“along various” “dirty pathways”

Thinking of Scott G.F. Bailey’s suggestion that all books should be judged by the Four Humours, I tried it out.


Choucas, 1927, by Zofia Nałkowska, tr. Ursula Phillips
This Polish humanitarian Zofia Nałkowska brings characters from different nations together in a mountain sanatorium. All dispossessed in some way. They are afflicted with illness; they are afflicted with hatred for other nationalities. The narrator wishes that the suffering of the human race would end but it will not. Her observant resignation orients Choucas towards winter and decreases sweating. The choucas-birds, acting out a representation of the crowd inside the building, increase phlegm by removing heat from the humans and displacing it into the enigma of animals. The sincerity of the author generates a consistent, light black bile, but underlying warmth (quick feeling) improves the story’s health, removing digestion problems and clearing the bowels. Concealment piques the melancholy and keeps excessive phlegm at bay. Overall a hardy book though the liver is small.


Titan, 1800 - 1803, by Jean Paul Richter, tr. Charles T. Brooks
A prince’s proud, eccentric, excessive, unfortunate, sometimes secretly malicious, plotting friends and associates show him how to be a balanced person as he observes their personal disasters, e.g., dying, going mad, whatever. The author’s temperament is natively sanguine; we assume his hair was thick ditto urine. The aim, in spite of his constant airy digressions, is still ultimately phlegmatic. Titan’s desire for sanity rejects choler, melancholy, and dryness. (Counterpoint: should the habit of punishing other characters be diagnosed as choleric impatience? Could the digressions be described as fevers? This line of enquiry is not totally convincing.) Expect a shapely stool while reading.


Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz, 2013, by Maxim Biller, tr. Anthea Bell
One of the real Bruno Schulz’s former students remembered him saying, “We [artists] can turn day into night and night into day. We may cover snow-capped mountains with luxuriant foliage. That is our, the artist’s, freedom, and such is artistic truth, which we can demonstrate through our works.” Maxim Biller’s Schulz doesn’t know anything about that. I think Biller would like his fanfic to be brunette and lithe with a fresh complexion like the stories real-Schulz wrote, but the calculations he goes through – the insertion of Schulz-facts and bits from the stories and the faithless strangulation of Schulz’s air-infused methods (the artist’s “freedom” becomes hallucination, people really are birds) – are too anabolic.


ULULU: Clown Shrapnel, 2007, by Thalia Field
Field’s tireless invocation of flexible performance (both in startling poem-text acrobatics and in the mutating characters) gives this book a healthy youthful physique, though the examples she uses (without violating them) are rooted in the first half of the last century or earlier – Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays, 1895, 1904, Alban Berg’s opera adaptation of Lulu, 1935, Louise Brooks in the Lulu film Pandora’s Box, 1929, the modernist-beloved circus structure – suggesting an attachment to the past indicative of melancholy. Anxious activity is tempered by a refutation of repressive internalisation that, while manifesting violently, has the potential to produce sound sleep. Both the sleep and the likelihood of heavy sweating can be read as phlegmatic. The book is addressed outwards, to the audience and the same audience in implicated in the activity (ULULU: You, Lulu), placing the sociable sanguine elements in a dominant position.


The Descent of Alette, 1996, by Alice Notley
Alette’s fate is to enter a receptive state that will reward her with symbolic advice and totems while she looks forward to an event that functions as some sort of summary and as an arrow to the reader. This is an essentially pre-modern way of regarding a narrative, redolent of Romance of the Rose, Dante, etc. There is a high degree of catabolic reactiveness baked into the text by the poet who breaks down her lines into bursts of words separated by inverted commas.

“I walked into” “the forest;" “for the woods were lit” “by yellow
street lamps” “along various” “dirty pathways”

Naturally the catabolic style can be identified as choleric, these bursts of artificial presence are like flames; at the same time it is vocal and sociable, therefore sanguine. (Is it in danger of consuming too much? Also, looking back at ULULU am I in danger of diagnosing all poems as sanguine?) Both of these values coexist unproblematically with the melancholy self-questioning of Alette. Imbalance enters when we think of phlegm. Readers should consider a cool, wet climate. Eat cheese.

according to a pattern drawn from a patchwork quilt

When you mention advertising of course you can't forget the way that Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage comes, after a while, to begin a passage with a sentence about some person or event you have not encountered yet, speaking about the thing as if there is already a large context all around it and filling you with the desire to be up to speed with the rest of your compatriots who are now standing around you, holding a discussion you are excluded from.

It is as if they all have a Fiat!

There is, for example, the first sentence of Clear Horizon, 1935, the eleventh book, “Between herself and all that was waiting to flow in and settle upon this window-lit end of the great empty room, was the sense of missing Lionel Cholmley.” As if you knew Lionel Cholmley. You have never met Lionel Cholmley. Lionel Cholmley? Then there are three pages about Lionel Cholmley. Cholmley! He was worth knowing! Cholmley! He exits forever. “Having paid him tribute while pouring out her tea and getting back to the window-end of the long empty breakfast table, she bade farewell to Lionel Cholmley.” His radiation lingers – it is the idea of speaking without posing, intensified – “And instead of going to face down the room from the hearthrug, or to pose with the curve of the near-by grand piano, he remained in his place and said his poem as if he were a momentary spokesman, like a vocal testifier in a religious gathering, and, although his poem was heroic, his voice was only a little fuller and more resonant than usual, and quite free from recitational ‘effects.’ So that the poem prevailed …”

Soon afterwards, Miriam watches as a stranger rises in the crowd at a Lycurgan Society meeting, “slowly stammering out his simple words, annihilating the suave pseudo-Nietzsche on the platform,” and Amabel next to her says, “Mira! He’s real!” The man is not Lionel but he is a continuation; he is a Lionel-tentacle, and Amabel is the one who invents a new phrase for he is quite free from recitational ‘effects.’ The radiation is still there, spreading its ad of realness, so that soon (with the whole atmosphere presaging) Miriam will stop going to Lycurgan meetings and veer towards Quakers.

At the same time there is something buried, something muffled, as there was when her mother died and the book waved its hands obliquely, leaving open the possibility that you would not find out. That muffled-ness points to a world somewhere where everyone does things unexpectedly, for reasons you will never know (as though her mother had gone on holiday).

There’s a different form of radiation in Nanni Balestrini's Blackout, 1980, tr. Peter Valente, when the author springs some phrase on you and then repeats it on the next page surrounded by different lines and then maybe again in two pages until you realise it could occur in any place at all and still justify itself through radiant penetration. Honestly the poem has no way of saving itself from its lines. Nobody will veer anywhere; they are immediately present, because the line, “you persecute your persecutors with the truth” can occur after or before (as if on top of) the line, “meanwhile this occasion has unmasked all the petty tyrants who swore to me that they would eviscerate our friendship” (p. 26) or after or before the line “redirect your letters from Nice to Provence because tomorrow I’m leaving for France and who knows I may travel much farther” (p.27) until it is always unmoored – it always has the atmosphere of meaning something ... He put the poem together, says the editor, by “arrang[ing] the book’s text

according to a pattern drawn from a patchwork quilt with strips sewed at 45 degrees across a checkered base, developing a chart […] indicating which borrowed fragments would be placed in which numbered sections, in varying ratio depending on the cut.”

You are always waiting for a line-reappearance. It will be the same thing but in a new setting like a repeatable horror jewel. It is as if Lionel Cholmley kept coming back in as Lionel Cholmley, not as an anonymous stammering Lycurgan meeting man or as a Quaker or a statement from Amabel. What do monsters advertise, these M.R. James yūrei that stalk after you?