roman-à-clef

In the other [1979] profile, in Vogue, [Toni] Morrison spoke of a white American reader who had "told her how difficult it was to understand black culture in her books—it was so removed from his experience." She had responded: "Boy, you must have had a hell of a time with Beowulf!" The Vogue interviewer, missing the wit in this retort, went on to comment: "Morrison has no patience with people who plead ignorance; but then, she does not pride herself on being a patient woman. 'I find myself being more and more difficult,' she says. 'It's something I really relish.'" Even Morrison's literary difficulty and the pleasure she took in it was translated here into personal difficulty, a moral failing: How dare she be impatient! Well, wouldn't you be?

slicing gaping wounds in all your glances. / And there, just where the pain makes you stop and think, / that’s the very place / I put down my roots.

But I don’t want to forgive the betrayal. // Which means I still carry my own wounds. / I still carry a folded tongue, // burnished with silence; / the sweet nectar of poetry withers.

It is like a dog driven off by his master that comes back to bark in front of the house at two in the morning. Not to be let in—he knows his master doesn't love him—but to make his presence known.

“He smiled at her. “I am entirely selfish,” he said ruefully, “and always hoping that someone will tell me to behave, someone will make herself responsible for me and make me be grown-up.” He is altogether selfish, she thought in some surprise, the only man I have ever sat and talked to alone, and I am impatient; he is simply not very interesting. “Why don’t you grow up by yourself?” she asked him, and wondered how many people—how many women—had already asked him that. “You’re clever.” And how many times had he answered that way? This conversation must be largely instinctive, she thought with amusement, and said gently, “You must be a very lonely person.” All I want is to be cherished, she thought, and here I am talking gibberish with a selfish man. “You must be very lonely indeed.””

You turn away from history / to be forgotten by the future. // To be forgotten by the world, / you turn away from home.

“Now a hunger that cannot quite be located in the body comes over her, a sense of yearning, for what? Maybe for kindness, for a moral sense that is clear and loud and greater that she is, something that can blanket her, no, no, something in which she can hide for a minute and be safe.”

I want you to write for pleasure—to play. Just listen to the sounds and rhythms of the sentences you write and play with them, like a kid with a kazoo. This isn’t “free writing,” but it’s similar in that you’re relaxing control: you’re encouraging the words themselves—the sounds of them, the beats and echoes—to lead you on. For the moment, forget all the good advice that says good style is invisible, good art conceals art. Show off! Use the whole orchestra our wonderful language offers us! Write it for children, if that’s the way you can give yourself permission to do it. Write it for your ancestors. Use any narrating voice you like. If you’re familiar with a dialect or accent, use it instead of vanilla English. Be very noisy, or be hushed. Try to reproduce the action in the jerky or flowing movement of the words. Make what happens happen in the sounds of the words, the rhythms of the sentences. Have fun, cut loose, play around, repeat, invent, feel free.

'The same theme is taken up in the Agamemnon [406, 749], but this time it is the amorous pothos for Helen that, having mastered Menelaus' heart, peoples the palace abandoned by his wife with phantoms [phasmata] of the beloved, with her apparitions in dreams [oneirophantoi]. Radiant with charm, haunting and elusive, Helen is like a person from the beyond, doubled in this life and on this earth in herself and her phantom, her eidolon. A fatal beauty created by Zeus to destroy human beings, to make them kill one another at the walls of Troy, she, more so than her sister Clytemnestra, deserves the appellation "slayer of men" [Euripides, Helen 52-55; Electra 1282-84; Orestes 16]. She who is "most beautiful" also incarnates horrible Erinys, the savage and murderous Ker. In her, desire and death are joined and intimately mixed.'

“Hedda Gabler is, in short, the study of an exasperated woman; and it may certainly be declared that the subject was not in advance, as a theme for scenic treatment, to be pronounced promising. There could in fact, however, be no more suggestive illustration of the folly of quarreling with an artist over his subject. Ibsen has had only to take hold of this one in earnest, to make it, against every presumption, live with an intensity of life. […] Something might have been gained, entailing perhaps a loss in another direction, by tracing the preliminary stages, showing the steps in Mrs. Tesman’s history which led to the spasm, as it were, on which the curtain rises and of which the breathless duration - ending in death - is the period of the piece. But a play is above everything a work of selection, and Ibsen, with his curious and beautiful passion for the unity of time (carried in him to a point which almost always implies also that of place), condemns himself to admirable rigors. We receive Hedda ripe for her catastrophe, and if we ask for antecedents and explanations we must simply find them in her character. Her motives are just her passions. What the four acts show us is these motives and that character - complicated, strange, irreconcilable, infernal - playing themselves out. We know too little why she married Tesman, we see too little why she ruins Lovborg; but we recognize that she is infinitely perverse, and Heaven knows that, as the drama goes, the crevices we are called upon to stop are singularly few.”

I want to bridge this filthy yearning.

“It is extraordinary that nobody nowadays under the stress of great troubles is turned into stone or a bird or a tree or some inanimate object; they used to undergo such metamorphoses in ancient times (or so they say), though whether that is myth or a true story I know not. Maybe it would be better to change one’s nature into something that lacks all feeling, rather than be so sensitive to evil. Had that been possible, these calamities would in all probability have turned me to stone.”

In The Odyssey, Odysseus is extraordinary for the flexibility with which he can inhabit many different names, or no name at all. It is this quality of being multinamed and nameless that enables him to survive. By contrast, almost all the warriors of The Iliad yearn to have a name and a story that lasts forever. Their many names and titles, as sons and brothers and comrades and fathers and rulers, are essential to their identities, their connections with one another, and their fame after death. They fear, above all, being humiliated (cursed with a negative name), or forgotten and nameless. The lists and catalogs of names are essential to the poem’s own work, of memorializing and mourning the dead. Once the bodies return to dust, these syllables are all that remain.