{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2477", "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.", "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'" }, "archive": "urth", "thread": { "id": 2477, "subject": "JBC", "messages": 1, "voices": 1, "first": "2000-11-29T09:17:31+00:00", "last": "2000-11-29T09:17:31+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes", "address": "ddanehy at siebel.com" }, "date": "2000-11-29T09:17:31+00:00", "subject": "(urth) JBC", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "The following is long, rambling, off-the-cuff and probably\noff-topic. I beg your indulgence.\n\nMantis pushed a few of my buttons when he wrote..." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "PEACE mentions James Branch Cabell's JURGEN. " }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "JBC is a fascinating case: notorious (mostly for the wrong reasons) and \nextraordinarily influential and damnear *forgotten*. One quotation, at\nleast, I imagine you are all familiar with: \"The optimist proclaims \nthat we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears \nthis is true.\"\n\nI've been working, for some years, on-and-off, even more dilatorily than \nis usual for me, on an essay on his various influences on Heinlein*. \nLarry Niven wrote a minor set of stories with Cabellian-named planets \n(he called them, at one point, the \"Leshy cycle\"; the only one with real \nCabellian roots, however, is \"Night on Mispec Moor\"). James Blish, among \nother major SF writers, was a member of the Cabell Society -- Cabell was \nstill alive at the time; he survived until the late '50s -- and editor \nof its journal, KALKI. Mark Twain praised his short-story collection \nCHIVALRY extravagantly, as did Theodore Roosevelt. And the witnesses or \ndepositions in the obscenity trial of JURGEN reads very nearly like a \n\"Who's Who in American Literature\" for the 1920s.\n\n---\n* Aside from the obvious -- that JOB is an homage to JURGEN -- several \nother RAH books are clearly Cabellian in inspiration. GLORY ROAD is a \nblatant Cabellian fantasy. In the collected letters (GRUMBLES FROM THE \nGRAVE) Heinlein describes the work-in-progress that was eventually \npublished as STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND as \"a Cabellian comedy.\" Etc.\n---" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "I just read JURGEN, the second JCB book I've read (the other being\nFIGURES OF EARTH). " }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "These are in many ways an excellent starting point; the only problem is\nthat they are also, in many ways, too similar to each other to give a\nfeel for the breadth of Cabell.\n\nMake no mistake; he was in some ways a very _limited_ writer. He had a\nfew simple themes that he expounded over and over again from his first\npublication to the day of his death, and a collection of literary tropes\nand tricks that he used reliably, almost predictably. But then, so did\nTwain, so did Shakespeare -- so does Wolfe, I might add.\n\nHis deepest themes were two, and both illustrated in his massive work\nTHE BIOGRAPHY OF THE LIFE OF MANUEL (\"Biog\"). JURGEN and FIGURES OF \nEARTH are very early volumes in \"Biog;\" indeed, FIGURES is one of the\nfew in which Dom Manuel of Poictesme actually appears and the _only_\none in which he is a major character. \"Biog\" follows the life of Dom\nManuel and his descendants (not \"lives\"; the conceit is that his \nlife is continued in his decscendents) from the 14th century in the \nmythical French province of Poictesme (a conglomeration of Poictiers \nand Angouleme) to the early 20th in Virginia. Over and over we see \nCabell's themes played out. One of them is summarized in the prologue\nto \"Biog,\" BEYOND LIFE, in describing the human race more or less as \nfollows -- I am quoting from memory and probably badly --\n\tan ape, reft of his tail and grown rusty at climbing,\n\twho believes himself to be the special favorite of the\n\tCreator.\n\nCabell's work was gently ironic and (as Mantis observes) gently bawdy,\nbut his irony did not extend to the bitter hatred of the human race we\noften find in \"humanists\" like Mark Twain, George Carlin, and Kurt\nVonnegut. This \"ape,\" he posits, is blessed, condemned -- at any rate,\nfated -- to play out the same comedy over and over, the scenery and the\nnames of the characters changing but the real content of the play never\nvarying greatly. (That he could write such varied and delightful books\ndedicated to this theme in no way belies the theme; rather it shows that\nthe comedy itself is rich and malleable, and that what interests us most\nof the time is indeed the surface dressings. It is, of course, also a\ntribute to his own powers of invention.)\n\nHis other great theme was that there were essentially only three \nattitudes toward life: he called them the Chivalrous, the Gallant, and \nthe Poetic. The Chivalrous attitude is that by which one which views \noneself as God's vicar on Earth, and responsible for justice and mercy \n-- in short, the hyper-responsible. The Gallant attitude says that life\nis for pleasure, so gather rosebuds while ye may. The Poetic attitude \nsees the world as raw material to be shaped into art. Each of these\nattitudes has its complications, ramifications, etc.; for example, each\nof them involves a fairly specific attitude toward the proper relations\nbetween men and women. (Chivalric: Men serve Women and worship them as \nintimations of Divine beauty. Gallant: Men pursue Women, who mostly want \nto be caught. Poetic: Men are inspired by Women to their highest \ncreations. -- Well, this _was_ the 1910s and 20s.)\n\nThe heroes of the various novels and stories that make up the eighteen\nto twenty-five (depending on how you count) volumes of the \"Biog\" are\nvery much illustrations of these attitudes; Jurgen himself is the ur-case\nof the Gallant philosophy. The clearest and purest illustrations of these\nattitudes, however, are in the short-story collections (with ten stories\neach; Cabell called them \"dizains\") CHIVALRY, GALLANTRY, and -- no, not\nPOETRY but THE CERTAIN HOUR." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Both JCB books in the end are sort of circular and linear at the same\ntime (a condition we sometimes see in PEACE). " }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "This is true of a number of Cabell's works, though far from all. The \nnature of his themes makes both necessary: to any given player, the\ncomedy is linear; to the (ideal) audience, since it is always going on \nwith a changing cast, it is circular, always repeating with surface\nvariation." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "JURGEN has a couple of ways of =not= showing things: there are the\nnaughty scenes that happen in the dark so you can't \"see\" anything,\nyou just have the innocuous dialogue of a man and woman alone in a\ndark room (this was the meat of the obscenity trial, as I understand\nit); " }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "This is partly due to the conventions of the time. Cabell was one of\na number of figures of the time who wrote gently bawdy and irreverent \ncomedies -- a couple of others moderatly well-known in SF/F circles \nto this day might include Thorne Smith and (to a lesser extent) Anatole \nFrance. But it was also very deliberate on Cabell's part; he wanted to\ntease and gently annoy the reader.\n\nSome editions of JURGEN, btw, include a marvellous little piece called\n\"The Judging of Jurgen,\" in which Jurgen himself is called to answer \nthe charges against the novel -- charges phrased as follows:\n\n\t\t\"You are offensive ... because this\n\tpage has a sword which I chose to say is not a sword.\n\tYou are lewd because that page has a lance which I\n\tprefer to think is not a lance. You are lascivious\n\tbecause yonder page has a staff which I elect to\n\tdeclare is not a staff. And finally, you are indecent for\n\treasons of which a description would be objectionable\n\tto me, and which therefore I must decline to reveal to\n\tanybody.\"\n\nThe accuser, a \"tumble-bug,\" also says:\n\n\t\t... in Philistia to make literature and to make\n\ttrouble for yourself are synonyms. I know, for already \n\twe of Philistia have been pestered by three of these \n\tmakers of literature. Yes, there was Edgar, whom I \n\tstarved and hunted until I was tired of it: then I \n\tchased him up a back alley one night, and knocked out \n\tthose annoying brains of his. And there was Walt, whom \n\tI chivvied and battered from place to place, and made \n\ta paralytic of him: and him, too, I labelled offensive \n\tand lewd and lascivious and indecent. Then later there \n\twas Mark, whom I frightened into disguising himself in \n\ta clown's suit, so that nobody might suspect him to be \n\ta maker of literature: indeed, I frightened him so that\n\the hid away the greater part of what he had made until \n\tafter he was dead, and I could not get at him.\n\n(The whole text of \"The Judging of Jurgen\" is online at \nhttp://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/1460/judging.html).\n\nJURGEN both made and ended Cabell's career in different ways.\nThe notoriety of its trial made the book sell, as no previous\nbook of his had done -- up till then, he was mostly to be found\nin remainder piles. But after, as he complained bitterly, there\nwere only two kinds of reviews available to him: that the new\nbook was just like JURGEN, and he was repeating himself; or that\nit was not like JURGEN, and he was no longer worth reading. For\na while, again due to the notoriety of the obscenity trial, he\nsold tolerably well; after people realized that there was \nnothing actually titillating in his novels, the sales faded away." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "and then there are certain mythic scale heroic episodes,\ntrials of mystery, which are completely missing from the\ntext--you have all the stuff leading up to it, and all\nthe stuff after, with only vague and/or coy hints as to\nwhat actually happened. " }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "True. This seems to violate one of the key elements of Cabell's \nown aesthetic creed: he wanted to \"write perfectly of beautiful\nhappenings.\" I have never satisfactorily resolved this in my own\nmind; I can only guess that these are not the beautiful happenings\nof which he wanted to write perfectly. -- also, like the missing\nsex scenes, it is a deliberate stimulant to the reader." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "(Some of them are apparently long running jokes throughout the\nvarious novels.)" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "These do indeed exist, but (imo) never in a form to intrude into\nthe individual stories. With the possible exception of THE SILVER\nSTALLION -- which is very much a sequel to FIGURES, and a kind of\nbridge from it to JURGEN -- the volumes of the \"Biog\" can all be\nread alone.\n\nI believe I've seen Wolfe comment on his admiration for and \naffinity with \"Southern writers\" in an interview or two. Cabell \nwas quintessentially Southern in the way Mark Twain was -- his\nwritings could only come from a Southerner, and could only offend\nSoutherners." } ] } ] }