Shuffle Synchronicities: Volume 1 - #294

"Peer Gynt-Suite Nr. 1, Op. 46: III. Anitra's Dance" by Edvard Grieg - 11/07/21

Nov 08, 2021

"Peer Gynt-Suite Nr. 1, Op. 46: III. Anitra's Dance" by Edvard Grieg

Apologies for the delayed posting tonight, I had my Moderna booster shot last night and have been quite tired and achy and feverish throughout the day today.

Also, another apology, to paraphrase Pascal and Twain: “If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter.”

Ironically or not, the post is about the quality of this project and my writing and my character, LOL.

But first a preamble about Grieg’s song and the play it comes from.

~“Peer Gynt” is the music to Henrik Ibsen's play of the same name, written by the Norwegian composer in 1875. It premiered along with the play in February of 1876 in Christiania (now Oslo), Norway.
Ibsen’s play was experimental for its time.
It’s been said that he wrote it in deliberate disregard of the limitations that the conventional stagecraft of the 19th century imposed on drama. Its scenes move uninhibitedly in time and space and between consciousness and the unconscious, blending folkloric fantasy and unsentimental realism.
Exploring a new kind of dramatic action that was beyond the capacities of the theatre of the day, creating a sequence of images in language and visual composition that became technically possible only in film.
It was also widely criticized then.
Hans Christian Andersen, Georg Brandes, and Clemens Petersen all joined the widespread hostility, Petersen writing that the play was not poetry.
Enraged by Petersen's criticisms in particular, Ibsen defended his work by arguing that it "is poetry; and if it isn't, it will become such. The conception of poetry in our country, in Norway, shall shape itself according to this book."
The portrayal of the family is known to be based on Henrik Ibsen's own…In a letter to Peter Hansen, Ibsen confirmed that the character Åse, Peer Gynt's mother, was based on his own mother. The character Jon Gynt is considered to be based on Ibsen's father, who was a rich merchant before he went bankrupt. Even the name of the Gynt family's ancestor is borrowed from the Ibsen's family's earliest known ancestor. There are striking similarities to Ibsen's own life; Ibsen himself spent 27 years living abroad and was never able to face his hometown again.
Thus, the character Peer Gynt could be interpreted as being a representation of Henrik Ibsen himself.~

So what was the play about?

~Peer Gynt is the son of the once highly regarded Jon Gynt. Jon Gynt spent all his money on feasting and living lavishly, and had to leave his farm to become a wandering salesman, leaving his wife and son behind in debt.
Åse, the mother, wished to raise her son to restore the lost fortune of his father.
But Peer is soon to be considered useless.
He is a poet and a braggart.
He spoils his reputation with his vivid imagination.
But falls in love with Solveig.
She is set to be married and when he hears the bride has locked herself in and doesn’t want to be married, he seizes the opportunity, runs away with her, and spends the night with her in the mountains.
Peer is banished for this.
And has an intoxicated dream in the mountains where he interacts with folkloric trolls.
The troll king rhetorically asks Peer: "What is the difference between troll and man?"
The answer given by the Old Man of the Mountain is: "Out there, where sky shines, humans say: 'To thyself be true.'
In here, trolls say: 'Be true to yourself and to hell with the world.'"
From then on, Peer uses this as his motto, always proclaiming that he is himself.
He then meets the Bøyg — a creature who has no real description.
Asked the question "Who are you?" the Bøyg answers, "Myself".
In time, Peer also takes the Bøyg's important saying as a motto: "Go around".
The rest of his life, Peer "beats around the bush" instead of facing himself or the truth.
After a number of adventures, Peer ends up in North Africa.
He wanders through the desert of Egypt, passing the Sphinx.
As he addresses the Sphinx, believing it to be the Bøyg, he encounters the keeper of the local madhouse, himself insane, who regards Peer as the bringer of supreme wisdom.
Peer comes to the madhouse and understands that all of the patients live in their own worlds, being themselves to such a degree that no one cares for anyone else.
In his youth, Peer had dreamt of becoming an emperor.
In this place, he is finally hailed as one — the emperor of the "self".
Peer despairs and calls for the "Keeper of all fools", i.e., God.
He returns to Norway in his old age, where he offers for sale everything from his earlier life.
The auction takes place at the very farm where the wedding once was held.
Peer stumbles along and is confronted with all that he did not do, his unsung songs, his unmade works, his unwept tears, and his questions that were never asked.
Peer escapes and is confronted with the Button-molder, who maintains that Peer's soul must be melted down with other faulty goods unless he can explain when and where in life he has been "himself".
Peer protests.
He has been only that, and nothing else.
Then he meets the troll king again, who states that Peer has been a troll, not a man, most of his life.
Peer looks for a priest to whom to confess his sins, and a character named "The Lean One" (who is the Devil) turns up.
The Lean One believes Peer cannot be counted a real sinner who can be sent to Hell; he has committed no grave sin.
Peer despairs in the end, understanding that his life is forfeit; he is nothing.
But at the same moment, Solveig starts to sing.
The Bøyg in Peer tells him "go around".
But Peer breaks through to Solveig, asking her to forgive his sins.
She answers: "You have not sinned at all, my dearest boy."
Peer does not understand—he believes himself lost.
Then he asks her: "Where has Peer Gynt been since we last met? Where was I as the one I should have been, whole and true, with the mark of God on my brow?"
She answers: "In my faith, in my hope, in my love."
Peer screams, calls his mother, and hides himself in her lap.
Solveig sings her lullaby for him, and we might presume he dies in this last scene of the play, although there are neither stage directions nor dialogue to indicate that he actually does.
Behind the corner, the Button-molder, who is sent by God, still waits, with the words: "Peer, we shall meet at the last crossroads, and then we shall see if... I'll say no more."~

So now that we know what it’s about, what does it mean?

~The traditional meaning is offered by critic, Klaus van den Berg, who says, “The simplest conclusion one may draw from Peer Gynt, is expressed in the eloquent prose of the author: ‘If you lie; are you real?’”
And a review of a recent adaptation by Will Eno similarly called it: “Ibsen’s story of a Norwegian narcissist who goes through life irrespective of how his callous behavior affects others…”
However, the literary critic Harold Bloom in his book The Western Canon challenged the conventional reading of Peer Gynt, stating:
“Peer Gynt…merely seems initially to be an unlikely candidate for…eminence: What is he, we say, except a kind of Norwegian roaring boy? – marvelously attractive to women, a kind of bogus poet, a narcissist, absurd self-idolator, a liar, seducer, bombastic self-deceiver. But this is paltry moralizing…Peer the scamp bears the blessing: More life.”~

So now that we know a little bit about what it means, does it have any memoiristic synchronicity?

Well, one of the things I’ve been struggling with recently is that I have been fearing that I myself have been somewhat of ‘a kind of bogus poet, a narcissist, absurd self-idolator, a liar, seducer, bombastic self-deceiver.’

It came up strongly last night when I read this The New Yorker article “The Most Ambitious Diary in History” in which profiler Benjamin Anastas writes of Claude Fredericks, a Bennington classics professor, who knew Anaïs Nin and James Merrill, and taught Donna Tartt, who wrote the novel The Secret History inspired by him, which an Amazon reviewer compared to my long sentence book about my dad. He kept a journal for eight decades, and persuaded many in his orbit that he was writing a titanic masterpiece. But asks the question, did he?

Anastas starts the profile by saying that to him Fredericks wrote the most prophetic literary criticism he’s read in recent years, a twenty-four-page chapbook based on a lecture titled “How to Read a Journal”.

~”In it, Fredericks extolls the journal as a special form.

Because its author can reflect solely on what’s already happened, the narrative is perpetually in medias res—a “peculiar quality” in a literary work.

Moreover, because the author doesn’t know while writing how his dilemmas will be resolved, the resulting narrative captures better than a novel “how complex experience actually is.”

Fredericks goes on, “What I’d like to propose is that . . . we now are no longer content with the conventions of fiction, that the whole idea of character and plot . . . no longer seems to be true.”

Three decades before the rise of autofiction—novels that appear to hew to an author’s lived experience, largely dispensing with the artifices of fiction—Fredericks…call[ed] for something similar.

Fredericks…in fact, proposes dropping the illusions of fiction altogether.

He makes a case for immersing readers in a subjective record of an individual’s experience, in “real time,” complete with all the errors, vagueness, lies, and mystifications that we engage in when we try to justify ourselves to ourselves.

A journal is a “living thing,” he says; a novel is a “taxidermist’s replica.”

Fredericks, as he points out…was uniquely qualified to explore the formal virtues of the journal.

Beginning at the age of eight, in 1932, and lasting until a few weeks before his death, at eighty-nine, Fredericks was producing what he liked to call “one of the longest books about a single hero ever written.”

All told, his journal stretches past sixty-five thousand pages.

The Getty Research Institute acquired Fredericks’s papers for an undisclosed sum.”~

As you can see, Fredericks’ theory and life’s work share a lot in common with my Shuffle Synchronicities project, at least its non-music and serialized memoir half.

How I don’t know how my life’s story will unfold even as I write about it publically every day.

The similarities don’t end with the form, but with Fredericks’ relative lack of success as well.

As The New Yorker profiler writes:

~”Fredericks might seem an unlikely candidate to have his archive preserved at an institution as prominent as the Getty, which is best known for collecting the papers of such avant-garde artists as Man Ray and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Fredericks had published almost none of his writing when the Getty made its acquisition: six poems, in 1944; one play, in a “New American Plays” anthology from 1965; two pieces in the Times Book Review; a small excerpt of his notebooks in Parenthèse, a literary journal, in 1979.

“Is there not achievement in remaining so completely unpublished?” he wrote, with a touch of self-loathing, as he was nearing forty.”~

Anastas adds toward the end of the introduction:

~“At once more addictively engrossing and fatally tedious than anything else I have read, it is the strange chronicle of a ‘great’ man whose genius is recognized almost exclusively by the chronicler himself.

It is Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” but set in Vermont, with Fredericks playing the roles both of Charles Kinbote, the fawning critic on the edge of mania, and of John Shade, the eminent but mediocre poet.”~

I have feared that my own work is both ‘addictively engrossing and fatally tedious’ and that my own character is sometimes on ‘the edge of mania’ and depicted with ‘mediocre’ craft.

Particularly this morning after waking up to find that someone whose opinion I value unsubscribed to the Substack and unfollowed me on Instagram after yesterday’s post on my Dad’s birthday.

Even this post itself already feels hopelessly solipsistic, and reminds me of what Anastas writes about Fredericks:

~“The journal sometimes overwhelms Fredericks with its outlandish scale: he expresses frustration with the responsibility of writing future entries, and he can seem demoralized by sitting down every day to confront the same life. At one point in 1982, Fredericks writes, ‘I’ve lost the thread again. This page, these pages, these volumes are a labyrinth I cannot find my way out of. I have wasted a life in writing them. They are without value. And yet they’ve helped keep me sane.’”~

I have often wondered recently if I should end the project after a year or should I continue it to a similar epic scope.

While it is an albatross sometimes, especially on the day after a Moderna booster, it also, as Fredericks says, does seem to keep me sane.

Though the process of writing it to keep me sane may seem to irritate others as Anastas relates that Fredericks’ project did to him and many others in his life.

And while Anastas writes of the literary merit of the project:

~“Langdon Hammer, a biographer and an English professor at Yale, told me, “I think Claude very honorably had an idea about the journal…He wanted to privilege exactly what we edit out and compress and shape as writers—the self’s own repetitiveness and falsifications…Claude wanted to honor the original, imperfect form…The text at its moment of creation.’”~

Anastas also points out that the very nature of the true journal, the diary, the memoir, is perhaps by definition offputting to many.

~“Fredericks…wasn’t concerned that there might be ugliness in his diary. According to his theory of the journal as a “total” work of literature, a diaristic account should be proudly unsanitized, including the prejudices and delusions that may reveal us to be monsters in our hearts. Indeed, when Fredericks gave his chapbook lecture, he told the audience that such an exposure is inevitable, ‘if we are honest.’”~

From there, the story gets a lot more complicated as Fredericks resigned from Bennington in 1993 after a male student accused him of sexual harassment.

Another major difference between my work and Fredericks is that he did not spare the names of the people who entered his life and then his memoir, while I generally do.

This was particularly challenging at the time in history because of his homosexuality. Naming the men in his liaisons not only put him at all sorts of risk but also them.

Anastas goes on to perhaps moralize a bit about Fredericks’ literary tactics as if they are related to his alleged sexual misconduct.

~“The entries themselves were full of private details: conversations with colleagues and students, phone calls with his mother, personal notes that he sent to friends and lovers, accounts of sexual encounters that he had with live-in partners and with relative strangers.

He doesn’t acknowledge a diarist’s responsibility to the people he is writing about; in the journal, he almost always uses actual names. Nor does he address the ethics of writing about intimate experiences with other people and making it your “work”—and your claim on literary immortality.”~

And yet The New Yorker profiler Anastas himself’s two most notable works appear to be a novel that was a fictional diary, An Underachiever's Diary followed by a memoir of his own, Too Good To Be True, that tells the story of his stalled career as a writer after that novel, the end of his marriage, and his attempts to rebuild his life again.

~Anastas published the book with Amazon's fledgling publishing imprint in New York City and numerous bookstores refused to stock it. Giles Harvey, writing in The New Yorker, grouped Too Good to Be True in a category he calls the "failure memoir" and cites F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up essays as an influence.~

Which feels quite similar to my own ‘failure writing’ in the long sentence book and here and of course Fredericks’.

One thing I don’t often do still, which Anastas seems to still do, is claim that failure writing or any writing or music or art is ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

Anastas says of Fredericks’ journal:

All told, I’ve read more than five thousand pages closely, and a few thousand more have passed under my eyes.
This experience generated a profound dissonance.
For all the effort that Fredericks put into completing his journal project—and promoting it to others—an essential element is missing: he was not a good writer…
His prose rarely displays the ingrained sense of control that true writers have even when jotting off a postcard. (I am not alone in feeling this way. In 1943, Fredericks laments, “[John] Berryman said my poetry had no technique behind it.”)…

And yet some of Anastas criticism of Fredericks’ work seem to show just how forward-thinking Fredericks was.