European Literature Archives - Page 4 of 7

Nikos Kazantzakis – The Last Temptation

Why rewrite the Gospels? Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation is the second attempt at it that I’ve met this year, after Tolstoy’s The Life of Jesus: The Gospel in Brief. Christians have four official versions of Jesus, and as many apocryphal ones as they like – why ask for more!? As Dustin Condren notes in the introduction to his translation of the Tolstoy, in Tolstoy’s case he wanted “to find the practical, pure teaching of Jesus Christ, to free it from the linguistic patina of ritual and scripture, removing both the dogmatic and the supernatural”. Tolstoy sought to reshape Christianity into a practical guide, removing it from the clutches of the orthodox (he uses the same exact term for the Bible’s pharisees, just to make it clear to his readers who the enemy is and always has been).

Tolstoy’s goal was noble enough – a better Christianity to make a better people. His tortuous life indicates how serious he was about finding this truth. The problem was that he went so far from the original text in places that even allies of the aging sage thought he had gone overboard. But taken as a whole, his project is interesting. In creating a synthesis of the four gospels into one narrative written in a more earthy idiom, Tolstoy makes us reflect on what the gospels and Jesus actually say. In reflection, we might turn back to the originals, or we might stick with Tolstoy. But either way, he makes us think. Another miserable soul with a deep distrust of organised Christianity was Soren Kierkegaard, and he too tried to make readers and listeners go back to the texts themselves by pressure washing them of the encrusted dogmatism, as he did in The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air.

I got the impression that Nikos Kazantzakis was less interested in all that. As P.A. Bien notes in his translator’s note, Kazantzakis spent his whole life shifting from idol to idol, experimenting with heroes ranging from Christ to Nietzsche, to Buddha and then Lenin, before finally reaching Odysseus and then going back to where he started. His Christianity was not like either Kierkegaard or Tolstoy’s in that it does not seek to proselytise. Instead, in recounting a new version of Christ’s life what he really does is try to combine elements from many of his intellectual experiences into a new synthesis, one very much influenced by Nietzsche in particular. Here were have, to go by Kazantzakis’s own prologue, a model, “a supreme model to the man who struggles”, because “every moment of Christ’s life is a conflict and a victory”.

This, then, is the Christ we meet in The Last Temptation: a man in conflict with himself. The Last Temptation contains an awful lot of temptations. When we first meet Jesus he is the carpenter who makes crosses for others’ crucifixions, and he is engaged in a battle with God to avoid answering His call. “Till I die!” he shouts, in answer to the question of how long he will continue resisting God. Jesus here goes in attitude from a stroppy teenager, to a love-preaching ingenue, to a fire-breathing prophet, over the course of the book, as key moments from his life – his stay in the wilderness and John the Baptist’s death, a visit to a desert monastery – come to affect him. We meet Mary Magdalene, Mary his mother, and many other characters from the Bible.

But Jesus and Judas are the most interesting. They always are. Even to a non-Christian, Jesus has to be a most curious god, because he is at least part-human. In his struggles and confusions and his like-us-ness he serves as an entry point into the world of Christianity. To those who are Christians, he becomes a human companion within one’s soul, who is more understanding of our pains and sufferings than the immaterial being he also is, might be. Judas, meanwhile, is fascinating as a betrayer. He and his fate are the yardstick for measuring God’s kindness and forgiveness – does He allow Judas to go to Hell, given Judas was predetermined to betray his master? Kazantzakis avoids all this by having Judas betray Jesus at Jesus’s own instigation. There is no other way, Jesus says, for the Kingdom of Heaven to come.

Familiar stories and parables are also played out in The Last Temptation. Like Tolstoy, Kazantzakis takes a slightly sceptical stance towards miracles, relegating many of them to dreams (such as the walking on water). Nevertheless, perhaps the most egregious (to traditionalists) thing he does is “fix” certain parables. We may remember the Parable of the Ten Virgins, in which the virgins are asked to remain awake for the coming bridegroom. Some have brought enough oil, while others have not. Those who have are present when the bridegroom comes, while the others have had to run off to get more. Upon their return, they find the doorway locked and are refused entry. Here’s Matthew’s version of the ending: “Lord, Lord, open to us.” But he answered, “Most certainly I tell you, I don’t know you.”

Here is Kazantzakis’s addition to the ending: ““This is a wedding,” [the bridegroom] cried. “Let everyone eat, drink and be merry. Open the door for the foolish virgins and wash and refresh their feet, for they have run much.””

Where the Bible is at times exclusionary and absolutist in its demands, Kazantzakis’s Jesus is a big fan of forgiveness. His alterations to what we know not only make Jesus more human, but also make his teaching more humanly possible as well. Nobody ends up in hell, nobody goes without forgiveness who truly desires it. It is even more a religion for the small and lowly than Christianity already is.

The problem with writing about Jesus is we all know what happens to him at the end of his time on earth. Many of us also know a good deal about what he gets up to, while on earth. The Last Temptation, therefore, needs to engage us emotionally, rather than grip us through its plot. This it generally achieves on the back of Kazantzakis’s language, which is earthy and often beautiful. We learn that Andrew “made friends with laughter and food”. Jesus’s early blessing by God is described thus: “he had felt a light, prolonged tingling on the top of his head, very tender, like a caress”. We find a lovely comment on the relationship between body and soul: “the body is the camel on which the soul mounts in order to traverse the desert”. Finally, souls are described as “sparks of God.” Nice stuff.

Yet there is a certain tension in this novel as well. The more serious Jesus and his message is within its pages, the more tragically ridiculous he becomes to us. All the talk of a new temple and a new world lose their power when we look around ourselves and see only signs of Jesus’s failure to achieve his stated goals. Alas, it’s hard for us to remove the ironic glasses we all wear, but we must do so to enjoy The Last Temptation to its fullest. Although, this is a charge we could level at any religious work these days…

The temptations that Jesus encounters sometimes work, and sometimes don’t. Jesus is a cowardly, fearful man who is uncertain of his destiny, at least in Kazantzakis’s rendering of him. But when, for example, he tries to convince us that this Jesus might be tempted by worldly power, it simply does not chime with the Jesus we have accompanied thus far. At least in the Bible there is sufficient economy of expression that we might, with extreme imaginative effort, allow ourselves the thought that Jesus might be tempted by such things – here, at six hundred pages of him, we cannot see it.

Still, the clue is in the title. We are here for the last temptation, the big one. For Kazantzakis, this is when Jesus has successfully made his way to the cross and been crucified. At this point he falls into a dream state, and in this state he dreams an alternate life. This life has two components. First, it has erotic fulfilment, as Jesus and Mary Magdalene finally consummate their affection for one another; then, it has domestic happiness, as Jesus lives and has a lot of children with the sisters Mary and Martha, while Magdalene disappears from view. In all this, Jesus is accompanied by a green-winged angel, who we can tell quite quickly is not all he seems.

After all of his struggles, now Jesus finds a kind of peace. “Harmony between the earth and the heart, Jesus of Nazareth: that is the kingdom of heaven,” says his new friend. Rather than his duty as Messiah, Jesus finds his paradise in the accumulation of small, day-to-day joys: food, wine, labour, sex. And through his many offspring he finds he has conquered death.

Readers at this point may be somewhat confused. Presuming none of us is a Messiah ourselves, isn’t all this not happiness? Little joys and gratitudes, a dampening of one’s anxieties about death? Yes, it is. But we also have to answer the question of whether this is enough, because if this isn’t enough, then we need something else, and that something else inevitably ends up being God or some other higher purpose. When Jesus realises that this is all he’ll get, he doesn’t renounce his new domestic life, but he does begin to doubt it.

Things fall apart when he meets his disciples and Paul. Paul, we remember, was once Saul, but a conversion on the road to Damascus led him to a new life and a new name in fulfilling God’s wishes. He arrives at Jesus’s home only to find the Messiah is not the one he had gone about praising to others. But Paul is mighty, and not to be dissuaded by Jesus’s failure to correspond to his own youthful teachings: “Whatever gives wings to men, whatever produces great works and great souls and lifts us a man’s height above the earth – that is true. Whatever clips off man’s wings – that is false.” Paul creates a new Jesus, ignoring the one before him, because he acknowledges that people need Jesus. Not domestic dandy Jesus, but a comforter and hopebringer. The reality, ultimately, is not altogether important.

Then the disciples arrive, old and broken. They find Jesus after their own efforts in life have failed, and he tries to justify himself to them: “In my youth I set out, like a youth, to save the world. Afterward, when my mind had matured, I stepped into line—the line of men. I went to work: ploughed the land, dug wells, planted vines and olives. I took the body of woman into my arms and created men—I conquered death. Isn’t that what I always said I would do? Well, I kept my word: I conquered death!” Jesus’s family happiness in the dream does not come from nowhere. Characters from his own mother all the way to the earthy, rich, Zebedee, say repeatedly that happiness comes from losing one’s illusions and settling down with a wife. This is exactly what dream-Jesus has done.

But the disciples do not accept his betrayal. In fact, the book reaches the peak of its emotional power as they reject him, crying “Coward! Deserter! Traitor!” again and again. He has not conquered death, only hidden it from himself. He has certainly not honoured God either.

The Last Temptation ends as Jesus awakes, still on the cross. Seeing this, he realises that he made the right choice after all, and has nothing to regret. In discovering the alternative path through the dream, we and he see what the good path means by comparison. Like Jesus, we can feel relieved in the knowledge that “everything has begun.”

But what on earth are we to do with a novel like this? It takes our understanding of what a good life is and tramples it into the ground, instead favouring a life of constant struggle with temptation and doubt. What a pain, to find the world more complicated than we might wish… Here, in this love of struggle, is Nietzsche’s influence most clearly felt. Here too is Kazantzakis’s own life. His father helped the Cretan people revolt against their Ottoman rulers, providing one example of heroism; later the boy was sent to be taught by monks, providing a much more spiritual set of heroic ideals. The Last Temptation is in some way a dramatization of these conflicting images of goodness. One that sees harmonising the spirit with God as the greatest good, and the other that sees harmonising the body with earth as it.

The problem is that struggling is not the key to happiness; it is the key to growth. And providing we can keep ourselves from struggling too much, or in the pursuit of unattainable goals, we can find in a bit of struggle a source of joy. Jesus’s struggle is not “a bit of a struggle”. It is a merciless, exhausting, brutal conflict, a war against his own body and his own soul. But Jesus was the Son of God, so he was supposed to struggle like this. When we choose to live our lives in small joys and kindnesses, it’s much less clear what greater journey and duty we are missing out on. But if we look inside ourselves, perhaps we can find it. And then, and only then, Kazantzakis’s Jesus might be closer to a model worthy of emulation.

It is always a bit funny to take Jesus and rework him. But unlike the Koran, we can say that the Bible was written by people who may have been fallible. Given this interpretative layer, which The Last Temptation acknowledges by having Jesus get angry at Matthew (“I say one thing, you write another, and those who read you understand still something else!”), there is more leeway to reinvent Christ. Tolstoy wanted a Christ who would be happy toiling on the fields alongside him, while Kazantzakis wanted a Christ who could be a paradigm for spiritual growth for us in the modern age, no matter how much we may find the directions of his growth somewhat strange or irrelevant to our own lives.

Ultimately, what seems certain is that Jesus will continue to provide fascination for people in the years to come, even as Christianity falls further and further out of view. This man who combines God and human, when we add his doubts and anxieties (and even the Bible dramatizes these), comes to be remarkably close to us humans now, living in a world where people throw around words like “transhumanism” and “posthuman”, “cyborg” and all the rest with reckless abandon. As our command of the world becomes more godlike, our command over ourselves and our destinies remains riven with the old uncertainties. It makes sense to see Jesus as someone who might have some kind of answers. This Jesus, Kazantzakis’s Jesus, may do.

For more Kazantzakis, I’ve read and reviewed Zorba the Greek and his biography, Report to Greco. For more Last Temptation, I’ve heard Scorsese made a film.

The Lush Language of Bruno Schulz

Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew, wrote a few stories in the 1930s and then was killed by the Gestapo after Germany took over Poland. It is upon these few stories which his legacy rests. They are stories of a little village on the Austro-Hungarian borderlands, of a strange father and a stranger world, and are at times comedic, at times serious, at times deathly sad. What makes them special – for after all there are quite a few central-European writers bemoaning life in the provinces at that time – is the way that Schulz writes. His language is infused with a kind of imaginative intensity, and every image, sound, or thought, is described without a cliché in sight, so that they hang in the mind long after we have finished reading.

In his obsession with language and his life’s tragic trajectory, Schulz is not unlike Isaac Babel. In his treatment of strangeness and absurdity, he has something of Kafka about him (he translated The Trial into Polish). And in his interest in the imagination and spaces, forbidden and mysterious, he often reminded me of Borges. But as a writer, for better or worse, he is clearly unique, entirely himself.

Stories

The world that Schulz describes is seen through a child’s eyes and endowed with the full imaginative potential that each child brings to the world. The stories he tells are not plot-driven. Instead, they are closer to paintings – they make us drink our fill of a particular impression or mood. When things happen, it’s almost always an afterthought. Take the story “Birds”. The narrator’s father decides to house a hundred exotic birds in one room of their home after becoming interested in ornithology. When he needs still more entertainment, he decides to cross breed them, creating new and more bizarre specimens. In his obsession, the father begins to become bird-like himself. But one day the cleaner comes and throws the birds out. This is the essence of the story.

It lasts four or five pages. What sustains it is its language, more than the plot. A phrase like this – “The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year’s loaves of bread” – is enough to make us stop, pause, wonder. The story also contains its fair share of ideas, but unlike say in the case of Musil, the language in Schulz seems more important than what it might be trying to say. There is a condor who urinates in the same chamber pot as the narrator’s father, an image that brings to mind a certain Austrian psychoanalyst. Then there is the matter of the father’s own ornithological transformation – a demonstration of how our obsessions take hold of us. The story ends, however, after the birds have been driven out, with the father coming downstairs – “A moment later, my father came downstairs – a broken man, an exiled king who had lost his throne and his kingdom”. The image is too ridiculous to be wholly serious, and this light-heartedness means that Schulz never gets too bogged-down in the cleverness of ideas.

Character

Character also goes some way to sustaining a cold, hard, plotless universe. In “August” we meet some of the narrator’s relatives. Here’s an example:

“Emil, the eldest of the cousins, with a fair moustache in a face from which life seemed to have washed away all expression, was walking up and down the room, his hands in the pockets of his voluminous trousers.”

I love this description because of the trousers. It almost seems that they are more characterful than Emil himself. When Schulz applies his wondrous language to people, he can make truly memorable descriptions. Emil’s storytelling is described thus: “he told curious stories, which at some point would suddenly stop, disintegrate, and blow away.”

Of an aging man, Uncle Charles, Schulz excellently conveys a kind of paranoia through his description of Charles’ environment: “The rooms, empty and neglected, did not approve of him, the furniture and the walls watched him in silent criticism.”

But the figure who is most striking is easily the narrator’s father. Unlike Kafka’s father, the father of Schulz’s story is a person more to be pitied than feared: “We heard him talk to God, as if begging for something or fighting against someone who made insistent claims and issued orders”. He is at one point compared to an Old Testament prophet, but in the act of throwing a chamber pot from a window, so that the comparison is just as embarrassing to us as it is to the narrator. At one point the father turns into a crab, at another he appears to be in the process of transforming into a cockroach. In a tragic reinterpretation of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” the narrator, a child, begs his mother to tell him what has become of his father. She merely says that he is now a travelling salesman, and home rarely. But the truth is that like Gregor, he has become monstrous, a thing to be shunned. And this is not something that the narrator should discover.

Imagination and Books

I wrote that Schulz shares with Borges a preoccupation with books and with magical spaces. In the longest story “Spring”, the narrator becomes engrossed in a stamp collection that comes to represent for him the key to understanding the world. In “The Book”, what appears to be an old catalogue is transfigured by the narrator’s nostalgia into being the source of all earthly joy. He looks everywhere for it, only to discover that the housemaid is using its pages for lighting fires. A paragraph like this, of which there are many similar examples, seems to make Schulz into a precursor to the great Argentine:

“An event may be small and insignificant in its origin, and yet, when drawn close to one’s eye, it may open in its centre an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order of its being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently”.

Schulz here is exploring the way that objects can be transformed by attention, and how they might disclose hidden meanings. Borges’s world too, is filled with magical objects – daggers, alephs, and the like. But what differentiates Schulz from Borges is that Schulz has more heart. The near destruction of the book for starting fires is a disaster, rather than a development in a story of ideas. The narrator’s emotions are felt by us, even though we retain a certain ironic distance (after all, we know that with age the narrator will realise that a catalogue is just a catalogue, and really not worth getting so excited about).

Magic Spaces

Beyond books, Schulz uses the imagination to transform his provincial town’s world into something far greater. One of my favourite stories is “Cinnamon Shops”, which sees the narrator go on a walk late at evening:

“It is exceedingly thoughtless to send a young boy out on an urgent and important errand into a night like that, because in its semi-obscurity the streets multiply, becoming confused and interchanged. There open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are doubles, makebelieve streets. One’s imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of the apparently familiar districts, maps in which streets have their proper places and usual names but are provided with new and fictitious configurations by the inexhaustible inventiveness of the night.”

With Schulz we never know when the real world ends and when the magical one begins. The narrator visits his school, but finds it transformed now that it is dark. He enters spaces he has never been before. He feels a certain anxiety, which Schulz conveys perfectly through his language:

“The profound stillness of these empty rooms was filled with the secret glances exchanged by mirrors and the panic of friezes running high along the walls and disappearing into the stucco of the white ceilings.”

Awe and wonderment are what makes these descriptions so compelling. Schulz has a particular talent for describing the sky, which always succeeds in making it ominous, or joyous, or frightening, as he desires.

Conclusion

His was a small oeuvre, but there’s no denying Schulz’s talent, which is why there are few valid reasons for avoiding him. Nevertheless, he is a writer who is better sampled in sips than gulps. My girlfriend, who bought me the collection, asked me to read the tales aloud to her. This was the right approach. Slowed down by my voice, the language could reach me with its full melodious complexity. I could not rush to find some plot – I could only enjoy what I had in front of me.

Schulz is a master of words. Even if his ideas are not as gripping as some other writers, or his plots as exciting, still he draws us in. Language, at least in his hands, is far more important than ideas or plots are in those of other writers, because Schulz uses language to transform the world. He reveals possibilities for vivid description which are obscured by the layers of cliché we normally read in books, and in doing so frees us from looking on the world as something finished, already described. Thanks to him we can see it as something magical once again.

Magic Sentences – Flaubert’s Three Tales

The thing with Flaubert is that he knows how to write a sentence. And not one of those magnificent but coldly complex sentences, of the sort that Henry James or William Gass carved out on a regular basis – a sentence that you admire like you admire a marble sculpture – from a distance, aesthetically. No, what Flaubert wrote were real, living, breathing sentences. I can’t read a sentence by Flaubert without wishing his ghost could find its way into my wrist and guide it to write something similar. Flaubert, this superhuman master of realism, is one of the only authors whose style I feel obliged to imitate. Because although he does nothing fancy, unlike almost everyone else in the world each and every sentence he wrote somehow comes out original and fresh.

He somehow could not think in clichés. He was repulsed by them. The only thing we as readers and writers can do to avoid falling completely under his linguistic spell is to try to remind ourselves that his work was the result of an extreme effort – these novels and stories were the real sculptures. Whereas the likes of Zola and Balzac were pumping out novels faster than your average 19^th century bourgeois French intellectual could read them, Flaubert barely managed a handful over the course of his life.

Whether or not you like the content is in a way besides the point. Personally, I didn’t like the plot of Madame Bovary that much. But the Three Tales, which I read last week, are rather fun. They are all very different. They range from the beautiful “A Simple Heart” to the weird “The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator” to the also weird but now in addition confusing “Herodias”. What was surprising for me, knowing Flaubert only from Madame Bovary, was seeing Flaubert’s range. Here’s a medieval tale, here a piece of historical fiction. It’s surprising because I tend to associate realism with writing about one’s own time and world, but Flaubert shows that neither need be a limitation.

Anyway, on to the stories, which I read in Roger Whitehouse’s translation!

A Simple Heart

“A Simple Heart” is the most standard of the stories collected in Three Tales. It is essentially the telling of the life story of a single woman, Félicité, who is a servant. Though she has the appearance of “a woman made out of wood, driven as if by clockwork”, that does not mean the tale is boring. There is an element of daring in this story, because Félicité is from low down in society, and in “A Simple Heart” there is neither ogling nor idealisation of the poor going on – Félicité simply is a human being, in spite of her simplicity. As a young lady she was disappointed in love, was divided from her siblings as a result of the need to earn a living, and eventually ended up in the service of a Madame Aubain, who is not particularly pleasant as a master, though she could, one supposes, be a bit worse.

Allow me now to mention a sentence, or rather two. We have been learning about the guests who turn up at Madame Aubain’s house. We have just read about the Marquis de Grémanville, who is somewhat profligate and prone to alcohol and overall not entirely welcome. The paragraph ends, and the next begins, as follows:

“I think you have had enough for today, Monsieur de Grémanville! Do come and see us again soon!” And she would close the door behind him.
But she was always delighted to welcome Monsieur Bourais, a retired solicitor.

What a transition! I had to stop reading and fetch my pencil. It is the most prosaic thing in the world, and yet, so perfect. The closing of the door and the closing of the paragraph, the way that we feel the sudden delight of Félicité seeing Monsieur Bourais thanks to the suddenness of his sentence, as if we ourselves were opening the door! I know, it is a minor thing. But like learning the parts of a mechanical watch, being able to look out for these details and savour them is what makes the Three Tales, and Flaubert in general, so wonderful.

Félicité works tirelessly. Her cares, for the children of Madame Aubain, for her own nephew when she meets him, all result in dejection and failure. But Félicité, who has a simple faith, just keeps going with life: “She doted on her mistress with dog-like fidelity and the reverence that might be accorded to a saint”. In some sense Flaubert’s tale reminds me a little of Gogol’s “The Overcoat”. Both stories take someone whom society was inclined to think relatively worthless – a servant and a petty scribe – and show that they have a certain dignity about them, in spite of their low origins. Félicité is treated awfully by those around her, but she does not lose her faith. And as a result, the reader comes out at the end of the story with a sense of the strength and the value of every individual. A better moral couldn’t be found.

The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator

I didn’t like the other two of the Three Tales as much as I did “A Simple Heart”. I am a bore, I know. “The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator” tells the story of how a certain Julian became a saint. As a theme, this is rather off-putting to the modern reader. I mean, who reads about saints these days? The most we might expect is a boring-old morality tale. And of course, that is part of the story. But there is more to it.

Julian is born in a castle, and to his mother and father respectively it is prophesied that he will become a saint and an emperor. As a young man he is a hunter, and here was something I had not expected – Flaubert’s violence. This tale is pretty unpleasant to read for even the most steak-loving of readers. Julian kills everything. For pages and pages we read about how he slaughters – and I mean slaughters – this or that creature. “They circled round him, trembling with fear and looking up at him with gentle pleading eyes”. And he kills them anyway. Lakes of blood, and all that – it’s all here! Eventually though, the animals fight back and Julian is told a curse is upon him. He will kill his father and mother. Uh-oh.

To save his family Julian runs off, becomes a mercenary, and gets a palace of his own – as you did, back then, in the days of knights and shining armour. Here’s another sentence: “The whole palace was so quiet that you could hear the rustle of a scarf or the echo of a sigh”. What suggestion!

Anyway, Julian does kill his parents, in the kind of ridiculous comedy-of-errors manner that is only possible in Greek tragedies and the Middle Ages, and commits to a life of voluntary wandering. Julian’s suffering as he wanders is just as intensely described as the suffering he inflicted on the animals, which meant it was effective even as it was difficult to read. But it is the end of the story that is the hardest part of all to read. A leper comes to Julian asking for help and Julian does everything he can to help the man, even hugging him tightly while they are both naked so as to give the man his warmth. I know we don’t have lepers these days, but Flaubert’s descriptions made me shrink back in disgust all the same.

Yet this, I think, is what makes the story so powerful – it really makes us feel what it must have been like to be a saint. We feel after reading like we have an idea of what is asked for. This is in stark contrast to, say, Tolstoy’s “Father Sergius” where it’s impossible to escape the feeling that Tolstoy and his main character just need to get a better therapist and maybe go outside more. Julian’s faith feels lived in a way that Sergius’s always felt on the edge of parody.

Herodias

Finally, the last of the Three Tales is “Herodias”, Flaubert’s retelling of the story of Salome and John the Baptist. I basically only know that story from the Klimt painting. And I have just googled it and discovered that the painting has nothing to do with this story to begin with, which means I know even less about the story than I thought. I didn’t like the story. I found it hard to follow. There are far too many characters and I do feel that readers without a sense of the background (more than just the tl;dr “John the Baptist gets decapitated” summary) are going to be just as confused as I am. Perhaps if I read it again slowly, after reading the Bible version, things would be clearer.

As it stands, I appreciated bits of it but not the whole thing. Moments like this description of a dancer will remain in my memory –

“Her feet moved rhythmically one in front of the other to the sounds of a flute and a pair of hand cymbals. She extended her arms in a circle, as if she were calling to someone who was fleeing her approach. She ran after him, light as a butterfly, like Psyche in search of her lover, a soul adrift, as if she were about to take flight.”

So too will the speech given by John the Baptist himself, which has a certain Biblical force about it. And finally there is this image, as the ruler of who has had John the Baptist imprisoned looks out over the desert, which has the same power as Shelley’s Ozymandias:

“His spirits sank as he looked out over the desert; in its fold and convolutions he seemed to see the shapes of ruined amphitheatres and palaces.”

But overall, I must say the story left me more confused than awed.

Conclusion

At under a hundred pages in my edition, the Three Tales are short enough to read over the course of three hours – in my case I read one each day. And I am certainly glad I read them, even “Herodias”. I really can’t express fully how giddy with excitement Flaubert’s prose makes me, even though it is distorted by translation. And in his use of historical topics, and not just the world around him, he has reminded me of the full range of literary possibilities associated with realism. Finally, these stories do have a certain thread of continuity to them. All of the Three Tales are concerned with faith, and the differing ways it manifests itself. And in the way that the faiths here are in the most part unusual – the prophet’s faith of John the Baptist, the saint’s faith of Julian – these stories are interesting and powerful to read, and not just beautiful. Though they are, certainly, that too.