[lit-ideas] Re: The Worst Verse Ever Written
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2011 11:41:30 EDT
ps on McEvoy's second point:
In a message dated 6/7/2011 12:17:03 P.M. , Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx writes:
"Too subtle. "He reasoned" does not necessarily mean "He reasoned well".
The example of a "sentence" is different as a well-formed formula will
necessarily be well-formed."
---
Too subtle but yet interesting. What Grice (and indeed Philippa Foot, in
"The grammar of good" -- posthumous) are considering is more ontological or
metaphysical:
an x
a good x.
Indeed, the 'sentence' example trades on 'well-formed formula'. But
consider some ungrammatical stuff by e e cummings. Some of the lines of his
verse
are not 'grammatical' sentences -- and this may have philosophical import
-- cfr. Barfield Owen, on poet's meaning).
----
But back to
an x -- a mere x
a GOOD x.
Grice and Foot are arguing that 'good' has an unpredictable grammar. It
pervades or imbues our most basic grammatical structures, like
S is P (subject predicate)
a good S is a good P.
------
It may be claimed that
"All good children go to heaven"
is a refutation in that
"All children go to to heaven" is falsified (by who?).
Foot's example is that of a 'tree'. Surely we wouldn't call a genetic
mutation of a birch a 'birch'. A birch is a good birch. Her examples are mainly
from botany. A good 'root' of a good birch is a root that feeds the tree. A
rotten root or a non-operating root is not a root, at all.
Mutatis mutandis,
'poem'.
------
Since 'good' is SUCH a complication, I suggested in my previous to
elaborate on expansions (via implicature) of 'good':
"This is a beautiful book -- the Bible."
----
"I derive a lot of pleasure from reading, oddly, Masoch's* memoirs."
----
And so on.
Speranza
* Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch (27 January 1836 – 9 March 1895) was an
Austrian writer and journalist, who gained renown for his romantic stories
of Galician life."
The term masochism is derived from his name.
During his lifetime, Sacher-Masoch was well-known as a man of letters, a
utopian thinker who espoused socialist and humanist ideals in his fiction and
non-fiction.
Most of his works remain untranslated into English despite Geary's
attempts.
The novel Venus in Furs is his only book commonly available in English
("And it's now in paperback," Geary writes in his blog).
Von Sacher-Masoch was born in the city then known as Lemberg, the capital
of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, at the time a province of the
Austrian Empire (now Lviv, Ukraine), into the Roman Catholic family of an
Austrian police director of Spanish descent and Charlotte von Masoch, a
Ukrainian
noblewoman.[2] He began learning German at age 12.
He studied law, history and mathematics at Graz University, and after
graduating moved back to Lemberg where he became a professor.
His early, non-fictional publications dealt mostly with Austrian history.
("But I changed some of the names, so that 'history' is ironic").
At the same time, Masoch turned to the folklore and culture of his
homeland, Galicia. Soon he abandoned lecturing and became a free man of
letters.
Within a decade his short stories and novels prevailed over his historical
non-fiction works, though historical themes continued to imbue his fiction.
Panslavist ideas were prevalent in Masoch's literary work, and he found a
particular interest in depicting picturesque types among the various
ethnicities that inhabited Galicia.
From the 1860s to the 1880s he published a number of volumes of Jewish
Short Stories, Polish Short Stories, Galician Short Stories, German Court
Stories and Russian Court Stories. ("I was going to write some Japanese short
stories, but lacked the background.")
His works were published in translation in Ukrainian, Polish, Russian and
French -- and, oddly, in Japanese.
In Ukraine his works were widely read and held in high esteem.
In 1869 Sacher-Masoch conceived a grandiose series of short stories under
the collective title Legacy of Cain that would represent the author's
aesthetic Weltanschauung.
The cycle opened with the manifesto The Wanderer that brought out
misogynist themes that became peculiar to Masoch's writings.
(Judith Butler said, "A pain.")
Of the six planned volumes, only the first two were ever completed.
By the middle of the 1880s, Masoch abandoned the Legacy of Cain ("Rather,"
he later wrote, "the Legacy of Cain abandoned me.")
Nevertheless, the published volumes of the series included Masoch's
best-known stories, and of them, Venus in Furs (1869) is the most famous today.
It was set to music and turned into an Italian opera (Milano, 1973).
The short novel expressed Sacher-Masoch's fantasies and fetishes
(especially for dominant women wearing fur).
He did his best to live out his fantasies with his mistresses and wives --
not necessarily in that order.
Sacher-Masoch edited the Leipzig-based monthly literary magazine Auf der
Höhe. Internationale Review (At the Pinnacle. International Review), which
was published from October, 1881 to September, 1885. This was a progressive
magazine aimed at tolerance and integration for Jews in Saxony, as well as
for the emancipation of women with articles on women's education and
suffrage.
In his later years, he worked against local antisemitism through an
association for adult education called the Oberhessischer Verein für
Volksbildung
founded in 1893 with his second wife, Hulda Meister.
On 8 December 1869, Sacher-Masoch and his mistress Baroness Fanny Pistor
signed a contract
making him her slave for a period of six months,
with the stipulation that the Baroness wear furs as often as possible,
especially when she was in a cruel mood.
Sacher-Masoch took the alias of "Gregor," a stereotypical male servant's
name, and assumed a disguise as the servant of the Baroness.
The two traveled by train to Italy.
As in Venus in Furs, he traveled in the third-class compartment, while she
had a seat in first-class, arriving in Venice (Florence, in the novel),
where they were not known, and would not arouse suspicion.
Sacher-Masoch pressured his first wife, Aurora von Rümelin, whom he married
in 1873, to live out the experience of the book, against her preferences.
Sacher-Masoch found his family life to be unexciting, and eventually got a
divorce and married his assistant.
In 1875 Masoch wrote The Ideals of Our Time, an attempt to give a portrait
of German society during its Gründerzeit period.
In his late fifties, his mental health began to deteriorate, and he spent
the last years of his life under psychiatric care.
According to official reports, he died in Lindheim, Germany in 1895.
It is also claimed, however, that he died in an asylum in Mannheim in 1905.
(Obviously, one of these two claims has to be ungrounded, since he
couldn't have had two deaths -- and in different years and places.)
Sacher-Masoch is the great-great-uncle to the British singer and actress
Marianne Faithfull on her mother's side, the Viennese Baroness Eva Erisso.
The term masochism was invented in 1886 by the Austrian psychiatrist
Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) in his book Psychopathia
Sexualis:
"I feel justified in calling this sexual anomaly "Masochism," because the
author Sacher-Masoch frequently made this perversion, which up to his time
was quite unknown to the scientific world as such, the substratum of his
writings. I followed thereby the scientific formation of the term "Daltonism",
from Dalton, the discoverer of colour-blindness."
(Ebbing also coined 'heterosexual').
"During recent years facts have been advanced which prove that
Sacher-Masoch was not only the poet of Masochism, but that he himself was
afflicted
with the anomaly."
"Although these proofs were communicated to me without restriction, I
refrain from giving them to the public. I refute the accusation that 'I have
coupled the name of a revered author with a perversion of the sexual
instinct,' which has been made against me by some admirers of the author and
by some
critics of my book."
"As a man Sacher-Masoch cannot lose anything in the estimation of his
cultured fellow-beings simply because he was afflicted with an anomaly of his
sexual feelings."
"As an author he suffered severe injury so far as the influence and
intrinsic merit of his work is concerned, for so long and whenever he
eliminated
his perversion from his literary efforts he was a gifted writer, and as such
would have achieved real greatness had he been actuated by normally sexual
feelings."
"In this respect he is a remarkable example of the powerful influence
exercised by the vita sexualis be it in the good or evil sense over the
formation and direction of man's mind."
Sacher-Masoch was not pleased with Kraft-Ebbing's assertions, but again,
'pleased' should be taken with a pinch of salt, since masochism is
paradoxical in that it equates, ultimately, 'pain' with 'pleasure' (hedone and
lupe
in Greek).
Nevertheless, details of Masoch's private life were obscure until Aurora vo
n Rümelin's memoirs, Meine Lebensbeichte (1906), were published in Berlin
under the pseudonym Wanda v. Dunajew.
The following year a French translation, Confession de Ma Vie (1907), by
"Wanda von Sacher-Masoch" was printed in Paris by Mercure de France.
An English translation of the French edition was published as The
Confessions of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch (1991) by RE/Search Publications.
References:
1858 A Galician Story 1846.
1865 Kaunitz.
1866 Don Juan of Kolomiya.
1867 The Last King of Hungary.
1870 The Divorced Woman.
1870 Legacy of Cain. Vol. 1: Love. (includes his most famous novella Venus
in Furs)
1872 Faux Ermine.
1873 Female Sultan.
1873 The Messalinas of Vienna.
1873-1874 Russian Court Stories: 4 Vols.
1873-1877 Viennese Court Stories: 2 Vols.
1875 The Ideals of Our Time.
1875 Galician Stories.
1877 The Man Without Prejustice.
1877 Legacy of Cain. Vol. 2: Property.
1878 The New Hiob.
1878 Jewish Stories.
1878 The Republic of Women's Enemies.
1879 Silhouettes.
1881 New Jewish Stories.
1883 The Godmother.
1886 Eternal Youth.
1886 Stories from Polish Ghetto.
1886 Little Mysteries of World History.
1887 Polish Stories.
1890 The Serpent in Paradise.
1891 The Lonesome.
1894 Love Stories.
1898 Entre nous.
1900 Catherina II.
1901 Afrikas Semiramis.
1907 Fierce Women.
See also
BDSM
Sadism and masochism in fiction
Story of O
Biale, David, "Masochism and Philosemitism: The Strange Case of Leopold Von
Sacher-Masoch," Journal of Contemporary History 17 (1982), 305-323.
Regarding personal names: Ritter is a title, translated as Knight, not a
first or middle name. There is no equivalent female form.
Hyams, Barbara (2000). "Causal Connections: The Case of Sacher-Masoch". In
Finke, M.C.; Niekirk, C.. One Hundred Years of Masochism. Rodopi. ISBN
9042006579.
Schlemowitz, Joel (1999). "About the novel Venus in Furs by Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch". New York: homepage.newschool.edu.
Weinberg, Thomas S.. Erwin J. Haeberle. ed. SACHER-MASOCH, LEOPOLD RITTER
VON. Garland Publishing.
_http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/GESUND/ARCHIV/SEN/CH22.HTM#b1-SACHERMASOCH,%20LEOPOLD%20RITTER%20VON_
(http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/GESUND/ARCHIV/SEN/CH22.HTM#b1-SACHERMASOCH,%20LEOPOLD%20RITTER%2
0VON) . Retrieved October 6, 2009.
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. "Psychopathia Sexualis". Internet Archive.
_http://ia350608.us.archive.org/1/items/psychopathiasexu00krafuoft/psychopathiasex
u00krafuoft_djvu.txt_
(http://ia350608.us.archive.org/1/items/psychopathiasexu00krafuoft/psychopathiasexu00krafuoft_djvu.txt)
. Retrieved October 6,
2009.
The complete text of Venus in Furs from Project Gutenberg
The Bookbinder of Hort, part of an anthology, Stories by Foreign Authors
The Letawitza
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch article from Human Sexuality: An Encyclopedia
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