalgia, including for the era of slavery (finally abolished in Brazil in 1888, when Bento would have been in his mid-forties), is one of the main themes of the book, which is extremely attentive to the social status of its characters; the stereotyped, racist presentation of dialogue and character by the narrator is an indicator of his class, which profits from slavery. Machado does not simply indict his narrator as an individual, he indicts the whole social structure that he represents; some of the force of that indictment is lost if the racism and class dominance that characterized that social structure are down-played.* It may also make a difference whether the cocada seller, whom Bento calls ‘um preto’ in the Portuguese, is referred to as ‘a black man’ or as ‘a black’—although the precise nature of that difference is something beyond my ability to judge. Neither rendering of the word conveys the complex history of racial categorisation in Brazil, with its range of labels for different skin tones (something of which I am only dimly aware); probably only a footnote—or, better, a paragraph or two in the introduction—would have sufficed in that regard.** I am left wondering whether Scott-Buccleuch, by changing ‘black’ into an adjective and inserting ‘man’, removes the expression of a dehumanising classifying element that was integral to the society the novel portrays, or whether Gledson, by hewing more closely to the original wording, neglects the cultural difference that might lead a modern anglophone reader to experience a kind of mental jolt on encountering what would have been, in context, a matter-of-fact term. Perhaps the truth is something else entirely. It does seem clearly unsatisfactory, though, when Scott-Buccleuch at another point translates ‘um preto’ as ‘a servant’, which disguises the reality of slavery interwoven throughout the ostensibly wistful reminiscences of an adolescent romance. The choices made by these two translators may well represent different answers to the question: just what kind of a novel is Dom Casmurro? I will begin to explore this question in a separate post, but I will say now that I don’t believe it’s a question that can ever be satisfactorily answered.

* There is also the possibility that the cocada seller’s mode of speech is a deliberate display for the benefit of his intended customers, i.e. that he is speaking in the way that he supposes free white people with money would expect of him. Interestingly, in Caldwell’s translation of this passage, Capitu and Bento too become more colloquial (“Go ’way,” and “Give ’em here!”), as if they alter their speech when addressing someone far lower down the social hierarchy. Caldwell translates ‘um preto’ as ‘a Negro pedlar’, which seems to me like an imposition of terminology from a North American context.

** It’s a telling indicator of the difference between the two translations that while Scott-Buccleuch dispenses with footnotes altogether (not necessarily a matter wholly within his control, of course), Gledson’s, though lacking in this instance, are copious and generally illuminating.

Two Untitled Cut-Up Poems

1.
the waiting bones
  old and white and twisty
rattling noisily
                all night

the rusty little skull
                out of breath
its dark songs
                extinguished

 

 

2.
one single wisp of smoke
rising
spiralling upward to fling out
pale    grey    leaves
    turning in circles far above
                       the light

        floating   away