Yearly Archives: 2010

marcel proust, “the prisoner”

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Marcel Proust
The Prisoner
(trans. Carol Clark) 
(Penguin, 2003)

The last three books of Proust are the ones I find myself coming back to; this time I return because of seeing Chantal Akerman’s filmed version of this book (La captive, 2000); it was so different than what I remembered of my first viewing three years ago that I thought it was time to turn back to Proust to see how he’d changed. I preferred the new translation of this book to the Moncrieff last time through; but this volume is handier, which is a large part of why I’m using this version. It’s vexing that this book & the final volume still aren’t available in this country because of copyright, though I kind of hate the chunkiness of the American paperback versions of this translation.

What I like about this section of the book is how with the Albertine captivity narrative, the novel jumps the rails of realism. The narrator’s problems in this book are not, on the face of them, the problems of anyone real; rather, it’s an imagined picture of heterosexual desire, a thought-experiment on Proust’s part. I’m not especially interested in how life in early twentieth-century Paris; that isn’t without interest, of course, but it’s the behavior of Proust’s characters and the narrator’s changing understanding of this behavior that I really care about. There’s not a huge amount of depiction of society in this volume (where I found myself losing interest in the earlier volumes); rather, the action is mostly interior. 

This is a book about jealousy; Albertine is the focus of the narrator’s jealousy, of course, but her person is almost immaterial, a blank screen on which the narrator can project (or reflect) his own fantasies:

But what I could not bear to imagine in Albertine was my own unceasing desire to attract new women, to sketch out new novels in which they would figure; it was the thought of her casting her eye, as I had not been able to restrain myself from doing the other day, even when seated beside her, at the young girl cyclists sitting at the tables in the Bois de Boulogne. Just as one can know only oneself, one could almost say that one can be jealous only of oneself. Observation is of little use. Only from one’s own pleasure can one derive both knowledge and pain. (pp. 356–7.)

With such a narrator, it’s hopeless to imagine Albertine as a real character; rather, she’s a fantastic projection. He reasons that he should have a great love, but doesn’t really have any idea what to do with it when he finds himself in one. There’s no romance in their external relationship – at one point, the narrator wonders whether he ought to buy her a yacht, as if that were what one did in the situation he finds himself in. Their relationship takes place almost entirely in the narrator’s mind, and one wonders if he’d prefer the physical Albertine not to exist; certainly he doesn’t do very much with her, and he comes across as absent-minded, more caught up in this thoughts than in anything that might be going on around him. They talk, but the narrator drifts off, and gets caught up in his own thoughts; early in the book, they discuss noises on the street, which leads to a five-page passage where the narrator considers waking from sleep. It’s virtuosic, of course, some of the nicest passages in the book, but it suggests solipsism:

Wasn’t it perhaps Françoise who had been sleeping, and I who had wakened her? Or rather, wasn’t Françoise somehow enclosed within me, for distinctions between people and their interactions hardly exist in that sepia darkness where reality is no more translucent than in the body of a porcupine, and where our minimal perceptions can perhaps give an idea of those of certain animals? (p. 109)

Albertine is beside the narrator on his bed, but she has been forgotten entirely, replaced her even as a stand-in for the other person by Françoise. It’s difficult to fault the narration for this, of course. At the end of the passage, where the narrator considers the cries of street vendors, we are told that “the cries rolled on for me like an echo of the waves where Albertine left to herself could have been lost, and took on the sweetness of a Suave mari magno” (p. 113). The reference is to the beginning of Book II of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, where he considers how nice it is, when safe on the shore, to watch someone drowning at sea; this is almost exactly the position of the reader, watching the narrator bumble through his jealousy.

This is being narrated retrospectively, of course, an old man reflecting on a younger man’s folly, but sometimes one wonders how well is is being done. A dumbfounding moment late in the book:

Albertine had never told me that she suspected me of being jealous of her, of spying on everything she did. The only words we had exchanged about jealousy, a long time before, seemed to suggest the opposite. (p. 306)

The narrator throughout the book has been acting like a lunatic; one wonders if he thinks that Albertine is an idiot and doesn’t notice anything, or whether he really doesn’t understand how strange his behavior actually is. (The narrator, as mentioned, is somewhat disconnected from reality; early in the book, for example, there’s a hilarious interlude where he fails to understand how a telephone works; a bit later he describes an airplane taking off in such a way as to make it appear that it suddenly moves vertically.) Maybe it’s simply that he’s more interested in jealousy than in other people; a few pages after he considers that Albertine couldn’t have noticed his jealousy, this passage appears:

And no doubt that is how it always is when two people face each other, since each of them is unaware of a part of what is inside the other, even what he is aware of he only partly understands, and each of them shows the other only what is least personal in him, whether because they have not understood themselves and think that the rest is unimportant, or because certain attractions which are not truly part of them seem to them more important and more flattering, or because there are other qualities which they think they need in order not to be despised, but do not have, and so they pretend to care nothing for them, and these are the things which they seem to despise above all and even to abominate. But in love this misunderstanding is carried to the highest degree since, except perhaps when we are children, we try to ensure that the impression we give, rather than being an exact reflection of our thoughts, should be what these thoughts conclude will have the best chance of getting us what we want . . . (pp. 317–8.)

It’s for passages like this that I go back to Proust; and going back, of course, is a pleasure in and of itself, noticing what I marked up the last time through, a record of change in different colors of ink. It’s hard not to think, when re-reading Proust, that it’s more worthwhile doing that that keeping up with what’s new. 

(This edition does, it should be noted, have weird punctuation issues: stretches of dialogue within a paragraph are kept inside single quotes, and “he saids” and “she saids” appear inside those single quotes; different speakers are introduced with a dash. I assume this is an attempt to follow French convention; it appears jarring and unnecessarily strange to the reader of English books. The American versions of the new translation didn’t have this punctuation issue; but I suspect that I care more about the translation of punctuation than most people do.)

it is useful to have dreams

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“Desire, therefore, can be useful to the man of letters, first by keeping him at a distance from other men and from resembling them, then by restoring some movement to a spiritual machine which otherwise, beyond a certain age, tends to seize up. None of this makes us happy, but we can examine the reasons that keep us from being so, reasons which would have remained hidden from us if not for these sudden irruptions of disappointment. And dreams cannot be made real, we know that; still, perhaps we would not form any without desire, and it is useful to have dreams so that we can see their collapse and learn from it.”

(Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark, p. 166.)

where reality is no more translucent than in the body of a porcupine

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“Or rather, wasn’t Françoise somehow enclosed within me, for distinctions between people and their interactions hardly exist in that sepia darkness where reality is no more translucent than in the body of a porcupine, and where our minimal perceptions can perhaps give an idea of those of certain animals?”

(Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark, p. 109.)

july 1–july 10

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Books

Films

  • All About Eve, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
  • The Polymath: The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman, dir. Fred Barney Taylor
  • Planet of the Apes, dir. Franklin J. Schaffner
  • Bis ans Ende der Welt (Until the End of the World) (long version), dir. Wim Wenders
  • The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, dir. John Huston
  • The Last Days of Disco, dir. Whit Stillman

frederic tuten, “the adventures of mao on the long march”

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Frederic Tuten
The Adventures of Mao on the Long March
(New Directions, 2005; originally 1971)

The Adventures of Mao on the Long March is a collage-novel which tells, in circuitous fashion, what happened on Mao’s Long March. Although they initially appear to be the same, Tuten’s Long March firmly diverges from Mao’s Long March. The novel ends with an interview with Mao in 1968; in a description of Mao’s apartment, we learn that he reads, among many other periodicals, Artforum, Esquire, The Nation, and Cahier du Cinéma, and we realize that we are in the company of a different Mao. Before the interview, there are sections from a realist history of the Long March, collaged texts usually about aesthetics, sections of invented dialogue and action, and sections which parody the style of American writers. This is a book that reads very differently than it did when first published, in part because it has gained a great deal of front and back matter. Starting at the front of the book, one finds a forward written in 1997 by the author; then an introduction, John Updike’s “Satire without Serifs” (originally a review published in the New Yorker); then the book itself; then a list of sources used in the book (when this was added is unclear); and finally a postscript written in 2005 by the author, which goes some way into describing the book’s history. The cover, a lithograph of Mao by Roy Lichtenstein, also needs to be read as part of the book, as it was created for the original text.

But this is also a book that can be read differently when you burrow down to the text itself. Composed in part of sections borrowed from other texts, it was initially published without a list of sources; some the reader would be likely to recognize (bits of Hawthorne, Pater, and Wilde, for example), some less susceptible to recognition (long extracts from James Fenimore Cooper’s Venetian novel The Bravo). Now, of course, it’s very easy to tell where his sources spring from: plugging a string of text into Google generally brings even the unfamiliar to light. The first paragraph, for example, I found weirdly familiar; sending the phrase “to wit, a bottle of strawberry syrup” to Google provides two results, the first being this book and the second being the August 1898 issue of The Quartier Latin (the quoted text is the paragraph beginning “A beauty show” and ending “and so there was peace and happiness”), which I’m fairly certain I’ve never read. (This source, for what it’s worth, isn’t listed in the list of sources; an epigraph from Antony and Cleopatra is, but that epigraph isn’t to be found in my copy. Maybe it fell out of the book in some reprinting.) Before Google, most readers would have had to let this quote pass by; now anyone can pretend erudition. 

I’m sent back to Guy Davenport’s essay on Barthelme’s “Paraguay,” “Style as Protagonist in Donald Barthelme,” in which he carefully folds back the story to find the unacknowledged sources (a travelogue by Jane E. Duncan and Corbusier) to see how they resonate:

Barthelme’s genius was in such layering. Sometimes we can locate all the layers, sometimes not; Barthelme clearly wanted us to remain in the interstices: that’s where his poetry is. He does not mind (in fact, has alerted us) that phrases like “vast blind wall” and “vast expanse of blankness” can be identified as prose by an architect who cannot control the echoes these phrases contain from Kafka, Mandelstam, Piranesi, and from history. (p. 109 in The Hunter Gracchus.)

“Paraguay” appeared in 1969, slightly before The Adventures of Mao on the Long March; but there’s a similar aesthetic strategy being used, one found as well in the contemporaneous collage essays of Paul Metcalf. Tuten, like Metcalf, is essentially using language as a readymade; this goes for both the found texts on aesthetics, as well as for the parodies of the style of American authors, where an existing style is also something that can be taken and used as a tool. I think of the story of when Duchamp and Brancusi visited an airshow; pointing to a propellor, a beautiful example of industrial design, Duchamp said “Painting’s washed up. Who’ll do anything better than that propellor? Tell me, can you do that?” There are already so many things in the world: direct creation counts for less in such a world. The same goes for plot: Mao’s Long March was, as the real Mao realized, something that could be used as a metaphor; Tuten appropriates it for his own use. Tuten differs from Metcalf in that Metcalf’s interests (at least after Genoa) are not fiction, but rather describing a subject through juxtaposition. 

Although this is a comic novel which uses parody as an essential rhetorical stategy, Tuten doesn’t seem to be making fun of the original texts, even though it might be very easy to do so; rather, he allows them to shine under a different light to show what else might be there. An early section, for example, lifts a visit to the sculptor Kenyon’s studio in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun:

“Here might be witnessed the process of actually chiselling the marble, with which (as it is not quite satisfactory to think) a sculptor in these days has very little to do. In Italy, there is a class of men whose merely mechanical skill is perhaps more exquisite than was possessed by the ancient artificers, who wrought out the designs of Praxiteles; or, very possibly, by Praxiteles himself. Whatever of illusive representation can be effected in marble, they are capable of achieving, if the object be before their eyes. The sculptor has but to present these men with a plaster-cast of his design, and a sufficient block of marble, and tell them that the figure is imbedded in the stone, and must be freed from its encumbering superfluities; and, in due time, without the necessity of his touching the work with his own finger, he will see before him the statue that is to make him renowned. His creative power has wrought it with a word. (pp. 8–9.)

How sculpture was thought of in 1970 was worlds away from how Hawthorne imagined sculpture in 1860; Tuten’s genius is to see that Hawthorne’s words could be recast to describe what had happened in the visual arts in the twentieth century and what Tuten was attempting to bring to the world of fiction. The author of the collage novel is, to a certain extent, putting himself in the same position as the reader: in his introduction, Tuten notes that he wrote this book while working on a Ph.D. on Cooper, and one doubts that anyone not reading Cooper in that fashion would have found the sections of The Bravo that Tuten finds to use. Like the reader, the author makes sense of these juxtapositions. 

It seems important that Mao was still alive when this book was written (and when Lichtenstein’s print was made), as opposed to Warhol and DeLillo’s use of him: dead, he existed only as icon. Appropriating a living person as a character is a braver act (with the caveat, of course, that Mao was presumably then, as now, so distant as to be unreal). Written now, this book would register has historical fiction; in 1971, Mao’s legacy had not entirely congealed and could, one presumes, still be shaped. Lichtenstein’s Mao is a jolly Mao; in the 2005 afterward, Tuten recalls getting a telegram from a confused Diana Vreeland congratulating him on his scoop in interviewing Mao. At that point in time, Mao could still be shaped.

This is a well-wrought book, one which should be discussed more than it is. It’s odd that this book hasn’t come up recently in relation to David Shields’s Reality Hunger: it’s a fine example of how collage can be used inside the structures of fiction rather than precluding fiction, as Shields seems to be arguing.

“affectionately, marcel: the selected correspondence of marcel duchamp”

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Affectionately, Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp
(edited by Francis M. Naumann & Hector Obalk, trans. Jill Taylor) 
(Ludion Press, 2000)

Naumann & Obalk’s edition of Duchamp’s correspondence presents a selection of Duchamp’s letters presented chronologically. What one notices most about these letters – especially if you start at the beginning & read right through, as I did – is how workaday they are. Duchamp is not, for the most part, sharing his ideas with his correspondents. None are exceptionally long; most are brief records of what he’s been up to, detailing his travels, financial dealings (many of these), and of course his work attempting to sell art for his friends. One gets the weird sense of Duchamp as a boring person. I don’t think he was, of course; consulting a timeline, it’s clear that he was almost always busy doing interesting things while writing these letters. But these letters present the quotidian Duchamp; certainly, he wasn’t using his correspondence to work out ideas. There’s a vast gulf between the Duchamp presented here and the Duchamp of the interviews.

These letters were gathered from the recipients, as Duchamp never saved copies of his own letters (or letters sent to him). Gaps sometimes emerge: barely anything is said about the construction of the Large Glass; letters to Beatrice Wood don’t show up until 1940. Only one letter was sent during his very brief marriage to Lydie Sarazin-Levassor in 1927 (he tells Walter Pach on 24 June that marriage is “a delightful experience so far and I hope it will go on. My life is in no way changed by this.”). The next letter, sent to Katherine Dreier on 12 March 1928, notes that he’s been divorced since 25 January. An explanation of his personal life is not to be found in these letters; clearly, there’s a distinction between the public Duchamp and the private Duchamp, and the private Duchamp doesn’t make it into letters. (His letters to Maria Martins, which one presumes might be some of his most revealing letters, haven’t been made public.) Which is not to say that bits of emotion don’t show through: for example, in a series of letters to Katherine Dreier in 1928 he defends his backing out of the art world vociferously:

Your 2 letters announcing the possible stop of activities in the S.A. did not surprise me___ The more I live among artists, the more I am convinced that they are fakes from the minute they get successful in the smallest way.
     This means also that all the dogs around the artist are crooks___ If you see the combination fakes and crooks___ how have you been able to keep some ind of a faith (and in what?)
     Don’t name a few exceptions to justify a milder opinion about the whole “Art game”.
     In the end, a painting is declared good only if it is worth “so much”___ It may even be accepted by the “holy” museums___ So much for posterity___
     Please come back to the ground and if you like some paintings, some painters, look at their work, but don’t try to change a crook into an honest man, or a fake into a fakir.___
     That will give you an indication of the kind of mood I am in___ Stirring up the old ideas of disgust___
     But it is only on account of you___
     I have lost so much interest (all) in the question that I don’t suffer from it___ You still do___ (5 November 1928; originally in English)

It’s unclear what exactly has stirred him up into this rage – in the letters that bookend it, he complains that he was never friends with Alfred Stieglitz (but he was never friends with anyone) and he rails against the idea of Waldemar George writing a book about him; he also complains that he’s feeling his age of 42. There are two letters from 1930 (one detailing his book on chess); none at all from 1931 or 1932, and by 1933 he’s happily in a relationship with Mary Reynolds and trying to get Brancusi’s art shown in New York. These letters don’t serve as biography: the exciting things seem to be happening in the margins.

But there are enough interesting details to make this book well worth reading: in 1935, for example, Duchamp attempted to sell his Rotoreliefs at Macy’s on consignment, with no luck. He accuses Alfred Barr of “malicious incompetence” in a rare unguarded moment. His correspondence attempting to get funding for his system of playing roulette (which became Monte Carlo Bond is entertaining: he’s not trying to figure out how to win, he’s just trying to get by, which he suspects could be done scientifically if he only had the funds to do it. In a letter to Yvonne Chastel, Duchamp mentions that a first edition of Lautréamont’s Les chants de Maldoror is “one of the 5 or 6 books that make up my entire library”; one immediately wonders what the other volumes would be. In 1950, Walter Arensberg, who believed that Francis Bacon was Shakespeare, appointed Duchamp Vice President of the Francis Bacon Foundation. And in a letter to the French critic Jean Suquet, Duchamp indicates his indebtedness to Roussel:

One important point for you is to know how indebted I am to Raymond Roussel who, in 1912, delivered me from a whole “physicoplastic” past which I had been trying to get out of. A production at the Antoine theater of “Impressions d’Afrique” which I went to see with Apollinaire and Picabia in October or November 1912 (I would be grateful if you would check the date), was a revelation for the three of us, for it really was about a new man at that time. To this day, I consider Raymond Roussel all the more important for not having built up a following. (25 December 1949)

A letter to Michel Carrouges points out that he hadn’t known Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” as Carrouges had suspected; rather, Roussel filled that space.

This is, it needs to be said, a beautifully edited and produced book; one might quibble, at times, about the jocularity of the English translations, but the French original is always provided for reference. Marginal notes identify figures and artworks mentioned in the letters; significant events in Duchamp’s life are similarly presented chronologically, creating a biography of a sort. The picture that emerges of Duchamp at the end of this book remains opaque. Certain correspondents recur over his life: Man Ray, Brancusi, the Stettheimers, Henri Pierre Roché, Katherine Dreier. But these are, by and large, Duchamp’s friends from whom he was separated by distance; letters, for Duchamp at least, present an odd cross-section of life, and at the end of this book Duchamp is still hiding.

on belief

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“ ‘I wonder,’ Howard said. ‘You have to believe, and then it will help you. It’s the same with the Lord. If you belief in the Lord, then there is a Lord for you; if you don’t believe in Him, there is no God for you – nobody who lights up the stars for you and directs the traffic in the heavens. Now, don’t let’s argue about such details; let’s come to the plain story.’ ”

(B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, p. 187.)

“ ‘Conscience,’ he began again reflecting on this word and speaking to himself, ‘conscience! What a thing! If you believe that there is such a thing as conscience, it will pester you and blast hell out of you, but, on the other hand, if you don’t believe in the existence of conscience, what can it do to you? And I don’t believe in it any more than I believe in hell. Makes me sick, so much thinking and fussing about nonsense. Let’s hit the hay.’ &rdquo

(B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, p. 248.)

b. traven, “the treasure of the sierra madre”

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B. Traven
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010; originally 1935.)

I have not, I should first point out, seen the John Huston film of this, which seems marginally better known than the novel; sooner or later I’ll get around to it, but I haven’t yet. This is a caper narrative, of course: something that’s set up early on and repeatedly emphasized is the corrupting power of gold, and the narrative tension is the question of whether any of the characters will be able to escape this. The characters are not very likable (with the possible exception of the experienced old man, who we suspect will pull through); but it’s impossible to tell three-quarters of the way through the book who the villain will turn out to be. The book is oddly structured: characters are introduced who seem like they might be significant, then they fade away. It’s true to life, but confusing for fiction.

The narration of this book is also confusing: there are frequent excursions for long stories (in the style of the Manuscript Found in Saragossa); though they are told by a particular character, they are in the same narrative voice as the rest of the book, an omniscient third-person. The narratives always seem to know things that they shouldn’t know (the thoughts of dead characters); in this sense, this might be thought of as a clumsy book. A paragraph in which a main character is killed, for example, starts with his thoughts, moves to a description of what he does, moves to the thoughts of his murderer, and describes the act of murder; the paragraph consists of nine sentences but the perspective repeatedly shifts. This doesn’t seem to be self-conscious in the style of Faulkner; rather, it’s the easiest way to tell the story. While written in 1935, characters think of what they’ve seen in the movies as a model for what might happen to them. 

The social perspective of this novel might be unexpected. The first chapter concentrates on what work – or the lack of it – can do to a man, pointing out exactly how much money it costs to continue to exist when you have none. As noted, Traven’s character’s aren’t particularly sympathetic; he’s operating in the naturalist tradition of Dreiser or (more likely) Zola, and he’s deeply interested in how the machinery of the economy works. (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was contemporaneous with John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy; they’re told differently, but the perspective of the danger of capital is similar.) One notices this now: contemporary novels concerned with work and how terrible it can be are very much the exception. The socialist novel has more or less disappeared; but here economic justice is openly debated by the characters:

“. . . The old man hasn’t stolen the goods. They’re his honestly earned property. That we know only too well. He didn’t get that money by a lousy cowardly stick-up, or from the races, or by blackmailing, or by the help of loaded bones. He’s worked like a slave, the old man has. And for him, old as he is, it was a harder task than for us, believe me. I may not respect many things in life, but I do respect most sincerely the money somebody has worked and slaved for honestly. And that’s on the level.”
     “Hell, can your Bolshevik ideas. A soap-box always makes me sick. And to have to hear it even out here in the wilderness is the god-damned limit.”
     “No Bolshevik ideas at all, and you know that. Perhaps it’s the aim of the Bolsheviks to see that a worker gets the full value of what he produces, and that no one tries to cheat a worker out of what is honestly coming to him. Anyway, put that out of the discussion. It’s none of my business. And, Bolshevik or no Bolshevik, get this straight, partner: I’m on the level, and as long as I’m around you don’t even touch the inside of the old man’s packs. That’s that, and it’s final.” (pp. 236–7.)

This is the point, of course, where it becomes clear who the villain is; there’s not so much a hero as another victim. The gold will be lost, as we’ve been told over and over again by the stories the wiser characters tell; the best one can do is to get by without ripping anyone off too much. The old man mentioned here comes out fine because he’s taken for a doctor by the natives; the natives are foolish, but, it’s made clear, better than the American interlopers or the Church which is cheating them. Men are in competition in this book; only a single notable woman appears in this book, Doña Catalina María de Rodríguez, described in a story in chapter 16: but she falls as well because she takes on the avarice that killed her husband. 

One finds one pausing at the distinctive dialogue, which doesn’t sound quite like anything else. A representative passage of Americans speaking from near the beginning of the book:

“Aw, gosh,” said one of the sailors, “don’t talk so much squabash. It makes me sick hearing you. Come up, you two beachers, and we’ll stuff your bellies until they bust. We throw it away anyhow. Who the funking devil can eat a bite in this blistering heat? Gee, I wish I was back in that ol’ Los An, damn it.”
     When they left the tanker, they couldn’t walk very far. They lay down under the first tree they reached.
     “That was what I call a square meal, geecries,” Dobbs said. “I wouldn’t walk a mile even for an elephant tooth. I’m out for the next two hours. And we better get a rest.”
     “Okay by me, sweety.” (p. 21)

Or later in the book, some Mexican bandits (previously established as only speaking Spanish) castigate each other after a murder:

“Aw, shut up, you damned yellow dog! Why didn’t you do it? Afraid of that funking son of a bitch by a stinking gringo, hey? I know who did it and bumped him. And I tell ye, get away from me, both of you chingando cabrones and que chinguen los cabrones a las matriculas. Do I need your stinking advice, you puppies? Out of my way, you make me sick looking at you, you dirty rats.” (p. 269)

anish. Generally when Spanish is used in the text, it’s followed by a restatement in English (“Tiene un cigarro, hombre? Have you got a cigarette?”); maybe profanities left untranslated are more powerful. The euphemisms “funking” and “geecries” appears all over the book rather than their antecedents; neither appear in the OED, and “geecries” would appear only ever to have been used in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, though it’s vaguely possible that Traven is using “funking” in the sense of “cowardly”. One wonders if anyone actually ever talked like this. 

This particular edition is, it should be said, an embarrassingly ugly book. The insides have been reshot from some older, smaller edition, leaving the text box weirdly positioned on the page; the cover of this paperback employs the hoary old trick of trying to make it look like it’s a frayed old hardcover, the spine about to fall off, then negates that entirely by slapping a strictly two-dimensional yellow banner obliquely across the front declaring that “READERS WHO IGNORE THE GENIUS OF B. TRAVEN DO SO AT THEIR PERIL,” a quote sourced to the NYTimes Book Review, though one that I can’t find in their archive. Another tacky yellow banner adorns the back, with a blurb from John Chamberlain’s original review in the Times in 1935; the rest of the back cover ignores the concept of the front.) The back cover copies suggests that the book is worth reading because it may have inspired 2666, which suggests a certain amount of desperation. When confronted with a cover like this, one remembers Jan Tschichold’s dictum that dust-jackets of books should always be thrown away as advertising.

One wonders as well why there’s no editorial apparatus around this book, save a brief biography of Traven on the first page that uses phrases like “many scholars think.” Certainly an introduction could be cobbled together for a novel’s seventy-fifth anniversary edition. An interview with Vice last year (the source, probably, of the “many critics” connecting this book to 2666) could have been turned into something serviceable; a sharp editor might have had Blixa Bargeld put together something. A history of the text – if it started out in German, how much of it was the creation of the original editor – would be useful and probably of general interest, especially when the author’s life is being used to sell the book on its back cover.