Monday, February 1, 2016

a mistress may presumably have an unlimited number



When I saw that the woman in Eliza Haywood’s 1726 novella The City Jilt; or, the Alderman Turn’d Beau was named Glicera I thought back to the article I had seen earlier that day in the online version of the New York Times about a five-hour theatrical adaptation of Roberto Bolaño’s 2066, 2004. The author of the article had said that Bolaño’s book was “wildly digressive,” meaning praiseishly that the dead Chilean had done a startling, impressive, and difficult job, but I could not recall a single digression in 2066 that attracted my attention more than the one that had been created for me by Haywood when she wrote the word, “Glicera.” It was a mysterious black hole for me in the story; I could not grasp it as a name. Why Glicera -- had anybody ever been called actually Glicera? -- then what relevance did it have to the motto of the story, since Haywood is also the creator of personages with pointed names like Betsy Thoughtless (in A History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, 1751) and Bellacour (a lover in The Double Marriage; or, the Fatal Release, 1726, a book that ends like Hamlet with everyone dead except one latecomer surveying the corpses), and then what about the fact that the word “Glicera” wants me to think that the character is wearing the same green grey dress all the time, and I can’t picture her in another dress: she always has to wear that one? And she is always in the same room with a bare wall behind her, textured like stone but without the joins between blocks: it looks as if stone has been slabbed somehow on the walls, like thick liquid concrete, and yet it is brown, not grey. There are shadows. Such a wall has not been described in the Jilt anywhere but I have made it. Potentially Glicera is a name which will not answer itself or be answered by the story, and it is a suspended infinite digression that I could kill off, I said to myself, if I thought about it for more than two seconds – then I won’t do it I said – I do not want to answer by thinking of explanations for it, or words in other languages that might resemble it, or by thinking of figures in antiquity who were named Glicera, and if I have ever known any then I will blank them out of my memory so that I can retain my own endless, bottomless Glicera, and not replace her with the one who wrote about love to the dramatist Menander in the years BC, and “Tibullus’ Glycera has long occasioned needless confusion and speculation [… The word] has no apparent symbolic force (although having some poems might help us decide that), and is in all likelihood a pet-name, of which a mistress may presumably have an unlimited number),” said David F. Bright in Haec Mihi Fingebam: Tibullus in His World, 1997. Glycera, Glicera, was a nickname for courtesans, meaning Sweetness, or something like that --


6 comments:

  1. in the sixties i lived in chihuahua for a year; the indigenes warned me to stay away from ciudad juarez. very dangerous place. interesting about the wall image-behind the wall lies--what? bolano's fascination with a hidden agenda behind the political machinations of power perpetrated by unknown and unknowable forces... i haven't read haywood or bolano, just looked them up on wikipedia, but they sound mysterious and shadowy. "glicera" as a symbol for the arcane and subtle purposes of the femine mystique? richard savage was greatly admired by johnson, but regarded as creepy by most others; that part of haywood's life was obscure, blending into the impalpability of 2666(london burned in 1666 & it's the so called no. of the biblical beast). this sort of inchoate shadowy behind the scenes operation seems in some way connected to lovecraft et alii, even as remote as sir thomas browne(urn burial). anyway, fascinating and provocative stuff...

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    1. That's the post I should have written, right there.

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    2. no real scholarship there, tho; mostly rehash of wiki... tx anyhow

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    3. Scholarly or not, I enjoyed it.

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  2. I suppose Tibullus could've had a number of mistresses, and called them all "Glycera" so he didn't have to keep their names straight. I'm reminded of that scene in All That Jazz where Roy Scheider's character says, "The blonde with the television show in Philadelphia? I remember that girl's name. I remember that girl's name because that girl meant something to me. The blonde with the television show...her name was Sweetheart!"

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    1. Multiple Sweetnesses: the Glycera sugar bowl. According to one theory his Glycera is the same person as his Nemesis. "Of Nemesis my song must tell! | Without her name I make no verses well." This is what happens when you refer to people by nicknames. Two thousand years later, and nobody knows who they are.

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