This was my first time reading this play, and I have mixed feelings about it. There are some things I liked, and a lot that just did not work for me. It is worth noting that in the Introduction to the text, G.B. Harrison points out that scholars believe that Shakespeare only wrote a small part of the play, and that the poor writing which dominates the text is from someone else.
… Pericles is still retained in the canon of Shakespeare’s work, though there is little trace of his hand in any passage before Act III. With the third act the style changes and much of the remainder of the play may well b e Shakespeare’s writing, but if so it is Shakespeare far below his best. Most critics are agreed, however, that the prose scenes of the brothel (IV.ii and vi) are undoubtedly his. The earlier scenes of…
I very much admire this painting, “The Fried Fish Shop”, its composition and the limited range of colours which suits this painting which is in the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery in Leicester. Rowe was an important active member of the Artist’s International Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artists%27_International_Association
Margaret Hoening was a painter and an etcher [who studied] at the Art Students League. There, she met the artist couple Paul Cadmus and Jared French. In 1937, she married French, fifteen years her junior, who had spent the previous decade with Cadmus. The trio formed a tight bond, with Cadmus and French continuing their relationship. Together, the three formed PaJaMa (a mashup of their first names, Paul, Jared, and Margaret). ~https://d6jcg90g7mpvu.cloudfront.net/s3fs-public/margarethoeningfrench.pdf
Genre: historical novel with ‘mise-en-scene’ dialogue
fictive characters based on historical persons l’Affaire Dreyfus
Contents: 3 parts, 496 pages
Language: French
Trivia: Nobel Prize 1937
#20BooksOfSummer20
ANALYSIS
1. Explain the title of the book.
Jean Barois is the name of the main character. He grew up in a French provincial town and was educated in a catholic college.
2. What is the predominant element in the story?
Narrative: Du Gard is renowned for the different techniques:
direct dialogue: mise-en-scene
interior monolgue
free direct speech: (the narrator takes on the speech of the character)
“Tu vois, toi…”
tone signifies that… “ Vous savez bien que je ne comprends bien à vos lectures.”
camera effect: – Jean Barois’s business card: the last address lines are crossed out.
In this ‘snapshot’ Barois tells us the Jean is unemployed. (pg 161)
Darin finden sich auch Informationen über die Verpflegung der Seeleute, denn diese musste laut Seemannsordnung in der Musterrolle des jeweiligen Schiffes eingetragen sein.
So schön, wie es die Seemannsordnung von 1902 in der Sprache der damaligen Zeit formuliert, könnte ich das nicht ausdrücken, deshalb hier der Text im Original:
„Insbesondere muß aus der Musterrolle erhellen, was dem Schiffsmanne für den Tag an Speise und Trank gebührt.“
Zitat aus § 14 der Seemannsordnung vom 2. Juni 1902; abgerufen unter de.m.wiksource.org
I live in the depths of South London and have missed the freedom of the Capital. This isn’t exactly a hardship in the grand scheme things. But when the days are grey and I feel down in lockdown, I think of what I will do when I can fully return to the City I love.
Going down the rabbit hole
I have been so excited for the V&A’s major exhibition of Alice: Adventures in Wonderland, since its announcement in 2019. How could you not be with the lead marketing images? Luckily, according to the museum’s website, the exhibition is postponed for a later date.
I’ve also missed coffee in the V&A’s cafe, designed by William Morris, James Gamble and William Poynter. I love starting my day in this mosaic wonderland with the most spectacular chandelier in London @vam
We seem currently to be going through a period of iconoclasm which has an interesting history itself. One of my favourite plays is “Forty Years On” by Alan Bennett. It often seems to me that British, and particularly English, society resembles some sort of minor public school. Hence I can easily hear John Gielgud intoning Ecclesiastes 44-1:-
Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.2The Lord hath wrought great glory by them through his great power from the beginning. 3Such as did bear rule in their kingdoms, men renowned for their power, giving counsel by their understanding, and declaring prophecies: 4Leaders of the people by their counsels, and by their knowledge of learning meet for the people, wise and eloquent are their instructions.
Now, when I googled this a moment ago, I discovered that the first six words of the title refers to a book written some 75 years ago by Agee and Evans with photographs of tenant farmers and their dreadful plight in the depression. The verse from Ecclesiastes was obscured and immediately raises the question about how the meaning of the past can be changed or indeed obscured. It also raises the questions about for whom history might be written, recorded or commemorated.
However, before examining the text, consider the last sentence….” meet For the people, WISE and ELOQUENT are their instructions”. Well it would be nice if the present incumbents of the senior management team were wise and concerned for the people and by no means can the repetitive bumbling be described as eloquence.
(Incidentally, I remember hearing that controversial Cornishman D.M. Thomas remarking once that we had moved from reading Isaiah to watching dire television in two generations!)
Now before we start praising famous men, let alone building statues to them, we also need to consider women and children. The statue which really brought pimples to the skin and still does was near the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin which shows those children going to the West in the Kindertransport and those from whom they have been sundered, facing the death camps in the East. Then, also very moving is the statue by Kathe Kollwitz. This sculpture is under an oculus and exposed to the rain, snow and cold symbolising the suffering of civilians during World War II. It is a pieta- a woman with her dead child. She had lost her son, Peter on the battlefield in the First World War.
At this point I should like to recommend a book and close with a couple of quotations which I think are worth pondering. The book is by Rachel Hewitt and is called “A Revolution in Feeling” It deals with the changes of feelings during the 1790s. To quote from the dust jacket;” Every society in every age, feels differently, and from the seismic shifts of the 1790s Britain emerged the contours of our contemporary attitude to need, longing and emotion”.
Now from that complex but original thinker Walter Benjamin, “This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
WALTER BENJAMIN, Theses on the Philosophy of History
Here we return to eloquence again, a reminder that style in historical writers engage our interest from Hazlitt-
The history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of POETICAL JUSTICE; it is a noble or royal hunt, in which what is sport to the few is death to the many, and in which the spectators halloo and encourage the strong to set upon the weak, and cry havoc in the chase, though they do not share in the spoil.
WILLIAM HAZLITT, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays
Finally
Finally, I listened to a radio programme last night about refugees in camps across the Channel in France desperate to escape persecution and many of them, children in conditions cramped as in a slave ship. What are we going to do to alleviate their situation?
There may be elements of magical thinking in relation to monuments as clearly their destruction does not entail the erasure of the past or the racist structures still in existence. It might be argued that in their removal they can become instrumental towards that aim. Some may also consider that they are works of art which raises further questions about aesthetics – content and form etc.
