A Modest Proposal - Jonathan Swift (1729)

 

A Modest Proposal

Maybe you know what it means when somebody has A Modest Proposal. I did not, until very recently, mostly because I am not a native speaker, but now I am in on the joke. A Modest Proposal is used to make a straight-faced suggestion of something completely absurd and outrageous. It all harks back to Jonathan Swifts essay “A Modest Proposal” from 1729.

In this essay Swift, completely straight-faced proposes to solve to problem of poverty, idleness and the hordes of papists in Ireland by selling infants to gentlemen in Ireland and Britain for eating. He presents a perfectly sensible case complete with the economics, the practical details, the problems it would solve and the general benefits to the scheme. Well, except the delicate detail that eating children is just about the most horrendous idea imaginable.

I suppose in all its absurdity it is supposed to be funny, but you have to have an inclination for very, very black humor to enjoy this. Raising children like livestock and cooking them when they are a year old for their tender meat is an absolutely revolting idea and it was just too black for me.

The context of this essay, however, is interesting. Ireland and the Irish were essentially lawless to the British in the eighteenth century. There were no limits to how you were allowed, and maybe even encouraged to, abuse the local population, which was in turn looked upon as a lesser sort of human beings, Papists, poor and good for nothings. As an Irishman Swift was likely upset by the arrogant attitude of the British and while “A Modest Proposal” goes further than even the vilest British bigot, it is written in the same tone as other very demeaning schemes to abuse the Irish, which very outrageous enough in themselves.

Sometimes you need an exaggeration to see the problem.

A second apparent context is the rationalism that was becoming popular at this time and towards which Swift was very sceptic. This is quite apparent in “Gulliver’s Travels” where the scientists or “projectors”, as he calls them, are ridiculed as useless geeks. Swifts saw common sense as being opposed to rationalism (although in truth the two are very connected) and wrote this essay as a rationalistic argument that makes no sense at all.

“A Modest Proposal” is a very short booklet. The only way it could be pumped up to 30 pages was by inserting lots of pictures with no relation to the story and print it in a font larger than those used in my son’s easy-reading books. So, I breezed through the text here in the weekend and I am ready with my second entry of 2019.

  

Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift (1726)

Gulliver's Travels

I must have been only a child when I first encountered the story of Gulliver and his travels. The memory of a movie with a giant on a beach with hundreds of tiny people tying him up is very vivid. This is a story many, if not most, people are very familiar with, but the part we recall is usually only the visit to Lilliput. The story is much longer than that. After Lilliput Gulliver went to the giants in Brobdingnag, the to a series of lands inhabited by crazy scientist types and necromancers and finally to the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos in Houyhnhnm-land.

The narrator, one Lemuel Gulliver is a surgeon (a bone-mender) who takes jobs on ships that keep shipwrecking him alone in the most bizarre lands. First stop is Lilliput, where he is a giant among tiny people. There people are also of small minds and outsize ambitions and although he repeatedly helps them out and befriends them, he eventually has to escape as they, in all friendliness, seek to main and kill him.

Next, he ends up with the giants in Brobdingnag. Tables turned, Gulliver is now the tiny person among monstrously large people with large minds. These have no plans to hurt Gulliver, but the sheer size of everything makes even a bee a deadly foe. When he leaves this country, it is merely by accident, being picked up by an oversize bird.

In the third book the marooned Gulliver is picked up onto a flying island. This is a country ruled by scientists with their concerns on math and the heavens rather than common sense. There is definitely a sense that Swift did not care for the academics of his age and these people are laughable in the extreme. Down on the ground he visits a university where “projectors” are wasting time and money on useless projects. This trip also takes him to a place where people get very old and stupid and another, ruled by necromancers, where he has long discussions with long dead people.

Finally, in the last chapter Gulliver visits that land of the talking horses where humans are reduced brutes called Yahoos.

Jonathan Swift, the famed Irish writer, clergyman and many other things, was a satirist and Gulliver’s Travels was intended as a satire on the British government in particular and British/European mores in general. As such the book describes a trend from mild and entertaining, even bawdy, to increasingly mean and bitter satire. In the last chapter Swift is foaming with anger and bitterness and while the idea of clever and civilized horses is amusing there is not much to laugh at in that chapter.

Fortunately, we get that in the first chapters. There are plenty of amusing scenes, from Gulliver quenching a fire in the royal palace by pissing on it to the scientists working on abolishing spoken language since all words can be replaced by things. If you just carry enough things with you, you can make a full conversation without uttering a word. An idea shot down by women who insist on the right to chatter… It is this levity and the bizarre scenery Swift paints that makes for an amusing read even today, where the satire itself has mostly lost its relevance.

I understand why later versions, especially on the screen, has focused on the first chapter in Lilliput. It may be the section with most relevance today. However, there are lots to get from the other chapters as well and I would particularly like to see a movie rendition of the visit to the flying island.

Of course, I will recommend this book, but I knew that even before reading it. It is a classic after all.

Happy New Year 2019

Happy New Year 2019

It is the end of the year and time, again, to look back on the year that has passed.

First, I would like to thank those of you who read my blogs. I know you are not many, but quality easily makes up for quantity and I am grateful for you being there and love your comments. A very happy New Year to all of you!

This has been an eventful year. I moved with my family from Israel, where I have been living for the past 6 years, back to Denmark where I now live in Copenhagen. That was a major transition and kept me busy for a large part of the year. I have also been travelling quite a bit including a visit to The States in the Easter break, Korea, China and many other places. Accordingly, I did not do as many movies this year as I did in previous years.

The movie count ticks in at just 55 movies, the lowest for a year so far. Of these 46 are List movies and 9 are off-List movies. Last year I started a practice where I choose three movies each year to review beyond the List. The idea was that these should be my suggestions for the List, but over time this have changed to simply movies I am curious to watch. I have to admit that the quality of those movies has be varying and not all of them deserves one of those hallowed slots. Lately I made the further addition that one of them should be Danish, but I am considering dropping this requirement. The selection of Danish movies is generally not interesting enough. I think going forward that I will check if there in a given year is one deserving attention, otherwise I will pick internationally.

Of the List movies I went from 1963 to 1966, which is probably not that impressive. There have been great movies (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Repulsion, A Hard Day’s Night) and utter crap (Vinyl, Mediteranee, Pierrot le Fou) and a lot in between. I maintain that the List content of the sixties is not as interesting as the fifties or forties, but there are enough pleasant surprises and quality content to keep me going.

On the book side I have done far better than expected. I have read and reviewed eight books, which is way ahead of the five books I aim at. The books span a century from The Trial of Persilles and Sigismunda from 1616 to Moll Flanders of 1722. Compared to previous years the books I read this year have been consistently good and interesting, which goes a long way to explain how I got this far. Also books are good to bring along for long flights…

If I should pick one for general recommendation it would be The Conquest of New Spain. Besides being a singularly unique and captivating story, it is also based on true events eye-witnessed by the author. I learned a lot reading that book and I was thoroughly entertained.

It is also telling that none of my 2018 reads will end on my crap list.

2019 looks to be more of the same, except that I have no plans to move anywhere this year so hopefully I will get to review a lot more movies and continue to read great books.

If anybody has suggestions for 1967 or 68 off-list entries do let me know, I am all ears.

Happy New Year to all of you and may 2019 bring joy and prosperity and lots of great movies.

Moll Flanders - Daniel Defoe (1722)

Moll Flanders

Daniel Defoe may be best known for his “Robinson Crusoe”, but he was apparently a prolific writer and his second entry on the List is no light-weight. “Moll Flanders” was published three years later and is in many ways a very different novel, though it shares two central properties with “Robinson Crusoe”: Both are written in first person pretending to be written by the main character and secondly the amount of detail and background knowledge included is staggering. Defoe did not do things halfways.

In “Moll Flanders” Defoe writes from a woman’s perspective, which in itself must have been challenging, especially since it feels very authentic. This is an age were gender roles were far more clearly defined than today and the reality of women would have been quite different from what men had to deal with. The central character narrates the story from her old age as a sort of confession on a sinful, but spectacular life. She is a penitent, yet beneath all her protestations we do sense a pride because Moll is a survivor and survive is what she has done through all the challenges and hardships she has been facing.

On paper she seems to have been a terrible person. She has been married five times, once with her own brother, she has been a prostitute and a thief, imprisoned and transported to America, a common way in those days to get rid of criminals, and she had several children with several men of which she only recognized one of them, and that after he became an adult.

However, as the story unfolds it becomes clear that Moll is rarely to blame for her situation. She is trying to make the best out of difficult situations and things just sort of happens. One thing she does learn is to trust no one completely. I doubt she tells anybody the full story of her herself, instead she keeps certain parts of her situation, funds or background hidden. This often makes her come about as dishonest, but really, she has simply learned the hard way to be cautious.

It is a thoroughly interesting story that moves surprisingly fast despite the high level of detail. The section where she becomes a thief may be the most spectacular, and it is, but I was very interested in her many relationships and how she got into them. That gave a surprising insight into the social dynamics of the era so different from our own.

If there was one thing I did not quite understand it was her casual attitude towards her children. Even if some of them died early she must have had several children around that she seems to care little about. Those from her first marriage we hear nothing about. The one she got as a courtesan she keeps until he is five and then he disappears. With her Lancashire husband she has a child which is raised by foster parents that she pays every year, yet when she is together with him again the child is not an item. And what about the children she had with the banker?

It does not detract from the general impression though that this is a captivating read and a story full on the same scale as “Robinson Crusoe”.

This is actually a reread of the book. I did read it years ago, the first book on the list where this is the case, and I was surprised how much of the story I had forgotten and how much better I found the book this time. It may be that reading all this old stuff primes me for reading this. Or I just get smarter with age, though that is questionable.

A highly recommended read.

Love in Excess - Eliza Haywood (1719)

Love in Excess or The Fatal Inquiry

This was a nice surprise.

I did not have high expectations for Eliza Haywood’s “Love in Excess or the Fatal Inquiry” believing it to be some silly love story among the rich and famous. Well, it is a silly love story among the rich and famous, but surprisingly fun to read. 

We follow the central character, Count D’Elmont as he develops from an inconsiderate and selfish playboy to become a steadfast and loyal lover. This happens through a series of romantic encounters with a range of women. 

The first, Amena, is a girl of lower (though not low, God forbid) status, whom he dumps, literally in the middle of the street, when it threatens to become serious. Off she goes to a monastery, the catch-all destination for fallen women. The next is the mercenary Alovisa. She is a conniving woman of means (read: rich!) who has her eyes set on D’Elmont. He is not blind to her wealth and she really wants him so why not? Also she is the sister of his brother’s girlfriend and it is nice to help him out.

However, when the matchless Melliora appears it is love at first sight and while Melliora is restrained and virtuous (a good girl), D’Elmont embarks on a crazy courtship. Alovisa knows something is up but just not who the girl is. The neighboring Baron wants Alovisa (just a bit of shagging, nothing too serious) and his sister Melantha wants the Count. This of course spirals completely out of control leaving the Baron and Alovisa dead and Melliora off to a monastery.

Finally, D’Elmont, in his despair, goes to Rome to get distracted, but all he can think of is Melliora. In Rome there are more women who want him, but now he has realized that there is only one girl for him and so he is busy dodging their attempts at him, while at the same time helping Melliora’s brother get his girlfriend so she will not be sent off to a monastery.

This is hilariously fun. Especially the conclusion of part two was a riot. Straight out of Fawlty Towers. The book tries hard to become serious in the romantic relationships, but to no avail, I can always sense that glint in the eye, that mischievous smile, that is driving for comedy. It makes for a great and fast read.

The book is also remarkable in the sense that it is written by a woman who dares to make the girls proactive and possessing erotic desires of their own instead of being the receptive vessels the male dominated moral codex of the day preferred. Sure, the most mercenary of the women get their due, but all of them are active players and even the saintly Melliora crave a good shagging. I am pretty certain this caused a stir when it was published in 1719 and would have been wonderfully subversive as a countercurrent to the mainstream.

For me it was also a bit of an eye-opener. I would have relegated this kind of story to “girl-pulp-literature” little better than a telenovela and as such written it of as not something for me, but hey, I loved it, it was truly fun to read.

I wonder if “Love in Excess” was ever considered for a movie or a mine-series. It would work great visually, and I would love to see it.

  

Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe (1719)

Robinson Crusoe

Welcome to the 18th century!

With “Robinson Crusoe” I have officially opened a new century, something that does not happen too often going through this list, and in style. “Robinson Crusoe” was and still is a bestseller, one of the most popular novels of its time and remained so for at least two hundred years.

I must admit that the hype is deserved. It is every bit as interesting and engrossing as its popularity would indicate. Maybe my version had updated the language slightly, but I felt that the writing here was far smoother than what I have learned to expect from these old books. But that is actually the least of what this story has to offer.

Everybody knows the story of “Robinson Crusoe”. Or think they do. A man gets stranded on a deserted island and learns to survive. If you really know the story you also know that eventually he befriends a native and names him Friday. This basic story is so famous that it has generated a whole bunch of spin-offs or adaptions. I recently watched “Cast Away” and was struck by the similarity. Matt Damon has a tendency to get stuck on deserted planets. It even has a name, a robinsonade.  

What fewer people realize is that the story is more than just being stuck on an island. The protagonist, Robinson Crusoe, spends the first part of the book escaping a sinking ship on the way to London, then escaping Moorish captivity while trading on the slave coast and finally setting up a plantation in Brazil. Each of these stories are interesting and detailed in their own right and it is quite late in the book that Robinson Crusoe sets out to Africa from Brazil and gets marooned on his island for 28 years.

It is true that a fair part of the book follows Crusoe in his challenge to first stay alive and then getting comfortable on the island, but the book then takes an interesting turn. Having stayed on the island for many years Crusoe finds out he is not alone. His island is used by a native tribe from the main land to take war prisoners for human sacrifice and to munch on them. The European horror story about wild savages. What is a lonely Englishman to do about that? This story develops in interesting ways that I had not expected and the short of it is that eventually Robinson Crusoe is not so alone anymore but ruling over a small population of various origin.

Throughout the story Crusoe is a crafty and prodigious fellow who manages to accomplish a lot with little. He is lucky at times, but he is also a hero who makes is own luck. He rarely gets things right in first attempt and he honestly admit to taking on futile projects that he eventually has to give up because he did not think them through, but he does not give up and usually gets where he wants in the end. Very commendable, yet humble traits. His attitude towards the natives are both what you would expect from a European in the 17^th century, but also, when he thinks things over, surprisingly modern. His plans to simply kill the cannibals is abandoned because he is questioning his right to judge them. Something colonial Europeans rarely considered.

It is therefore easy to like Robinson Crusoe. The only place I was seriously questioning him was when he left with the English ship together with Friday rather than waiting for the Spaniards and Friday’s father. Where they not supposed to join them on the island and together work on a way to escape? That was a bit strange.

Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” enters my top 3 of best books so far in sharp competition with “Don Quixote” and “The Conquest of New Spain”. I had a great time reading it and I feel that a big gap in my general learning has been patched by finally having actually read to book. I feel ashamed it took me this long.

Oroonoko - Aphra Behn (1688)

Oroonoko

”Oroonoko” is a short story from 1688 by Aphra Behn.

Already in that short sentence there is a lot to comment upon.

This is my last book from the 17^th century and from now on it will be 18^th century books for the next several years to come. That is, I suppose, an anniversary of sorts.

Secondly Aphra Behn was a remarkable character, apparently. A rare female writer in an age where practically all writers were men and a royalist on the Stuart side at a time when public sentiment was so strongly against the Stuarts that Britain welcomed a Dutch prince to take the throne. She was a spy in Antwerpen, she was for awhile in Surinam (where the story takes place) and even at one point in prison. A busy lady.

It is however the book itself which is the focus of this review. At a mere 77 pages this was a very easy read, made even more so by an author that generally sticks to the point and know how to move a story forward. Something her contemporaries could learn something from.

“Oroonoko” is the story of an African prince, the eponymous Oroonoko, who runs afoul of his grandfather, the king. The king is envious of the prince’ woman, Imoinda, and claims her for himself. When it becomes apparent that the brave and honorable Oroonoko will not put up with this the King sells her to a slaver and tell Oroonoko that she died. Some time later Oroonoko, who himself has sent war prisoners to slavery befriends a slaver who invites him onboard his ship only to trick him and ship him off to slavery in the New World.

Although Oroonoko is black and sold as a slave he is treated almost as royalty by his owner and his friends and in his semi-freedom he finds Imoinda and they are reunited. Oroonoko wants to return to Africa with his wife, especially as she becomes pregnant. That however is not so easy. A slave is after all a slave. Eventually Oroonoko’s patience run out and he incites the slaves to rebellion and escapes. This turns out pretty badly, mainly through white mans dishonesty.

I found this a very interesting story for many reasons. This has been seen as an antislavery story, but Behn does not seem to have a problem with slavery per se. She still classes people as some being better than others, aristocracy versus the rabble, nobility against the dishonorable. The special thing about Aphra Behn is that she is colorblind. To her skin color is not what sets people apart and being black or Indian for that matter is not an inherent flaw. Nor, interestingly, is adherence to another religion. Dishonesty, faithlessness and cruelty however makes people less and these are the flaws Behn are lashing out against. When the rebellious slaves are easily talked into giving up their rebellion and turn on Oroonoko they show themselves deserving their status as slaves, whereas the noble Oroonoko was never supposed to be a slave.

While the part of the story that takes place in Africa is largely fantasy, the second part in Surinam is very credible and bears all the marks of first hand experiences. So, here we have a woman who has actually travelled in Surinam and uses the story of the African prince to tell about the experience. She even goes so far as to place herself in the story although more as a witness than an actual participant. The result is a richness in detail that makes this a window into a world I knew nothing about.

The plot itself is also interesting though I suspect it was largely borrowed from the Greco-Roman classics. It is a heroic tragedy, but with an unlikely hero and villains that would be very familiar to Behn’s contemporaries. I bet this did not make her super popular with her readers, though others might have found some glee in having these characters exposed.

So, conclusively, this was definitely a good read and an interesting story, but also a historically important text. Definitely recommended.