The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana IV -- chapter 3: FLOWERS and MORE FOG

from Benali's edition of Dante's Commedia

So often, chapter titles lend a childish, or, well, a less than sophisticated, sense to a book, not that there's anything wrong with that.  Many of my favorite books, YA or children's, rank right up there with my all-time favorites.  Of "grown-up" books, however, I can only think of a few that manage to use chapter titles especially well: Tortilla Flat, Ender's Game, and, of course, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.  In my impatience and eagerness to get to the meat of the next chapter, I often forget to look at the chapter number or, if it's there, the title.  We are now on chapter 3 of Mysterious Flame and only now have I finally looked up at the chapter title.  I flipped back over the first two, and they're great!

1. What is your impression of Yambo's opinion of himself, especially now that he's seen evidence of his past as a businessman and with (though perhaps he's only invented it, as Gratarolo suggests) Sibilla?
2. (I will generally leave issues of Italian grammar aside, like, for instance, the differences between tu and lei and their correlates in French, unless you'd like me to load up each post with bits of Italian minutiae; otherwise, if you have a question about anything like this, please ask.)
3. This chapter makes me really wish I could afford ancient treasure tomes like these!  I am guilty of buying books just because they're pretty, because they feel nice.  I love a library for its smell.  Would I say no to a Nook were it offered me?  Of course not!  But pages and ink and sweat and love packed between stretched, gilt leather covers....  But that's just me.  Is it such a business of passion for Yambo?
4. "Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."  As Yambo has forgotten his past and lost the experiences of love with it, from where will new love build or grow or spring [insert your poetry here]?  In a child, love begins as dependence and trust, and therefore is extended--and only ever around the girth of its own selfishness--to parents, guardians, caregivers.
5. "Are there drugs for remembering?" // "Maybe Sibilla..."  What is the emotion he's experiencing toward this girl?
6. So here's the line that provides the chapter's title: "And someone will pluck your flower, mouth of the wellspring, someone who won't even know, a fisher of spongers with take this rare pearl."  The context, of course, provides its own interpretation of jealousy and lust, but there's another use of plucking flowers, or deflowering, which also applies to the source of Yambo's fear--and mixed sense of conquest--for his maybe-relationship with Sibilla.  Also, often, a wellspring is a ready source of ample fog when conditions are right.
7. Issue of translation and plurals: Umberto Eco carefully supervises the translation of each of his works.  He most certainly was aware of the translator's pluralization of palazzo to palazzos, though the "correct" carry-over pluralization would be palazzi.
8. At the time the Lira went out for the Euro, 1000 lira was worth about 65 cents (very approximately) --just to give you an idea.
9. Another brilliant analogy: Yambo compares his loss of past to the loss of the third dimension, leaving everything flat--without depth.
10. Eco ascribes certain fog quotations to certain characters as their favorites.  Is this meant to indicate character traits or the like, or was the determination arbitrary?
11. Ah, that last sentence!

Finally, what do you think of the nickname, Yambo?  I don't have an Italian copy of Mysterious Flame, so I don't know if the original uses the Y or the more appropriate Ia (Italian generally skips y/upsilon), like J, K, X, and W (except for carryovers from English or French or whatever else), which are phonetically useless.  It doesn't make much sense to examine it in English, which shows itself mildly as "I am," and all it's Old Testament weight, though I can't totally disregard it.  As it is, "Io," is Italian's first-person singular pronoun.  Closer to its spelling, however, is the Italian of the poetry term, "iamb," "giambo" in Italian ("iambo," "iambe," and "jambo" in others of the Romance languages), which, in English, is a trochee, but in Italian, as "giambo" is actually three syllables, contains in its first two an iamb.  I don't know.  Names are usually important, but I can't find anything more than this.  Thoughts?

Through the Looking Glass VI -- chapter 4: BLACK BIRD

The first half of Chapter 4 (to the completion of Dee's recitation) manages a balance of true nonsense for nonsense's sake ("The Walrus and the Carpenter," for example, though I think there's yet some revelatory nuggets here anyway) and what I believe to be truly symbolic, either as intended by Carroll or as subconscious manifestation.

What are your thoughts regarding:

• the music from the tree, which starts when Alice and the Tweedles begin their brief dance and ends abruptly upon their finishing;
• Alice's narration of her story to her sister;
• "The Walrus and the Carpenter":

– There is evidence that Carroll intended no symbolism whatsoeverby this poem, and despite uncounted readers' attempts, and that it’s indeed complete nonsense, for Carroll left the choice of the second character to Tenniel, based upon the latter's preference in drawing, betwixt a carpenter, a butterfly, and a baronet.

– (from Roger Green, via Martin Gardner) The operetta Alice, by Savile Clarke extends the ending of the poem with an additional stanza, thus:

        The Carpenter he ceased to sob;

                The Walrus ceased to weep;

        They’d finished all the oysters;

                And they laid them down to sleep—

        And of their craft and cruelty

                The punishment to reap.

        —at which point the ghosts of two oysters return and dance upon the chests of the gluttons.  According to Gardner “Carroll felt, and apparently audiences agreed with him, that this provided a more effective ending for the episode and also somewhat mollified oysters sympathizers among the spectators.”

The second half of the chapter is significantly darker, even if you are an oyster sympathizer.

1. Which is Alice more justified to "like": the Walrus, who felt sorry for the oysters; or the Carpenter, who ate fewer of them?
2. The Red King is Carroll.  Defend.
3. Dee and Dum are mirror opposites (enantiomorphs; examine Tenniel's illustration of Alice preparing the brothers for combat.  Except for the accoutrement, they are indeed mirror images of each other).  If one stood before a mirror, he would not see himself (so to speak), but his brother.  As we're dealing with reflections, what do you think of someone battling with his/her own reflection?
4. This chapter opens with a famous nursery rhyme, which turns out in the end of the chapter to be prophetic--i.e. the crow actually comes.  Does Carroll, perhaps passively, hope that his writing might be similarly prophetic?  Does he have any such hope?
5. Interesting bit of double symbolism with the crow: first, consider the quotation from Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat, below; second, the fact that in 585 B.C. the war between King Alyattes of Lydia and King Cyaxares of Medes ended--or was interrupted--by a total eclipse of the sun.  Tangentially, is there a connection between Alice's taking refuge under a tree and the somehow-avoidance of dark and death?

From Tortilla Flat:

        Where is Danny?  Lonely as smoke on a clear cold night, he drifts through Monterey in the evening.  To the post-office he goes, to the station, to the pool rooms on Alvarado Street, to the wharf where the black water mourns among the piles.  What is it, Danny?  What makes you feel this way?  Danny didn’t know.  There was an ache in his heart like the farewell to a dear woman; there was a vague sorrow in him like the despair of autumn.  He walked past the restaurants he used to smell with interest, and no appetite was aroused in him.  He walked by Madam Zuca’s great establishment, and exchanged no obscene jests with the girls in the windows.  Back to the wharf he went.  He leaned over the rail and looked into the deep, deep water.  Do you know, Danny, how the wine of your life is pouring into the fruit jars of the gods?  Do you see the procession of your days in the oily water among the piles?  He remained motionless, staring down.

        They were worried about him at Danny’s house, when it began to get dark.  The friends left the party and trotted down the hill into Monterey.  They asked, “Have you seen Danny?”

        “Yes, Danny walked by here an hour ago.  He walked slow.”

        Pilon and Pablo hunted together.  They traced their friend over the route he had followed, and at last they saw him, on the end of the dark pier.  He was lighted by a dim electric wharf light.  They hurried out to him.

        Pablo did not mention it then, but ever afterwards it was his custom, when Danny was mentioned, to describe what he saw as he and Pilon walked out on the wharf toward Danny.  “There he stood,” Pablo always said.  “I could just see him, leaning on the rail.  I looked at him, and then I saw something else.  At first it looked like a black cloud in the air over Danny’s head.  And then I saw it was a big black bird, as big as a man.  It hung in the air like a hawk over a rabbit hole.  I crossed myself and said two Hail Marys.  The bird was gone when we came to Danny.”

*

The Tweedles always frightened me more than anything else in the two books when I was a kid.

Jane Eyre XXIX -- chapter 28: LOST IN THE MOOR-LANDS

"The Raven Tree," by Chris Lord

1. Since the last Jane Eyre post, I am more convinced than ever that Jane is a bird.  Here, in the second paragraph of chapter 28, Jane stands at a crossroads examining her options.  She doesn't know where these paths may lead despite the signs' indications, because she doesn't know what may await her at any of the potential ends.  She is very much like the birds from Bewick's in chapter one: destitute, alone, and sedentary--at least temporarily--in points dark and dreary.
2. "We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence."  Always?
3. "Long after the little birds had left their nests...."; "I was a human being and had a human being's wants: I must not linger where there was nothing to supply them."
4. In addition to her now past life, Jane has left all her fiscal earnings behind.  Considering the manner of her departure, would she have accepted her salary had it  been proffered?
5. Interesting what one can become habituated to: compare (if you've read the latter) Jane, here in destitution, with the paisanos of Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat.
6. "Why do I struggle to retain a valueless life? Because I know, or believe, Mr. Rochester, is still living: and then, to die of want and cold, is a fate to which nature can not submit passively. Oh, Providence! sustain me a little longer! Aid—direct me!"  What does she mean by this?
7. ignis fatuus: I believe this is, by Potter lore, a "hinkypunk," which is a will-o'-the-wisp by the rest of English folklore.  (If you haven't read The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Doyle, this would be a perfect time.  Imagine you're lost like Jane somewhere within this moor-land as described so much more effectively by Doyle.  What might a will-o'-the-wisp or hinkpunk do to your paired hope and despair?)