Funny how Grimmelshausen is on here. I read his Life of Courage and thought the heroine was a very likeable badass who makes the most of a harsh situation! A proto-feminist novel of sorts. But Dr. Crucifer would no doubt see her as a threat.
Not to engage in ecclesiastical counteravouchings, but Theroux, presumably well versed in such matters, would likely disagree with Crucifer and the annotation here, pointing to among many other things Galatians 3:28—“there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” That said, one must concede (spoiler alert!) the Greco-Roman world was already patriarchal before Paul showed up.
This may be a stretch, but there is not much to go on. Ribald Rib Tickler was the title of Time Magazine's (1/14/1974) brief review of the 1974 Vietnam war-themed musical comedy, More Than You Deserve. (Cf. Ch.38 Love “is a grace all hear of, none deserve.) The play featured an impotent soldier falling in love with a nymphomaniac who, among other things says of group sex, “Mother always told me there was safety in numbers, but mother never told me how much fun it was!” The title song has these lyrics:
From the very first moment I saw you/ I knew our love would be so strong / And the very first moment I kissed you / I knew our joy would last so long / Then I saw you making love to my best friend / I didn't know whatever to say / I saw you making love to my best friend / So I looked him right in his eyes and I said / Listen boy / Won't you take some more, it's what you came for / And don't mind me, I won't throw you no curves / Have yourself a ball with my good woman / Won't you take some more boy, it's more than you deserve. (The song was later recorded by Meatloaf on his "Dead Ringer" album.) If anything, the lyrics to some other songs in the musical are far worse.
“ Hans Baldung’s Hexenbilder: (Paintings & Woodcuts). C. 1510-1530"
While Ponovsky and others would tend to agree with you that Baldung created the visual vocabulary of the witch hunt, Margaret A. Sullivan more recently argues, convincingly, otherwise. See, The Witches of Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer, 2000). The timing, subject, and audience for the art of Baldung all argue against the view that the witches in his prints and drawings were a reaction to actual witch-hunts, trials, or to malevolent treatises such as the Malleus maleficiarum. Rather, his work depicting witches is more plausibly a response humanist interest in the poetry and satire of the classical world and are better understood as constructions created to serve artistic goals and satisfy a humanist audience. Sullivan concedes, however, that if the “results were aethetically satisfying in terms of an artistic outcome, leading to the development of an imaginative and entertaining new kind of subject matter,” they possibly could have contributed to “altering male attitudes and creating a climate that could culminate in a tragedy [witch hunts] of immense proportions.” But if indeed Baldung contributed to that, “it would be an outcome both ironic and terrible.”
First, this is a monumental effort, for which I am grateful. It notably expands on your prior work extensive work. I wanted to quickly note that your idea of bibliographic “characterization-by-proxy” in fact became a prominent notion outside of literature per se. There were commentators and even specialized services that sprang up around the pandemic-era obsession with curated Zoom video conference background bookshelves. Basically, people realized that the books behind you were now part of your personal brand, and some folks leaned very hard into that. There was even a full two-day academic conference about the phenomenon titled “Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic” (recursively conducted only online), though something like “Logos as Interior Decoration” may have been more apt: https://university.open.ac.uk/arts/research/book-history/conferences/bookshelves Your scholarship here certainly would have have provided a valuable contribution on literature’s precursors to this rather absurd modern pantomime.
A wonder to behold, and an astonishing work of scholarship. I have nothing to add to the annotations, but for another example of a post-Rabelais list of books in a novel, see Laurent Bordelon’s <Monsieur Oufle> (1710). Chapter 2 is an annotated 6-page catalog of all the occult books in his library; for a discussion and sampling, see vol. 2 of my The Novel: An Alternative History, pp. 278-79. For an English translation of the novel, go to: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_a-history-of-the-ridicul_bordelon-laurent_1711/page/8/mode/2up
Thank you, Steve! "Monsieur Oufle" looks extremely interesting, I'll be sure to delve into it asap. The lineage of the "madman’s library" from Rabelais to Bordelon, and eventually to the type of curated malice I’m looking at with Crucifer, is a fascinating one. I'm particularly interested to see how Bordelon’s satire of superstition mirrors or diverges from the way these later texts codify their own "occult" certainties.
Do you know of any other "library chapters", perhaps in contemporary literature?
Steve certainly will know much more, but two things come to mind.
Roberto Bolaño's, Nazi Literature in the Americas, is deadpan satire and pure imaginary bibliography. The novel is a mock encyclopedic survey of 33 fictional fascist-leaning writers, generally absurdly minor literary figures. Each entry includes invented works, summaries, publishing histories, and biographical notes. The collection exposes ideology through aesthetics. The bookshelf becomes moral evidence.
The obviousThe Name of the Rose by Eco indirectly can be seen as bibliographic “characterization-by-proxy." The monastery's labyrinthine library, a speculum mundi rather than a personal collection, reflects the story’s theological power struggles and epistemological fear. But the book, in effect, does tell you who weaponizes the catalog and who fears what knowledge.
And for (I would argue) a very closely related example of metonymic characterization, although using record albums instead of books, see High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. The protagonist organizes people by taste. You date someone; you audit their record shelf for romantic compatibility. In smaller measure this concept was used by Theroux in connection with Eyestone’s record collecting in Warholic.
Funny how Grimmelshausen is on here. I read his Life of Courage and thought the heroine was a very likeable badass who makes the most of a harsh situation! A proto-feminist novel of sorts. But Dr. Crucifer would no doubt see her as a threat.
Andrew the Chaplain’s De reprobatione amoris: (The Rejection of Love). Book III of De Amore. C. 1184-1186 (Andreas Capellanus)
Capellanus’s De remedio is mentioned in Laura Warholic in connection with Eyestone’s notes on frigidity.
The Gnomes of Zeeland previously made an appearance in Ch.36 (The Deipnosophists).
“ The Jilts: or, Female Fortune Hunters”
See also Ch.43, “The Unfortunate Jilts”
St. Paul’s Epistles
Not to engage in ecclesiastical counteravouchings, but Theroux, presumably well versed in such matters, would likely disagree with Crucifer and the annotation here, pointing to among many other things Galatians 3:28—“there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” That said, one must concede (spoiler alert!) the Greco-Roman world was already patriarchal before Paul showed up.
“ Ribald Rib"
This may be a stretch, but there is not much to go on. Ribald Rib Tickler was the title of Time Magazine's (1/14/1974) brief review of the 1974 Vietnam war-themed musical comedy, More Than You Deserve. (Cf. Ch.38 Love “is a grace all hear of, none deserve.) The play featured an impotent soldier falling in love with a nymphomaniac who, among other things says of group sex, “Mother always told me there was safety in numbers, but mother never told me how much fun it was!” The title song has these lyrics:
From the very first moment I saw you/ I knew our love would be so strong / And the very first moment I kissed you / I knew our joy would last so long / Then I saw you making love to my best friend / I didn't know whatever to say / I saw you making love to my best friend / So I looked him right in his eyes and I said / Listen boy / Won't you take some more, it's what you came for / And don't mind me, I won't throw you no curves / Have yourself a ball with my good woman / Won't you take some more boy, it's more than you deserve. (The song was later recorded by Meatloaf on his "Dead Ringer" album.) If anything, the lyrics to some other songs in the musical are far worse.
“ Hans Baldung’s Hexenbilder: (Paintings & Woodcuts). C. 1510-1530"
While Ponovsky and others would tend to agree with you that Baldung created the visual vocabulary of the witch hunt, Margaret A. Sullivan more recently argues, convincingly, otherwise. See, The Witches of Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer, 2000). The timing, subject, and audience for the art of Baldung all argue against the view that the witches in his prints and drawings were a reaction to actual witch-hunts, trials, or to malevolent treatises such as the Malleus maleficiarum. Rather, his work depicting witches is more plausibly a response humanist interest in the poetry and satire of the classical world and are better understood as constructions created to serve artistic goals and satisfy a humanist audience. Sullivan concedes, however, that if the “results were aethetically satisfying in terms of an artistic outcome, leading to the development of an imaginative and entertaining new kind of subject matter,” they possibly could have contributed to “altering male attitudes and creating a climate that could culminate in a tragedy [witch hunts] of immense proportions.” But if indeed Baldung contributed to that, “it would be an outcome both ironic and terrible.”
I don't remember any others, but I'll give it some thought. "Monsieur Oufle" is very sharp and funny: I'm sure you'll like it.
First, this is a monumental effort, for which I am grateful. It notably expands on your prior work extensive work. I wanted to quickly note that your idea of bibliographic “characterization-by-proxy” in fact became a prominent notion outside of literature per se. There were commentators and even specialized services that sprang up around the pandemic-era obsession with curated Zoom video conference background bookshelves. Basically, people realized that the books behind you were now part of your personal brand, and some folks leaned very hard into that. There was even a full two-day academic conference about the phenomenon titled “Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic” (recursively conducted only online), though something like “Logos as Interior Decoration” may have been more apt: https://university.open.ac.uk/arts/research/book-history/conferences/bookshelves Your scholarship here certainly would have have provided a valuable contribution on literature’s precursors to this rather absurd modern pantomime.
A wonder to behold, and an astonishing work of scholarship. I have nothing to add to the annotations, but for another example of a post-Rabelais list of books in a novel, see Laurent Bordelon’s <Monsieur Oufle> (1710). Chapter 2 is an annotated 6-page catalog of all the occult books in his library; for a discussion and sampling, see vol. 2 of my The Novel: An Alternative History, pp. 278-79. For an English translation of the novel, go to: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_a-history-of-the-ridicul_bordelon-laurent_1711/page/8/mode/2up
Thank you, Steve! "Monsieur Oufle" looks extremely interesting, I'll be sure to delve into it asap. The lineage of the "madman’s library" from Rabelais to Bordelon, and eventually to the type of curated malice I’m looking at with Crucifer, is a fascinating one. I'm particularly interested to see how Bordelon’s satire of superstition mirrors or diverges from the way these later texts codify their own "occult" certainties.
Do you know of any other "library chapters", perhaps in contemporary literature?
Steve certainly will know much more, but two things come to mind.
Roberto Bolaño's, Nazi Literature in the Americas, is deadpan satire and pure imaginary bibliography. The novel is a mock encyclopedic survey of 33 fictional fascist-leaning writers, generally absurdly minor literary figures. Each entry includes invented works, summaries, publishing histories, and biographical notes. The collection exposes ideology through aesthetics. The bookshelf becomes moral evidence.
The obviousThe Name of the Rose by Eco indirectly can be seen as bibliographic “characterization-by-proxy." The monastery's labyrinthine library, a speculum mundi rather than a personal collection, reflects the story’s theological power struggles and epistemological fear. But the book, in effect, does tell you who weaponizes the catalog and who fears what knowledge.
And for (I would argue) a very closely related example of metonymic characterization, although using record albums instead of books, see High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. The protagonist organizes people by taste. You date someone; you audit their record shelf for romantic compatibility. In smaller measure this concept was used by Theroux in connection with Eyestone’s record collecting in Warholic.