roman-à-clef

the writing blog for Roman Imp

[en-theos]

'The same theme is taken up in the Agamemnon [406, 749], but this time it is the amorous pothos for Helen that, having mastered Menelaus' heart, peoples the palace abandoned by his wife with phantoms [phasmata] of the beloved, with her apparitions in dreams [oneirophantoi]. Radiant with charm, haunting and elusive, Helen is like a person from the beyond, doubled in this life and on this earth in herself and her phantom, her eidolon. A fatal beauty created by Zeus to destroy human beings, to make them kill one another at the walls of Troy, she, more so than her sister Clytemnestra, deserves the appellation "slayer of men" [Euripides, Helen 52-55; Electra 1282-84; Orestes 16]. She who is "most beautiful" also incarnates horrible Erinys, the savage and murderous Ker. In her, desire and death are joined and intimately mixed.'

J.P. Vernant & A. Doueihi. 1986. 'Feminine Figures of Death in Greece' Diacritics, 16(2), 54–64.

[chthonic-cassandra]

“Hedda Gabler is, in short, the study of an exasperated woman; and it may certainly be declared that the subject was not in advance, as a theme for scenic treatment, to be pronounced promising. There could in fact, however, be no more suggestive illustration of the folly of quarreling with an artist over his subject. Ibsen has had only to take hold of this one in earnest, to make it, against every presumption, live with an intensity of life. […] Something might have been gained, entailing perhaps a loss in another direction, by tracing the preliminary stages, showing the steps in Mrs. Tesman’s history which led to the spasm, as it were, on which the curtain rises and of which the breathless duration - ending in death - is the period of the piece. But a play is above everything a work of selection, and Ibsen, with his curious and beautiful passion for the unity of time (carried in him to a point which almost always implies also that of place), condemns himself to admirable rigors. We receive Hedda ripe for her catastrophe, and if we ask for antecedents and explanations we must simply find them in her character. Her motives are just her passions. What the four acts show us is these motives and that character - complicated, strange, irreconcilable, infernal - playing themselves out. We know too little why she married Tesman, we see too little why she ruins Lovborg; but we recognize that she is infinitely perverse, and Heaven knows that, as the drama goes, the crevices we are called upon to stop are singularly few.”

— Henry James, “Henrik Ibsen”

[lifeinpoetry]

I want to bridge this filthy yearning.

— Rosie Stockton, from "DISPERSAL," Fuel

[sivavakkiyar]

[finelythreadedsky]

Ursula K. Le Guin, Finding My Elegy (2012)

[weltenwellen]

Wildness Before Something Sublime Leila Chatti

[theravingcelt]

“It is extraordinary that nobody nowadays under the stress of great troubles is turned into stone or a bird or a tree or some inanimate object; they used to undergo such metamorphoses in ancient times (or so they say), though whether that is myth or a true story I know not. Maybe it would be better to change one’s nature into something that lacks all feeling, rather than be so sensitive to evil. Had that been possible, these calamities would in all probability have turned me to stone.”

— The Alexiad, written by Anna Komnene, the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, c. 1148.

[hamletofficial]

In The Odyssey, Odysseus is extraordinary for the flexibility with which he can inhabit many different names, or no name at all. It is this quality of being multinamed and nameless that enables him to survive. By contrast, almost all the warriors of The Iliad yearn to have a name and a story that lasts forever. Their many names and titles, as sons and brothers and comrades and fathers and rulers, are essential to their identities, their connections with one another, and their fame after death. They fear, above all, being humiliated (cursed with a negative name), or forgotten and nameless. The lists and catalogs of names are essential to the poem’s own work, of memorializing and mourning the dead. Once the bodies return to dust, these syllables are all that remain.

– Emily Wilson, Translator's note for The Iliad.

[metamorphesque]

To you I belong, however time may wear me away. 

Rainer Maria Rilke, "You, You Only, Exist"

[cithaerons]

From his fever in Brundisium he visits like the wavering in bronze scratched grave-bound across its gods and heroes, the worried wick of a face still breathing light. Ceaseless as a vow, he is muttering the thread of elisions and emendations spinning ever finer, down to the last minute’s snap. He will reach its harsh caesura between the swell of the Adriatic and the setting Pleiades, his books unburnt, immortal, incomplete. He stands at your shoulder like a shade in a mist of marshes, carrying the torch for every maker who would have glimpsed just one more line ahead.

– Sonya Taaffe, Sibylline

[papenathys]

- Seamus Heaney on Irish history and recontextualization in his translator's note, from Beowulf: A New Verse Translation

[loveridden1999]

when james baldwin "you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read" & "love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up" & "it took many years of vomiting up all the filth i’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before i was able to walk on the earth as though i had a right to be here" & "you have to go the way your blood beats. if you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all" & &

[natalieplease]

Early drafts demonstrate that marriage was crucial to Shirley's vision of the novel from the start. In one version, the sister of Erica, the protagonist (later to be named Eleanor), wants to set her up with a man. "Carrie wanted me to get married, for some inscrutable reason," Erica says. "Perhaps she found the married state so excruciatingly disagreeable herself that it was the only thing bad enough she could think of to do to me." To be married, Shirley always feared, was to lose her sense of self, to disintegrate—precisely what happens to Eleanor in the grip of the house.

'Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life', by Ruth Franklin – Chapter 15 (on the writing of The Haunting of Hill House)

[letsbelonelytogetherr]

— Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (via letsbelonelytogetherr)

[ginkgofold]

Japanese covers of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy

[quotespile]

“He has always had a dread of crossing borders, he doesn’t like to leave what’s known and safe for the blank space beyond in which anything can happen. Everything at times of transition takes on a symbolic weight and power. But this too is why he travels. The world you’re moving through flows into another one inside, nothing stays divided any more, this stands for that, weather for mood, landscape for feeling, for every object there is a corresponding inner gesture, everything turns into metaphor. The border is a line on a map, but also drawn inside himself somewhere.”

— Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

[terpsikeraunos]

ancient greek word of the day: ὀμβροκτύπος (ombroktupos), sounding with rain