Posts filed under “Books & Literature”
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
ALCIPHRON.
The typewriter is a Swintec 1146 CM, made for Swintec by Nakajima in Japan.
And now, here is Dr. Boli’s preface for the new Serif Press edition of Alciphron, an attractively printed volume that can be ordered from Amazon for a reasonable price.
Alciphron is one of those classical writers of whom we must say that we know nothing, and whatever we know is probably wrong. Even his era has been the subject of intense debate, with opinions varying by centuries. The question was unsettled when the introduction to this Athenian Society edition of Alciphron was published in 1896, and it is still just as unsettled today. Therefore we shall not enter the debate.
Instead, we can ask what Alciphon’s work is and why anyone would want to read it. These are also unanswerable questions, but since they will remain unanswerable for eternity, we may safely debate them now.
Alciphron’s letters are a species of fiction, but it is difficult to fit them into any category of fiction modern readers are familiar with. That is surprising, because the letters strike us as extraordinarily modern. They turn our image of the classical world upside-down, lifting up the marble statues of heroes, kings, and emperors to show us the parasites, courtesans, criminals, and working stiffs scurrying like mad under the dignified stones above them. These characters are imagined as writing letters in good literary language, but expressing their hopes and motivations in just the way such people would feel them. The imaginary letters show us lower strata of Greek society filled with real people who have real thoughts, and we come away with the conviction that even a robber or a pirate is a human being just struggling to get through life.
Since the writing seems so modern to us, perhaps we might adopt a very modern term for it and call these letters flash fiction. Each one of them paints a vivid picture of one episode in the supposed writer’s life, but—like the best very short stories—these letters often suggest a much longer and more involved story in the background.
Now that we have a way of describing what the work is, we can move on to what it is for: that is, the vexed question of why we read fiction when we know it’s all lies.
The best answer to why we read fiction—at least good fiction—is that we learn more truth from it than we learn from any other source. We might read a scholar’s laborious study of the culture of parasites and courtesans in ancient Greece, coming away with a bundle of facts and statistics that would leak out of our brain like nickels from a pocket with holes in it. But Alciphron gives us a letter from a parasite who just had to endure a courtesan’s smacking him over the head with a bladder full of blood, while the rest of the dinner guests laughed themselves sick. We don’t forget that, and we know what it was like to be one of these professional comedians who traded all their dignity for a round of good dinners.
Although there is no agreement on when Alciphron lived, or even if the name “Alciphron” really belonged to the author, there is general agreement that he did not live in the times he described—the times when Epicurus and Menander were alive. Therefore these letters are, in a sense, historical fiction. They occasionally introduce real characters from history, like the comic playwright Menander—often considered Alciphron’s inspiration for his characterizations—and the philosophers who infested Athens at the same time. Thus in a sense Alciphron is imagining a world of which he did not have first-hand knowledge. But from our point of view he is still as reliable a purveyor of truth as a fiction writer—that is, an acknowledged peddler of falsehoods—can be. He did not live when Menander lived; but he lived in a world of parasites, courtesans, pirates, slaves, adultery, lawsuits, drunken dinner parties, and all the other characters and situations he describes so vividly. We live in a world of just as many evils, but they take different forms. Alciphron brings that dead world to life in our minds, and that is what his letters are good for.
The translation we have chosen comes from the Athenian Society edition of 1896, which was published privately and anonymously. It is reasonably accurate and pleasant to read. The original is an exceedingly rare book; only 255 copies were printed in total, with a solemn pledge never to print more. The Internet, however, changes our ideas of rarity, and more than one of those 255 copies can be found in online libraries. We take our text with gratitude from copy No. 35, preserved and scanned by the University of California. We have made no substantial changes to the well-printed text, correcting only a few obvious misprints. However, the 1896 edition had the Greek text on facing pages, which we have not printed here. We have also moved the notes from the back of the book to the foot of the page, so that readers will not have to turn to the back as many as three or four times in one page.
We should also mention that the names of the characters are meant to be indicative of their traits. The F. A. Wright translation of 1922 attempts to replace the Greek names with English equivalents and makes other adaptations to a modern English audience. Thus “Epiphillys to Amaracine” becomes “Kate Gleanings to Marjory Meek,” and her letter beginning “Having woven a garland of flowers, I was going to the temple of Hermaphroditus, intending to offer it in honour of him of Alopece,” instead begins, “I had made a wreath of flowers and was going to Alopekë where my Fred lies buried, to put it on his grave.” Fred from Alopekë was a bit much for us to take, so we left the names alone.
The arrangement of the letters has been left alone as well. The Loeb edition of Alciphron from 1949 has a table of seven different arrangements in seven different editions; the present arrangement into three books is not logical, but it is manageable.
The Letters of Alciphron at Amazon.
And now, for the benefit of screen-reader users and (of course) our robot friends, here is the transcription of the sonnet.
When all the rich are rotting in their graves;
When generals are mingled with the dust
Of privates, and the masters and the slaves
Have turned to dirt, as everybody must;
When swords and plows have crumbled into rust,
And no one struts, and no one pleads or begs;
When all the members of the upper crust
Are sunk down to the bottom with the dregs;
When crippled beggars earn their heavenly legs
And drink ambrosia like an honored guest;
When emperors are taken down six pegs
And buried with the poor and dispossessed;
Then Alciphron will still remember me,
And I shall have my immortality.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
WHAT SHOULD WE CALL IT?
It’s an interesting phenomenon in the world of literature, and it seems to Dr. Boli that there ought to be a word for it. What do you call it when the dominant group is treated as the norm, but the non-dominant groups are assigned to their own little ghettos? Ethnicgroupism? Nationaloriginism? There ought to be some short and simple term for it, don’t you think?
LET’S TALK ABOUT SOMETHING INTERESTING FOR A CHANGE.
This is not a new idea to you. You had already been aware of the water when you opened the book. It seems to you that the idea of “water” is contained in the idea of “ocean.”
But surely we must be about to get to the good stuff. You go on to chapter two and find that it describes in minute detail another class of evidence by which we can deduce that the ocean is full of water. The third chapter describes experiments with floating bodies, whose buoyancy proves that there is water in the ocean underneath them. The fourth chapter brings in a hygrometer, whose needle is pegged at the top of the scale when the end is dipped in the ocean. The rest of the chapters consist of stories of historical figures who went bathing in the ocean and came out wet. The concluding chapter summarizes all the evidence, and ends with a ringing declaration that it can no longer be denied that there is water in the ocean.
Well, that book was a disappointment. You didn’t learn anything about the ocean, because the book was only interested in the one thing about the ocean that you already knew.
So you take a class in oceanography at the community college—but once again you find that the professor and the course material have only one thing to tell you, which is that there is water in the ocean, and nobody can deny it.
In desperation, you turn to YouTube—a desperate measure indeed—and find that most of the videos that come up when you search for “ocean” are all about the astonishing and outrageous discovery that there is water in the ocean.
What would you think after all that? You would think that the whole intellectual world had managed to miss the point of oceans. You would think that everyone was belaboring the obvious. You would think that people were depriving themselves of the astonishment and delight they could enjoy if they only looked at the things in the water rather than at the water itself.
We are fortunate that we do not live in that intellectual world. But you probably guessed already (if you are the sort of reader who has the patience for five hundred words of introduction) that we were using the case of the ocean as an analogy for something else.
For most of human history, it was the nearly universal assumption that men and women are different and have different roles. There are still people who believe that today. Dr. Boli is not one of them, and he will explain why very briefly. The assumption was probably useful in paleolithic times, when the sexual dimorphism we inherited from our primate ancestors was a meaningful distinction. In those days it was good that there was one class of big strong oafs who went out to bonk mastodons on the head, and another class of more nimble and thoughtful members of the tribe who made plant fibers into thread and processed the mastodon skins and raised the young and coordinated the meals and established the rudiments of what would later become civilization.
But we might define civilization as the gradual process of making physical differences between human beings irrelevant. A woman can order from Grubhub as easily as a man can. A man can push buttons on the microwave as easily as a woman can. In a world where intellectual capacity is the most important ability, no physical difference between men and women is significant in deciding what position any individual should hold in life.
You may agree or disagree with Dr. Boli’s assertion, and for the purpose of our discussion here it makes no difference at all. We need only agree on the historical fact that, until quite recently, it was almost universally believed that men and women occupied different positions in society. In spite of occasional brilliant cranks who thought otherwise, there was no really serious challenge to that idea until the late eighteenth century at the very earliest.
So when academics look at literature from the past and find evidence of sexism, they are doing exactly what our hypothetical oceanographers did when they presented conclusive evidence that there is water in the ocean. They are telling us what everybody knows, over and over again, ad infinitum and ad nauseam. They are pointing out the water in the ocean.
Yet they do it over and over. Whole academic careers are built on analyzing the literature of the past in terms of patriarchy and the subjugation of women, which is exactly analogous to analyzing the ocean in terms of water. That was the environment in which the people of the past lived. We know that. But there were whales, and angelfish, and sharks, and sea otters, and giant squid, and glorious coral reefs filled with unimaginably colorful life. Wouldn’t it be more fun to talk about those?
Dr. Boli has a proposal for academic literary critics—or art critics, or any other students of the culture of the past. He will stipulate, as they say in the legal business, that the history of the past is a record of the subjugation of women by men. He will even stipulate that the past would probably be improved if we went back and kicked most of those men out of their leadership positions and stuck random women in there instead. The women could hardly do worse. In return, because he has made those stipulations, you do not need to argue your case anymore. Your assertions are admitted. They will not be challenged. Instead, you can start to look at the marvelous things the people who lived in the past did with the world they were given. If you do that, Dr. Boli will probably buy your books.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
From DR. BOLI’S UNABRIDGED DICTIONARY.
Existentialism (noun).—The philosophical position that certain things exist. Not generally taken seriously in philosophical circles.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
