Eclogues: Eight Stories, by Guy Davenport
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Eclogues: Eight Stories, by Guy Davenport
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A unique collection of stories alive with intellectual and imaginative energy Inspired by sources as diverse as Virgil, Dumas, and the daily newspaper, the 8 stories in Guy Davenport’s Eclogues reflect the wide-ranging passions and curiosities of one of America’s most original and agile writers. Taking the form of diary entries and pastoral poetry, and with allusions to Italo Calvino and the Greek gods, these stories are prime examples of Davenport’s ingenuity and mastery of technique. Eclogues includes philosophical explorations and portrayals of deeply human emotions with stories such as “The Trees of Lystra,” Davenport’s meditation on the intersection of early Christian doctrine and Greek myth, and “On Some Lines of Virgil,” in which a group of teenagers experiments with sexuality during a lazy summer in Bordeaux. The author’s playfulness and defiance of expectations make for a fascinating and surprising read.
Eclogues: Eight Stories, by Guy Davenport- Amazon Sales Rank: #2209341 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-09-01
- Released on: 2015-09-01
- Format: Kindle eBook
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Eclogue: a pastoral or idyllic poem. By George F. Taylor ECLOGUES , Guy Davenport's third collection of short fiction, is somewhat atypical of other of his collections of fiction in that all the pieces can be loosely gathered under a common category, pastoral. Without getting into the literary differences between pastoral, idyllic, and utopian, we will here agree that all these works take advantage of the assumption in "pastoral" that allows a much freer treatment of reality than is usually assumed in fiction and allows an extension and reevaluation of reality. I have avoided calling any of these works "stories" because Davenport's fiction consistently resists being categorized. What may seem a story is actually an essay, or often as not, a melding of the two. "Story" will be used here only as a convenient label for whatever is being discussed. Another connection among the stories is that all of them are based loosely on prior literature or an actual historical event.If this is your first exposure to Davenport's fiction, you should be warned that he requires a much greater effort on the part of the reader than most authors. The style Davenport chose for his fiction is difficult until you get accustomed to it. He writes in a sort of collage-like style. Paragraphs and even parts of sentences may at first seem to have nothing to do with what came before. However like a collage, the various bits and sections come together into a whole much greater and more interesting than the parts.THE TREES OF LYSTRA is based on the Acts of the Apostles 14:6-20.The biblical account tells of the healing by Paul of a man crippled from birth in the town of Lystra. The people of the town are all pagans and interpret this an an appearance of Zeus and Hermes as humans just as in the myth of Baucis and Philemon. Convinced that they must do homage to apparent gods, the townspeople and priest show up with glands of flowers and an ox to be sacrificed. When Paul insists that he and Barnabas are only common men, and jews at that, the people immediately react as if they had been hoaxed, and Paul and Barnabas are invited to leave Lystra with a hail of stones. Davenport tells the story from the point of view of the townspeople, and it puts a whole different spin on the story.THE DEATH OF PICASSO is possibly the most complex thing Davenport ever wrote. The story is only 18 page long, but contains enough material for several books. Like most of Davenport's fiction, this is set in a location outside the USA, and if the setting is Holland, as this one is, you can expect considerable Dutch in the text. There is also French, Latin, and a bit of ancient Greek.These days Google Translate can help you with the Dutch and French, less with the Latin and not at all with the Greek.Right away you are faced with the subtitle "An Erewhonian Sketchbook" (in Dutch). Davenport is telling you that this is an utopian story. Erewhon is nowhere spelled backwards, and none of this ever happened. For the plot that forms the scaffolding for this work Davenport uses two characters from "Apples an Pears," The teacher and philosopher Adrian van Hovendaal and the reprobate teenage Sander who has proved so hypersexual (a father at 14) and uncontrollable that his psychiatrist has given up on him. The idea is that a summer building a cottage on a remote island with van Hovendaal will get him under control by removing him from any temptation. This goes fairly well up to the very end.Meanwhile in between the main story line is an analysis of van Goth's painting, the psychology in Picasso's painting, the story of a wild child discovered in France in 1802 who grew up alone in the woods, an examination of the sociology and psychology of adolescent boys, and much, much more. The sections are parts of a journal van Hovendaal is keeping. The dates are in the calendar of the French revolution. Along the way a dozen or more historians, philosophers and artists are included. The thing that saves such complex writing is both the remarkable quality of Davenport's writing and that even if you don't understand half of it, there is so much left that it is still wonderful to read. The end of the story involves the teacher becoming the taught. You will have to read it to find out what this means.THE DAIMON OF SOCRATES is based on the story of how Epameimondias and Pelopides, friends and members of the famous Theban Sacred Band of warriors managed against all possibility to defeat the tyrants that Sparta had set up to rule Thebes after the Peloponnesian war.The source material is Plutarch, Xenophon's Hellenic and Diodorus Siculus. Pelopides and a few trusted friends plotted to kill the tyrants while Epameinondas killed the Spartan guards in the citadel. Davenport's story covers only the day before the plot and the battle itself, but he draws it out with all the suspense of a good detective novel. Later under Epamiemondas and Pelopides the Theban army defeats the Spartans in a land battle for the first time in history and thereby free all Greece from Spartan control.CHRIST PREACHING AT THE HENLEY REGATTA takes its name from a painting by Stanley Spencer called Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta. The Henley regatta is a real annual international rowing contest dating back to the nineteenth century. There is no plot. The whole story is a carnival of contrasting and similar actions and people filled with Davenport's unique gift for description: "She was as shy and obvious as a rose., Bees stitched along the bells of a file of hollyhocks. Little girls with the faces of eager mice." Davenport mixes the crowd of actual historical people with characters out of fiction.There is Lord Peter Whimsey who bows in passing to Bertie Wooster. Whimsy is a character from Dorothy Sayers' detective novels. Wooster is a character from P. G. Wodehouse's novels. All this crazy but somehow intelligible action makes for an almost surreal experience.This work could be analyzed endlessly, but it is much more fun to just revel in it. A bonus is a series of collage drawings by Roy. R. Behrens that references something in the text on the facing page.MESOROPOSTHONIPPIDON is loosely based on what is known of Diogenes the cynic who lived in a barrel with a pack of dogs and owned nothing but the ragged shirt he wore. The source material is from Diogenes Laertes and Juvenal. The story is narrated by a young potter, Nippaki who has taken to Diogenes' philosophy of contempt for cant and unexamined custom. The two are very different in one aspect. The Cynic tells his hedonistic disciple, "You have not learned the pleasure of despising pleasure." In fact Nippaki is so given over to sexual pleasure with his girl friend that the reader wonders when he finds time to make pots. While the most explicit words are in Greek, this story is frankly pornographic enough "to redden Aphrodite's cheeks and cause Eros to jump and squeal with glee." But then, what would you expect from a story whose Greek title translates as pony-penis-sized?LO SPLENDORE DELLA LUCE A BOLOGNA (The splendor of the light in Bologna) is a very short piece that is essentially a eulogy for the young poet and philosopher T. E. Hulme. The story is set at the Fourth International Congress on Philosophy held in Bologna, Italy in 1911, which Hulme attended. The main part of the piece aims to show in a direct way Hulme's concern with images--concrete images over abstractions. For Hulme an image was precise, clear shapes and language that present an intellectual-emotional complex in an instant of time before it could be subjectivized by previously acquired conventions. Knowing this you can understand his delight with the clear, crisp light he found in Bologna.Hulme rejected the subjectivisim and vagueness of romantic literature and art, and despite his relatively small output during his short life, he was a major influence on the development of modern poetry, especially by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. T. E. Hulme was killed in the trenches of World War I in 1917 at the age of 34.This story is enhanced with drawings by Roy Behrens of an astronomical observatory, which, of course, is devoted to capturing light.IDYLL is an adapted translation by Davenport of Theocritus' fifth idyll. Two shepherds who apparently are old friends meet by chance at a spring to water their flocks. After some friendly banter they challenge each other to a singing match with a nearby woodcutter as judge. One wins, and the prize is a lamb from the other's flock. However the winner foregoes his prize and invites his friend for a swim. Afterwards they share a meager meal. At this point the story transitions imperceptibly to a civil war hospital where Walt Whitman has come to dress a wounded soldier's leg. The story ends with more wounded men arriving after a defeat. We have here two contests between men where the differences could not be more stark.ON SOME LINES OF VIRGIL is adapted from Montaigne's "Sur de vers de Vergile." You will immediately notice the unusual typographical layout. The entire novella consists of 125 numbered sections with five paragraphs of four lines in each section. In an interview Davenport said he used this formal layout exactly like the paragraph itself. I doubt it was that easy.The story is set in Bordeaux with a group of young adolescent boys and girls on summer vacation so there is considerable French in the text. The children are surrounded with a menage of various parents, a crazy uncle who lives in a wall, a young man who has lost both his legs, and a professor of art history, and a dog. Here Davenport returns to a subject that was evidently important to him. He always maintained the idea put forth by Charles Fourier that intellectual and sensual development in children should be allowed to progress naturally at the same time. He thought that the pretense that children had no sexuality until it suddenly appeared at age 18 was pathological as a social norm and caused all kinds of problems.Davenport always carefully put stories involving adolescent sexuality in an utopian (i.e. unreal) setting, usually in the more socially liberal countries of northern Europe. In "On Some Lines of Virgil" he has one of the young characters say, "You must remember none of this happened." All the children in Davenport's stories are intellectually gifted and physically beautiful with almost impossibly enlightened parents. Given these conditions there is all kinds of indiscriminate sexual play and exploration among the adolescents which is allowed by the parents because the parents know, as did Davenport, that this is a natural phase of development that would not last very long, as it usually does. Occasionally these episodes of child sex play go on to the point of becoming tedious, and the reader wants to say, "OK Guy, we get it."The extent of the different social, psychological and theoretical ideas presented in this story are well beyond covering in any review. It is enough to say that Davenport always makes these points clearly and logically. One such is when a precocious character says, "I would never have met the Joviet I am with Jonquil had she not created him." In other words, we discover ourselves through others.Davenport's unlimited powers of description are revealed here in multitudes. "In moted, slant museum light through old panes blabbed and undular there was a photograph.." He finds the unforgettable phrase, "bright flowers sweet as a kiss in a dream." A few pages on you find a character describes as, "He has ideas that Vercingetorex would consider outdated." If you took Latin and read your Caesar you will see that sentence as a brilliant description of a true reactionary conservative. If you did not it won't mean a thing. Not to worry. There is such an abundance of wonderful language in Davenport's work that even if you miss half of it, there is still more than enough to make it a joy to read.No one will tell you that Davenport's fiction is easy, but if you are willing to make the effort, you will be most thoroughly rewarded.
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