Multiple Reading Personalities

“For his friend Enkidu Gilgamesh
did bitterly weep as he wandered the wild:
‘I shall die, and shall I not be then as Enkidu?
Sorrow has entered my heart!”

Mask of the demon Humbaba (British Museum)

I first heard of Gilgamesh last March from a literature student I met when volunteering for a PEN Festival event. She mentioned it as the oldest known work of fiction, and I was a little miffed never to have heard of it. I was therefore happy to see it pop up on my reading list when I decided to adopt a more chronological approach to it.

But before I could discover the Epic, I had another lesson to learn, one about public-domain works. I have a Kindle, I thought, and if this is really the oldest piece of fiction known to men, I should be able to download it for free, right?

Right and wrong, of course. It’s pretty ironic that someone who’s been thinking about translation as much as I have been recently would need a refresher course on a reality as basic as this one: when you’re talking about a foreign-language work, you’d better think twice about translation quality before you commit your time to it. Turns out that Gilgamesh is still pretty much a work in progress; the versions I at first downloaded for free were frankly not the most readable. I lost two weeks trying to find my way around the Epic. I finally went with the well-regarded Andrew George’s translation (and yes, I paid for it), which rewarded me by being quite accessible. I concentrated most of my reading on the Assyrian version circa 1200 B.C. (the “standard version”), though I also dabbled in the “Old Babylonian” version – the Pennsylvania and Yale tablets – to fill lacunae in the text. Well, mostly the translator did that for me, but my erratic initial readings also helped.

With this long introduction made – the Epic, unified by the character of Gilgamesh, really seems to be constituted of two main stories. The first is that of Gilgamesh and Enkidu; Gods meddle in it with a heavy hand. The second is concerned with Gilgamesh alone on a quest, and divinities seem to have much less direct influence on the plot. The two sections are unified by the question of mortality.

At the start of the Epic, Gilgamesh is a somewhat paradoxical figure – a son of Gods endowed with all manners of perfection, yet a tyrant resented by his people. The Gods send Enkidu to counterbalance his power. Raised by wild animals, found by a hunter, tamed by a courtesan and brought to town once civilized, Enkidu is so shocked by Gilgamesh’s enthusiastic exercise of his ‘ius primae noctis’ that he decides to fight him. He is bested, but the two become friends and decide to gain glory by going to the Forest of Cedar and defeating its protector Humbaba, a creature who could be a dragon, a demon or a volcano… It’s not very clear that the Gods approve of the adventure, but the two pull it off and return triumphant to Uruk. There, Ishtar tries to seduce Gilgamesh, but he rejects her; furious, she borrows the Bull of Heaven from her father Anu, and sends it to rampage in the city. Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the bull – an outrage which, added to their little Humbaba excursion, the God decide to punish. Gilgamesh being their favorite, Enkidu is the one they strike: he dies.

His heart broken, jolted into awareness of his own mortality, Gilgamesh decides to go on a quest for Uta-Napishti, the man who survived the Deluge and has been given eternal life thereafter. It takes him years wandering, but Gilgamesh finally reaches his goal, only to fail the first test given him: to go a week without sleep. As a consolation prize, he gets a rejuvenating plant, but even that gets stolen from him by a serpent on the way back to Uruk. Gilgamesh is left to accept that his legacy, the walls of Uruk, will be his only form of immortality.

While there are some traits of older epics that I do not love (such as heavy repetition), I found the Epic to be surprisingly readable. A lot of the motives (the Deluge, the snake stealing eternal life, the crossing of the river to the Golden Land where Uta-Napishti lives…) recall other mythologies and would be worth exploring further, but I was mainly interested by the relation by Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The balance of power between the two seems very original and not totally explained by the current transcription – Enkidu has more importance than the friend who often accompanies the hero in the Greek tradition, but he is as summarily dismissed. He was the character I had most interest in, and his background story (notably, but not only, his relation with the prostitute and his anger at Gilgamesh’s behavior towards virgins) gave him some depths of personality beyond other characters. It was a shame he was the one who had to die.

“Poor fellow, poor fellow! thought I, he don’t mean anything; and besides, he has seen hard times, and ought to be indulged.”

Fenêtre sur mur (Gimli_36/ flickr)

I recently wrote of starting a Jane Austen book full of questions, only to end up oblivious to anything but the story one third of the way into the book. With Bartleby, it was the opposite: questions started to overwhelm me at the end.

The story is told from the point of view of an unnamed Lawyer, a man of experience who professes to look for tranquility foremost in life. His stated intent is curiously at odd with reality: out of three clerks in his employ, one (Turkey) is irate every morning, the second (Nippers) incensed in the afternoon, and the third (Ginger Nut) a rather distracted young boy. The situation and the way the Lawyer describes it make it clear that behind pompous manners and an appearance of respectable bourgeois greed lies a generous heart kept in check just enough to fit in the Wall Street society, with an innate sympathy for his misfit employees. The Lawyer keeps finding reasons to “excuse” his not firing his employees, a behavior the reader could see as either weakness or kindness; because of the story of a few charitable acts, I decided for the second, but reading comments on amazon.com, I might be in the minority.

Yet I was touched by the decency of the character, and not surprised that when he needed to hire a fourth clerk and Bartleby presented himself looking “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn” – he should be engaged on the spot. But where the other clerks regularly erupt (against their copyist lives?) and move on, Bartleby soon starts resisting fulltime. He starts by refusing to read aloud his work, debuting the famous phrase – “I would prefer not to” – which soon will come to characterize his entire behavior, including the most basic of his work duty, copying. The man also settles at the Lawyer’s office. The occupation is discrete but firm; the Lawyer is refused entrance when he stops by out of business hours.

After some struggle, the Lawyer comes to accept Bartleby’s unexplainable conduct, and probably would have let him stay forever in his chambers where every window opens on a wall, were it not for social pressure. His patience for lunacy threatens his reputation, maybe ultimately his business, and the Lawyer is not foolish (or strong enough) to dismiss the concern. He tries to dismiss Bartleby, but when the later resists; his reserves of “fight” exhausted, the Lawyer decides to flee to new offices, leaving Bartleby behind.

Even then, the Lawyer doesn’t really desert Bartleby: when the office’s new occupant has him arrested and sent to the Tombs, the Lawyer traces him and attempts to make his life there more comfortable, notably by buying Bartleby food privileges. But ever refusing, Bartleby has ceased to eat whatsoever. He dies, probably of starvation, eyes wide open on another wall.

My confusion (mostly at Bartleby’s behavior) was not allayed by a “potential explanation” the Lawyer offers (that Bartleby had been a clerk in the office of the Letter of the Deads, opening for the administration the last missives of the now-defunct, and that this dreadful occupation might have damaged him in some way). Some further reading however helped. Two interpretations in particular seemed illuminating, “Bartleby as criticism of the then-emerging office life”, and “Bartleby as a mirror of Melville’s depression at the time of writing”. It seems to me that the presence of other angry clerks and of a judgmental society of lawyers might give credence to the first. The second, richer interpretation is based on the fact that when Melville wrote Bartleby, he was at a difficult time professionally. After a number of successful adventure books, he was encountering harsh criticism and low sales for books dearer to him (including Moby Dick). Bartleby represents the temptation to curl up in a corner and just stop –stop writing first, then stop living. The Lawyer would be another aspect of the writer – the well-educated, well-adjusted man with an unexplainable sympathy for the quirks of mankind, the one whose tolerance might (or not)have enabled Bartleby’s refusals. The absurdity of the story might reflect the one Melville would have felt in his own life; in that sense, the story would be interesting to confront to Kafka’s work.

“I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.”

Peacock Plumes by Erik Veland

Re-reading my notes on Pride and Prejudice almost a month after they were written, I was amused to see how faithfully they reflected my experience with reading Jane Austen: a great many early remarks, both laudatory (Such sharp wit! Such ability to sum up a scene in a few well-chosen details!) and annoyed (Disjointed structure! Unnecessary intrusion of the writer’s opinion!)… Then, about a third of the way into the story, notes stop. I was so fully taken in I forgot to think about what I was reading.

Yet I did not love Elizabeth Bennet: while I thought she was a great character, I’m not sure I would like her very much as a person. The second in a family of five daughters, Elizabeth is her father’s favorite – a quick-witted girl with a judgmental/ gossipy/ cynical streak. Her older sister, Jane, seems the traditional model of female perfection: selfless, beautiful, loving and naïve. The three younger sisters appear as counterpoints to this onslaught of qualities: one of them, Mary, is typecast as the plain-looking girl who tries to compensate her lack of looks through culture, and comes out looking ridiculous; the other two, Kitty and Lydia, are two brainless girls maniacally addicted to fun. The family is rounded up with a nice-but-weak paternal figure and a mother who is the prototypical Austen airhead married woman (like Mary Musgrove in Persuasion, Mrs. Bennet is self-centered, intellectually limited and crassly manipulative).

As if such a family wasn’t enough of a liability, the Bennet girls’ marriage prospects are also limited by their lack of financial expectations, their father’s estate being entailed to their nearest male relative. Mrs Bennet, for all her shortcomings, seems more aware than anyone else of the real danger of poverty the situation places her daughters in, and is intent on marrying them as well and as fast as possible.

An opportunity seems to present itself for Jane when Mr. Bingley, a rich gentleman, rents the nearby estate of Netherfield. An attachment immediately begins between the two of them; unfortunately, Bingley’s two sisters and his friend Darcy, afraid that the match would be unfavorable, separate the two lovers by attracting Bingley to London and convincing him that Jane has no true attachment to him.

Elizabeth meanwhile has conceived a strong dislike for Darcy: not only did he disdain her at a ball, he is also believed to have wronged Mr. Wickham, a militia officer she is fond of, and she suspects his interference between Jane and Bingley. Of course she will slowly discover that he was (mostly) innocent, and he will realize his attraction to her; and when they both have overcome their ‘pride and prejudices’, they will end up together and help Bingley and Jane reunite.

The interwoven love stories at the heart of the book are illuminated by a number of secondary plots, such as the loveless marriage of Elizabeth’s friend Charlotte Lucas to a boorish clergyman, the reckless elopement of Lydia and Wickham or the depiction of the frozen life of Lady Catherine, Darcy’s aunt eaten alive by birth pride. These snippets inform the heroines’ choices and provide a counterpoint to their mostly good decisions. They point directly to Austen’s vision of the necessity to balance heart and head in matters of sentiments; Austen’s almost cruel wit keeps the whole from feeling preachy. The only character that really left me feeling uneasy was Mary, afflicted with intellectual pretensions but little true intelligence or sensitivity. In the grand tradition of Moliere’s femmes savantes, her efforts at self-improvements only seemed to make her a worse person. No political correction here, no belief that self-improvement is accessible to all but to the already gifted: as Austen puts it, there is “in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil — a natural defect which not even the best education can overcome”, a cynicism I don’t quite know what to make of.

A theme I will keep an eye on in my future Austen readings!