Sorry this has come so late. In February and March, I read Brave New World, a modern classic; Super-Infinite, a newly published biography of an intriguing literary figure; The Iliad by Homer; Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the reading experience was strangely funny, rather than romantic as I expected.
Brave New World
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is one of the most well-known dystopian sci-fi novels. Jonathan Bate in A Very Short Introduction: English Literature quotes Shelley that literature of the past is not just a collection of historical documents from the world of the author,
But contained within the idea of Literature in De Quincey’s special sense is a faith in the capacity of human beings not to be entirely bound by history, confined by time and circumstance.
Literature transcends time. Brave New World definitely transcends the time when it was written, which is the 1930s and it still comments on the world we live in here and now.
Before I read the novel, I knew only two things about it. First thing was that, Brave New World and 1984 are two prophetic works of literature that have become lenses that we now see our world through. We compare and contrast our world with theirs. Some say since the two books were published, the world went the way of 1984, and some say we came closer to Brave New World.
The second thing I knew was that the title Brave New World came from the Tempest by Shakespeare. Miranda, a young woman who grew up on a desert island with only her dad, saw human beings for the first time after the shipwreck, and exclaimed, “Oh brave new world, that has such people in it”. So I thought the novel might refer to the Tempest a lot. It wasn’t exactly that, but Shakespeare’s works definitely featured as a symbol in the story.
So those were the two reasons why I decided to read Brave New World. It’s a modern classic, and although it’s not on a topic I’m particularly passionate about, I need to know what it’s about. It’s also a classic with Shakespeare connections. At this point in my life, I feel like I want to know everything, everyone who has anything to do with Shakespeare.
The world-building of Brave New World is amazing. I tried my hand on world-building recently and I can’t fathom how much imagination and logical thinking it required to build a world like the one in the novel. You can tell this futuristic world clearly comes out of our current world, but it has gone far far away. In the beginning chapters, children are not born and raised by parents and within a family context anymore, they are produced along factory lines and raised centrally in institutions. Marriage does not exist anymore, quote the novel word for word, “everyone belongs to everyone else”. People are truly free, free from marital or family duty and obligations, free from illness and aging, free from frustration (like falling in love with a woman and not being able to sleep with her) and any negative emotions. Quote the novel, “everybody’s happy now.” Free from pain and toil. In the end, free from any meaning and purpose of life.
One of the main characters who live in the uncivilised part of the world reads and quotes Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s words haven’t changed, they are just as beautiful. But when the richness and depth of feeling from Shakespeare are contrasted against this weightless, easy and empty world, it just made me feel stronger that pain is worthwhile, and true love and happiness come with a cost.
This is a very rough review, I didn’t even tell you what the story is about, I don’t want to, so not to spoil your reading experience. But I highly recommend it.
Super-Infinite
It was newly published in 2022 and it was the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction last year. It’s called Super-Infinite, the Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell. It’s a biography of John Donne, who lived from fifteen seventy-two 1572 to sixteen thirty-one 1631, meaning he lived around the same time as Shakespeare. It’s difficult to introduce John Donne in a few words, he had an interesting life and played many roles throughout his lifetime. He was probably most famous for his love poems, but later on he became a celebrity preacher in St Paul’s Cathedral. In Norton Anthology, the collection under his name includes erotic sonnets as well as Holy Sonnets.
I can’t remember exactly the moment I first heard of John Donne. The second time I met him was very surprisingly in Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones and then got further acquainted in Mad about Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate. It’s interesting to see him coming back to fashion. I wonder how many people are going to start reading John Donne because of this biography.
There are some beautiful sentences and images put into words in the book that are worthy of John Donne. A lot of them are breathtakingly beautiful and shockingly bold, almost fierce. For example,
He believed our minds could be forged into citadels against the world’s chaos: he wrote in a verse letter, ‘be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.’ Tap a human, he believed, and they ring with the sound of infinity.
Or
To read him is to know that we cannot ever expect to shake off our family: only to pick up the skull, the tooth, and walk on.
If John Donne knew about this biography, I think he would have been pleased.
Among all the stories, a few things stood out to me: The biography talks about something called “a commonplace book”, a method Donne used to collect ideas from different authors and books under specific headings, which I’m very tempted to try. It talks about how Samuel Johnson thought pretty negatively about Donne and his works. Just shows how unconventional Donne was. There is also a single paragraph in the book, that is one and a half pages long, with a pair of brackets bracketing the entire section, on ‘did Donne know Shakespeare’. Donne’s attitudes towards disease and death are particularly interesting, having lived through many spells of illness and watching death hover at his door. His view on human beings is, I think, highly biblical,
Humanity, as he saw it, was rotten with corruption and weakness and failure – and even so it was the great light of the universe.
I think he’s talking about the fall and sin, but also that men and women were created in the image of God. People are sinful but glorious at the same time, and they
… worth your attention, your awe, your love.
Randell mentioned Donne loved the Gospel of John and the Psalms. I wonder how much of Donne’s fantastical imagination of death was affected by his Christian belief of the New Creation and his reading and interpretation of the Book of Revelation. I guess I can try to find out by reading Donne’s writings first-hand.
The Iliad
One of my 2023 reading goals is to get into ancient Greek and Roman literature. And I started with the Iliad.
Just to show how much I enjoyed the Iliad, I wrote five blog posts on various sections and characters in total. I’ve never produced so much content from a single book before.
For all of you who follow my blog for English classics and Shakespeare stuff, apologies for going off course. But please bear with me. I am reading ancient Greek and Roman literature for a specific purpose and that is to help me better appreciate English classics and especially Shakespeare, which references the Greek and Roman stuff so much. Please come along, we WILL talk about English classics again.
For those who recently joined us for the Iliad, nice meeting you! I will carry on reading Oresteia and Metamorphoses etc etc.
If you’ve been following my Iliad journey you are probably aware that I read E. V. Riew’s translation but every now and then I dipped into Alexander Pope’s verse translation from the early 18th century.
By the end of Pope’s translation, I came across his concluding note unexpectedly. The first thing that surprised me and made me laugh was the style of writing for the note section. The whole Iliad was beautifully translated into a very grand style, that was fit for an epic poem. Quote the last few lines of Pope’s Iliad.
All Troy then moves to Priam’s court again,
A solemn, silent, melancholy train:
Assembled there, from pious toil they rest,
And sadly shared the last sepulchral feast.
Such honours Ilion to her hero paid,
And peaceful slept the mighty Hector’s shade.
But when it came to the notes, they were written in the style of very informal everyday speech, especially after hundreds of pages of epic verses of grandeur.
We have now passed through the Iliad, and seen the anger of Achilles, and the terrible effects of it, at an end…
The contrast was so drastic I nearly fell off my chair metaphorically and I cried out aloud across the ages to Mr Pope, in my head, you CAN speak normally! You actually speak exactly the same way as we do! Why didn’t you do a nice and easy prose translation?! But obviously I didn’t really want that because we’d have lost this amazing verse translation. But you get my point. That was a delightful moment.
The second thing I loved was that it seemed Pope felt the incompleteness of the story too and therefore added extra notes to give the readers the ending of the war and of a few main characters. Which answers a lot of my questions! He recommended Virgil for the wooden horse episode. Like Helen was welcomed back by Menelaus favourably, a question and a wish I had about Helen. And dandy Paris and his arrow, actually killed Achilles, just like he did so many other Greek leaders in the Iliad, which I was going to write about in Helen’s post but I ran out of time. Shame about Ajax who killed himself after surviving all these bloody battles. And I’m mega sorry for Priam. The ending of Priam is featured in Hamlet. My purpose of reading ancient Greek and Roman literature is for their own sake but like I said, it’s also to help me understand Shakespeare better and it’s all coming together here. I’m very excited!
In addition to Pope’s note, I just received the Library of Greek Mythology, which is a collection of stories, and I read the sections about the Trojan war which include a lot of this information. It read like a no-nonsense account of the Greek myths, almost like a Wikipedia page!
Shakespeare’s Sonnets
I started reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets this month more seriously. I’m using the Folger edition. I love the layout, the font size and the empty space for my scribbles. I have listened to Sonnets read out loud from the beginning to the end a few times like listening to songs. By more seriously this time round, I mean reading with a pen in hand, looking up words in the dictionary, re-reading lines again and again, and writing down questions and comments that come to my mind.
My biggest impression so far is that these are not the kind of love poems I expect them to be! The first four sonnets for example, are Shakespeare’s advice to a beautiful young man to get married and have children, which was entirely unexpected. And his argument is largely, you’ll grow old and die, and if you don’t have children, you’re depriving the world of more beautiful people like yourself, and that’s not good.
I have so many questions! Who was this young man? How beautiful WAS he? What was his relationship with Shakespeare for him to give his advice on this matter? In this way? Were they all written for the same young man? I presume so, otherwise how many beautiful young men did Shakespeare know and have to persuade? And I wonder if the young man was persuaded in the end!
Happy reading!
A Day of Small Things 