“Furthermore, the mutilated bodies of Jacob Donner, Samuel Shoemaker, Joseph Reinhardt, Antoine, and James Smith were still unburied and scattered around the tents and Tamsen was not of a mind to clear up the mess.”
“Mutilated body parts of arms, legs, bones, and other trash were prevalent in the cabins and on the grounds, but Eddy and Foster had just been through their own tragedy, and refused to clean up the mess.”
Richard F. Kaufman’s Saving the Donner Party: and Forlorn Hope, 2014
Who expected Tamsen Donner to tidy mangled corpses? Who were William Eddy and Charles Foster defying? “Mess” and “_____ up” were both incongruous, as were the words “from head to toe the evident son of a hat-maker” in a sentence from Balzac’s Rise and Fall of César Birotteau, 1837, tr. Katherine Wormeley. “A stout, chubby-faced fellow of medium height, from head to foot the evident son of a hat-maker, with round features whose shrewdness was hidden under a restrained and subdued manner, suddenly appeared,” he says, without telling you what might have made the man look distinctly “from head to toe” like something as totally precise as the son of a hat-maker. The son of a hat-maker is mystical here: what does it do to signal its presence? How does it overcome and supersede the ordinary qualities that Balzac actually lists? He has decided without anything else that this character not only is “Andoche Finot, son of a hat-maker in the Rue du Coq“ but also phenomenally resembles himself. Finot is dazzling, like the sun seen in its idea. All characters could be introduced like that in all books. For a moment the imaginary figure is in his pure form, untouched by story, and it is downhill from here. In Kaufman the people are impurified, they are not what they are, they are as petty as someone who won't pick up their socks; they are detached or split, they are in more than one place. “One does not often see a lamp and an angel united in the same body,” writes Lautreamont, tr. Guy Wernham, Les Chants de Maldoror, 1868, as the lamp in a sentence develops an angel’s wings and torso. Maldoror licks the angel’s face until the skin is gangrenous. The incongruity here is in the word “often.”
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was cesar birotteau a real person? if an invention, he may have been fueled by Balzac's coffee madness; as a typical small parisienne business person; or was B"s father a hatter? re the donner tragedy: all data was assimilated after the fact, and from available witnesses(one of whom opened a restaurant in San Francisco). hard to know what their attitudes were in situ; Ms. Tamsen may have just been bored...
ReplyDeleteShe might have been bored out of her brain, but Kaufman wouldn't know about it unless there's a primary document somewhere that seems to have evaded everybody except him. I'm fascinated by that unguarded use of "mess" to describe dead bodies. McGlashan does everything he can to mash you into empathetic paste ("Left alone in the snow-mantled forests of the Sierra, what were this man's emotions?") but Kaufman is willing for you to think of detached hands as if they were dirty socks.
ReplyDeleteBirotteau fits so well into Balzac's usual areas of interest -- finance, social climbers, concealed and exposed suffering -- that I don't think he needed to be on a coffee high to invent him.
i admit to being curious about authors' use of stereotypical scenarios to evoke reader emotions. on the one hand, if a scene is totally original, it might be hard for the reader to grasp, and on the other, if the scene is too familiar, it may seem trite... one reason i've never tried to write... i suppose a lot of communication is based on rerun cultural gestaltic programmatic unfoldings; so the reader can unconsciously put himself into a wellknown or well imagined scenario and the author can then limit his descriptions to fit in with what he thinks the reader is familiar with. like in a mickey spillane novel. most readers have never shot someone, but aside from war experiences, they might have imagined it from having absorbed the details from other media... where am i going with this? communication depends on a common focus, i guess; makes the difficulties of translation even worse, as in 6 words for a hat's posts on bulgarian poetry... one of these days i am going to quit rambling; 70 year habits are hard to break...
ReplyDeleteWhat would a non-stereotypical scenario look like, I wonder. I was listening yesterday to an interview with Joel Shapiro at the Modern Art Notes podcast website, and he said that the sculptors' search for the invention of new forms was a dead end; there were no new forms, or nothing that could be acknowledged as a new form.
DeleteMr. Shapiro would be having a classical approach to sculpture? hmm; abstract 3-dimensional art might offer some pretty strange scenarios. anyway, a literary example would have to include things that probably the average reader would not be aware of, like a toaster being used as an emergency generator for powering a heart transplant. something that was totally out of the range of experiences of the normal human; i guess that would get into scifi,though... there were some pretty good examples in the book i'm reading: vivian grey/b. disraeli: where vivian is in a duel and fires once, is hit, and accidentally fires again and gets his opponent through the heart; which so upsets him he enters a decline and has to go to germany for a long time to recover his wits. there he meets a nice girl, they go for a walk and while laughing she falls over dead. i was a bit taken aback; but disraeli is like that; some of his books are among the most interesting i've read... but those examples might disorient the average reader a bit. i don't know, what do you think...?
DeleteFrom your description it sounds as if he's still reliant on stereotypicality, though; if he hadn't set up a scenario that the reader expects then he wouldn't have the excitement of thwarting it. I'd have to read the book to know.
ReplyDeleteShapiro is an old Minimalist-Conceptualist retiring into Juddian figuration. I suppose that makes him classical, in a sense.
you're probably right; the stereotypical idea is another non-starter, i guess... oh well, i have buckets full of those... what's Juddian? don't know much about geography... don't know much about geology... or art, for that matter...
ReplyDeleteNot a non-starter, I'm just not sure how to judge it. If you invent a typical scene and then kill it off, is that enough, or would it have to be something as extreme as Finnegans Wake? But is anything in the Wake a 'scenario'? If it's not possible to write atypical scenarios then is the scenario itself the thing that needs to be eliminated?
Delete(I was thinking of Donald Judd, a minimalist who often worked with squares and rectangles. Shapiro has been balancing rectangular blocks together to make his sculptures, and the last one I saw in person was figurative.)