17 May 2009 at 10.40 am (Bookish Adventures with Bartholomew)
No, Bartholomew’s not dead. As the picture illustrates, he’s recovered from his near-death experience of last summer, and is currently working on taking over my bookshelf.
Perhaps he resents me for failing to include him in this archive for eight months. It’s more difficult than I expected, however, to find plant-related book news.
Luckily, Lucas Turnbloom also likes plants and books.
I feel much better.
17 May 2009 ~ St. Catharines
25 September 2008 at 9.24 pm (Bookish Adventures with Bartholomew)
Tags: Don McKay, environmental theory
“By ‘wilderness’ I want to mean, not just a set of endangered spaces, but capacity of all things to elude the mind’s appropriation. The tools retain a vestige of wilderness is especially evident when we think of their existence in time and eventual graduation from utility: breakdown. To what degree do we own our houses, hammers, dogs? Beyond that line lies wilderness. We probably experience its presence most often in the negative as dry rot in the basement, a splintered handle, or shit on the carpet. But there is also the sudden angle of perception, the phenomena surprise which constitutes the sharpened moments of haiku and imagism. The coat hanger asks a questions; the armchair is suddenly crouched: in such defamiliarizations, often arranged by art, we encounter the momentary circumvention of the mind’s categories to glimpse some thing’s autonomy — its rawness, its duende, its alien being.” (21)
The independence of “domesticated” living things always startles me. In only five hours Bartholomew became a far more complex individual (as witnessed by the photo from this morning).
That’s neat.
25 September 2008 ~ St. Catharines
Works Cited:
McKay, Don. “Baler Twine.” Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry & Wilderness. Wolfville: Gaspereau Press, 2001. 15-33.
25 September 2008 at 1.42 pm (Bookish Adventures with Bartholomew)
Tags: environmental theory
‘My mind,’ he said, ‘rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants, but I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.’ ~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four
Despite his posh new home, Bartholomew continues to look a bit Dickensian. Which is why I’ve advised him not to reveal the following bit of information. But Bartholomew needs to clear his conscience. Brace yourself, dear reader.
Bartholomew has never been to England.
I know, I know. In the past I’ve not only claimed Bartholomew as the product of a Dickensian orphanage, I’ve also discussed how his name derives from Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. Bartholomew wears the British flag, he celebrates May Day in the British style, and the birth of the British dramatist Thomas Middleton. Yet Bartholomew has never been farther than Kitchener, Ontario.
It’s all been a lie.
Or has it? Bartholomew and I began having this argument about two weeks ago now, when I first started writing my short fiction submission for my “Writing the Environment” class. Bartholomew wasn’t happy that I set the story in London, England, a city that I, like Bartholomew, have never physically visited.
Yet, reading Ackroyd’s London (London: Vintage, 2008), and thinking about what it means to inhabit an environment, I wonder if I don’t have at least a partial claim to this city. My best friend growing up was British (as, you may have guessed, was her family): spending a good deal of time with their family, I was unsurprisingly exposed to British culture. Besides learning to eat toast with jam and cheese, and watching copious amounts of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, I also (given that reading was one of our favourite weekend activities) read a plethora of British literature: some of my first exposures to Michael Bond, James Herriot, CS Lewis, Roald Dahl, William Blake and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came from her shelves.
I grew up in literature, then, with an understanding of British grammar, punctuation, and lexicon, and an ear for the rhythms of British prose and poetry. I grew up inhabiting a literary London.
Of course, an actual resident in London is going to have a better sense of the city itself, and, likely, will be able to convey the visceral sense of that city better than I. When it comes to an understanding of how London has been imagined in the history of English literature, however, I feel fairly knowledgeable, and my imaginary London seemed the perfect backdrop for a story of a man who lives almost entirely in his memory of books: especially considering the figure of Sherlock Holmes occupies a central space of those memories.
Sherlock, of course, is one of those odd literary figures whose mythology seems to have consumed his author, both during Doyle’s lifetime and after: Doyle killed Sherlock in “The Final Problem” in 1893, but the pressure of fans and publishers convinced him to revive the character eight years later. Today, one can go on a Sherlock Holmes tour in London and see the Holmes plaque and statue outside Abbey House at 221B Baker Street (an address which did not exist in Doyle’s lifetime: Baker Street only went up to the 100s before turning into “Upper Baker Street”), as well as the Sherlock Holmes Museum (a 19th century home converted to look like the apartment described in Doyle’s work and bearing the postal address “221b Baker Street”).
Sometimes the imaginary is more real than the real.
Canadian literature is, of course, an critical part of my identity: it is important not to neglect the history, politics, theory and art of one’s own geographical landscape. There is more to identity, however, than one’s geography culture (which is one of the reasons I pay such close attention to gender politics and theories in my work as well). It was through British literature and not Canadian, however, that I first entered the “environment” of text, and this is a history and culture to which I will continue to make modest claims.
Despite what Bartholomew thinks.
25 September 2008 ~ St. Catharines
Glossary of Terms:
Bond, Michael (b.1926). Author of the Paddington Bear and Olga da Polga book series. The latter is especially my favourite, as it features a British guinea pig who tells fabricates absurd adventures. As I always suspected, all guinea pigs have Napoleon complexes.
14 June 2008 at 4.02 am (Bookish Adventures with Bartholomew)
Tags: Ben, Christopher Marlowe, EEBO, Ernesto Laclau, Gaurav, Jean Baudrillard, thesis, Thos. Middleton, Will Shakespeare
Sometimes Bartholomew and I just don’t agree.
Recently, my vegetative roommate and I have been at odds on the issue of space. Bartholomew has lately suggested to me that perhaps I don’t need all those copies of Doctor Faustus and The Spanish Tragedy which litter “his” bookshelf. Considering, however, that I’m the one who rescued (and paid for) Bartholomew, and also that he owes his very name to the early moderns with whom he resides (we shall recall that his namesake is the clownish Bartholomew Cokes from Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair), I think this attitude is a bit ungrateful.
Let’s consider the situation carefully. Of major Elizabethan and Jacobean dramas, I have multiple versions of Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (five editions), Lyly’s Endymion, Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister, Peele’s The Old Wives Tale, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (three editions each), Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness, Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling, Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan and The Malcontent, Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday , Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts, Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster, The Maid’s Tragedy, and The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (two copies of all of these).
When considering two of the more-anthologised dramatists of the period, Marlowe and Jonson, things begin to get ridiculous:
By Christopher Marlowe:
Complete plays (London: Penguin, 2003).
Doctor Faustus (three single, five anthologised)
Edward the Second (one single edition, two anthologised) [i]
Tamburlaine, Part I (one single edition, one anthologised).
Tamburlaine, Part II. (single edition)
The Jew of Malta (two, anthologised).
By Ben Jonson:
The Complete Plays, Vol. 1 (London: Dent, 1915/53) [2 copies]
The Complete Plays, Vol. 2 (1963).
Volpone (two single editions, five anthologised).
Bartholomew Fair (single edition).
Epicoene (three, anthologised).
The Alchemist (three, anthologised).
Every Man In His Humour (two, anthologised).
Sejanus, His Fall (one, anthologised).
I’m not even going to attempt to fully catalogue my Shakespeare editions: I have two Oxford folios (the compact 1959 edition and Wells and Taylor’s 2005 Complete Works), as well as a cheap Wordsworth edition [ii], and a nigh-complete four-volume Norton set (minus the Histories), as well as my incongruous collection of Revels-New Mermaids-Methuen-Arden-Penguin-Norton Critical-Longman-Signet-Dover single editions of the plays (not to mention anthologised versions).
So many editions might seem to demand explanation; indeed (as you probably suspected) I can provide one. Actually, I can provide several.
My early modern collection (as with most who become interested in this period) began with Shakespeare. In high school, however, I didn’t much appreciate or even understand the differences between editions: simply owning the plays was enough, and, when one’s economic resources are scarce (as they are for most 16-year-olds), one tends to purchase the most inexpensive editions available: single Dovers [iii] and (because some of the plays are not so readily available in single editions) Wordsworth folios. Gradually, these were replaced with editions which included line numbers, introductions, and footnotes; then, as I became more involved in the university, I upgraded to editions with contextual essays, and introductions and notes by reliable Shakespeare scholars, whenever I could find them.
Then I started researching the other early moderns, who, because they are sometimes difficult to find, I bought in any edition (out of date, or in massive and entirely unpragmatic anthologies which included yet another version of Doctor Faustus [iv]. Again, whenever I found more recent, better (notes and editing), smaller, or sometimes just different editions of these plays (with different critical perspectives), I would add them to my collection.
The most uneven collection I have is, perhaps oddly, Jonson’s. This is mostly because there are only three widely-available complete folios of his works (if you don’t include the original 17th century prints or EEBO facsimiles thereof) available. Of these, the Oxford collection, by CH Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, is 11 volumes, each ranging from about $200-$450 (Canadian),[v] and the Cambridge online/print complete works which is not yet available (and bound to be out of the typical student’s price range). Felix Schelling’s two-volume set (originally printed in 1910) is both compact and generally available at used book stores, but contains no line numbers, and so is not suitable for citing in academic work. The easiest way to obtain scholarly editions is to order single or anthologised editions of the plays: doing so, however, results in owning several copies of “The Alchemist (& other plays).” Even then, there’s no guarantee in finding all the plays, and I’ve had dreadful luck locating any of the later works: readily affordable W. Gifford editions contain notes but, like the Schelling, have no line numbers (and so are like the Dover editions of Shakespeare). The more critical Revels editions of Anthony Parr’s The Staple of News, Michael Hattaway’s The New Inn, and Peter Happe’s The Magnetic Lady are anywhere from $70-$200 [vi].
I don’t mean to sound at all complaining about uneven publishing: such are the conditions of my field of study, and other scholars have their own peculiarities with which to work. I simply offer these facts as a justification for the several editions of early modern drama that I own, and which I promise I will continue to buy.
Not that any one has demanded I do justify my multiple books[vii]. I have, however, been wrestling with my conscience on this matter for the last week or so, and the problem came to a crisis today. Earlier (after a quick stop to my favourite used bookstore), Gaurav and I stopped by Chapters, to sample the books we don’t already own, and see if there was anything that could break our resolve not to spend money, especially on books that, admittedly, we would likely only read part of before new ones came along to distract us. Two in particular tempted me: Ernesto Laclau’s Emancipation(s), and Baudrillard’s The Perfect Crime. My resolve won out[ix], due to no real strength of my own, but because of the pressing knowledge that I’ll be fairly weighted down with critical/theoretical readings for the next month while I finish the thesis.
Still, the Baudrillard was tempting, if only because his essays are concise (the longest in The Perfect Crime is 12 pages, and clearly written). My good sense won out in the end, though, especially as I remembered that I had already bought a little collection of Baudrillard essays less than two months ago, whose title I couldn’t remember, and out of which I have only yet read a pair of essays. I had to wonder though, which other Baudrillard could possibly have won out over The Perfect Crime, whose end cover describes the text as an investigation of “the murder of reality,” (and is thus an obvious follow-up to his Simulacra and Simulation, which I had been reading for most of last term for both my first chapter and my final paper in Lit. Theory redux).
None of the other books in the store seemed familiar, so I assumed that whatever book I had bought must now be out of stock. When I went home, then, I began to search for my Baudrillard text: I looked in the piles of “new” and “in use” books on the floor (since the Baudrillard was both new, and, because of chapter one, also potentially associated with the “in use” category), and on both my “general” and “favourite” theory shelves. The only Baudrillards I found were the much-abused Simulacra and Simulation and, oddly enough, The Perfect Crime.
Oddly enough, because I have absolutely no memory of having bought this text: try as I might to recall this experience, I cannot recollect standing in line and eventually paying for, this book; too, I still could not remember the name of the other text from which I remembered reading the pair of essays (“Holocaust” and “History”). Another twenty-minute search unearthed no other Baudrillard. Eventually, it occurred to me to check again whether those essays are not, in fact, included in The Perfect Crime. They aren’t.
They are, in fact, in Simulacra and Simulation.
This whole experience has confirmed for me, a few realities:
1. I am not aware of the books I own.
2. I am not aware of the books I buy (and may in fact, be spending vast fortunes on hundreds of books I already own). [x]
3. I am not aware of the books I read.
4. I am running out of space on my floor.
I fear I am fulfilling all sorts of stereotypes [xi]. I also fear I am encountering extremely early senility. Or perhaps I am a scholar wise beyond my years. Consider reality 3. in comparison to the following, for example:
To compensate a little for the treacheries and deficiencies of my memory, which are so extreme that more than once I have picked up, thinking it new and unknown to me, some book that I had carefully read some years before, and scribbled all over with my notes, I have adopted the habit for some time now of noting at the end of every book — I mean those that I do not intend to read again — the date when I finished it and the opinion I had formed of it as a whole, my purpose being at least to remind myself of the character and general impression of the author that I had conceived when reading it. (Montaigne, “On Books,” 171-172). [xi]
Except Montaigne never wrote for a plant. Also, I somehow think my note-taking skills are less uniform and disciplined as his were. Well, if in ten years or so I am still keeping this archive, and I happen to write a review of Orlando, or The New Inn, hopefully you will direct me to my notes on the same.
End Notes:
[i] Edward the Second. I will, of course, be adding Martin’s Broadview edition of this play to my collection when it comes out next year. (After all, I am transcribing/annotating sections of it.)
[ii] Wordsworth edition. The kind where the print comes off in your hands: I owned this one prior to receiving the better-edited Oxfords.
[iii] Dovers. Dover editions usually cost between $1 and $5, and are inexpensive because they are drawn from public domain sources and translations, and involve little editorial mediation (which is one of the more expensive aspects of re-publishing). This means, however, that you may be getting out of date notes (or none at all) or inaccurate or poor quality translations (these are not Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, or Fagle’s Aeneid. On the other hand, some famous and lasting translations (for example, Longfellow’s Inferno, Smollett’s Quixote, or Chapman’s Iliad) are public domain.
[iv] Doctor Faustus. Not that I mind Doctor Faustus, I’m just puzzled why this play, of all of Marlowe’s appears in nearly every anthology of early modern, or British literature. Edward II and Tamburlaine are my personal favourites though, as a rule, nothing really goes amiss with Marlowe.
[v] Herford and Percy Simpson. This edition was originally released in 1925, and, while it has been updated several times, according to the people at Cambridge, no major changes have been made reflecting recent interrogations of the critical history surrounding Jonson’s work; I suppose we shall have to wait to judge the differences between the Oxford and Cambridge editions.
[vi] Revels editions. With The Magnetic Lady not being available in Canada. I’ve been relying on interlibrary loan for all of these works.
[vii] my multiple books. Outside of Bartholomew, and you may have realised by now I do a lot of, we shall say, “creative interpretation” for him.
[viii] resolve won out. At least temporarily for the Laclau. I have a feeling I’ll be looking at this text again in a month or so.
[ix] I already own. I may be acquiring these vast fortunes through bank thefts and other devious schemes: it stands to reason that if I am buying books unawares I may be involved in other unconscious crimes. For all I know, I have secret warehouse and overseas storage boxes of two or three hundred copies of Moby Dick and The English Patient.
[x] all sorts of stereotypes. If I ever buy a cat, it is the end of me.
[xi] “On Books”. For an interesting reading of this essay and the relationship between books and memory in general, see Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (Vancouver: Raincoast, 2007).
Works Cited:
Montaigne, Michel de. “On Books.” Essays. Transl. J.M. Cohen. London: Penguin, 1993. 159-173.
14 June 2008 ~ St. Catharines
25 May 2008 at 3.48 pm (Bookish Adventures with Bartholomew)
Tags: Don McKay, environmental theory, Gaurav, Peter Ackroyd
It was bound to happen sooner or later: all those late nights reading plays, typing and deleting introductory paragraphs, and writing a quick* article before sleep, have worn at my defenses; the microbes have invaded and converted my corpus into a battlefield. The site of the conflict: my middle ear.
It doesn’t seem so bad, does it? An ear infection: confined to a single location, not contagious via the air, and it doesn’t even come with much of a fever. The ear is a complex and delicate organ, however, and also very small: any swelling then (which invariably attends infection) is extraordinarily painful, making it, at times, difficult to concentrate on anything else.
Besides this, I’ve temporarily lost some of my hearing. I don’t think many of us realise how much we rely on our sense of hearing to orient ourself within our surroundings: without proper use of both ears, sounds nearby become muted, and blend with background noise (which becomes louder). Being in noisy areas, then, is disorienting. Add to this the difficulty of listening to music, turning my head, chewing, or talking, and the whole experience is rather irritating, and interferes with my regularly-scheduled activities. [i]
What has any of this to do with Bartholomew? Well, you may recall that when I introduced him, I commented that in anthropomorphising and regularly featuring him in my archive, I hoped I would pay more attention to him, and prevent him from suffering the dehydrated death of all my previous plants. The plan was actually quite successful: I remembered to water him, to trim any dead or decaying leaves, to turn him as he follows the sun, so that he grows straight. Paying such close attention allowed me to observe minute changes in his growth and appearance; these (rather unpredictable) changes were to be the subject of Bartholomew’s next article. [ii]
Then, tragedy struck. Bartholomew grew a bit too tall and collapsed under the weight of his own leafy vine. I was forced to trim a rather large section at his base where the stem had broken and turned black. He grew rather rapidly again after that, and, to prevent a like occurrence, I provided him with a little stake/flagpole to support his weight as he creeped up. It worked, for a few days, until he again curled away from the stake into the ground.
Since then, I’ve done some reading, and learned that though they attempt to grow upwards, young ivies should actually be encouraged to grow horizontally until their stems are thick enough to support their own weight. So then, the trick is not to tie him up, but to pin his stem to the soil in his pot.
The happy, and rather amazing fact, is that ivies are nearly impossible to kill [iii], and Bartholomew, though I’ve cut him down twice now, continues to grow rapidly. I even managed to save his last cutting which is currently floating in a water/fertiliser mixture. Soon he’ll grow roots and will be replanted in soil and, if I remember my biology correctly, will have the exact DNA as the other half of him; even though he will appear as two distinct plants, he is technically only one.
One plant in two distinct bodies; colonies of autonomous bacteria in me: this type of inter-relatedness of organisms is precisely the information that recent eco-critics like Niel Everndon or Don McKay use to complicate our notions of territoriality and individuality: the natural co-dependence of organisms within a single body suggests the theoretical approaches and methods we ought to take towards our social and political operations. [iv]
This is all fascinating to me, but poor Bartholomew still looks a little sad. To cheer him up, I thought I would read a bit to him from Peter Ackroyd’s “biography” of London, a book which Gaurav gave to interest me while my auditory senses are suffering. I must say, it does the trick nicely: Ackroyd has painstakingly combed chronicles, annals and diaries, as well as plays, letters, and law-codes, and volumes (literally) of other sources[v] to uncover the sensory and visceral details of London at all its stages of life (from prehistory to contemporary day).
It’s a massive tome (822 pages, including the index), so no complete review will be in the works for some time yet. I did, however, (and perhaps ironically) just complete “London Contrasts,” two chapters on the sounds and silences of London during the early medieval period. It’s fascinating to learn that London, not even at a population of one million yet (a feat which it would not achieve until 1801), was actually louder then than it is now (at a population of over 7.5 million). While modern cities value quiet as sign of efficiency and progress, in those days
noise itself is associated with energy and the specifically with the making of money. Sound was intrinsic to the trades of the carpenters and the coopers, the blacksmiths and the armourers. Other occupations, such as dockers and porters, the loaders and unloaders by the wharves, actively employed noise as an agent of business; it was the only way of affirming or expressing their role within the commercial city. (72)
A noisy blacksmith’s means a productive blacksmith’s, while only traders with goods to sell have anything about which to shout. Similarily, in non-economic activities, church bell-ringing was a competition of sorts, and used to salute the “health” of the city (since they took a deal of youthful energy to ring).
London has its silences too, of course, and Ackroyd reveals that strict curfew was kept: in the previous chapter “You be all law-worthy,” we learn that working and drinking after curfew was forbidden and that any figure out after curfew had rung would be “arrested as a night-walker”. Too, citizens were encouraged to ‘raise hue and cry’ against any transgressor of the peace” (61). The hue and cry itself, then, indicates a kind of life flourishing in London: perhaps almost bacterially, interrupting (and defending) the natural rhythms of the city itself, but it emphasises the relationship between sound and the life systems of a large city (and perhaps questions both the modern emphasis on silence and the myths of individuality and anonymity of the city’s inhabitants).
Ackroyd, then, does take an eco-critical approach to his work: a fact indicated by his labeling of his book as a “biography”. Indeed, Ackroyd prefaces his work with an introduction titled “The city as a body,” one where the “byways of the city resemble thin veins and its parks are like lungs” (1). At times the city is “refreshed” (2), at other times diseased: the health of London depends, however, on the smaller collective and individual bodies that run within this enormous circulatory system.
End Notes:
[i] scheduled activities. Thesearch has slowed a little. I have, however, had ample time to read other works (hence the increased number of book reviews in the last week). I recently finished James’s The Turn of the Screw, but am going to wait awhile to review it, first, because I read the majority of it while waiting in the clinic, while clips from Star Wars and Hannah Montanna played on the television, making it not the most ideal environment and circumstances in which to concentrate, and second, because I’m not the most informed on Victorian novels, and would like to read a bit of the critical material first (but can’t justify reading non-thesis related articles when I’m behind in my work).
[ii] Bartholomew’s next article. I was planning to read this alongside Levinas’s theory of the other; the moment has been lost, alas!
[iii] impossible to kill. Kari informed of this when I was considering my options at the plant orphanage: it is, in fact, the main reason I chose to adopt Bartholomew.
[iv] political operations. I discussed McKay’s theories on the environmental implications of anthropomorphoses in my article on Planet Earth. In his essay, “Beyond Ecology,” Everndon asks
Where do you draw the line between one creature and another? Where does one organism stop and another begin? Is there even a boundary between you and the non-living world, or will the atoms in this page be a part of your body tomorrow? How, in short, can you make any sense out of the concept of man as a discrete entity? How can the proper study of man be man if it is impossible for man to exist out of context? For the ecologist, then,the desire of some in the humanities to deal only with the fragment of reality they term “human” is nonsense. (95)
For McKay, metaphor (a “literary” tactic) becomes useful in (re)forging relations with the environment. For Everndon, we are already in a relationship with the environment, and must therefore take care to direct our studies to account for the inter-dependency of organisms. Ackroyd takes this approach in many ways: by examining the different social and political groups that interact within the city, and the city’s relationships with the landscape without the city walls, and by examining human relationships with the stones and water (especially the Thames, and the English rains), and other meteorological events that shape the city and thus the survival strategies of its inhabitants. This approach explains why the book, though arranged roughly in chronological order, tends to jump forward and backwards in time, so that different aspects, causes, and resolutions of different relationships can be illuminated in different ways.
[iv] other sources. I do wish Ackroyd had cited his quote sources within the chapters or an endnotes section, but I think this would interfere with the reading narrative he has established. He does include an essay on source and further reading material at the end of the work.
Works Cited:
Ackroyd, Peter. London: The Biography. London: Vintage, 2001.
Everndon, Niel. “Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens and London: U of Georgia P, 1996. 92-104.
25 May 2008 ~ St. Catharines
Glossary of Terms:
Quick. adj. A word that is actually inapplicable to nearly anything I’ve ever written.
1 May 2008 at 10.30 pm (Bookish Adventures with Bartholomew)
The First of May is upon us, and Bartholomew, identifying with his British “roots” has decided to celebrate the traditional May Day festivities in style. While those same roots prevent Bartholomew from too-vigorous dancing around the traditional May Pole, with a little assistance from your industrious protagonist, Bartholomew was able to partake in a bit of bathing in the May Dew (or, at least, the late afternoon May Day rains) [i], and May garlanding[ii].
The origins behind May Day are in many ways untraceable: festivities celebrating the beginning of summer and the harvest have been appropriated in England by Protestants, and Catholics alike[iii], and variations on popular traditions vary from county to county. In recent years, the celebrations have been conflated with the secular financial, political, and educational seasons: the first of May is also, for example, a Bank holiday in contemporary England.[iv] May Day festivities are, however, probably descended from a conflation of earlier Welsh, Celtic, and Anglo-Saxon holidays.
Besides garlanding and dancing, other May Day festivities include the crowning of a May Queen[v], the casting of “clouts” or winter coats, mock bear dancing by local males, and May Ducking where
all the boys of the village sally forth with a bucket, can, or any other vessel, and avail themselves of a license which the season confers, to ‘dip’, or well-nigh drown, without regard to person or circumstance, the passenger who has not the protection of a piece of ‘May’ conspiculously stuck in his dress, at the same time that they sing ‘the first of May is dipping day’ … There is a great deal of fun on the occasion, for many an unfortunate body who has failed to comply with an ancient custom is seen slinking home like a drowned rat. (153)
A similar traditional involves the allowance of pranks on victims known as ‘May goslings”. As with April Fool’s celebrations, this reign of mischief by local youth is to end at noon.
The association of May Day festivities with pagan celebrations, as well as the festival’s emphasis on public dances between men and women, and the inversion of social order (with boys acting as animals, girls acting as rulers, and children as lords) was the main point of critique amongst Puritans like Philip Stubbs [vi] in the early modern period.
Yet festivals like May Day are critical, as their immortalization in literature serves to demonstrate: early American short stories are highly indebted to the influence of May Day celebrations, as Emerson’s “May Day” (1867), Irving’s”Pride of the Village” (1819-20) and Hawthorne’s “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” (1837) indicate. The cycle of festivals is also the pattern which undergirds Frye’s theories of archtypes, and, most relevant for me, festive tropes such as the inversion of gender and social hierarchy, are the bases of the “festive comedy” genre in early modern English drama.[vii]
I think most individuals feel the importance of festivals outside of literature and theory, however; following a winter that extended well into March and an April where (if you are like me) most of the nicer days were spent indoors writing end-of-term papers, grading exams, and catching up on the sleep missed from the night before — following a term of searching for work, and filing taxes — wouldn’t it be a welcome relief to spend the first week of “summer” planning for, and participating in, a communal space in which the individual has the opportunity to break from the solitary space demanded by these activities and join in a festive space with the community for which we have long laboured?
End Notes:
[i] May Dew. “For at least 200 years, it was widely believed that bathing the face in dew early on May Day morning was excellent for the complexion, and in particular helped to whiten the skin and eradicate freckles” (158). As Bartholomew doesn’t suffer from freckles, and it would be rather unhealthy for him to have a “white complexion”, I’m not concerned that he didn’t get outside until the late afternoon.
[ii] May Garlanding. Apparently children used to travel door to door exchanging flowers they collected for money. Bartholomew, as you may recall however, rarely contributes to the local economy.
[iii] Protestants, and Catholics alike. The Magdalen College choir at Oxford, for example, annually sings the Te Deum Patrem Colimus anthem at the top of the college tower; this tradition has been traced (according to Roud) to Catholic roots (begun as a requiem mass for Henry VII); it has also been thought that the occasion was a Christian reinterpretation of pagan May Day songs. Whatever the origins, in the 1840s, Roud writes, Magdalen fellow Dr John Rouse Bloxam found that the ceremony was “more like a Baccanalian song than a sacred hymn. The choirman and choristers went up the Tower in their usual garb and kept their hats and caps on during the singing. The principle function of the choristers seemed to be to throw down rotten eggs on the people below.”(156) The ceremony was thereafter reformed along more Anglican lines.
[iv] contemporary England. Is it a coincidence that the Guardian Hays Book Festival also occurs around this time? This is the absolute perfect way of luring bookish types like Bartholomew and me out to May festivities.
[v] May Queen. Less often, a May King s also crowned. The May Queen, however, is a more fitting representation of Flora, Latin goddess of spring and summer.
[vi] Philip Stubbs. In his 1583 pamphlet against the Maypole, Stubbs writes:
Against May Day [...] every parish, town, and village assemble themselves together, both men, women, and children, old and young, even all indifferently [...] there is a great lord present amongst them, as superintendent and lord over their pastimes and sports, namely, Satan Prince of Hell: But their chiefest jewel they bring [from the woods] is the may-pole, which they bring home with great veneration [...] This May pole (this stinking idol rather) which is covered all over with flowers, and herbs [...] [is] reared up with handkerchiefs and flags streaming on the top, they strew the ground round about, bind green boughs about it, set up summer halls, bowers, and arbours hard by it. And then fall they to banquet and feast, to leap and dance about it, as the heathen people did.
[vii] “festive comedy” genre. This genre may become increasingly relevant in later articles…
Works Cited
Roud, Steve. The English Year. London: Penguin, 2006.
1 May 2008 ~ St. Catharines
26 April 2008 at 5.03 pm (Bookish Adventures with Bartholomew)
Tags: Don McKay, environmental theory, Jean Baudrillard, Sir David, Thos. Middleton
With the exception of occasional trips to various book depositories to collect more research material, I do most of my thesis work in my own room, where access to my library is, well, most accessible. Bartholomew, as it happens, also spends most[i] of his working days in this same room[ii]. Consequently, the pair of us spend a bit of time together, and have developed a fondness for the same activities. This week, for example, I was marking exams with Planet Earth* on in the background, and Bartholomew, with a clear vantage point from his early modern perch, was watching with me. I like Planet Earth for its (by now) familiar shots of elusive Siberian camels and African wolf dog hunts, as well as David’s comforting British narrations. Bartholomew likes all the rapid-growth footage of cherry blossoms and arctic tundra. We both win when David utters his fabulous “From the ashes rises the phoenix: Grass.”
This line, taken from the “Great Plains” episode, is characteristic of the punning and anthropomorphising language David uses in his narrative. While this narrative gives me delight, it also gives me pause.
The BBC has gone to great lengths in Planet Earth to point out their filming ethics. In the “Planet Earth Diaries” (ten-minute “makings of” videos that follow each 50 minute feature) the film crews discuss their “non-intervention” policies: they film from helicopters and hides, they refuse to help animals that are hungry, preyed upon, or separated from their herds.[iii]
Too, the separation of the video diaries, which show the filming, from the features themselves, which include no evidence of the human film crew, reflects the production team’s mandate to show the remotest and previously unfilmed habitats as one would encounter them in nature: that is, without intervention by other humans. In cutting the film in this way, the BBC offers an exact copy of the natural world, allowing the viewer to gain familiarity with it without having to disturb the environment himself.
In other words, the BBC creates a simulacrum of these environments[iv]:
Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. [...] It is genetic miniaturization that is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control — and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. (2)
The above is Baudrillard’s definition of the simulacrum from his Simulacra and Simulation. In Baudrillard’s terms, the possibility of infinitely reproducing the digital film images in Planet Earth is problematic, precisely because it replaces the filmed environments themselves. The viewer takes the image for the reality. This is a problem Baudrillard identifies occurring in human (non)interaction with the caves of Lascaux*:
In the same way, with the pretext of saving the original, one forbade visitors to enter the Lascaux caves, but an exact replica was constructed five hundred meters from it, so that everyone could see them (one glances through a peephole at the authentic cave, and then one visits the reconstituted whole). It is possible that the memory of the original grottoes is itself stamped in the minds of future generations, but from now on there is no longer any difference: the duplication suffices to render both artificial. (9)
One problem that Baudrillard fails to address in his essay is why, exactly, it is important to have a relationship with the real. One might argue that in preserving fragile habitats on film we reduce the number of human visitants that erode, clutter, or otherwise destroy the natural beauty of, for example, the caves of Lascaux. More, since certain animals, like the Amur Leopard in “From Pole to Pole” are already nearing extinction (David reports there are only 40 left in the wilderness), film preserves the image and habits of an animal so that others can learn from it (and its destruction) in a future world from which it will foreseeably be absent.
Humans, however, are already a part of the environment shared by endangered (and non-endangered) plants and animals. Indeed, the Caves of Lascaux are not primarily valuable because they are ancient geological formations, but because they are a record of human origins and our interactions with our environment in the past. What is the point, then, of preserving these caves, or even the “untouched” caves of Lechuguilla [v] in Planet Earth’s “Caves” episode, if we are never to interact with these environments again?
Baudrillard’s complaint might also be that the possession of the pervasive simulacra reduces our appreciation of the original: as long as we think the caves or leopards or rainforests are preserved on film, we no longer feel we need the real sources of the image. More, the viewer does not notice the further deterioration of the real because every time we view our own simulacrum, it appears in exactly the same state as the last time we saw it.
Baudrillard’s use of the passive voice in phrases like “one forbade” and “an exact replica was constructed,” however, perhaps [vi] suggests that his critique is not necessarily of the act of simulating itself, but of the fact that we hide that the simulated product is a simulation. This allows those who create the simulacra to remain hidden, and from their hiding place direct the individual’s beliefs and desires. We think these beliefs and desires are both tied to real objects and also completely our own, when they are non-real ideologies constructed by others.
One might counter that in including the “Diaries” at the end of each episode, the BBC draws attention to, rather than obscuring, the process of simulation behind the images. Yet the BBC’s openness with their procedures and mandates perhaps distracts the viewer from more subtle directorial methods that direct us to think and emote in a BBC-directed way. For example, the candidness with which the “Diaries” discuss filming methods, and show the arduous physical suffering of the film crews who keep up their good-humoured banter in spite of their frustration, the emotional trauma they encounter having to helplessly watch struggling animals, even the occasional breaks from non-intervention policies as with the penguin chick, constructs an image of the BBC as an empathetic, industrious institution striving for a worthy environmental cause. This image distracts us from the fact that the documentary also won prestige and financial success for that same institution; the ends of the documentary are not necessarily as altruistic as the viewer thinks. Moreover, as consumer of the documentary, we perhaps think that our financial support of the BBC’s endeavour is toward a “good” cause. It is possible that this judgement of the documentary’s social worthiness, though, stems not from any innate values the viewer possesses, but is constructed by the discourse of the film itself.
I wonder, however, if this discourse cannot be viewed more optimistically. True, Planet Earth is an artificial representation of the natural world, and true it has been cut, narrated, and scored to direct its viewers to a specific ideology and emotions.[vii] This does not mean the ideology and emotions themselves are inherently lacking value.
David’s attitude towards the grass is not the only time he uses humourous or punning language to narrate its subjects in human terms. In this same episode, for example, he claims that “fire sparks panic in the [gazelle] herd” [my emphasis] and, concerning an arctic fox trying to collect five or six goose chicks in its mouth, “sometimes, one mouth simply isn’t enough.” The music which accompanies these shots is equally as anthropomorphic. Composer George Fenton matches a hunted caribou herd with trumpets in a minor key, playing grazioso (gracefully), providing a sad majesty to their plight. The wolves which hunt them, unsurprisingly, get pulsing strings and drums, and runs of chromatic thirds, providing a sense of urgency: it becomes clear where the viewer’s sympathies should lie in this hunt. The rather adorable arctic fox in segment three, in contrast, is accompanied by a jaunty arrangements of strings and flutes as she hunts for her even more adorable cubs. Finally, the square-headed Tibetan wolf in segment four hunts mountain pika to a Mission Impossible-esque theme.
These musical interludes, one might argue, along with David’s anthropomorphic language, direct the viewer to project certain human emotions onto the animals and plants that we witness. This tactic threatens to appropriate these untouched habitats into a discourse of civilisation; it makes the non-human human, eradicating its own origins and languages in favour of our own, proving Baudrillard’s point that humans do not study historical or natural objects to learn from the other, but to reaffirm our own existence.
Don McKay, however, takes a different view on the matter. For him, anthropomorphic language provides us with
a sudden angle of perception, the phenomenal surprise which constitutes the sharpened moments of haiku and imagism. The coat-hanger asks a question; the armchair is suddenly crouched: in such defamiliarizations, often arranged by art, we encounter the momentary circumvention of the mind’s categories to glimpse some thing’s autonomy — its rawness, its duende, its alien being. (21)
For McKay anthropomorphism functions the way that all metaphors function: they claim that a thing both is and is not another thing. In the example of Planet Earth, the music and narrative bring these unfamiliar wildernesses within the human world — we understand them as possessing the same emotions that we possess, and have empathy with them: we are part of the same environment. Simultaneously, we recognise the absurdity of suggesting that grass undergoes mythic transformations, or that a wolf hunting rabbit-like animals is akin to an undercover heist. The BBC’s focus on capturing behaviours and locations previously unfilmed heightens the disparity between familiar language/emotions and organisms that are completely outside our realms of familiar encounters. Here anthropomorphoses emphasises how far separated the viewer is from the “real” world that we can only see through simulation, and perhaps encourages the viewer to seek re-engagement with that real in an ethically aware manner.[viii]
End Notes:
[i] most. Except when I take him out for water.
[ii] in this same room. Perhaps you think I should refer to it as “our” room. Well, Bartholomew doesn’t contribute to the local economy much, so I retain singular possession of the space, grammatically. This gives me the illusion of power. Like court spectators who vied for seats nearest to King James, trying to increase their social and political value. See Orgel, Stephen. The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance. Berkeley: U of California P, 1975.
When Bartholomew starts contributing more to my thesis than an occasional skeptical “hmm…” and dropping Thomas Middleton collections on my head as I write, then maybe I’ll include him in the lease agreement.
[iii] separated from their herds. One exception occurs in the “Ice Worlds” episode, where the Antarctic team frees a penguin chick trapped in the ice, reuniting it with its frantic mother. Yes, this one incident is minor enough that neither the habitat or behaviour of the penguins is not going to be altered which is what non-intervention ethics are concerned with, but I wonder, does the mother penguin’s familiarity and acceptance of the team in her habitat indicate that in the very act of filming the animals’ behaviour alters. Then again, research teams of all kinds are a regular part of the Antarctic environment anyways.
[iv] a simulacrum of these environments. Once again, I owe this line of thinking to a comment Prof. Dickinson made in lit. theory redux.
[v] caves of Lechuguilla. The fifth longest cave in the world, located in New Mexico (Carlsbad Caverns). it took the BBC two years of negotiations with the New Mexico government before they could access the caves for filming, and following filming the caves were closed even to research teams.
[vi] perhaps. It may be a matter of translation.
[vii] has been cut narrated and scored. The complexity of this cutting, scoring and narrating is well worth paying attention to: for example, the viewer can liken the grass in “Great Plains” to the “major theme” of the episode, as in a piece of music. The episode begins with the grass in its infancy in the Mongolian summer, and is depicted growing with the seasons across different geological locations. The subjects of the episode are the habitats that grow with the grass. This theme, in fact, is matched by a musical theme played by oboes and strings and a single violin the upper-octave, and swells and falls as the summer approaches and passes.
[viii] to seek reengagement. Not Bartholomew, though, he’s “rooted” to his ceramic pot.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of the Simulacra.” Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Shiela Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994.
McKay, Don. “Baler Twine: Thoughts on Ravens, Home & Nature Poetry. Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry and Wilderness. Kentville: Gaspereau Press, 2001. 11-33.
26 April 2008 ~ St. Catharines
Glossary of Terms:
Lascaux. Paleolithic cave system in the Dordogne region, discovered in 1940 and closed in 1963. The caves contain human-made wall paintings now visible online at the official site.
Planet Earth. n. nom. possibly the best nature documentary series yet made. Well, it was made with “an unprecedented production budget, using high definition photography, and revolutionary ultra-high speed cameras, five years in the making, over 2000 days in the field, using 40 cameramen across 200 locations” (Planet Earth, the complete series, 2007). I’m aware this is BBC marketing-speak here, but the high budget and quality technology is evident in the visual and aural quality, as well as the subject-matter, of the series. It’s beautiful.
18 April 2008 at 6.33 pm (Bookish Adventures with Bartholomew)
Tags: Ben, early modern philosophy, gender studies, thesis, Thos. Middleton, Will Shakespeare
The last couple of weeks or so, Bartholomew and I have been reading the works of Thomas Middleton and Ben nigh exclusively. For me, this effort has been part of my on-going battle with the 4P99 paper: Thom and Ben are the subjects of my first chapter [i]. For Bartholomew, it’s a chance to get better acquainted with the early modern dramatists with whom he shares his shelf space.
When it comes to choosing favourites between the pair, I think it’s unsurprising that I’m going to pick Ben every time. Bartholomew, though, he’s throwing his lot in with Thom. Hence the theme of today’s Bookish Adventures with Bartholomew. You see, Bartholomew recently discovered that today is the 428th celebration of Thomas Middleton’s birthday [ii], and has demanded I make a fuss over the occasion.
I must admit, I sort of see his point. Thomas Middleton is, after all, pretty fantastic, and, like most of the dramatic early modern poets who don’t have the good fortune to be named Will Shakespeare, he’s sadly overlooked by the casual reader.
So why is “T.M. Gent.” deserving of your attention? Well, for starters, the man was a proficient networker. In an age of poetic collaboration, Middleton was the collaborating-est poet around, working with most of the big* names in London theatre, including John Webster, William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, Anthony Munday, Michael Drayton, John Marston, and, of course, with Ben himself. He even worked with the afore-named Will Shakespeare, on Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, and Macbeth (critics suspect he wrote the witch scenes) [iii].
Middleton is also the author of A Game at Chess (1624), the single most financially successful play during the English renaissance [iv].
Finally, Thom. is probably the early modern dramatist you’d most like to spend time with at the pub. In his city comedies*, Thom. writes on a lot of the same themes that Ben and Will are writing about: the hypocrisy of aristocrats, the debauchery of the peasants (and the aristocrats), problems of sexual licentiousness and greed in London’s market, the power politics of marriage, and, of course, the theatre itself. Yet Thom handles these subjects with a lot of liberty and understanding: he doesn’t demand we cut out our gambling and lying altogether. Too, he’s fairly supportive of homosexuality and women. In fact, since I like to quote myself so much, here’s what I wrote about his play The Roaring Girl [v]:
The simulation and dissimulation common in early modern London is the theme of both Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl and Jonson’s The Staple of News.[vi] Middleton, however, reveals (and revels in) the potential for London as not merely a simulation but a hyper-reality, a society where the signs of gender, desire, and wealth possess no real referents; his critique is mainly of the hypocritical attitude of males within this hyper-reality who insist that women conform to essential gender qualities which cannot exist as long as males insist upon women as objects of exchange in the hyper-reality. The possibility of a hyper-reality in which women are active autonomous subjects is, for Jonson, repugnant, and he takes what could be likened to an anti-theatrical stance on the problem, attempting to expose the hyper-reality of London as insubstantial system which ultimately fails against the essential virtue of a self-regulating patriarchy. Jonson’s attempt to distinguish an appropriate “essential” theatre that can operate congruently with the self-regulating patriarchy, however, fails in his inability to reveal the “essentially” virtuous Pecunia as either wholly female or male. (2-3)
That’s a bit dull, really. I only include it as part of my on-going efforts to give friends and readers an idea of what I’m writing about in my thesis (and also to prove that I am indeed getting some work done — you aren’t suffering my long-winded discussions of Ben without cause). Here’s a bit in Thom’s own words:
Lord Nol. Why, thou hadst a suitor once, Jack: when wilt marry?
Moll. Who, I my Lord? I’ll tell you when, i’faith;
When you shall hear
Gallants void from sergeants’ fear,
Honesty and truth unslandered,
Woman manned, but never pandered,
Cheats booted, but not coached,
Vessels older ere they’re broached;
If my mind be then not varied,
Next day following, I’ll be married.
Lord. Nol. This sounds like doomsday.
Moll. Then were marriage best;
For if I should repent, I were soon at rest. (5.1.110)
I admire Moll, far more than Shakespeare’s Katherine even (The Taming of the Shrew). Fearless, independent, and witty witty witty. She forces the men of the play to recognise her as an autonomous being.
So happy birthday, Thom! Bartholomew has asked that I send you belated congratulations, too, on the recent Oxford edition of your collected works! [vi]
End Notes:
[i] my first chapter. This chapter was finally submitted today; Martin gave it the eloquent working title “Chapter One.”
[ii] Thomas Middleton’s birthday. Well, not really. Birth records in early modern London were a bit sketchy; most have to be guessed at from church records, which were much more dependently kept. 18 April 1580 is the date of Middleton’s baptism registration. His birth would have occurred in the week prior to this date.
[iii] the witch scenes. Bet you didn’t know that, did you? That’s right, the great Will, like any other dramatist of this period had a lot of input from other writers and sources. (I must take care: this archive is quickly becoming the “knock Will down a peg or two; that’s unfair. I like him too. There are other playwrights though, folks!)
[iv] A Game at Chess. It was a political play, satirizing the Spanish court, and the Infanta Maria, who was being considered as a marriage match for young Charles I. The play was so contentious that it was shut down after nine days (the longest continuous-running performance in London at the time), and the Globe Theatre prosecuted by the Privy Council. With characters like the “Fat Bishop of Spalato,” it is fairly offensive to the Catholics/Spanish. (The marriage to Spain never occurred, by the way, but as Charles got his head chopped off in 1649, it was probably for the best.)
[v] The Roaring Girl takes as its subject the famous female transvestite, Mary “Moll” Frith, who not only wore men’s clothing, but was also known for her habits of smoking tobacco, carousing in pubs, and dueling. Moll is thought to have attended one of the performances of the play, sitting in the on-stage audience with the other roarers.*
[vi] The New Inn is the first of Ben’s late plays. Set in London, the action of the play takes place in and around the newly-formed rumour mill (yes, it actually sells gossip), and critiques the spending habits of a miser (Pennyboy Sr.), a prodigal (his nephew, Pennyboy Jr.), and the prodigal’s “dead” father, Pennyboy Canter, who learns them all a lesson in civic virtue.
[vii] collected works. Speaking of birthdays, I was going to recommend this as an excellent gift idea for anyone considering mine. Then I realised it’s $255 (I’m pretty sure it was much much much cheaper when first released). Even I think that’s a bit much for Middleton. Take a look at it anyways: it’s a nice edition.
http://www.amazon.ca/Thomas-Middleton-Collected-Gary-Taylor/dp/0198185693/ref=pd_rhf_f_i_k2a_1
Works Cited:
Me! “Chapter One.” In Obviously Unpublished. (April 2008 ). 1-18.
Middleton, Thomas. The Roaring Girl. In Thomas Middleton. Vol.II. Ed. Havelock Ellis. London: T Fischer Unwin. 1-114.
18 April 2008 ~ St. Catharines
Glossary of Terms:
Big. adj. Of large magnitude. Another relative term; for example, “Erin thought dramatists like Middleton and Jonson were a big deal, but her readers thought she was completely nutters.”
City Comedy. n. (lit.) Genre of comedy, you guessed it, set in the city! Usually that city is London, but Shakespeare set his Measure for Measure in Vienna. Ben’s four most popular Jacobean comedies are in this genre, as are most of Middleton’s. City comedies usually take the problems of commerce, law, prostitution and the fair as their themes/settings. Also, the plots usually involve the different characters attempting to outsmart/swindle each other.
Roarer. n. (obs.) Name given to youths in early modern London who ate, drank, gambled, drank, dueled, and generally kicked up a ruckus (while drinking). During the Protestant Interregnum under the rule of Oliver Cromwell, roaring took on a more political meaning as roarers fêted with the spirit of carpé diem, against the oppressive social regime.
9 April 2008 at 11.19 am (Bookish Adventures with Bartholomew)
Tags: Ben, Deleuze and Guattari, environmental theory, Roland Barthes
Friends, Bartholomew; Bartholomew, Friends.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way. Bartholomew is a plant. On closer inspection, he appears to be some variety of ivy. I’m not certain. You see the nursery at Ikea can be likened to a Dickensian orphanage. You hear that swelling chorus? “Food, glorious food!” That’s right, I’m thinking Oliver. You know that scene in chapter two (which also contains the famous, “please sir, I want some more” scene) where Oliver is forced to stand in front of the faceless board? This is how I imagine Bartholomew:
“Boy,” said the gentleman in the high chair, “listen to me. You know you’re an orphan, I suppose?”
“What’s that, sir?” inquired poor Bartholomew.
“The boy is a fool- I thought he was,” said the gentleman in the white waistcoat.
“Hush!” said the gentleman who had spoken first. “You know you’ve got no father or mother, and that you were brought up by the parish, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Bartholomew, weeping bitterly.
“What are you crying for?” inquired the gentleman in the white waistcoat. And to be sure it was very extraordinary. What could the boy be crying for?
Orphans are orphans and plants are plants. Everyone gets the same functional plastic orphanage pot and rote watering each morning by a bored teenager named “Dan”. I’m not blaming Dan, I sure he’s just as powerless against the Board as Bartholomew, but at least he gets a name.
Poor Bartholomew.
I purchased Bartholomew for $2.00 (including his ceramic pot) and brought him home. He now resides, as you can see, on the shelf by my window, amongst my early modern drama. [i] Now he rises to fame as the protagonist in the newest feature in my non-material archive, Bookish Adventures with Bartholomew. You’ll watch Bartholomew as he grows taller, eventually leaving the safety of the drama shelf and extending up to early modern poetry and prose and, if all goes to plan, the early modern and post-structuralist criticism.
This outrageous anthropomorphising approaches sheer lunacy, but it’s an idea I’ve been mulling over for a few weeks now, ever since I read the following passage in lit. theory redux:
The proper name (nom propre) does not designate an individual: it is on the contrary when the individual opens up to the multiplicities pervading him or her, at the outcome of the most severe operation of depersonalization, that he or she acquires his or her true proper name. The proper name is the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity. (37)
This excerpt is from Deleuze and Guattari’s “1914: One or Several Wolves?”. The idea of the article is that just as the individual is both a single body and multiple (each with autonomous bacteria, organs, cells, and plasticites), the individual also belongs to a communal body that is several layers of communities existing within larger communities. Names are the things which indicate the communities in which the individual exists at any given moment. Our seminar examined the concept of nicknames: nicknames (like proper names) are generally not self-titled, but are names which others in our community give us to designate what we we mean to that community. For D&G, the nickname is a form of love: it indicates our selection by another.
Thinking back through my own nicknames, I can see what they mean: my brothers have individual names for me by which they have referred to me for for as long as I can remember, the origins of which have been forgotten, and which are entirely meaningless (and thus not used by) any one beyond my immediate family: they designate my belonging to my familial community [ii]
Nicknames are fascinating precisely because (as Dickinson pointed out) they begin to construct an “archaeology” of the person: you can identify from what “era” old friends and acquaintances come simply by what name form they use to address the named person. For example, in high school, a friend and I were writing notes to each other in our “world issues” class (probably the most boring class I ever took, and that includes civics). As my friend was sitting in the desk ahead of me, he had to turn around to write on the paper which was on my desk, and, a consequence of writing upside-down, misplaced the last two letters of my name. When I laughed, he very calmly added an “e” to the end, and said
“Ernie J” That’s your name now.
Bizarrely, it stuck throughout the rest of high school. You can always tell my friends from that era from nothing more than the use of that name. Interestingly, this is a name that, like all other nicknames I’ve possessed, I have had little control over, and which even the people who designated and used the name seemed to have little input in its creation: it is, like original atomic structures, or the chromosomes which constitute the body itself, a “random assemblage” (D&G, 34) of letters that, because we were bored, because the event seemed humourous to us, we repeated, and through repetition, continued to give the assemblage meaning.
Of course, names are often hurtful, and don’t seem to designate love at all. They do, however, continue to establish the individual’s relationship with the community. One must think, if however briefly and subconsciously, of that name and the body it designates, in order to utter it. Which means the body is not effaced. The easiest way to destroy a body is to remove its proper name, to group it among a homogenous “other” and to order its destruction from afar: an enclosed office, pen on paper.
I can’t have a particular relationship with a passenger pigeon.* It’s already dead. I do know, however, the blue jay who screams two feet outside my window each morning: his name is Jeremy[iii].
I’m not suggesting that in naming and anthropomorphising we can ever understand the other: this would be an entirely irresponsible suggestion. We are already in a relationship with our environment[iv], however, and naming perhaps reminds us of this fact, and serves as a beginning for a more responsible relationship with at least our local environments. So I name Bartholomew, and include him in my writing, and, with any luck, this will remind me to offer him water occasionally[v]. I name him Bartholomew and yet continue to be ignorant of what kind of plant he is, exactly. Perhaps I will never know and this species name will be a part of a community (say, a biological community) to which Bartholomew belongs separate from me. This is a name he will keep to himself.
End Notes
[i] This is a fitting location for him, since Bartholomew is named after the irresponsible Bartholomew Cokes in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. I like to imagine my plant would be a bit more irresponsible than myself. Perhaps I am projecting though. (By the way, it’s pronounced the British way: “Bart-ol-mew”)
[ii] I still get cards and letters addressed to “Erin-Merrin” and “little freak” — the last of which is only non-offensive when used by my brother Craig.
[iii] After Jeremiah, prophet of doom. Blue jays are ridiculously loud and obnoxious.
[iv] Environments too, are “random assemblages” of individuals born to that locale.
[v] In the past I have tended to neglect this act, and as a result, most of my plants have died.
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. “1914: One or Several Wolves?” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis and London: U of Minneapolis P, 1987. 26-38.
Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. http://www.online-literature.com/dickens/olivertwist/
9 April 2008 ~ St. Catharines
Glossary of Terms:
passenger pigeon. n. See Barthes, Roland.
