I begin by repeating my spoiler alert from last week. This concerns the final chapters of an E.L. Doctorow novel published in 2014, the last one he published (he died the following year). IF YOU WANT TO COME TO IT FRESH, YOU WILL NOT WANT THE REVELATIONS I AM ABOUT TO MAKE! Anyone still here? Okay, then. Andrew's time as a teacher at a DC high school is brief. He soon, accidentally, and in a manner I won't relate, comes to the attention of President George W. Bush. We learn only at this point that the two knew each other -- indeed, they had been roommates at Yale as undergrads. They had both been involved in what seem like typical frat-boy hijinks, and in at least one such instance Andrew had taken the blame to help keep the Bush family crest clean re one such hijink, involving a Bunsen burner in a Yale lab. Someone in the Bush staff gets nervous that someone like that -- someone who could tell such tales to the press corps -- is in DC. So they press...
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A year-ending thought. I've been thinking about an old medieval French term, with Latin roots: "liege". At a King Richard's Fair, one costumed character may bow to another and call him "my liege". It is akin to saying "my lord," but not exactly, and a variation is to say "my liege Lord" -- which makes sense in a feudal system, where there is only one particular Lord to whom I owe allegiance - the rest are more or less a matter of indifference to me, a humble serf or page or whatever -- so you can be a lord without being MY lord, or you can be my liege Lord. And, thinking thus, I experienced a bit of a semantic epiphany. Liege. Allegiance. The second syllable in the second of those words sounds a lot like the first of those words. The gravest of sins, the one that gets you assigned to the frozen lake of Cocytus in the deepest final circle of the Inferno according to Dante, is betrayal. Betrayal, specifically, of one to whom the s...
Following up on yesterday's observation. The original Hebrew word for Satan is a noun meaning obstruction or opposition. Likewise, the Greek "diabolos" means "slanderer." These are hardly terms one employs for a faithful employee. So the etymology would seem to pose a problem for the warden/functionary view I mentioned yesterday. But well after the origin of such terms, and well before Dante's time, Satan had taken on some of the contours of a functionary. The concept of a Great Chain of Being suggests, after all, a harmonious universe where everything has its place, presided over by God, so that the very concept of an active adversary of God on the cosmic level comes to seem absurd, and there is little left but room for a warden who is sometimes also a trickster. The Nicolas Cage movie DRIVE ANGRY comes to mind in this connection.
I was binge-watching THE WIRE recently, but the theme song "Way Down in the Hole," kept causing my mind to wander to theological questions. The lyrics end as follows, "Don't pay heed to temptation, for his hands are so cold, "You gotta help me keep the devil, Way down in the hole." Within post-biblical Christian theology, the role of the devil in cosmology is very ambiguous. Is he a servant of God, or is he an adversary? Is he sort of a frenemy? If, with Dante, you see Satan chiefly as a prison warden of hell, then Satan would seem to be a servant of God. He rules over a "kingdom" only in the sense that a warden does. He superintends the punishment that the higher authority has decided should be meted out. God is the Governor and the legislature, the judges and juries, all in one Being. Satan is the humble obedient prison warden. Yet Satan's presence there too is a punishment. The "warden" analogy falters here. You can ...
The recent death of Barbara Reynolds is worth some mention here. Barbara Reynolds was the goddaughter of Dorothy Sayers and a formidable scholar of the Italian language. For more than 30 years she was chief executive and general editor of the Cambridge Italian Dictionary. After Sayers' own untimely death in 1957 it was Reynolds who put together the available materials and finished the work on the Sayers' translation of Paradiso , the third volume of Dante's Commedia . Sayers' translation of Inferno had appeared in 1949, of Purgatorio in 1955. The Sayers/Reynolds translation of Paradiso came out in 1962. Despite huge differences in every sort of respect, I'm a great admirer of the Anglo-Catholic intellects of the first half of the 20th century, the so-called "Inklings" and their circle included, and Sayers perhaps most of all in that crowd, not just for her Dante translation (and the commentaries) but for the detective fiction and the width of h...
Mystery solved! As some of you may remember, I've long been intrigued by a passage in Dorothy Sayers' introduction to her translation of Dante's Inferno. The passage, written in 1949, includes allusions to roughly 60 different people who played a part in English social history in the century or so before that date. Some she refers to by full name, most by part of a name, some by an allusive phrase. Her point is that an intelligent reader five centuries later will need help understanding a poem that makes such allusions, and she tries to provide analogous help in her notes on Dante. Roughly two thirds of a century has passed, and even for Anglophilic Americans, her prediction had been amply verified. Some of the references are obvious, some take some digging, some left me confused for a long time. But I believe I have cleared up the most confusing example. She refers to "Brown and Kennedy." Those are quite common names, so googling didn't help The arc...
Yesterday I discussed an incident from my teen years when a neighbor lady (NL) interrupted my effort to provide an impromptu exegesis of Dante's Divine Comedy. Today I'll see if I can finish that exegesis. Well, Dante was writing at a time when the Papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor were engaged in a struggle for power. He used the three afterlife destinations to suggest his own take.... That's when I was interrupted. I'm not sure where I would have gone from there, or how effectively, at 14: but here is my effort to finish the thought more than 40 years later. He used the three afterlife destinations to suggest his own take on the power struggle. His take, roughly, was that the Church should renounce any claim to temporal power and be a more purely spiritual organization. It could do this by making clear its subservience to the Holy Roman Emperors in temporal matters. On a related point, Dante was not happy with the behavior of the Italian city-state...
I remember when I was in high school I became interested in Dante's DIVINE COMEDY. (For those of you who may be curious, I was reading the Sayers/Reynolds translation, which preserves the terza rima scheme of the original verse.) This was a matter of some consternation to various kin and neighbors, who thought I could not possibly understand such a book and it could only hurt my lil' teenage mind to try. One neighbor lady (whom I will shroud in anonymity hereafter -- the initials NL shall be enough) somberly sought to discuss the book with me. The conversation went something like this: NL: What do you think the book is about? CF: (staggered a bit at the vastness of the ground a proper answer would cover): Well, Dante was writing at a time when the Papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor were engaged in a struggle for power. He used the three afterlife destinations to suggest his own take.... NL: No no, you're missing the point. His point was the kind of l...
June 2013 correction: Most of what I wrote here holds up. But I was wrong about the reference to "The Claimant." Somehow the Roger Tichborne case had escaped me. Oops. ______________________________ In my now-suspended blog I wrote several entries concerning Dorothy Sayers, and some comments she made in the introduction to her 1949 translation of Dante's Inferno . Today, while we are still quite early in the history of this blog, I'd like to stitch all those entries together. This is my best answer to the question: what did her allusions mean? The allusions in question arose because Sayers was addressing the question of why contemporary readers need as much apparatus as she had attached in order to understand an early 14th century poet. "Let us suppose that an Englishman were to write a contemporary Divine Comedy on Dante's model, and that in it, mixed up with a number of scriptural and mythological characters, we were to find, assigned to vario...