Whilst contemplating the lumps in "my stirabout on the hob" and lofting a pint of "your only man," I reminded myself today, à propos de rien, of the works of Mr de Selby, that great Irish physicist-philosopher, best read about in the footnotes of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman and who may or may not be the same person of the same name in The Dalkey Archive. O'Brien [né Brian O'Nolan AKA Myles na Gopaleen] also once wrote a book, An Béal Bocht 'the poor mouth,' in Gaelic that was a cruel satire of Irish romanticism yet beyond reproach since most of his conservative critics had not the Gaelic to read it. His de Selby is an absurd Hibernian Lucretius.
This is hardly to be wondered at since he held (a) that darkness was simply an accretion of 'black air', i.e., a staining of the atmosphere due to volcanic eruptions too fine to be seen with the naked eye and also to certain 'regrettable' industrial activities involving coal-tar by-products and vegetable dyes; and (b) that sleep was simply a succession of fainting-fits brought on by semi-asphyxiation due to (a). Hatchjaw brings forward his rather facile and ever-ready theory of forgery, pointing to certain unfamiliar syntactical constructions in the first part of the third so called 'prosecanto' in Golden Hours. He does not, however, suggest that there is anything spurious in de Selby's equally damaging rhodomontade in the Layman's Atlas where he inveighs savagely against 'the insanitary conditions prevailing everywhere after six o'clock' and makes the famous gaffe that death is merely 'the collapse of the heart from the strain of a lifetime of fits and fainting'.
[Nolan O'Brien. 1939/1966. The Third Policeman. Chapter 8, footnote 1]
I was lead to O'Brien through the secondary literature on Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Curtius' remarks on the Hisperica Flamina and Teofilo Folengo's macaronic epic Il Baldus. And, then, somehow, de Selby made me ponder again Des Esseintes' musings on Late Latinity in Huysmans' incomparable Against the Grain.
L'auteur qu'il aimait vraiment et qui lui faisait reléguer pour jamais hors de ses lectures les retentissantes adresses de Lucain, c'était Pétrone.
...
Ici, c'est l'inspecteur des garnis qui vient demander le nom des voyageurs récemment entrés; là, ce sont des lupanars où des gens rôdent autour de femmes nues, debout entre des écriteaux, tandis que par les portes mal fermées des chambres, l'on entrevoit les ébats des couples; là, encore, au travers des villas d'un luxe insolent, d'une démence de richesses et de faste, comme au travers des pauvres auberges qui se succèdent dans le livre, avec leurs lits de sangle défaits, pleins de punaises, la société du temps s'agite: impurs filous, tels qu'Ascylte et qu'Eumolpe, à la recherche d'une bonne aubaine; vieux incubes aux robes retroussées, aux joues plâtrées de blanc de plomb et de rouge acacia; gitons de seize ans, dodus et frisés; femmes en proie aux attaques de l'hystérie; coureurs d'héritages offrant leurs garçons et leurs filles aux débauches des testateurs; tous courent le long des pages, discutent dans les rues, s'attouchent dans les bains, se rouent de coups ainsi que dans une pantomime.
Et cela raconté dans un style d'une verdeur étrange, d'une couleur précise, dans un style puisant à tous les dialectes, empruntant des expressions à toutes les langues charriées dans Rome, reculant toutes les limites, toutes les entraves du soi-disant grand siècle, faisant parler à chacun son idiome: aux affranchis, sans éducation, le latin populacier, l'argot de la rue; aux étrangers leur patois barbare, mâtiné d'africain, de syrien et de grec; aux pédants imbéciles, comme l'Agamemnon du livre, une rhétorique de mots postiches. Ces gens sont dessinés d'un trait, vautrés autour d'une table, échangeant d'insipides propos d'ivrognes, débitant de séniles maximes, d'ineptes dictons, le mufle tourné vers le Trimalchio qui se cure les dents, offre des pots de chambre à la société, l'entretient de la santé de ses entrailles et vente, en invitant ses convives à se mettre à l'aise.
[J.-K. Huysmans. 1884. À rebours. Chapter 3]
Huysmans' "breviary of décadence" (secundum Arthur Symons) surfaced for me in a footnote to the transcripts of the Oscar Wilde-Marquis of Queensbury libel trial because it figures in The Picture of Dorian Gray. It's a crooky labyrinth we plod through in the reading of literature.
Translations.
Posted by jim at June 14, 2003 07:42 PMThe writer he really loved and who made him reject for good and all from among the books he read, Lucan and his sounding periods, was Petronius.
...
Here, we have the Inspector of Lodgings coming to inquire the names of the travellers lately arrived; there, it is a brothel where men are prowling round naked women standing beside placards giving name and price, while through the half-open doors of the rooms the couples can be seen at work; elsewhere again, now in country houses full of insolent luxury, amid a mad display of wealth and ostentation, now in poverty-stricken taverns with their brokendown pallet-beds swarming with fleas, the society of the period runs its race,-- debauched cut-purses like Ascyltos and Eumolpus on the look-out for a piece of luck; old wantons of the male sex with their tucked-up gowns and cheeks plastered with ceruse and acacia red; minions of sixteen, plump and curly-headed; women frantic with hysteria; legacy hunters offering their boys and girls to gratify the lustful caprices of rich men; all these and more gallop across the pages, quarrel in the streets, finger each other at the baths, belabour each other with fisticuffs like the characters in a pantomime.
All this told with an extraordinary vigour and precision of colouring, in a style that borrows from every dialect, that cribs words from every language imported into Rome, that rejects all the limitations, breaks . all the fetters of the so-called "Golden Age," that makes each man speak in his own peculiar idiom — freemen, without education, the vernacular Latin, the argot of the streets; foreigners, their barbarian lingo, saturated with African, Syrian, Greek expressions; idiotic pedants, like the Agamemnon of the Satyricon, a rhetoric of invented words. All these people are drawn with a free pencil, squatted round a dining-table, exchanging the imbecile conversation of tipsy revellers, mouthing dotards' wise saws and pointless proverbs, all eyes turned upon Trimalchio, the giver of the feast, who sits picking his teeth, offers the company chamber-pots, discourses of his insides, begging his guests to make themselves at home.
[J.-K. Huysmans. 1884. Translatred by John Howard. Against the Grain. Chapter 3]