The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars “all the world must . . . graze on Hellebore” The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton (1577-1640) is an epic, encyclopedic exploration of melancholy that covers, as its subtitle explains, What it is: With All the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of It. In Three Maine Partitions with their Several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up. After a 100+ page introduction in which Burton gives an overview of melancholy and his approach to it, the first “Partition” covers the causes and symptoms of melancholy, the second details the cures of melancholy, and the third explores a particular branch of it, love melancholy, followed by a section on religious melancholy. Burton says that he wrote his book because 1) everyone in the world suffers from melancholy at some point, and 2) he would like to relieve his own melancholy by writing about it. His basic advice is to live with moderation in all things, including eating, drinking, fasting, dancing, exercising, studying, physic taking, love, marriage, venery, and chastity. Why should you read The Anatomy of Melancholy, which runs for fifty-five hours of Elizabethan prose in the Ukemi audiobook? Well, here are five reasons: 1. You’ll learn something of the history of medicine and science, philosophy, and literature etc. 2. You’ll savor the absurd things people have believed for thousands of years and nod at the fundamental, persisting human truths. 3. You’ll confirm the value of moderation. 4. You’ll marvel at the melancholic obsession of Burton, an Oxford university divine who was a voracious reader endowed with a superhuman memory. 5. You’ll enjoy Burton’s Elizabethan writing, his wit, style, digressions, lists, long sentences, and language. Burton is perhaps more of a compiler, summarizer, and assessor than an original thinker, modestly saying of his MANY sources, “I light my candle from their torches.” He writes his book around quotations from and references to the likes of Homer, Euripides, Aristophanes, Xenophon, Aristotle, Plato, Plutarch, Apollonius, Herodotus, Ptolemy, Horace, Pliny, Livy, Petrarch, Virgil, Tacitus, Ovid, Suetonius, the Bible, Hercules de Saxonia, Melancthon, Galen, Heraclitus, Paracelsus, Augustine, Avicenna, Boethius, Bacon, Savonarola, St Jerome, Machiavelli, Boccaccio, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Ariosto, Chaucer, More, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, a who's who of scholars, philosophers, historians, astronomers, scientists, church leaders, and writers from ancient till Elizabethan times. Burton was an omnivorous reader, his approach exhaustive: “I had rather repeat things ten times than omit anything of value.” Indeed, because the causes and symptoms of melancholy are often the same, as in fear or sorrow, he does repeat ideas and examples. As he goes about citing ancients, Muslims, various types of Christians, and so on, he seems to believe almost anything he’s read or at least is willing to entertain its possibility. He treats literary, mythological, biblical, legendary, historical, and contemporary figures and examples with equal attention, almost as if they’re all part of the same world with the same ontological status--though he sure often remembers that he’s an Anglican Christian. All that makes his book an interesting window on beliefs and knowledge of the Elizabethan age. Some causes of melancholy (e.g., witches and magicians) and some cures (e.g., anointing your teeth with the earwax of a dog) that he cites are absurd today, but the symptoms he explains and the sympathy he evinces for them, as well as his immersion in the infinite and diverse field and his heroic attempt to categorize it are all impressive and enriching. There is common sense (e.g., “corrupt fantasy” in imagination, fear and sorrow may lead to melancholy) to go with the nonsense (e.g., melancholy may be cured by bleeding with strategically applied cuts or leeches). And much of the nonsense is entertaining, as when he explains the short lives of sparrows by their salacity or gives an instance of a man "that went reeling and staggering all the days of his life . . . because his mother being great with child saw a drunken man reeling in the street." He is prey to many of the prejudices and stereotypes of his era and culture, as when he says that the (native) “Americans” are devil worshipers or that “Germany hath not so many drunkards, England tobacconists, France dancers, Holland mariners, as Italy alone hath jealous husbands.” He has his pet bête noires, like litigious lawyers, mountebank doctors, greedy apothecaries, trencher chaplains, carpet knights, counterfeiting politicians, epicures, atheists, idolaters, popes, monks, spendthrifts, prodigals, ambidexters, cooks, and onions. Although susceptible to the misogynistic bent of his era, he realizes that if women are bad, men are worse. I LOVE Burton’s lists! When he gets rolling and riffing on something, I start by smiling, end by chortling, and marvel at the fecundity of his pen. For example, when he heads off criticism of his book by listing his writerly flaws: “And for those other faults of barbarism, Doric dialect, extemporanean style, tautologies, apish imitation, a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dung-hills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out, without art, invention, judgment, wit, learning, harsh, raw, rude, fantastical, absurd, insolent, indiscreet, ill-composed, indigested, vain, scurrile, idle, dull, and dry; I confess all ('tis partly affected), thou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself.” Or when he riffs on how melancholic we become if anyone messes with our stuff: “If our pleasures be interrupt, we can tolerate it: our bodies hurt, we can put it up and be reconciled: but touch our commodities, we are most impatient: fair becomes foul, the graces are turned to harpies, friendly salutations to bitter imprecations, mutual feastings to plotting villainies, minings and counterminings; good words to satires and invectives, we revile e contra, nought but his imperfections are in our eyes, he is a base knave, a devil, a monster, a caterpillar, a viper, a hog-rubber, &c.” Or when he rolls on the difficulties of living happily in the world: “In a word, the world itself is a maze, a labyrinth of errors, a desert, a wilderness, a den of thieves, cheaters, &c., full of filthy puddles, horrid rocks, precipitiums, an ocean of adversity, an heavy yoke, wherein infirmities and calamities overtake, and follow one another, as the sea waves; and if we scape Scylla, we fall foul on Charybdis, and so in perpetual fear, labour, anguish, we run from one plague, one mischief, one burden to another, duram servientes servitutem, and you may as soon separate weight from lead, heat from fire, moistness from water, brightness from the sun, as misery, discontent, care, calamity, danger, from a man.” I enjoyed Burton's evident pleasure in talking about love. He gets excited while citing seduction scenarios featuring age gaps, incest, beauty, fashion, conversation, nudity, eye-contact, kissing (lip-biting and mouth sucking!), touching (pap caressing!), singing, dancing (the engine of burning lust!), gift giving/promising, lying, crying, etc. He relishes declaiming “farewell!” etc. while channeling lovesick lovers, whether fearful or sorrowful, joyful or tragic, male or female, old or young, mortal or divine, Biblical or classical, historical or contemporary, fictional or real. In addition to being an incredibly well-read bachelor scholar and divine, he was, after all, a man. When he criticizes war and “heroes,” I sense a kindred spirit: "They commonly call the most hair-brain blood-suckers, strongest thieves, the most desperate villains, treacherous rogues, inhuman murderers, rash, cruel and dissolute caitiffs, courageous and generous spirits, heroical and worthy captains, brave men at arms, valiant and renowned soldiers, possessed with a brute persuasion of false honour." Some words about the Ukemi audiobook. First, it’s superbly read by the John Geilgud-esque Peter Wickham, who reads everything with understanding, pleasure, and wit. Second, the audiobook translates into English Burton’s MANY Greek and Latin phrases and quotations, which makes it much easier to “read” what he wrote by listening to the book than by reading it in a physical form. When Burton inserts into an English sentence, “insanum bellum?” the audiobook translates it as “is not war madness?” When he writes, “novices, illiterate, Eunuchi sapientiæ,” the audiobook replaces the Latin with “eunuchs of wisdom.” Experts in Greek or Latin may be irritated by this aid to the average reader, but I appreciate it. Actually, Burton himself often adds an English translation for his Latin phrases (e.g., “Besides, I might not well refrain, for ubi dolor, ibi digitus, one must needs scratch where it itches”). Other times, as when he gains momentum on a list in the “vulgar” English tongue, he tends to insert a Latin element or two, so you can kind of understand what he means from the context. Finally, the audiobook begins with two scholarly introductions about the book and its author. Paul Jordan Smith calls The Anatomy an entertaining masterpiece that influenced writers like Johnson, Milton, Sterne, and Keats, and says, “It's a bit of a cosmos, a compendium of poetry, medicine, philosophy, philology, theology, climatology, old wives tales, politics, utopia, satire, magic, and more. It celebrates all of the earth and all of the human moods as it anatomizes melancholy.” Floyd Dell then describes the book as “an analysis of morbid psychology, with an artistic interest, by a reclusive bookworm” who “grew up in the age of Shakespeare, and … was interested in our eccentricities” and “unreason.” You really should read it! View all my reviews
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Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Titus Groan and Gormenghast in the Modern World Is Gormenghast only the delusion of a “dotty” young man? It appears in no atlas and belongs to a past age of lineage, lords, and castles. After his birth in the vast, decaying castle in Titus Groan (1946), the first novel in Mervyn Peake’s trilogy, and after his desertion of it in Gormenghast (1950), the second novel, in Titus Alone (1959/1992) young Titus finds himself lost in a modern world of cities, cars, airplanes, factories, concentration camps, detectives, and even sentient spy globes (and maybe even clones), ever pursued by mysterious identical twin men in tall helmets. Titus Alone is a strange novel! Picaresque, allegorical, science fictional, and dream-like, it concerns Titus’ struggle to come to terms with Gormenghast, with his desertion and memories of it, and with his tenuous hold on its reality. Forthright and self-centered, Titus moves through the modern world like an unstable Candide, not wanting to become tied down to places, friends, or lovers. Nevertheless, he builds relationships with various people, including the larger than life, rudder-nosed, free-spirited Muzzlehatch, the beautiful, ample, and kind Juno, his three beggar bodyguards from the Under-River (into which the failures of the world descend), and the exquisite spoiled rich girl Cheeta, whose father is a scientist who has built a factory tower with identical faces in the windows and sounds like the smell of death. Simon Vance gives a stellar reading of Titus Alone. His voices for Muzzlehatch and the denizens of the Under-River are engaging and savory, and his reading of Titus’ delirious ravings (in which he channels the people from his past) is inspired. Alas that his Cheeta sounds too petulant and not malevolent enough. The audiobook is the 1959 edition with 109 chapters, not the more recent and restored version from 1992 with 122. The added chapters develop Juno’s character, the factory, and the charade climax, but I think the original version of the audiobook is fine without them. Titus Alone is half as long as the first two novels in the trilogy, has fewer detailed descriptions and shorter chapters, and feels less immersive, coherent, and polished. And I sympathize with readers who feel that, due to his declining health, Peake was not able to write a third novel to equal the first two in bizarre and compelling grandeur, and that it’s better just to read a duology and to ignore the third volume. However, readers who love the first two books will find flashes of their brilliance as well as new moods and modes in Titus Alone, and though it is not a masterpiece on their level, it is interesting and has unforgettable characters, scenes, and lines, for example, the absurd courtroom questioning of Titus about Gormenghast, the pleasurable early love between Titus and Juno, the horrible conversation between former prison camp guard Veil and former prisoner Black Rose, and the sad sunset clouds that look like silently roaring animals to Muzzlehatch. View all my reviews
Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
My rating: 5 of 5 stars A “Supernaturally Outlandish” Masterpiece Gormenghast (1950), the second novel in Mervyn Peake’s classic fantasy trilogy, opens with seven-year-old Titus Groan, the 77th Earl of Gormenghast, already conflicted by rebellious desires to escape the meaningless rituals and dry duties of the castle and from his role as its figurehead: “His days were full of meaningless ceremonies whose sacredness appeared to be in inverse ratio to their comprehensibility or usefulness.” The novel depicts Titus’ maturing into a sensitive and self-aware young man scarred by violence, seasoned by loss, and attracted by the world outside. Into that plot Peake weaves the career of the amoral ex-kitchen boy Steerpike, ever scheming his way deeper into the heart of Gormenghast. And for comic relief, Peake spends (almost too) much time with Professor Bellgrove, his bachelor colleagues, and Irma Prunesquallor, who wants a husband. There are many memorable set pieces in the novel, like the moment when Titus and his sister Fuchsia discover that they love each other, the funeral of the bird-tiny Nannie Slag, the “Bachelorette” soiree at the Prunesquallors, the demise of an anile headmaster, the game of marbles in the Lichen Fort, the life or death struggle between an athletic malevolent youth and a septuagenarian crippled dwarf, the tracking of a satanic outlaw, the aborted ceremony of the Bright Carvings, the encounter with the wild Thing in the forest cave, the Biblical flooding of the castle, and the schoolboy game featuring a classroom window 100 feet above the ground, a giant plane tree, a pair of polished floor boards, and a gauntlet of slingshots. Audiobook reader Simon Vance’s narrator is clear, refined, and sympathetic, and his character voices varied and on target (especially Dr. Prunesquallor, Irma, Bellgrove, Barquentine, Steerpike, and Flay). But his Fuchsia needs more raw passion and less nasal whine and his Countess Gertrude more gravitas and less dowager quaver. Gormenghast resembles the first novel in the trilogy, Titus Groan. Both books are set in a vividly realized castle world populated by grotesque denizens. Both intoxicate the reader with rich language, baroque detail, painterly description, and blended humor and pathos. Both leave images etched upon the mind’s eye. Both feature long passages of conversation or description punctuated by unpredictable scenes of suspenseful action. Both express themes about the primacy of passion and imagination over reason and calculation and the comforting and stultifying influence of tradition on human lives. However, although both novels are “fantasies of manners,” Gormenghast is also a romantic comedy, a British school story, a gothic thriller, and a bildungsroman. And it highlights new themes: the conflict between duty and freedom and the transformations, wonders, and absurdities of love and aging. The focus on Titus and his desire to be free shifts the novel away from the more leisurely pace and adult themes of the first one. While the first book covers about a year in the life of the castle and is mainly about the effect of Titus’ birth on other people, this book covers about ten years in the life of Titus and is primarily about his maturing. In a way the titles of the first and second novels should be switched! This book is more funny, moving, and terrible than the first. I kind of prefer the first, though, because I’m uneasy about how much attention Peake gives to the professors and Irma. Gormenghast is a great work full of dense and poetic writing, grotesque and human characters, and humorous, moving, and epic stories set in an exaggerated fantasy world that recalls our own. Finally, Gormenghast, like Titus Groan, is a unique masterpiece that offers a satisfying conclusion to the story arc of the first two novels that almost renders the third book, Titus Alone, unnecessary. View all my reviews
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
My rating: 5 of 5 stars The Pleasures of a Painterly, Baroque Nightmare Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan (1946) is unique. Dense, hermetic, epic, grotesque, and beautiful, it stands alone in the landscape of literature, like the labyrinthine, “umbrageous,” vast, and craggy crumbling castle Gormenghast, in which the Groan family of earls and their servants live, ruled by iron tradition and obscure ritual. The novel begins with the birth of Titus, the unsmiling son of Sepulchrave, the 76th Earl, and with the escape of the amoral and ambitious kitchen boy Steerpike. These events initiate “that most unforgivable of all heresies,” change. Peake writes the stifled life of the decaying castle and its grotesque inhabitants with humor and empathy. And with intense detail, so that it might be difficult for some readers to enter Peake’s world of painterly descriptions and bizarre metaphors. But the persevering reader drawn more to the strange pleasures of a poet-painter’s skewed imagination than to the familiar excitements and moral clarity of Tolkienesque fantasy will discover a strange world unforgettable characters, events, and images. Some of my favorites are: a room full of white cats; a field of flagstones framed by clouds; a poem read out of a window by a wedge-headed poet; a gift ruby red “like a lump of anger”; a room tangled by painted roots; a library refuge of row upon row of priceless—and flammable—books; a sinister equestrian statue; a funeral featuring a headless human skeleton, a calf’s skull, and a blue ribbon; a one-legged, foul-mouthed dwarf walking back and forth over the dishes of a ceremonial breakfast; a deadly duel featuring a two-handed cleaver, a sword, and a room full of spider webs; a pair of voluminous purple dresses floating on a lake; a serious baby making “a tiny, drunken totter” on a sandy beach… The novel depicts the effect on the castle and its denizens of the unexpected birth of a male heir to the Groan line. The main point of view characters are Rottcodd, the ancient Curator of the Hall of Bright Carvings who whiles away his life there, dusting the statues and sleeping in his hammock, introducing and closing the novel; Sepulchrave, the melancholy Earl who lives for ritual and books without realizing that they prevent him from connecting with his children; Gertrude, Sepulchrave’s massive and phlegmatic wife, who ignores her daughter, son, and husband gives all her care to her beloved wild birds and white cats (gathered around her like sea foam around a lighthouse); Fuchsia, Titus’ elder sister, black-haired, red-dressed, full-lipped, strong, vulnerable, imaginative, passionate, full of angry and tender love; Cora and Clarice, Sepulchrave’s expressionless violent-purple clad mirror image twin sisters, who, after suffering a stroke in unison that left their left sides paralyzed, are stunningly stupid, vain, resentful, and power lusting; Flay, the stick-like, taciturn personal servant of Lord Sepulchrave, given to sudden bursts of violence when his or his master’s dignity is insulted; Titus’ Nannie (Slagg), doll-like, desiccated, tremulous, self-pitying, childish, simple, senile, loving; Dr. Prunesquallor, the family doctor, a fop with refined hobbies and a high-pitched hyena laugh; Irma, his repressed, bony spinster sister with perfect white skin and a doomed desire to be a lady; Swelter, the fat, gargantuan Chef who lords it over his debased kitchen boys and men and plots to butcher Flay. AND the prime mover of the plot, Steerpike, the agile, amoral, conscienceless, ambitious, manipulating, clever, cold, and almost deformed youth who, escaping from Swelter’s kitchen early on, spends the rest of the novel (literally and figuratively) climbing up through the castle’s inner workings and insinuating himself into its heart, a noxious, new, alien thing. A summary of characters with hints of the plot fails to convey the most wonderful thing about the book, Peake’s style, which bristles with imaginative conceits and extended metaphors. So much rewards rereading. I first read the trilogy in the Ballantine paperback editions in junior high, then re-read them in graduate school, then listened to the audiobooks ten years ago, and each time I fell under Peake’s spell. In a sense his work is not fantasy because nothing fantastic (in the usual sense of the word) happens: no magic, no supernatural phenomena, etc. On the other hand, because almost nothing in the novel is just like we’d find it in the real world, being exaggerated and more grotesque or more lovely or more ugly or more silly or more philosophical and so on, the castle and its rituals and its denizens become fantastic, something that can only exist in the imagination of a kooky and imaginative painter poet like Peake. A funhouse mirror warping the everyday world into something larger, darker, brighter, lovelier, uglier, funnier, and more tragic than our real world and lives in it can be. On the other hand again, because everything in the novel reveals so much human nature, it is the best kind of fantasy. Simon Vance reads the audiobook with perfect clarity, rhythm, and feeling. I often found myself rewinding to enjoy again his enthusiastic reading of Peake’s rich language and eccentric characters. Although his Fuchsia is too much simper and not enough passion, his other characters are great, especially his Flay (terse gravel), Swelter (flabby unction), Steerpike (cold working class), Nannie Slagg (wrinkled querulousness), Dr. Prunesquallor (trilling “Ha-ha-ha-ha!”), and the twin sisters (vain and venomous monotones). The themes of Titus Groan remain relevant: the conflicts between imagination and ambition, emotion and calculation, and new and old; the detrimental effect on human minds and relationships of tradition, ritual, and class; the pain and wonder of artistic creation; and the difficult but vital need to find our own special place where we can be fulfilled. The last paragraphs of the novel give an indication of its strange pleasures: The castle was breathing, and far below the Hall of the Bright Carvings all that was Gornmengast revolved. After the emptiness, it was like tumult through him, though he had heard no sound. And yet by now there would be doors flung open. There would be echoes in the passageways and quick lights flickering along the walls. Through honeycombs of stone would now be wandering the passions in their clay. There would be tears and there would be strange laughter. Fierce births and deaths beneath umbrageous ceilings. And dreams, and violence, and disenchantment. And there shall be a flame-green daybreak soon. And love itself shall cry for insurrection. For tomorrow is also a day, and Titus has entered his stronghold. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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