Into the Woods

Internet Archive — Around the World in 80 Days

Internet Archive — Around the World in 80 Days

Here in the sticks I’m clearly not surrounded by a population of readers. The Stokes County library at Danbury is tiny. There are bookstores in Winston-Salem, but they’re pretty terrible bookstores, not like the bookstores in the San Francisco Bay Area. But living in a travel trailer I don’t have room for books anyway. So I’ve been making my own books with free on-line texts and my Sony Reader.

I wanted to continue my tour of 19th century French literature, but after the bleakness of Notre-Dame de Paris, I needed a change of pace. I had never read Jules Verne, even in translation, so it seemed like a good time to check out one of the pioneers of science fiction.

Verne has not a lick of interest in philosophical ramblings. He is interested in characters, and places, and situations. So he just tells a tight, well-ordered story. He is, to tell the truth, just a tad shallow. In fact some people assume that his books are for young people.

Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingts Jours — Around the World in 80 Days — is a romp. It reads like, well, a David Niven comedy.

I’m not sure what to read next. Probably George Sand, to see what kind of connection, if any, can be made between George Sand and my favorite 19th century English novelist, George Eliot.

These lines from nndb.com are intriguing. I’m not sure who wrote it:

As a thinker George Eliot is vastly superior; her knowledge is more profound and her psychological analysis subtler and more scientific. But as an artist, in unity of design, in harmony of treatment, in purity and simplicity of language, so felicitous and yet so unstudied, in those qualities which make the best of George Sand’s novels masterpieces of art, she is as much her inferior.

Wikipedia

Speaking of gothic revival architecture, here’s a trivia question for you…

What literary event in 1831 also was a historical event and an architectural event?

The answer: the publication of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris. English translations of this novel, for some reason, are generally named The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

I finished reading this novel a couple of weeks ago. I can’t say that I recommend it. It is almost unbearably bleak and pessimistic. It is, however, a superb and classic gothic novel. There is almost no daylight in this book, unless it’s a hanging at noon. Instead it’s the dark streets of medieval Paris, the dark vaults of Notre Dame cathedral, blown-out candles, and bats and bells. There are superstitions about the supernatural, including the moine bourru, which I think is generally translated to werewolf in English, though the French moine is a monk, and so moine bourru hints at the dark side of ecclesia.

When Hugo published Notre-Dame de Paris, the cathedral had fallen into near ruin from centuries of neglect. Paris was even considering tearing it down. But Hugo’s book sparked a huge interest in the cathedral, and tourists started coming to Paris just to see the cathedral. This led to renovations that started in 1845. It probably would be fair to say that Victor Hugo saved Notre Dame cathedral.

Certainly there were some grand examples of gothic revival architecture. But in America, there arose an everyman’s version of gothic revival — carpenter gothic.

Wikipedia

When I spoke with Rodney Pfotenhauer, the architect who designed the gothic revival cottage I’m building, I asked him if he’s a historian of architecture, since he had worked so many features of gothic revival into such a small house. He said no, he just looks at a lot of pictures.

One other thing before I leave the subject of Notre Dame. I have made no secret of the fact that, by building a gothic revival cottage, putting an organ in it, and putting bat houses in the woods behind it, I’m indulging in a rather elaborate pun. I hope that, when my house is finally done and landscaped, that people who see the house for the first time will break out laughing. That will be the correct response. When one of the framers working on my house stood inside the foundation and looked at the blueprints for the first time, he started grinning, and I’m pretty sure he laughed. He got it.

I am so glad that, owing to my friend Catherine, who dragged me to a Sunday afternoon organ concert followed by mass, I’ve heard the Cavaillé-Coll organ at Notre Dame. Shortly after this, I wrote in a letter to a friend:

Catherine and I went to an organ recital on a Sunday evening at Notre Dame. Cesar Franck, I can tell you, sounds just as bad at Notre Dame as he does anywhere else.

But we stayed for the evening mass. It was an incredible show to a packed house, with excellent music, awesome acoustics, beautiful theater, and altar boys that Oscar [Wilde] would have loved. The organ postlude was a barn-burner, a great swelling of sound in the back of the cathedral like an approaching thunderstorm that swept in and struck hard, rattling the windows and stopping the crowd in the aisles as they were leaving, to look up at the organ as though they were expecting lightning to strike at any second.