Aladdin

They're part of our childhood, as much as the tales of the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen; who does not know of Aladdin and his wonderful Lamp, of the seven voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, of of Ali Baba and his forty thieves? And yet these tales came to us, not from oral tradition nor from one person's fertile imagination: they arrived instead by way of translation and appropriation when, in 1706, The Arabian Nights Entertainment, was published in Europe. This edition was based on diverse sources in Arabic and Persian texts, with additional tales tacked on by Antoine Galland, who also edited out any erotic passages and all the poetry. From then, as with other fabulous tales, such as those of Robin Hood or Baron Münchausen, he and future editors felt free to add and appropriate other stories and graft them on the the existing tradition. The result is, that an authentic translation of the original stories somehow seems wrong to those raised on this other, broader but less authentic, tradition.

The fact that these stories have so frequently been adapted, for stage and later for screen, has added to their cultural significance. Long before Disney's 1992 Aladdin, the tale of a boy and his lamp was the subject of stage plays and pantomimes as early as 1788; the first film version was made in 1898, with a hand-colored arriving in 1906. In 1939, Popeye the Sailor took a turn as Aladdin in the Flesicher Brothers color featurette (Popeye was also to appear in Popeye Meets Sinbad the Sailor and Popeye Meets Ali Baba and his Forty Thieves). There was also a well-regarded live-action feature film, 1940's The Thief of Baghdad, which borrows all manner of Arabian-nights material (including an evil vizier named Jaffar).

One might say that each generation has a version of Aladdin of their own -- doubtless there will be many more to come -- but what about the Disney version? What are its key differences from the original story, and what do you think of them? Or, if you had a chance to make an Aladdin of your own, how would you put the story together?

Gogol

Statue of Nikolai Gogol by Andreyev

He was a man of his time, and a man somehow out of time. His life (1809-1852) was nearly coeval with that of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), and in some ways they might seem to have much in common: best known for their short stories, which capture something of the essential horror and absurdity of life; both died miserably, and saw their reputations buffetted before becoming the "classic" authors they're now regarded as. But there, in a way, the similarities end: Poe was a true Romantic, more than half in love with easeful death, but also capable of exquisite framings of life and love. Ravens, graveayards, and premature burials were Poe's native ground. Gogol, in contrast, was a realist, alebeit one whose acute awareness of the absurdity of the real often led him into a sort of surrealism; his native haunt was the infamous Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburgh, his native tribe the faceless bureaucrats in the employ of the Russian government, who flowed along its pavements like the dead souls flowing through the gates of Hell in Dante's Inferno. They did have one other odd thing in common: a wicked sense of humor.

"The Overcoat" is perhaps the greatest encapsulation of the way in which a single object of clothing can take on an almost talismanic power, conveying identity itself, and -- when lost -- a fate far worse than death. But it's with "The Nose," an absurdist meditation on the nature of rank, power, and identity that Gogol's social satire reached its peak. Foreshadowing later tales of severed identity, such as Dostoyevsky's The Double, Hans Christian Andersen's "The Shadow," and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it imagines the consequences of a severed nose, a nose that refuses to be re-arratched, and soon acquires a mysterious life of its own.

And it's had a pretty good afterlife, as well. In 1963, using pinscreen animation -- a fantastical and difficult method that produces haunting monochromatic images -- Alexandra Alexeieff and Claire Parker produced what I feel is the best direct adaptation of the story (you'll recognize one of the instruments in the soundtrack -- it's a biwa!) It's also been the subject of several plays and an opera, not to mention the sequence in Woody Allen's Sleeper, where he steals the dictator's nose and leads his guards on a merry chase. And you can imagine how I felt when, as I was cleaning out the basement of my house, I felt when I came upon a small wooden box, opened it, and saw this!

The Palm-Wine Drinkard

This week, we move to consider Amos Tutuola's weird yet groundbreaking novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town. When it first appeared in 1952, the reviews were a mixture of astonishment and admiration; Dylan Thomas famously proclaimed it a "brief, thronged, grisly and bewitching story," and other reviews were also quite positive; others called it a "strange, eerie, poetic novel" and praised it as the embodiment of an African perspective of Africa. And yet, today, modern African writers such as Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong'o have tended to disparage Tutuola, accusing him of being too eager -- even if unconsciously -- ready to write just the sort of exotic, juju-filled story that Western readers expected from the "dark continent."

Forty years after its publication, in 1992, I was fortunate to have a brief correspondence with Mr. Tutuola, and to receive a contribution from him for a book I had proposed at the time: Without Any Rules: The Politics and Poetics of the Vernacular. Unfortunately, as fate would have it, the book proposal never found a home, and when Mr. Tutuola passed on in 1997, I found myself with his contribution still unpublished. And so, it occurred to me that I might share it with the class here on the website. I had asked contributors to reflect on what they considered their "vernacular" mode of writing, and what follows is the opening section of Mr. Tutuola's reply -- it has never been published before now:

By vernacular, I suppose, one means the language into which a child is born and is brought up. A language he picks up almost spontaneously as a matter of course when growing up. By this definition, my own ‘vernacular’ or ’mother tongue’ is Yoruba – a language spoken by a subgroup in West Africa, particularly in the Western and Eastern parts of Nigeria and the Benin Republic. Their root is of course in Nigeria. The people in these areas would now be about 20 million. The sub-group is also called Yoruba people. 

I was born at a time the meeting of our own culture and that of Europe had taken place – indeed at a time British colonialists still held the political and economic leverages of my country and that of some other African countries. This is to say I grew up at a time I had no choice but to be exposed to another language. The language of our colonies. The language in which the official business of my country is conducted, to wit, English. 

But I was not to confront this language until I started schooling. And as fate would have it, I could not get far in formal schooling due to lack of finance (as I lost my father at a tender age). Thus, I had what can be referred to as a tolerable exposure to Yoruba, my mother tongue. 

Years after, when I wanted to write, English, the official language of my country, was the one I wrote in. Ordinarily, this would be a little surprising, given my barely indepth knowledge of the language on the one hand, and my appreciable grounding in Yoruba, my mother tongue, on the other. But that was what I found myself doing. 

Although I wrote (and still do)in English, my writings, looking back now, are still in Yoruba, my mother tongue. In here is deliberately put in italics. The medium in which my ideas are expressed is English, but when I write, the ideas I express, the atmosphere I create, and as reviewers of my works (perhaps rightly) maintain, the gestures readers encounter on the pages of the books I write are Yorubaish. Thus I think it can be said that beyond being a Yoruba writing in English, my works are African in conception.

I think that Mr. Tutuola's comments here give us a remarkable account of the unexpected combinations, conflicts, and sometimes fortuitous collisions of language and consciousness that are a powerful feature of postcolonial writings. Should a writer seeking to resist colonization be obliged to write in the colonizer's tongue? And if she or he chooses it despite its histories, can it be shaped, as Tutuola suggests, back into a "native" language?

Two years after The Palm-Wine Drinkard, he published My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which was later the inspiration for an electronic album by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno, which is widely regarded as one of the most powerful, pioneering recordings of its kind. I urge everyone to read -- and listen to -- all of these remarkable works.

Dubliners

James Joyce's Dubliners -- a collection of short stories originally completed around 1905, but not published until nine years later -- is widely regarded as one of the finest works of its kind. As with all of Joyce's works, it seeks after the essence of "dear old dirty Dublin," the city in and near which Joyce had grown up, and the city -- though he left Ireland never to return -- in which he still dwelt in his imagination, and was the essential core of every one of his later works.

Dublin in 1904 was a bustling city, with all kinds of shops and commerce which brought the goods of the world to its doors. And yet, at the same time, it was home to some of the darkest and dingiest slums of its day, corridors of hopelessness from which many never fully emerged. Joyce himself had travelled through at least two of its social classes, thanks to the wavering fortunes of his father; he'd enjoyed both a middle-class home and a semi-private education at Clongowes Wood Academy, and far poorer quarters along with the cold water and thrashings at the O'Connell School operated by the Christian Brothers. The Jesuits were intellectual in bent, and Joyce much preferred them; the loss of his place there and return to dismal life in Dublin were hard on him.

But the change did Joyce a favor; having been dislocated from his class and his comrades, he experienced a crisis of faith with his religion, and was thus better prepared than most to see Ireland in a multi-dimensional way, and to be drawn into the European modernist movement. Unlike other writers of his generation, he never gravitated to the nationalism of the Young Ireland movement and its successors, and had nothing but disdain for the attempt at the revival of Irish Gaelic literature and culture (at one point in "The Dead," the main character pointedly objects to the notion that Irish is "his" language). One can readily imagine Joyce, his eyesight poor and always growing poorer, peering through thick-lensed spectacles at the plight of the people about him, whose lives were strictly circumscribed by poverty, strict Catholic morality, and the consciousness that Ireland was a subjugated nation, claimed by the English and with her harps on its flag.

There is nothing supernatural in these stories -- only the extreme inner consciousness of loss, of the fragility of beauty, of the fleeting nature of life's few pleasures.  In Araby, we follow a desperately shy and isolated young man through his day, and into the night on a trolley in a doomed attempt to find a fitting gift for the girl he loves but can barely speak with. In Clay, we play a little game -- a game about destiny, family, and (yes) death. And in The Dead, we come full circle, looking within and without the walls of polite Dublin society, and witness the emergence of a newly urgent sense of identity that, though certainly Irish, rejects the cultural conventions of "Irishness."

Kwaidan

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) was a man between cultures -- quite a few of them, in fact. His father was Irish, but his mother was a Greek noblewoman. The one thing they had in common, apparently, was a fanatical devotion to Roman Catholicism; the one thing their son felt most strongly was an aversion to it. After an acrimonious separation, Lafcadio was packed off to Ireland to live with a series of relatives, each of whom abandoned his care to another; eventually he was sent off to a Catholic boarding school and later to a seminary, both of which only hardened his feelings. Hearn, as soon as he could, left for America, where he supported himself as a journalist, first in Cincinnati, then in New Orleans. From there, he went as a foreign correspondent, initially in the French West Indies and then in Japan. He was 40 years old when he arrived, and would only live to be 54, and yet it was in Japan that he made an international name for himself; he obtained a teaching job, married the daughter of a local samurai, and learned Japanese, which he came to speak fluently. His collections of Japanese stories, among which Kwaidan is the best known, have remained in print ever since; in 1965, three stories from this book were adapted by Masaki Kobayashi in his film Kwaidan. His life was also the basis for a play, "The Dream of a Summer Day," which toured Ireland in 2005.

Western audiences have always enjoyed tales of ghosts and, as Hearn calls them, "strange things." The Japanese settings of Hearn's tales have led some to accuse him of exoticizing Japanese culture, but these same stories have gained and retained popularity in Hearn's adopted homeland. The best of them have elements which appeal across cultures, and among them, the tales in Kwaidan rank among the finest tales of terror this side of Edgar Alan Poe.

Welcome to English 121

Map of the World as a "Tube" Map © Michael Tompsett

Welcome to our Summer Session II course, English 121: Literature and Nation!

The idea that literature, like food or music or dance, should possess or embody a national culture, is quite a recent one in terms of world history. The older dream was of a universal literature, written in Greek or Latin and readable around the world and for all time. This dream, for better or worse, faded with the collapse of the ancient empires, particularly that of Rome. It wasn't until some centuries later, when nations were beginning to emerge from the medieval checkerboard of duchies and domains, that the idea of writing literature in one's own native language, and expressing the natural and national character of its speakers, began to emerge. It was this vernacular writing with which national literatures were born, and with them the sense that each nation ought to have its own pantheon of literary and artistic giants.

Today, while we can use terms like "American Literature," "Irish Literature," or "Japanese Literature," it's not always easy to separate them off.  People emigrate from country to country; most nations contain many languages, ethnicities, and faiths; the most successful literature is translated and read around the world. Still, each country's literary heritage has something of the essence of the nation in it, both as it might be perceived internally, and as it might be seen by others.

PLEASE NOTE: This is a hybrid course, and we will not be meeting on all of the scheduled dates; approxinately half of our course work will be done online, in the manner of a "distance learning" class. More information is on the syllabus, and I'll go over the course structure at our first class meeting.