ENVY.

Comments

1. jamessal says

   May 13, 2010 at 10:16 am

   the very secretness of proud dreams.
   Hey, that’s nice!
2. Grumbly Stu says

   May 13, 2010 at 11:02 am

   Yes, that also struck me as an acute idea. It could be useful when when trying to find a basis for understanding some of the behavior of adolescent males. As usual, I found the idea striking precisely because I could immediately associate it with something concrete. It gives me a new take on a friend of mine, although he is no adolescent.
3. John Emerson says

   May 13, 2010 at 12:52 pm

   For a well-written analysis of Olesha’s man-centered artistic world, along with those of Babel and Platonov….
   I’ve been reading about 19th c. Frrench life and literature for some time (right now the Goncourt Diaries), and the sex-and-gender norms were really horrifying. The sexual partners of the men I’ve been been reading about were prostitutes (rated by price), cheating wives, house servants, and finally the “grisettes”, very poor working women who just wanted to have a little fun and weren’t necessarily prostitutes, though often they became that.
   At the high end were actresses and opera singers, who were assumed to be courtesans and were capable of soaking a guy for his entire inheritance. There were apparently almost no equal relationships, and the few women who played at all (George Sand, Princess Belgioso, Princess Mathilde, Mme Sabatier) were regarded as marvels of nature.
   Few of these men were married, and the ones who were seem not to have been at all attached to their wives — though obviously there’s a selection bias there, since happily married men probably didn’t hang with the Goncourts, and even if they did, it probably would have been bad taste to talk about sexual happiness in that wretched crew. A fair proportion of the 19th century French authors were celibate or tried to be, and most of the others seem to have had unhappy or squalid love lives (though again, selection bias).
   It was not the “Vive La Difference” France I was taught about as an undergraduate!
4. jamessal says

   May 14, 2010 at 8:26 am

   Transparent and quivering, like the elytra of an insect, the name of Lilienthal from my childhood years had a marvelous sound to me… That name, flying as if stretched on light bamboo laths, was linked in my memory with the beginning of aviation. The fluttering, gliding Otto Lilienthal was killed. Flying machines no longer resembled birds. Light wings with yellow shining through were exchanged for flippers. You could believe that they beat against the ground on takeoff. At any rate, on takeoff the dust springs up. The flying machine now resembles a heavy fish. How quickly aviation has become industry.

   Well, I wasn’t gonna post it, because I think the connection is tenuous, maybe even solipsistic, but there are only three comments, and the above passage reminded of this one, highlighted by Mark Ford in a review of Javier Marias’s latest novel, Your Face Tomorrow, Volume Three: Poison, Shadow and Farewell (with some context from Ford):

   Deza [the main character] is made to watch a DVD that Tupra [a mob boss] believes demonstrates why he can go around beating up people and killing them — or perhaps he is just taking advantage of an opportunity to induct his recruit into the brute facts of life in order to render him fitter for purpose. The DVD consists mainly of documentary footage of people being beaten up and killed. Deza watches the Mafia chief with whom he dined, and with whose wife he danced that very night, using a penknife to gouge out the eyes of a man tied to a chair, “the way someone uses a dessert knife to cut out the stone from a peach half, or the seeds from a watermelon.” He watches a woman astride a man, smashing his head with a hammer. Tupra explains in Deza’s ear the strategic value of each incident: among the silent witnesses of the torture by repeated hanging of a hooded prisoner is a high-ranking American politician; one of the executioners of three men and a woman by machine gun on a beach in the Golfo de Taranto is in the current Italian government; in the crowd watching a woman being raped by a horse in Coahuila is a prominent, potentially important Mexican businessman.
   “Resist the desire not to watch,” urges Tupra, and Deza slowly feels the poison entering his system:

   And when I use that word “poison,” I’m not doing so lightly or purely metaphorically, but because something entered my consciousness that had not been there before and provoked in me an immediate feeling of creeping sickness, of something alien to my body and to my sight and to my mind, like an inoculation, and that last term is spot on etymologically, for it contains at its root the Latin “oculus,” from which it comes, and it was through my eyes that this new and unexpected illness entered, through my eyes which were absorbing images and registering them and retaining them, and which could no longer erase them as one might erase a bloodstain on the floor, still less not have seen them.

   I guess it’s just the way both authors stop to ponder a word in the midst of powerfully rhythmic prose.
   Okay, I wanted an excuse to post the Marias passage.
5. language hat says

   May 14, 2010 at 1:55 pm

   Oddly, one of the plot points in Envy is that the young protégé of aging Andrei rescued him from having his head smashed with a hammer. It’s a funny old world.
6. languagehat says

   November 27, 2018 at 5:50 pm

   And now I’m reminded of St. Augustine’ friend Alypius:

   He had gone on to Rome before me to study law – which was the worldly way which his parents were forever urging him to pursue – and there he was carried away again with an incredible passion for the gladiatorial shows. For, although he had been utterly opposed to such spectacles and detested them, one day he met by chance a company of his acquaintances and fellow students returning from dinner; and, with a friendly violence, they drew him, resisting and objecting vehemently, into the amphitheater, on a day of those cruel and murderous shows. He protested to them: ‘Though you drag my body to that place and set me down there, you cannot force me to give my mind or lend my eyes to these shows. Thus I will be absent while present, and so overcome both you and them.’

   When they heard this, they dragged him on in, probably interested to see whether he could do as he said. When they got into the arena, and had taken what seats they could get, the whole place became a tumult of inhuman frenzy. But Alypius kept his eyes closed and forbade his mind to roam abroad after such wickedness. Would that he had shut his ears also! For when one of the combatants fell in the fight, a mighty cry from the whole audience stirred him so strongly that, overcome by curiosity and still prepared (as he thought) to despise and rise superior to it no matter what it was, he opened his eyes and was struck with a deeper wound in his soul than the victim whom he desired to see had been in his body.

   Thus he fell more miserably than the one whose fall had raised that mighty clamor which had entered through his ears and unlocked his eyes to make way for the wounding and beating down of his soul, which was more audacious than truly valiant – also it was weaker because it presumed on its own strength when it ought to have depended on Thee. For, as soon as he saw the blood, he drank in with it a savage temper, and he did not turn away, but fixed his eyes on the bloody pastime, unwittingly drinking in the madness – delighted with the wicked contest and drunk with blood lust. He was now no longer the same man who came in, but was one of the mob he came into, a true companion of those who had brought him thither.

   Why need I say more? He looked, he shouted, he was excited, and he took away with him the madness that would stimulate him to come again: not only with those who first enticed him, but even without them; indeed, dragging in others besides. And yet from all this, with a most powerful and most merciful hand, Thou didst pluck him and taught him not to rest his confidence in himself but in Thee – but not till long after.