Marstrander's fasciculus

Thirty-one years later

I bought this volume in 1980, having read the first two (of the Folio eight-volume edition) as a student. I read sections, at roughly ten-year intervals, until this week I finally found my way back to it and decided it was time to finish. A. S. Byatt recently described how she read the whole of the Recherche one summer and was captivated by it. I've started into the second Guermantes volume now, but I'm not making any predictions about how long it will take me to finish. I should, though, try to make it in less than thirty-one years.

Image from John Speed's Map of Mounster

Dr Steiner of Geneva

My friend Percy P. has recently responded to an article of mine in Poetry Ireland Review on 'Eco-poetry'. (See georgiasam.blogspot.com.) His generous response includes a hostile appraisal of George Steiner, whom I had quoted at the end of my piece in order to locate an idea of mystery at the heart of meaning in language. I knew that reference to Steiner was a risk, because of the extremes of irritation and admiration he usually provokes. So here's a little apologia for my reference to the polymath:

   I was introduced to GS by an American friend in the late seventies; she lent me a copy of Extraterritorial, his analysis of the outsider status of many leading modern writers and artists. After that I read Language and Silence, a collection of early essays, and After Babel, his study of language and translation. I could add a few more GS titles to my list, such as Real Presences, Errata, and the essay on Heidegger in the Fontana Modern Masters series. On the other hand, I never managed to get to his early books on the Russian novelists Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and on the death of Tragedy. While I was drawn into several passages of Antigones, I did not read it in its entirety. 

   During my days at UCD studying French and English, Continental culture was mainly represented by critical theory; the Anglo-American academy looked nervously on while whole swathes of scholarship were taken over by the 'radical' discourse of theory. Steiner's voice was singular and obstinate in the middle of all of this. Like many others, I was fascinated by the arguments, the range of reference, the alertness to historical cruelty and the regular raids on other fields such as music and linguistics.

   Some time after this, during my Lehr- and Wanderjahre, I went to Geneva on a Swiss government scholarship and attended GS's winter seminar. On that occasion he was lecturing on English romantic poets and the French Revolution, with a particular focus on Wordsworth and Coleridge. I found the atmosphere in the seminar very stimulating: Steiner had a great feeling for the historical context as well as for the literary object. He also had a genius for anecdotes that illuminated the moment.  

(to be continued...) 

J.A. Baker's book, The Peregrine

'Wherever he goes, this winter, I will follow him. I will share the fear, and the exaltation, and the boredom, of the hunting life. I will follow him till my predatory human shape no longer darkens in terror the shaken kaleidescope of colour that stains the deep fovea of his brilliant eye. My pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified.' p. 42

New arrivals

A few new titles landed yesterday in the book room: Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination of  'Work in Progress', with Samuel Beckett's first appearance in book form; Memoirs of W. H. Harvey, a TCD botanist; The Natural History of the Birds of Ireland by Watters; Rev. H. M'Manus's Sketches of the Irish Highlands; and an 1861 edition of the Proceedings against Dame Alice Kyteler for Sorcery (in Kilkenny in the 14th century).   

Recent purchases

Given the limited amount of space available, and the large number of books I have to accommodate, I try to limit new additions to the library to essentials, and to books that are good to look at. Thames and Hudson are doing great books nowadays, with a printer in China. E.g. Alexandra Harris's Romantic Moderns, and Martin Gayford's book on Lucien Freud, Man in a Blue Scarf. Cambridge's inaugural volume of the Beckett letters is also a fabulous production.