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Monday, April 1, 2024

Index

The index has grown to the point of becoming unwieldy, leading me to offer first a brief sketch of its contents.

For the most part the site contains literary criticism with topics ranging around the globe and through the centuries. There are also other essays, translations, travel stories, a few memoirs, a few political comments. With rare exceptions (mostly early) I do not post my poetry here.

In the literary essays I am willing to discuss virtually anything. This site is strong on literary theory, the idea of the avant-garde, ancient Greek, medieval European, and Asian literatures, and includes a series of treatments of blues songs as poetry.

Some of the essays are technical and include academic jargon, probably indigestible to a lay reader. Others are directed toward a general audience. Perhaps the most accessible are those in the Every Reader’s Poets series (section 5G below) which assume no background knowledge. 


The index now features hypertext connections. Simply click on any title below to read it.

Though this listing serves, I think, a clear purpose, not every posting falls easily into the categories. One essay might equally be placed under literary theory or medieval texts while another might fit under memoir, politics, or travel. Translations with comment might be either criticism or translation. Poke around a bit.

The categories are:

1. speculative, familiar, performance pieces, and other essays

2. literary theory

3. Greek texts (and a few Latin)

4. medieval European texts

5. other criticism
A. 16th-19th century
B. 20th century to the present 
C. Asian texts
D. songs
E. Notes on Recent Reading
F. Rereading the Classics
G. Every Reader's Poets

6. translation

7. poetry

8. politics

9. memoirs

10. travel


1. Speculative, familiar, performance pieces, and other essays
Agnostic Credo and Vita (October 2015)
Confidence Games (August 2022)
Contronyms (March 2019)
Cookbooks (April 2014)
Dead Reckoning (February 2011)
Deer (December 2012)
Documents of the first Surreal Cabaret (March 2012)
Documents of the second Surreal Cabaret (June 2012)
Documents of the third Surreal Cabaret (October 2013)
Documents of the fourth Surreal Cabaret (July 2014)
Documents of the fifth Surreal Cabaret (February 2015)
Notes on Pan (June 2014)
Oedipus and the Meaning of Polysemy (July 2011)
The Subversive Wit of Jerry Leiber (December 2022)
"The Three Ravens" (August 2013)
Trinidadian Smut (April 2016)
Truckin' (November 2014)
The Verbal Dance of the Blues (September 2020) 
“Walkin’ Blues” [Son House] (December 2011)

E. Notes on Recent Reading
Notes on Recent Reading [Melville, Greene, and Whalen] (September 2011)
Notes on Recent Reading 2 [Crane, The Crowning of Louis, Thornlyre] (October 2011)
Notes on Recent Reading 3 [Kipling, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Lynn’s Tao-te-ching] (November 2011)
Notes on Recent Reading 4 [Sarah Scott, de La Fayette, Wharton] (January 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 5 [The Deeds of God in Rddhipur, Burney, Cooper] (January 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 6 [Jewett, Addison, Crabbe] (February 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 7 [Nabokov, Austen, Grettis Saga] (April 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 8 [Bakhtin, Lewis, Brown] (May 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 9 [Plutarch, Tacitus, Williams](June 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 10 [Voltaire, France, Dryden](July 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 11 [Wright, Kerouac & Burroughs, Gilbert] (August 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 12 [Huxley, Norris, Dōgen](September 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 13 [Mirabai, Wood, Trocchi] (November 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 14 [Algren, Hauptmann, Rolle] (January 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 15 [Hemingway, Orwell, Gaskell]{February 2013}
Notes on Recent Reading 16 [Howells, Ford, Mann] (April 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 17 [McCarthy, Chang, Snorri](July 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 18 [Radcliffe, Stendhal, Erasmus](October 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 19 [Powers, Zhang Ji, Vietnamese folk song] (February 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 20 [Rowe, Stevenson, Issa] (May 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 21 [Fussell, Mahfouz, Watts] (August 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 22 [Waugh, Belloc, Okakura] (October 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 23 [Naipaul, Dinesen, Spillane] (January 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 24 [Fielding; Izumo , Shōraku, and Senryū; Plath] (June 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 25 [Baskervill, Gissing, Capote] (July 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 26 [Tuchman, Premchand, Cocteau] (November 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 27 [Forster, Sackville-West, Capote] (January 2016)
Notes on Recent Reading 28 [Verne, Waley, Hurston] (March 2016)
Notes on Recent Reading 29 [Achebe, Jewett, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam] (October 2016)
Notes on Recent Reading 30 [Bradford, Scott, Marquand] (April 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 31 [Marlowe, Trollope, p'Bitek] (August 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 32 [Morrison, Cary, Kawabata] (October 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 33 [Tourneur, Peacock, Greene] (December 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 34 [Hawthorne, Huncke, Bentley] (January 2018)
Notes on Recent Reading 35 [Scott, Norris, Jacobs] (August 2018)
Notes on Recent Reading 36 [Norris, Rexroth and Laughlin, Sand] (November 2018)
Notes on Recent Reading 37 [Waley, Wharton, London] (January 2019)
Notes on Recent Reading 38 [London, Vonnegut, Cather] (June 2019)
Notes on Recent Reading 39 [Aristophanes, Machiavelli, Braddon] (September 2019)
Notes on Recent Reading 40 [Saunders, Adichie, Radhakrishnan] (January 2020)
Notes on Recent Reading 41 [McCarthy, Priestley, Ehirim] (July 2020)
Notes on Recent Reading 42 [Bulgakov, Tedlock, Wlliams] (October 2020) 
Notes on Recent Reading 48 [Huxley, Cossery, de Maupassant] (November 2023)

Menus (August 2021)
My Most Politically Active Year (February 2011)
Nova Academy (March 2011)
Pestering Allen [Ginsberg] (March 2012)
Poetry on the Loose (September 2011)
A Scholar's Debut (October 2012)
Sherman Paul (August 2016)
Suburbanite in the City (November 2010)
Tim West (March 2013)
Vignettes of the Sixties (October 2019)
VISTA Trains Me (June 2011)

10. Travel 
Arrival in Nigeria (August 2015)
Acadiana [Lafayette, Louisiana] (May 2010)
An Armenian Family in Bordeaux (December 2014)
Carnival [Portugal] (May 2012)
Cookie Man [Morocco] (October 2011)
Creel (October 2010)
Dame Fortuna in Portugal (May 2012)
Dinner with Mrs. Pea [Thailand] (April 2013)
Election Day in Chichicastenango (January 2012)
An Evening in Urubamba (July 2011)
Favored Places (July 2019)
Festival in Ogwa [Nigeria](January 2011)
Fictional Destinations (April 2020)
On the Ganges' Shore (August 2013)
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Wilde's Salome as Femme Fatale

  

Wilde wrote Salomé in French, then worked with Lord Alfred Douglas to produce an English translation.  Strauss's opera uses a German version by Hedwig Lachmann.  My comments apply equally to each of these dramas.


    Salomé has little in common with Wilde’s other plays, those drawing room comedies with witticisms and ironic inversions falling thick and fast.  Salomé is less a play than it is a sustained tone poem on the theme of erotic desire, ratcheted up to such an intensity that the sudden murder at the end seems the only way out.  Herod, of course, obsesses over Salomé’s charms, while the young Syrian captain is driven by her to suicide, and the incestuous Herodias grouses with sexual jealousy in the background.  Salomé herself exhibits perhaps the most perverse and ardent compulsion of all, with her  insistence on kissing Iokanaan against his will, whether he be alive or dead. 

     Even without the masterful illustrations by Beardsley and such fevered later re-imaginings as Ken Russell’s 1988 film, the focus of the play is unquestionably desire.  Salomé’s transgressive character was recognized by the censors, and the play was initially banned by the Lord Chamberlain and later performed in a modified version.  When Mahler sought to stage Strauss’s opera in Vienna at the Staatsoper, he was blocked by the censors.   Widely admired by musicians and composers though with a dubious reputation among others, the opera was chosen as the benefit show at the Metropolitan Opera in 1907, but the reaction of prudes on the opera’s Board of Directors led to the show’s cancellation. [1]

     But what is the meaning of all this pent-up desire?  Perhaps the core motive, underlying the harmonics and variations, is the archaic masculine fear of female sexuality expressed in the African practice of female genital mutilation, in the orthodox Jewish idea of a niddah, and in legendary figures such as Lamia, the sirens, Lilith, and Melusina.  In the neolithic period, fertility goddesses seem to have been at the center of religious activities, but later, under monarchies with pantheon headed by a male ruler, the sexual Other was revalued.  Men’s marvel at childbirth combined with helplessness in controlling lust, the predictable anxieties of courtship, and, in many cases, guilt for oppressing women to generate a fear of female supernatural power.  The gift of Eden’s fruit, which doubtless originally signified the good things of the earth, became the cause of a calamitous Fall.  The course of the Odyssey is basically a route around one dangerous female after another in search of the positive example of Penelope as the loyal wife.  Morgan le Fay, succubi, and the real-life persecutions of accused witches

     This archetype descends through myth and then legend into fiction over the centuries without losing popularity.  At the time of Wilde’s play, the mere choice of Salomé as theme was provocative.  By the late nineteenth century her story had become a favorite theme of Symbolist and Decadent authors, notably in Moreau’s paintings and Huysmans’ fiction, but also in works by Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Massenet.  Salomé provided a theme lurid enough to satisfy transgressive tastes, yet remaining largely within Biblical tradition. 

     This notoriety is, in fact, however, only half of the dialectic.  The story in the gospels of Mark and Matthew, though they do not name her, tell the tale of Herodias’ daughter asking for the head of John the Baptist in a narration clearly meant as a sort of lesser crucifixion, a contest of good against evil in which the saints’ martyrdom serves a Providential purpose.  Josephus mentions her as the stepdaughter of Herod Antipas [2], but does not relate the story about John.  Though the princess of Herod’s court is not named until centuries after her time, a certain Salomé, identified in the late Book of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, by Bartholomew the Apostle, and called “Salomé the temptress” is named among those visiting Christ’s empty tomb.

     Unsurprisingly, she is made a heroine even a sort of feminist by a good many recent critics.  The lead perhaps is taken by Kate Millet in her ground-breaking Sexual Politics (1970) when she notes Wiilde’s own identification with the temptress and characterizes the play as a whole as a drama of “homosexual guilt and rejection.”  Before long one critic declared "The Jewish Princess Was a New Woman" and another argued that the play was "a devastating fin-de-siecle attack on the conventions of patriarchal culture."  This attitude influenced views of the politics of the piece, and it became possible to redeem even the ethnocentric stereotypes by claiming that Wilde had written “an Orientalist play that questions the very premises of Oriental discourse.” [3]

     In fact, however, Salomé’’s actions are irredeemably reprehensible.  She is selfish and her passion perverse.  The aesthetic glow that lingers about her derives from sexual energy heightened by the late nineteenth century Romantic notion of the wicked that descended from the popular taste for the Gothic some decades earlier. [4]  Evident in Baudelaire’s title Fleurs du Mal, Verlaine’s poètes maudits, and the slightly later career of Aleister Crowley, the aesthetics are in fact not far distant from the fondness for Nazi imagery among outlaw bikers or for Satanist pentangles among heavy metal fans.  Thus, Salomé’’s behavior is first of all titillating with little or no moral implication. 

     The contemporary readings of Wilde’s protagonist derive from two new complementary innovations he had introduced into the old story.  On the one hand, Wilde emphasizes Salomé’’s agency by stressing her independence from her mother who in the gospels is responsible for asking for John the Baptist’s death.  In the play Salomé acts like a willful teen-ager and ignores her mother (who does ultimately endorse her plan).  This strengthening of her character allows some to see her as an admirable heroine, yet it is decisively undercut by her sudden and violent death at the end ordered by Herod who had earlier seemed quite under her control.  Thus the prerogatives of the patriarchy are reasserted, and the possibility emerges of treating the princess as a tragic hero.

     Such a treatment, though, is unlikely to occur to the viewer whose appreciation of the play more likely resembles that of the listener to a formal concert piece setting forth a theme followed by variations, all charged with emotional electricity.  The image clusters occur and revur like leitmotifs; mentions of the moon, doves, flowers, and the gaze that fixes the other come and go like the corridors and the verbal phrases in Last Year at Marienbad.  The play as a whole may arise, as some have said, from Wilde’s own “forbidden” loves, seen as vicious by the homophobic, but in the end it is a sustained meditation on the dynamo of erotic power itself, whatever the origin or object, here so dramatically explosive as to ruin the protagonist.  Plato himself, to whose loves Wilde appealed so ingenuously in court, would have recognized the “madness” in which the characters are caught. [5]  In the end Wilde’s Salomé is a sensual and emotional experience far more than an intellectual one.  It is less a cautionary parable of a femme fatale than it is a dramatic simulation of sexual excitement, no less powerful for the fact that it is all but universal.

 

 

 

1.  Among those shocked at Strauss’s opera was J. P. Morgan’s daughter Louisa.  The work finally came to the Wiener Staatsoper in 1918 but the Metropolitan did not stage it again until 1934.  Apart from wealthy board members, reaction in New York included the reviewer from the Musical News to whom the “conception of the story is repugnant to Anglo-Saxon minds (“Comments on Events: Salome in New York,” 32 [March 9, 1907]).  This article also quotes several other opinions, among them a writer in the New York Musical Courier who supported the play and feared that its cancellation would make New York a “laughing-stock” in Europe.

2.  Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews (Book XVIII, Chapter 5, 4).

3.  See Jane Marcus’ essay in the Bulletin of the New York Public Library 78 (1974).  The next quotation is from Elliot I. Gilbert, “’Tumult of Image’: Wilde, Beardsley, and Salome,” Victorian Studies 26 (1983) and the last from Yeeyon Im “Oscar Wilde's "Salomé": Disorienting Orientalism,” Comparative Drama, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Winter 2011).   For a more subtle reading see Helen Tookey, “’The Fiend that Smites with a Look’: the Monstrous/Menstruous Woman and the Danger of the Gaze in Oscar Wilde’s Salome,” Literature and Theology Vol. 18, No. 1 (March 2004).

4.  Wilde was far from alone in finding the theme attractive.  There was in fact a bit of a vogue for Salomé during the period, expressed in poetry by Heinrich Heine, Stephane Mallarmé and William Butler Yeats, fiction from Joris-Karl Huysmans, Gustave Flaubert, and Jules Laforgue, and visual art by Gustave Moreau, Lovis Corinth, and Henry Ossawa Tanner.

5.  In the Phaedrus Plato explicitly says that love is madness, yet he adds that it may nonetheless bring the greatest of blessings (sec. 244).

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