All posts tagged King Lear

The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance @ the National Gallery

‘The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance’ is a one-room, free display at the National Gallery in London. Go in the main entrance, up the stairs to the mezzanine level, then turn right and up more stairs to room 46.

It’s amazing how much you can cram into one room in a gallery, in this case ten or so paintings, 4 or 5 drawings and several sculptures which, taken together, open up whole imaginative worlds and intellectual vistas. Amazing how much you can extrapolate from one work of art, about an entire era’s attitudes to men and women, ageing, its sense of humour, its fear of the supernatural.

The Ugly Duchess

It all starts by considering one of the best-known faces in the National Gallery: Quinten Massys’s early 16th-century depiction of an old woman, popularly known as ‘The Ugly Duchess’. Made in Antwerp in about 1513, it is an extremely striking image.

An Old Woman (‘The Ugly Duchess’), about 1513 by Quinten Massys © Photo: The National Gallery, London

Ugly

Quite obviously this is an exaggerated and grotesque caricature. Focusing just on the features, you’d have thought it was the face of an old man, but the closer you look you realise all kinds of things are going on in this picture. The most obvious element is probably the woman’s mannish, ugly face but you quickly move o to notice the very low-cut dress revealing her ample but wrinkled bosom.

It’s obviously a satire or caricature of the stock standard Renaissance portrait, which, of course, showed the sitter to best advantage, flattering them by smoothing out wrinkles and omitting blemishes. Quite obviously this painting is doing the exact opposite, packing in as many unflattering details as possible – big ears, stubby nose, disappeared lips, as many wrinkles as the human neck can cope with, a huge expanse of neck and bosom revealing the mannish solidity of her shoulders and the wrinkled bust.

The ‘philtrum’ is the technical name for the groove which runs between nose and lips, but it’s not only this which is long but the entire space or stretch of face from nose to mouth which is as huge as possible, almost giving her the prognathous appearance of a chimpanzee.

So there’s an implicit contrast with the genre of the standard Renaissance flattering portrait. But there’s another contrast worth mentioning, which is the contrast between the gargoyle grotesqueness of the face and body and the immaculately naturalistic detailing of the headdress and cascading wimple.

Detail of An Old Woman (‘The Ugly Duchess’), about 1513 by Quinten Massys © Photo: The National Gallery, London

Seeing a painting like this in the flesh allows you to go right up to it and marvel at the extreme detailing of the fabric of the headdress – you can virtually see each thread of the fabric, the detail of each one of the embroidered flowers; to marvel at the intricate working of the diadem or broach including the glints of light on the lovingly crafted pearls – which are, when you look really closely, echoed by the pearls studding the ring she’s wearing on her right forefinger.

So, to put it crudely, there’s another contrast at work here, between the deliberate grotesqueness of the face and the breath-taking filigree detail of the setting (headdress, broach, and amazing depiction of light and shade in the folds of the linen wimple).

Talking of her finger, there’s one last relevant detail which is the flower. In her right hand, between finger and thumb, she is delicately holding the flower of a rose which hasn’t yet opened. This is a traditional symbol of budding love i.e. a visual signal appropriate for a very young woman, a teenage virginal girl. Here it works as another element emphasising the grotesqueness of the portrait and satirising the entire genre.

Her husband

Mention of the rose leads us to the next factor, which is her partner. The exhibition has obtained on loan from a private collection in America the painting which originally partnered the duchess, namely Massys’s portrait of an old man.

An Old Man, about 1513 by Quinten Massys. Photo © Evan Read, Department of Paintings Conservation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sexism and unfairness

Now, you don’t have to be an art scholar to notice that, although it isn’t exactly flattering, although he too has a lugubrious nose and plentiful wrinkles, the husband portrait isn’t in the same class of grotesque as the old woman. Feminists interpret this as unfairness: why is the old man acceptable but the old woman grotesque?

One way of answering this is to say, with feminists, that Western society has always been sexist and patriarchal, with continuous misogynist tendencies. That age in women was treated far more harshly, seen as far more negative, than in men, and that an older man’s efforts to dress well and make the most of himself was respected whereas the same behaviour in an older woman was derided.

Artistic licence

But there’s another way of thinking about the issue, regarded as an artistic problem or genre. This is that ‘the old woman’, as subject, afforded Renaissance painters opportunities for invention, play and satire that portraits of more ‘normal’ people didn’t allow. As the curators put it, the ‘unruly bodies’ of older women, no longer smooth and supple as in standardised models of beauty, can be seen as metaphors for social disorder, for the topsy-turvey world which attracted medieval and Renaissance culture as much as its hierarchies of order.

There is undeniable joy in beholding ‘the Ugly Duchess’ trample beauty standards, social conventions and gender expectations.

Flower and fur

Back to the husband, and art scholars debate whether the posture of his right hand is politely rejecting the budding rose which the duchess is offering him.

Away and above these debates about symbolism is a simpler fact about this work which is the amazing depiction of the fur around his neck. Again it isn’t so clear in a reproduction, but in the flesh, standing in front of the actual painting, you can really see the difference between the depiction of the fur lining his coat and what appears to be the black velvet of the coat itself. it’s stunningly sensual and alive.

Contemporary couples

There’s a number of reasons why I strongly prefer the art of the Northern Renaissance to the Italian Renaissance. One is the rocky barrenness of the settings of so many Italian paintings, compared with the lush grass, flowers and verdure of northern paintings. I like the flowers and animals, the little rabbits and whatnot you tend to get in the background of northern Renaissance art.

Portraits like this don’t have animals and pastures in them, but they exemplify two other aspects of northern art I like. One is the extraordinary fine detailing of fabric, embroidery, jewellery and so on. The other is the ugliness of the people. Italian Renaissance paintings capture the handsomeness of Italian people, but I live in grotty northern Europe among people who are, by and large, not fashion models. Therefore I like the frank depiction of non-beautiful people. The exhibition gives an example of an older couple by a contemporary of Massys, Jan Gossaert.

An Elderly Couple, about 1520 by Jan Gossaert © The National Gallery, London

It’s hard to think your way into the mindset of the man on the left who probably paid a lot for this painting and was presumably, happy enough to pay for this pretty unflattering depiction. It bespeaks a mindset different from the Italian Renaissance, one which prioritises honesty at all costs. For me it’s something to do with the northern Protestant, or even Puritan, spirit. Truth over gloss. Epitomised by the arch Puritan Oliver Cromwell telling his portrait painter to depict him ‘warts and all’. It is the humanist tradition, accepting of human weakness, frailty and imperfection.

As to its relevance to the Ugly Duchess, this painting epitomises some of the conventions of double portraits which the Duchess flouts. The older woman is modestly dressed (her clothes covering her up to the neck). Her eyes are modestly cast down. And, crucially, she is standing behind and on the left side of her husband.

Left and right

In double portraits of couples like this, it was the convention to depict the man standing on the right, the hierarchically superior position, our left as we look at it. Therefore the duchess’s position on the right hand side of her husband (in the world of the picture) is another way in which the composition subverts or mocks conventional standards of portraiture.

Leonardo, the source

But talking of the Italian Renaissance links to the rather surprising presence of Leonardo da Vinci in the exhibition. Why? Because among his multifarious other interests, Leonardo had a well-attested interest in ‘the grotesque’. His notebooks contain page after page filled with sketches of a spectrum of non-attractive people, ranging from old and gnarly, through ‘ugly’ people and then beyond the bounds of plausibility to monsters who could have come from the island of Dr Moreau.

Grotesque caricature heads of five men and two women by Leonardo da Vinci © The Trustees of the British Museum

Leonardo’s grotesques were surprisingly popular. Many copies were made of his sketches and distributed around art workshops all over Europe. Thus Massys’s image, which I take to be quintessentially north European, turns out to derive almost directly from a sketch by the quintessentially Italian artist, Leonardo.

The debt owed by Massys to Leonardo isn’t trivial. Although the Leonardo original has disappeared, the exhibition includes copies of a Leonardo grotesque woman which, as you can see, are the direct source of Massys’s painting. Hardly anything about the Massys version is original except precisely the aspects I like, the fantastic detailing.

Bust of a grotesque old woman (1510 to 1520) by Francesco Melzi, after Leonardo. Royal Collection Trust © His Majesty King Charles III 2023

May – December couples

Western societies have often found the notion of the old and decrepit vaunting their attractiveness and flirting as if they’re still teenagers worthy of satire. ‘Mutton dressed as lamb’, as the proverbial saying has it. In fact, like everything else, the Middle Ages codified this into a genre, calling it the May-December relationship. To my surprise, a few seconds on Google show me that this term is still widely used to describe:

‘an amorous relationship between two people with a considerable age difference. The months symbolize the seasons, with spring representing youth and winter representing old age.’

In medieval art and literature the unequal relationship of an older man and a younger woman was often mocked (as, maybe, in our day, the marriage between Rupert Murdoch at the age of 85 to former model, Jerry Hall, or the references I keep reading about Leonardo de Caprio’s alleged penchant for much younger girlfriends). Less often described (and mocked) was the pairing of an older woman and a younger man (in our day and age, often referred to as a toy boy’). In medieval literature Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is one such older woman who takes a young male lover for explicitly sexual reasons.

Mention of the theme, as a popular one of the day, allows the curators to include a visual illustration, The Unequal Couple by by Israhel van Meckenem which shows an older woman (left) being cosied up to by a handsome young blade. The way he is reaching out to touch the bag of coins she is jealously guarding very heavily conveys the satirical thrust of the picture, that this kind of relationship is ‘against nature’ and could only exist because the May partner wants to get their hands on December’s money.

The Unequal Couple, about 1490 by Israhel van Meckenem, after the Master of the Housebook © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

Feminist interpretation

You won’t be surprised to learn that there is a revisionist feminist interpretation of the painting. Feminist art scholars agree that it can be read as a cruel joke in which the viewer is invited to laugh at this woman’s pathetic attempts to appear young and sexy, so we are being invited to mock her implied self-delusion.

But there is an alternative way to read the painting, which is as depicting an old woman who refuses to accept either the biological facts of aging or the social conventions which define what a woman, of any age, may or may not wear, and how she may or may not think of herself. If she regards herself as a winsome beauty, shyly offering her man a symbol of her budding love, then…why not?

To echo what I wrote above, a feminist interpretation sees a duchess who is also subversive of standard notions of beauty, defiantly flouting the conventions of her day.

Witches

But old women have been, for much of recorded history, quite ambivalent figures. (In fact, arguably any category of human being can be ambivalent. A young man may be smooth and debonair like Romeo or a thuggish killer like Edmund in King Lear. Humans have many sides, stereotypes, avatars, expectations.)

Anyway, old women have can be mocked for their pretensions (as the duchess appears to be) respected for their wisdom or even feared as uncanny figures. This fear can go to the extreme of thinking they have uncanny supernatural powers, in other words, are witches.

And it’s in order to highlight the similarities and differences in Renaissance iconography of older women – between an old woman satirised and an old woman feared – that the display includes an iconic image of a witch, made by Albrecht Dürer around the same time as Massys was doing his entertaining grotesque.

A Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat, about 1500 by Albrecht Dürer © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

As with most Dürer this image is packed with symbolism representing the inversion of traditional values and decorum. The woman is naked but not in the sexy manner of Renaissance nudes; the naked body of an older woman is seen as repellent and disgusting. The broom between her legs and her grip on a goat’s horn suggest the uncontrolled and inappropriate nature of lust in an older woman. She is rising the goat backwards but her hair is flowing in the wrong direction, into rather than with the wind. It is an image of reversal and chaos. Whereas the Massys painting was made for comedy and entertainment, the Dürer takes some of the same themes and treats them with horror, repulsion and fear.

Alice

Even this inclusion of witches hasn’t exhausted the ramifications and connections unravelling from this one painting. I think I knew but had forgotten an important fact about it which is that Massys’s portrait directly inspired the figure of the Duchess in ‘Alice in Wonderland’, as portrayed in Sir John Tenniel’s classic illustrations.

Alice, the Duchess, and the Baby by Sir John Tenniel (1865)

Here, in a sense, the Ugly Duchess found her spiritual home. As a painting she was only available for centuries to a handful of viewers. Even hung up in the National Gallery she was only seen by a small number of people. But as published in the Alice books and very widely distributed, she entered a kind of rogues’ gallery of all the other fantastical characters dreamed up by Lewis Carroll. Beyond fear or ridicule she is transformed into an object of pure, delightful entertainment.

Video

In this 10 minute long video National Gallery restorer Britta New discusses the conservation treatment of ‘The Ugly Duchess’, describing discoveries made during the conservation process, and the painting’s connection to sketches by Leonardo da Vinci and John Tenniel’s illustrations.

Related links

More National Gallery reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on April 10, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on April 10, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/04/10/the-ugly-duchess-beauty-and-satire-in-the-renaissance-the-national-gallery/

Heath Robinson’s Shakespeare Illustrations @ the Heath Robinson Museum

“Playing on pipes of corn, and versing love to amorous Phillida”. Published in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, London, Constable & Co (1914) The William Heath Robinson Trust

The Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner north-west London is my favourite small gallery in London. It’s only half an hour by tube from Oxford Circus (change at Baker Street onto the Metropolitan line for Pinner). It is a small but beautifully formed exhibition space and always  source of delight and enjoyment.

The museum hosts a steady series of fascinating little exhibitions in its one-room gallery which is big enough to hang 50, 60, 70 prints, illustrations and paintings. Sometimes they’re portmanteau exhibitions featuring a number of artists, for example, the fabulous one about neo-Romantic book illustrators, or the one about the Beardsley Generation.

This one is simpler and more focused; it features just one artist, Heath Robinson himself, with a selection of about 70 of his illustrations for luxury editions of Shakespeare’s plays.

Exhibition contents

The exhibition consists of:

1. 30 large prints of individual drawings or watercolours, hung on the walls.

2. About 7 framed collections which each contain up to a dozen smaller, black and white illustrations, each taken from pairs of plays, for example Macbeth and Julius Caesar (see below).

3. The four display cases each contain original copies of the luxury editions of the Shakespeare plays which Heath Robinson (HR) illustrated, alongside examples of similar volumes by contemporaries, being:

  • case 1: three original copies of the 1908 HR edition of Twelfth Night
  • case 2:
    • a 1914 edition of HR’s Midsummer Night’s Dream
    • 1908 edition of Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrated by Arthur Rackham
    • 1898 edition of Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrated by Robert Anning Bell
  • case 3: three old editions of The Tempest open to lovely illustrations
    • 1901 version illustrated by Robert Anning Bell
    • 1908 version illustrated by Edmund Dulac
    • 1908 version illustrated by Paul Woodroffe
  • case 4: four photocopies of comical illustrations HR made of Jacques’ Seven Ages of Man speech (from As You Like It) for the Bystander magazine in 1905

4. Finally, a slideshow of illustrations for Midsummer Night’s Dream for which the original artwork wasn’t available, projected onto the white gallery wall. There are 37 of these blown-up line drawings and it is quite mesmeric watching the sequence appear on the white wall. It has the effect of really bringing out the compositional clarity of HR’s black and white designs.

As to the 30 or so framed images hung round the walls of the gallery, they are divided into three groups, being selections of the illustrations HR made for:

  1. Twelfth Night
  2. A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  3. The Cape Shakespeare

1. Twelfth Night (1908)

In 1908 Hodder and Stoughton published Twelfth Night with forty coloured plates by Heath Robinson. It was the first time he had had the opportunity to illustrate a complete volume in colour. He didn’t attempt to provide a literal record of the action but, like a composer writing incidental music for a play, set out to capture the mood.

There are six framed originals. The first one is a wonderfully detailed, naturalistic study of a tall woman swathed in a full dress done in pencil (“Sir, my name is Mary”); the other five are richly coloured, deeply evocative, hugely impressive watercolours.

Duke Orsino: “So full of shapes is fancy.” Published in Twelfth Night by Hodder and Stoughton (1908). The William Heath Robinson Trust

Two things are obviously important about these. One is the architecture. There’s a person and what appears to be a squadron of ghostly cherubs in the picture but the real star is the buildings. The flagstones, the column he’s standing by and then the beautifully detailed colonnade across the square or atrium. It is thrillingly precise and accurate.

Second thing is the gloominess of the image, a night-time vibe which is emphasised when you see the daylight shining on the wall opposite and the top, and realise it is actually daytime. This has all been carefully crafted to capture the melancholy mood of the play’s male protagonist, Duke Orsino, who has plunged himself into a theatrically melancholy love for the aloof Countess Olivia:

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

In the scene as written the duke is, of course, surrounded by courtiers, but this is what Heath Robinson meant by capturing the mood or feel of the play, because in his mind Orsino is a lovesick loner and this beautiful illustration very powerfully conveys that.

These are the darkest of all the works, in fact one of them, “Present mirth hath present laughter”, is so dark it’s difficult to make out what’s going on. In these illustrations Heath Robinson took a very painterly approach to composition, blurring his usually crisp clear lines to create an almost impressionistic effect. His genius for the comic is almost completely absent. Some of the paintings are reminiscent of the Turner at his most misty sunset moments.

You can see what I mean by going to this blog about HR’s Twelfth Night images:

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1914)

In 1913 Heath Robinson, at the height of his career, suggested to his publisher, Constable, that he illustrate a luxury edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The end result was a combination of 12 coloured plates and 40 pen and ink illustrations. The pictures fall, like the play, into two groups, the serious business of the aristocrats, among the temples and columned buildings of Athens, and the fantastical goings on among the fairies and ‘rude mechanicals’ in the woods.

Compared to the sombre impressionistic Twelfth Night pictures, the Midsummer Night’s Dream ones could almost be by a different artist. They are all much more clear and crisp, combining a taste for clean outlines with the fantastical element of the many goblins, sprites, elves and pixies and the down-to-earth comedy of the working class characters.

I opened this review with an image which combines the tremendous architectural precision of the temple depicted at the top with a characteristic stream of rather grotesque goblins and whatnot flowing top left to bottom right. The young man tootling his pipes at bottom right evokes the Edwardian fascination with the Greek god Pan, but what I really love about this image is the way he’s resting on a fallen column. At the top is the official world of a complete functioning temple but as your eye follow the trail of flying goblins you descend into a jungle which has overgrown the world of reason and commerce and law till you arrive at a definitive image of the collapse of law and order and reason, the fallen column, leaning on which is the god of mischief and pranks making merry music. It’s an incredibly symbolic, charged image.

Alongside the fantastical ones, are pictures which show the rude mechanicals, the comic working class characters Quince, Snug, Bottom, Flute and Starveling. Here they all are in an ensemble illustration:

Bottom: “I will move storms, I will condole in some measure.” Published in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Constable and company (1914). The William Heath Robinson Trust

The most obvious thing is the space, the completely white top and bottom of the composition, relieved only by the single pot of drink. Amazing how the simple use of space creates drama and energy, makes the humdrum scene of half a dozen village idiots sitting on a bench seem supercharged with life.

This blog seems to have a good selection if not all of the Midsummer illustrations. You can see the clarity of the lines and the importance of architecture, straight columns, and angular steps in picture after picture:

Some of the colour illustrations, done in watercolour, retain the misty impressionism of the Twelfth Night set. I was particularly struck by a picture of a woman standing in the woods and at the top, instead of Heath Robinson’s detailed way with leaves (especially his favourite horse chestnut leaves) the painting dissolves into washes of green sprinkled with magic fairy lights which is impressionist in feel, almost like one of Monet’s lily pond studies.

Helena: “I’ll follow thee and make a heaven of hell, To die upon the and I love so well.” Pen and watercolour. Published in A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Constable and company (1914)

The Cape Shakespeare

The First World War effectively put an end to the market for sumptuous illustrated gift books. But in 1921 Heath Robinson received a commission from the newly established publishing house of Jonathan Cape to provide over 400 drawings to illustrate a new edition of the complete works of Shakespeare. He completed all 400 by June 1922 but, either though lack of fund for this particular project, or the general decline in the market for luxury books, the edition was never published. Amazingly, it was only in 1991 when Cape moved offices that this treasure trove of illustrations came to light and they are included in the exhibition courtesy of Penguin Random House, their present owner.

The colour illustrations

They’re fascinating for several reasons, first the large watercolour illustrations. The figures are bigger and more central than in the Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrations. They are more front and centre and dramatic.

Lear: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!” (King Lear).

Next, the colouring is much clearer and cleaner than in either the Twelfth Night or Midsummer illustrations. Maybe it was the war, maybe it was a natural development, but Heath Robinson has consciously left behind the Turneresque, impressionist vagueness I mentioned about the earlier paintings. Here the backgrounds are plainer and the figures more sharply delineated.

And the faces, they’re much more gargoyly. They have bog bulging eyes under heavy brows. Both Lear and the fool’s eyes look unnaturally enlarged, almost bulging. Compare and contrast with the discreet, almost invisible eyes in all the earlier illustrations. The conscious change in the treatment of eyes is symptomatic of the far wider range of dramatic moods to be found in the Cape illustrations and the need (and ability) to convey this with more than physical posture, but with a lot more detailed facial description.

The black and white illustrations

Because they were never separated to make printing blocks the freestanding black and white illustrations, often relatively small, have been brought together into ‘sheets’ i.e. 7, 8 or 9 of them presented in the same frame. These combine images from different but linked plays, for example, Henry IV part two and the Merry Wives of Windsor, or Julius Caesar and Macbeth.

It was the latter sheet which really grabbed me. Quite obviously the previous two projects had concerned comedies. Here Heath Robinson was called on to illustrate tragedy, violence, horror, fear. He does it in part by really simplifying down his designs. The hundreds of leaves and flowers and cascades of goblins from the Midsummer Night’s Dream period are all eliminated. Instead Heath Robinson develops a new approach which is to eliminate all unnecessary detail, reduce the number of lines, simplify the figures, and use large pools of solid black to give bite and drama.

A sheet of illustrations for Julius Caesar and Macbeth by William Heath Robinson

These images just don’t have the same impact on a small screen as they did to me in the gallery (the top reason for going to any art gallery is that the impact of a work of art is always massively bigger in the flesh). I know some of the images, like the bloke with the shield, may be a little on the cartoon side. But the more I looked at the image of the assassination of Julius Caesar, the more uncanny it felt.

Illustration for Julius Caesar by William Heath Robinson

Heath Robinson using the big white space we saw used to comic effect in the Dream and applied it to an intensely dramatic moment. There is nothing comic or frivolous about the murder of Julius Caesar and so all the figures involved are depicted in the simplest manner with as few lines as possible. But what a stroke of genius to not do it close-up, to not show the agony and the spurting blood. But to depict it far in the background as possible. Somehow it makes it all the more ominous and horrible and distant and detached and gruesome.

And then – who is the bearded man at the bottom right? Is it the soothsayer who said ‘Beware the ides of March’? Why is he so very distant from the action, barely in the picture, is he hastily exiting the terrible scene? But look at his shadow? It’s like a Rorschach blot, it’s like an abstract swirl, it adds to the sense of disorientation.

The more I looked at this, the more spooked I grew. And the more it seemed to capture the terrible world-historical consequences of the deed, namely another thirteen years of civil war which eventually led to the overthrow of the Roman Republic. The weird kissing black aliens in the bottom… I felt more and more spooked.

Something similar with some of the Macbeth illustrations on the same sheet, especially the raddled old figure at the bottom right, almost entirely in ink-black silhouette and shadow. Or the long thin silhouette of the the weird sisters at top right. The more I looked, the more uncanny and powerful they all became.

Obviously they’re to some extent meant to be shadows of the characters but these flowing pools of jet black are done in a style which approaches a Japanese woodcut level of abstraction. The tendency is strikingly evident in a standalone illustration of the dead Cleopatra. For a moment Heath Robinson has travelled back in time 20 years and become Aubrey Beardsley. The simple lines and languid posture are 1890s, but it’s really the liquid shape of the jet black shadows which reveals the influence. Looking at the shadow of her arm and the folds in the bed (?), I wondered whether their serpentine shape was meant to hint at the slinking asps which, according to legend, she killed herself with.

Cleopatra by Heath Robinson

As I mentioned, some of these b&w illustrations are very funny. There are quite a few comic illustrations of Falstaff and the other characters from Henry IV and the Merry Wives. But it was the uncanny images from Caesar and Macbeth which I kept coming back to. In only 15 years his style had travelled a long, way from the brilliantly naturalistic drawing which started the exhibition, “Sir, my name is Mary.” Although he remained, at the exact same time as doing this commission, a brilliant comic illustrator, some of these Shakespeare images seemed to me to break through to a completely new understanding of the stark, brutal forces at large in the world, unlike anything else in his oeuvre.

Illustrations for Henry VI and Richard III by William Heath Robinson, commissioned by Jonathan Cape in 1921. Unpublished. On long-term loan from Penguin Random House archive.

Related links

More Heath Robinson Museum reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on February 20, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Illustration
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on February 20, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/02/20/heath-robinsons-shakespeare-illustrations-the-heath-robinson-museum/

Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes (1997)

Given his reputation for avoiding anything which smacked of ‘the Poetic Tradition’, the fact that he dropped English at Cambridge because he found studying the classics too stifling for his imagination, and his lifelong preference for depicting the harsh realities of a brutal, untamed nature – it might come as quite a surprise that, right at the end of his life, in 1997, Ted Hughes published a full-on translation of the Metamorphoses by the ancient Roman poet, Ovid, the kind of thing you might expect from a far more traditional, decorous, academic poet.

An odd choice?

Having just read the full Ovid poem I can see that Hughes’s decision is less surprising than might at first appear. I had fond memories of reading the Metamorphoses 30 years ago and had completely forgotten that they are consistently brutal, intense and often very cruel indeed. As such, they obviously chime with Hughes’s lifelong obsession with the brutality, intensity, and visionary otherness of the natural world.

Also, it’s easy to overlook the fact that Hughes had, earlier in his career, translated another work by a canonical Roman writer, the Oedipus of Seneca. In fact I was surprised, double checking his bibliography, to discover that after his death a whole suite of translations was published – translations of The Oresteia of Aeschylus, Phèdre by Jean Racine, and Alcestis by Euripides, all published in 1999. What do they have in common? Classic stories from classical antiquity. So the Ovid translations are far from unique. Hughes’s imagination clearly took a classical turn in his last decade.

And then, on rereading his poetry as I just have, I realised there are scattered references to classical mythology throughout – not many, admittedly, but they’re there.

Plus the entire sequence in Moortown named ‘Prometheus on his crag’, and the poem in that volume about Actaeon, and one titled ‘Pan’.

So once you start looking, you find a strong undercurrent of classical references and subject matter throughout his oeuvre.

The Metamorphoses

The Metamorphoses is a long poem in Latin in which the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso, generally referred to as Ovid (43 BC t o18 AD) brought together into one continuous narrative some 250 ancient Greek myths and legends.

these ancient stories all have one thing in common – the protagonist, the figure at the centre of the story, be they man, woman, child, sometimes a minor divinity such as a nymph or nereid – at the climax of the story, each of them is transformed into something else. Sometimes into an animal, like a bird or pig or wolf or dog; sometimes into flora, such as a tree or flower; sometimes into inanimate matter, like stone – various characters are turned into statues or just into stone – or into water – several characters are turned into standing pools or streams.

Hughes’s approach

Ovid’s poem is huge. At just short of 12,000 lines of regular dactylic hexameter it is as long and detailed and complicated as the canonical epic poems of Homer and Virgil. Hughes’s version is nowhere near as long. For a start he restricts himself to just 24 of the longer or more complete tales.

So instead of a continuous narrative describing stories big and small, containing full length treatments with throwaway references in a line or two, as Ovid does, Hughes presents us with what is, in effect, a collection of 24 individual poems.

Second, and a more glaring difference, is Hughes translates Ovid into free verse. Hughes employed free verse and flexible stanza shapes right from the start of his career, so by 1997 he’d had 40 years of practice. The result is a style where every line is its own thing, its own measure, justifying its own length and rhythm by its meaning and poetic force, rather than being compelled to fit into a regular metre.

Tales from Ovid does in fact contain regular stanza structures, though I only slowly realised it. Thus the opening story about Phaethon who fools his father, the god of the sun, into letting him drive his chariot for a day and proves totally inadequate to the task – a kind of ancient Greek Liz Truss – and loses control of the immortal horses and lets the sun chariot swoop low over the earth causing widespread destruction – in Hughes’s hands this narratives begins by being told in 47 5-line stanzas, each line being as flexible as he needed it to be.

When Phaethon bragged about is father, Phoebus
The sun-god,
His friends mocked him. ‘Your mother must be crazy
Or you’re crazy to believe her.
How could the sun be anybody’s father?’

In a rage of humiliation
Phaethon came to his mother, Clymene.
‘They’re all laughing at me,
And I can’t answer. What can I say? It’s horrible.
I have to stand like a dumb fool and be laughed at.’

And so on. However, Hughes has no hesitation in switching format as required so that, for example, when Phaethon enters the palace of his father, the verse switches to long verse paragraphs in order to describe its grandeur.

Fittingly magnificent
Columns underpropped a mass
Of gold strata so bright
The eyes flinched from it.
The whole roof a reflector
Of polished ivory.
The silver doors like sheet flame –
And worked into that flame
Vulcan, the god of fire,
Had set, in relief, a portrait of the creation…

Back to 5-line stanzas for a bit and then, when Phaethon loses control of the horse of the sun so that they fly down, far too close to the surface of the earth, it switches again to verse paragraphs, although the freedom of individual lines remains identical to what it was in the stanzas i.e. there’s no particular rhyme or pattern except the power of the phrases themselves.

Earth began to burn, the summits first.
Baked, the cracks gaped. All fields, all thickets,
All crops were instantly fuel –
The land blazed briefly.
In the one flare noble cities
Were rendered
To black stumps of burnt stone.
Whole nations, in all their variety,
Were clouds of hot ashes, blowing in the wind,.
Forest-covered mountains were bonfires…

Later on the 9-page tale of Pyramus and Thisbe is told in a series of free verse 3-line stanzas so popular with contemporary poets for some reason. (Maybe this is for the simple reason that they’re no couplets which tend to make you expect rhymes, and not quatrains, ditto. Triplets are free of those old traditional expectations.)

Throughout the East men spoke in awe of Thisbe –
A girl who had suddenly bloomed
In Babylon, the mud-brick city.

The house she had grown up in adjoined
The house where Pyramus, so many years a boy,
Brooded bewildered by the moods of manhood.

These two, playmates from the beginning,
Fell in love.
For angry reasons, no part of the story,

The parents of each forbade their child
To marry the other…

In other words, Hughes felt utterly free to pick and choose verse forms, or variations of free verse forms, as they suited his needs.

List of the poems

  1. The Creation of the Universe. The Four Ages (Gold, Silver, Bronze, Iron). the Flood. The story of Lycaon (20 pages)
  2. Phaethon (21 pages)
  3. Callisto and Arcas (7 pages)
  4. The Rape of Proserpina (15 pages)
  5. Arethusa (4 pages)
  6. Tiresias (2 pages)
  7. Echo and Narcissus (11 pages)
  8. Erisychthon (10 pages)
  9. Semele (6 pages)
  10. Peleus and Thetis (4 pages)
  11. Actaeon (8 pages)
  12. Myrrha (15 pages)
  13. Venus and Adonis (16 pages)
  14. Pygmalion (7 pages)
  15. Hercules and Dejanira (13 pages)
  16. The Birth of Hercules (3 pages)
  17. The Death of Cygnus (6 pages)
  18. Arachne (9 pages)
  19. Bacchus and Pentheus (18 pages)
  20. Midas (11 pages)
  21. Niobe (12 pages)
  22. Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (5 pages)
  23. Tereus (17 pages)
  24. Pyramus and Thisbe (9 pages)

The merits of Hughes’s version

Characteristic, trademark phrasing, precise, brisk, no fat on the bone, no extraneous syllables. Hard, precise and clinical.

Hercules, the son of Jupiter,
Was bringing his new bride home
When he came to the river Evenus.

Burst banks, booming torrent,
Where there had been a ford. Hercules
Had no fear for himself, only for his wife.

No namby-pamby, stuff-and-nonsense, decoration or silly sentiment for our Ted. Stick to the facts, son, and tha’ll do alreeght.

The weaknesses of Hughes’s version

1. Verbosity

The weakness of Hughes’s later verse is its verbosity, as I tried to demonstrate in my overview of Hughes’s career. Much of Crow is dazzlingly brilliant, Gaudete is an extraordinarily weird achievement, but by the time of Moortown in 1979, you feel Hughes could churn this stuff out by the yard, by the mile if necessary. Same is true in spades of Tales from Ovid.

There are still flashes of brilliance in his phrasing, and his shaping of lines i.e. deciding how many words and beats to include in each line, and his ability to build up rhythms over successive free verse lines remains very impressive. But his commitment to a diction which is ‘a texture that is concrete, terse, emphatic, economical’ often ends up emptying the lines of colour. His verse feels oddly empty.

2. Functionality

Also, in order to tell stories in verse some of the lines need to be unavoidably functional. Now, if you’re Dryden or Pope, you could use a standard format like the rhyming couplet or blank verse, both of which are utterly predictable in layout, pace and metre and so very suitable for settling down to hear a very long narrative in.

Hughes tries to translate his 24 stories into ad hoc verse shapes and line lengths but, whereas these were justified when they contained a blitz of stunning images in his own poems, this approach works less well for narrative poetry.

Somewhere the critic (and mate of Hughes’s) Al Alvarez commented that Hughes’s poems leap from one dazzling image to the next. That’s fine if that’s all the poems are meant to do – dazzle. But telling a story requires something a bit more predictable, a regular repeatable style which can take a backseat to the narrative.

3. Thin

In stripping his versions back to the bone, Hughes loses a lot of what makes Ovid Ovid, which is the myriad digressions and throwaway references, about genealogy and relationships and attributes of this god or the achievements of that hero; all the peripheral detail which goes to build up a rich imaginative world. These are just some of the aspects which make the original Metamorphoses feel very dense and rich, sumptuous, luxurious. Hughes deliberately chucks all that out in order to hone things down to maximum intensity for each line. But what if the sumptuous detail is the point of Ovid?

4. Scene setting and landscapes

Now I’m really thinking about this, I realise that Ovid, in his best most extended stories, often goes in for slow, lush, storytelling descriptions of scenery and setting.

There was a valley there called Gargaphie, dense with pine trees and sharp cypresses, sacred to Diana of the high-girded tunic, where, in the depths, there is a wooded cave, not fashioned by art. But ingenious nature had imitated art. She had made a natural arch out of native pumice and porous tufa. On the right, a spring of bright clear water murmured into a widening pool, enclosed by grassy banks. Here the woodland goddess, weary from the chase, would bathe her virgin limbs in the crystal liquid. (book 3)

Hughes chucks all this out in order to get to the pith of the action.

A deep cleft at the bottom of the mountain
Dark with matted pine and spiky cypress

Was known as Gargaphie, sacred to Diana,
Goddess of the hunt.
In the depths of this goyle was the mouth of a cavern

That might have been carved out with deliberate art
From the soft volcanic rock.
It half-hid a broad pool, perpetually shaken

By a waterfall inside the mountain,
Noisy but hidden. Often to that grotto,
Aching and burning from her hunting,

Diana came
To cool the naked beauty she hid from the world.

I suppose Hughes’s version is more crisp, factual, minimalist and modern – but, in a poem of Ovid’s type, half the pleasure is in the details, the lushness and the time taken to elaborate and decorate the subject. It’s nice to know that Diana is the goddess ‘of the high-girded tunic’ and a thousand and one other details and spin-off phrases which adorn and enrich the Ovid. All burned away in Hughes. Hughes’s version is like a concrete multi-story car park – admirable in its stark, uncompromising efficiency. But difficult to warm to, let alone love.

5. Blank style

And that brings me round to the lack of sensuality in Hughes’s verse. His is a powerful sensuality of imagery but not of language, as such.

Right from the start Hughes was capable of using simple words in unexpected combinations to convey his otherworldly insights into nature with stunning power, but there was rarely anything special about the words themselves. they are often very ordinary indeed. It was always the novel combinations of words into brilliant, often mind-bending phrases which had so much impact on readers. In fact, paradoxically, Hughes often works with a very limited, plain diction.

Somehow, for me, his translation of the Tales really brings this out. The deliberate blankness of a lot of the style, and the occasional dazzling phraseology, can’t conceal the fact that a lot of the lines are, lexically speaking, rather, well, pedestrian.

The introduction

There’s a case for saying the best part of the book is the introduction. For a start, it’s admirably brief at just four and a half pages. After some fluff about Ovid’s biography, it quickly turns to Hughesian interests. After mentioning the Metamorphoses‘ importance to Chaucer as a source book for all manner of myths and legends, Hughes goes on to cite Shakespeare.

Characteristically, Hughes dismisses Shakespeare finding sweet and beautiful images amidst Ovid’s dense foliage. Instead:

A more crucial connection, maybe, can be found in their common taste for a tortured subjectivity and catastrophic extremes of passion that border on the grotesque.

Now, admittedly these elements are present in Shakespeare’s earliest, goriest plays and remain in moments of the high tragedies, especially King Lear. But roughly speaking who do ‘a tortured subjectivity and catastrophic extremes of passion’ remind you of? Hughes. and his hyperbolic brain-damaged worldview (see my overview of Hughes’s oeuvre for quotes to back this up).

But it’s worth bearing with this over-passionate man for the insights he offers into Ovid:

Above all, Ovid was interested in passion. or rather, in what a passion feels like to the one possessed by it. Not just ordinary passion either, but human passion in extremis – passion where it combusts, or levitates, or mutates into an experience of the supernatural.

Then Hughes says something really interesting and profoundly insightful. I quote it in full to give the rhythm and rise of his argument:

The act of metamorphosis, which at some point, touches each of the tales, operates as the symbolic guarantee that the passion has become mythic, has achieved the unendurable intensity that lifts the whole episode onto the supernatural or divine plane. Sometimes this happens because mortals tangle with the gods, sometimes because mortal passion makes the breakthrough by sheer excess, without divine intervention – as in the tale of Tereus and Philomela. But in every case, to a greater or lesser degree, Ovid locates and captures the particular frisson of that event, where the all-too-human victim stumbles out into the mythic arena and is transformed.

I think the thought behind this, and the phrasing, are wonderfully vivid and evocative. I’m not at all sure what he says is true of the entire Metamorphoses, which feature just as many nymphs and Naiads and whatnot as mortals – and also includes some happy endings, such as Pygmalion, and Baucis and Philemon (the happiest story in the Metamorphoses and so, symptomatically, not included in Hughes’s selection of tales.)

But as a description of what does happen to the poor, stricken mortals among Ovid’s hapless protagonists, this is a wonderfully, energetically perceived and phrased insight.

Conclusion

As Hughes’s last volume of poetry, Tales from Ovid has interest, though it’s not the best place to start if you’ve never read him before.

If you want to find out what Ovid’s Metamorphoses is actually like, then emphatically do not read this translation, try the more traditional versions from Penguin or OUP which give you the full text along with all the wonderful details and grace notes which welcome you into an entirely new world. Every bit as savage and cruel as Hughes’s, but redeemed and enlivened by far more colour and variety.

Poetry reviews

Classical poetry

Dark Age poetry

Medieval poetry

Renaissance poetry

Restoration poetry

Victorian poetry

Kipling

1930s poetry

Modern poetry

2 Comments
by Simon on November 23, 2022  •  Permalink
Posted in Poetry, Translation
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on November 23, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/11/23/tales-from-ovid-ted-hughes/

Worstward Ho by Samuel Beckett (1983)

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Worstward Ho is a short piece of prose published by Samuel Beckett towards the end of his life. The title is a parody of the adventure novel Westward Ho! by Victorian novelist, Charles Kingsley, which itself is a reference to the Elizabethan play Westward Ho! by Thomas Dekker and John Webster.

Regarded with a detached eye, the title is almost a parody of Beckett’s notorious miserabilism, but the title doesn’t begin to capture the apocalyptic evisceration of language which characterises the text.

Along with other late prose pieces, Company and Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho was collected in a volume with the equally parody-worthy title, Nohow On, which is actually one of the recurrent phrases in WO, in 1989.

On the first page the text includes what is probably Beckett’s most famous quote:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

By this late stage in his career, Beckett had moved far beyond conventional categories such as novel, novella or short story. In fact he had moved beyond what most people probably think of as literature or even meaningful language.

The piece takes his late prose mannerisms to extremes. The following analysis relies on the excellent summary of the piece given by James Knowlson in his biography of Beckett, Damned To Fame, because Knowlson has read and thought about this difficult piece far more than I will ever have time to.

Shakespearean source

Beckett began writing Worstward Ho on 9 August 1981 (we know all this kind of detail because these notebooks were left, in good condition, to university archives). Beckett wrote out three quotes from King Lear to the effect that, if you can say we’ve reached the worst, you have not reached the worst. It is Edgar who says, in King Lear, Act IV, Scene 1:

And worse I may be yet. The worst is not
So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’

The worst is unsayable, inexpressible. Therefore, the mere fact of being able to speak or write, by definition, means you’re not there yet. The piece therefore approaches the final collapse of language, repeatedly enacting it, but failing to cross the threshold into silence. Language can’t. It can only try and try again. Hence the repetitive nature of the motto: Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Language games

In the attempt to approach the edge of expressibility, Beckett experiments with language’s potential and Knowlson gives a useful little summary of the tactics employed:

Paring away

Most obviously the English language has been pared right back to a handful of words, brought together to create small phrases or lexical units.

A place. Where none. A time when try see. Try say. How small. How vast. How if not boundless bounded. Whence the dim. Not now. Know better now. Unknow better now. Know only no out of. No knowing how know only no out of. Into only. Hence another. Another place where none.

Combinations

These tiny units, the handful of words and short phrases, are then combined, recombined, repeated with variations. The strategy of ‘enumeration’ which had been part of his prose since Watt.

On back to unsay void can go. Void cannot go. Save dim go. Then all go. All not already gone. Till dim back. Then all back. All not still gone. The one can go. The twain can go. Dim can go. Void cannot go. Save dim go. Then all go.

New coinages

Paradoxically, having reduced English to almost the bare minimum, Beckett generates a number of new words, coinages, especially around the core idea of ‘worse’.

unworsenable, unmoreable, unlessenable, evermost, meremost, dimmost, unlestening, unnullable

This much messing about with words is unusual in Beckett. And there’s lots of it, it’s a conspicuous feature of this piece:

invain, unasking, missaid, whosesoever, hindtrunk, astand, nohow, vastatween, inletting, outletting, ununsaid, unreceding, unsay, unsunk, unmoreable

As you can see, most of them are created by adding un- to perfectly normal words to create their opposite. Matter and anti-matter. Inventions in the desert of language. Tinkerings on the verge of the void.

Swapping parts of speech

In the same spirit, words change their usual syntactical function. Thus nouns are used as verbs, verbs as nouns, adverbs as adjectives and so on.

Alliteration

Playing with these last few counters of a mind on the brink of collapse throws up a surprising number of alliterative phrases, which possess a hard, chiselled beauty:

Skull and lidless stare. Where in the narrow vast? Say only vasts apart. In that narrow void vasts of void apart.

Tongue twisters

Knowlson makes the point that Beckett loved crossword puzzles, word games, tongue twisters and there turns out to be surprising capacity for such games even when playing with a handful of dead counters:

  • Somehow in. Beyondless. Thenceless there. Thitherless there. Thenceless thitherless there.
  • With leastening words say least best worse. For want of worser worse. Unlessenable least best worse.

The intrusive narrator

Beckett took the tradition of the intrusive narrator, who had been used for comic effect in 18th and 19th century novels, and turns him into an unsmiling director of the action whose presence is indicated by the imperative form of the verb ‘say’. Say this. Say that. The word ‘say’ occurs 100 times in the text. Could be paraphrased as ‘take a…’ or Let’s assume the existence of…’ only pared right back to the shortest possible verbal gesture:

Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none.

Or this longer quotation gives a flavour of how the text creates itself through a series of orders or suggestions:

It stands. What? Yes. Say it stands. Had to up in the end and stand. Say bones. No bones but say bones. Say ground. No ground but say ground. So as to say pain. No mind and pain? Say yes that the bones may pain till no choice but stand. Somehow up and stand. Or better worse remains. Say remains of mind where none to permit of pain.

And what is it all this ‘saying’ is labouring to conjure into words, into reading, into being?

Content

Autobiographical memories

There is no ‘plot’, Good God, what an idea! But quite a few shapes or patterns emerge from this careful series of patterned paragraphs.

Beneath the dense wordplay, and forest of repetitions two images seem to emerge vaguely, as if through a fog, an old man walking hand in hand with a boy:

Bit by bit an old man and child. In the dim void bit by bit an old man and child. Any other would do as ill… Hand in hand with equal plod they go. In the free hands – no. Free empty hands. Backs turned both bowed with equal plod they go. The child hand raised to reach the holding hand. Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede turned. Both bowed. Joined by held joining hands. Plod on as one. One shade. Another shade.

Having read Knowlson’s biography, both of these central images strike me as having direct autobiographical roots. Beckett’s father loved going for walks in the Dublin hills, and took his son as often as possible, hence old man and boy hand in hand. The second recurring image is of an old woman:

Somehow again on back to the bowed back alone. Nothing to show a woman’s and yet a woman’s. Oozed from softening soft the word woman’s. The words old woman’s. The words nothing to show bowed back alone a woman’s and yet a woman’s. So better worse from now that shade a woman’s. An old woman’s.

And after his father died, Knowlson describes the way, on his increasingly infrequent returns to Ireland the family home, Beckett would accompany his mother to lay flowers on his father’s grave.

Nothing and yet a woman. Old and yet old. On unseen knees. Stooped as loving memory some old gravestones stoop. In that old graveyard. Names gone and when to when. Stoop mute over the graves of none.

Physical extremity

As so often, Beckett’s places his characters in extreme physical situations – not atop burning buildings or such, but caught in tight, taut, claustrophobic poses which mimic the tight, taut nature of the psychological conception and are reflected in the tight, taut, claustrophobic prose.

  • It stands. See in the dim void how at last it stands. In the dim light source unknown. Before the downcast eyes. Clenched eyes. Staring eyes. Clenched staring eyes.
  • Head sunk on crippled hands. Clenched staring eyes.
  • Clenched eyes clamped to it alone. Alone? No. Too. To it too. The sunken skull. The crippled hands. Clenched staring eyes.

Cramped, crippled, clenched. No wonder Beckett found it physically exhausting to write texts which require the reader not only to clench his body, but in some respect to clench your mind while reading. Knowlson tells us it took Beckett seven months just to write the first draft of Worstward Ho and that, over the winter of 1981 to 1982 he told friends that writing the piece was making him physically sick. As he wrote to long-time American collaborator, Alan Schneider, in his characteristically clipped and telegraphic style:

Struggling with impossible prose. English. With loathing.

Worstward Ho took Beckett a lot of effort to write and takes us a lot of effort to read, but I think it repays the effort. I think the major mistake that most people make who struggle with Beckett is thinking there is some grand hidden meaning behind it all. I think the truth is the opposite. There is no deep and hidden meaning, no powerful allegory or network of symbols which, if you could only decipher, would suddenly unlock these difficult texts, somehow make them easier to read and process.

They are what they are. The words mean what they say. Any reader or critic is at liberty to read into them any meaning they like, but all such readings looking for hidden meanings take you away from the immediate presence of the actual words themselves and their genuinely strange, haunting, beguiling, rigorously unsentimental, anti-romantic, hard, spare impact. And their difficulty.

First the bones. On back to them. Preying since first said on foresaid remains. The ground. The pain. No bones. No ground. No pain. Why up unknown. At all costs unknown. If ever down. No choice but up if ever down. Or never down. Forever kneeling. Better forever kneeling. Better worse forever kneeling. Say from now forever kneeling. So far from now forever kneeling. So far.

If the words are ‘about’ anything, if there is a ‘plot’ (and there isn’t) it’s to do with the way the text talks to itself, manipulates itself, positions, poses then immediately questions and subverts itself.

The dim. The void. Gone too? Back too? No. Say no. Never gone. Never back. Till yes. Till say yes. Gone too. Back too. The dim. The void. Now the one. Now the other. Now both. Sudden gone. Sudden back. Unchanged? Sudden back unchanged? Yes. Say yes. Each time unchanged. Somehow unchanged. Till no. Till say no. Sudden back changed. Somehow changed. Each time somehow changed.

It is the record of the narrator shaping and unshaping and anti-shaping the words and patterns and whatever they refer to, or unrefer to, as it goes along, or doesn’t go along, says or unsays, changes or unchanges, neverending, nevermoving, until it brings itself to a sudden and abrupt end:

Enough. Sudden enough. Sudden all far. No move and sudden all far. All least. Three pins. One pinhole. In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void. Whence no farther. Best worse no farther. Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on.

If you let go the reflex need to find ‘meaning’, if you recalibrate your mind to just go with the words in front of you and let them in, let them do their work, not strain for meaning and over-read them, but take them at face value, then they take you on an amazing journey to a very strange place, then they do something wierd to your mind. This is one of my favourite Beckett works because one of the purest, like The Unnamable, it is one of the least referential and therefore feels like a difficult, rebarbative, but deeply rewarding adventure in the possibilities of language and strange psychological effects.

Related link

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

1 Comment
by Simon on February 15, 2021  •  Permalink
Posted in Literature
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on February 15, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/02/15/worstward-ho-samuel-beckett/

%d bloggers like this: