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There's a funny bit in Biggles Fails To Return in which Ginger, impersonating a Spanish onion-seller in Monaco, shares some bread and an onion with a local. The local nearly spits out the onion, appalled at its sharpness, and asks Ginger where the heck they came from. Ginger is forced to quickly come up with an explanation of why he has English onions rather than the presumably sweeter Spanish ones.
I've been reading books for more than forty years, and this is the first time I realized that when characters take nothing but a loaf of bread and a raw onion as journey provisions, or eat bread and a raw onion for lunch, they're eating something like a sweet Vidalia onion, not the onions that make your eyes water and would be torture to eat whole and raw. I did vaguely wonder why they were always eating raw onions rather than, say, a raw turnip that at least wouldn't be actively painful to eat, but I supposed, without really pausing to interrogate it, that people in times past were so horrendously deprived that eating a raw onion for lunch barely registered!
This made me think about other bits in books that make more sense with context, whether that context is new information, other books, or just more life experience.
In The Once and Future King, the boy Wart, who will become King Arthur, is going on and on about the glory of fighting. Merlyn argues with him, then "seems to change the subject" and asks Wart which he had liked better, the ants or the wild geese. The chapter ends there. When I read the book as a child, I took that literally: Merlyn was frustrated with the Wart and changed the subject.
When I re-read the book as an adult, I realized that the geese were peaceful and didn't believe in national boundaries, and the ants were totalitarian and had the motto "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." Merlyn wasn't changing the subject, he was winning the argument... but the Wart, like me, missed the point.
More recently, I listened to Watership Down on audio, read by Peter Capaldi. I had mixed feelings about his performance, but while listening I suddenly understood something that I never had before, and I must have read that book twenty times.
In the warren of the shining wires, Silverweed recites a poem. It's quite beautiful and initially seems fantastical, with a rabbit asking to accompany the stream and become rabbit-of-the-water, accompany the falling leaves and become rabbit-of-the-earth, accompany the wind and become rabbit-of-the-wind. Finally, he openly asks to join Frith and die. Fiver is horrified at the poem (the others don't understand it) and says it's taking something true (all rabbits must die) and making it into something twisted and perverse (making the pursuit of death seem beautiful).
I always wondered about that poem. The final verse is straightforwardly what Fiver says the whole poem is about, but the earlier verses aren't clearly about death - they seem much more in the vein of other rabbit legends where magical things happen. I had puzzled over it, and finally decided that they're in the real world, so asking to be a magical being like a rabbit of the water or a rabbit of the earth was asking to go to the magical realm after death. But that never felt quite satisfactory to me.
Then, listening to Capaldi read the poem, I suddenly understood. Silverweed is talking very poetically about something that isn't a fantasy or metaphor at all. When he says he wants to go down with the leaves and be rabbit of the earth, he means that he wants to die and have his body decay and literally become part of the earth, and eventually, as it breaks down more and more, the water and the air. No wonder Fiver was horrified!
Have you ever understood things in books long after you first read them?
I've been reading books for more than forty years, and this is the first time I realized that when characters take nothing but a loaf of bread and a raw onion as journey provisions, or eat bread and a raw onion for lunch, they're eating something like a sweet Vidalia onion, not the onions that make your eyes water and would be torture to eat whole and raw. I did vaguely wonder why they were always eating raw onions rather than, say, a raw turnip that at least wouldn't be actively painful to eat, but I supposed, without really pausing to interrogate it, that people in times past were so horrendously deprived that eating a raw onion for lunch barely registered!
This made me think about other bits in books that make more sense with context, whether that context is new information, other books, or just more life experience.
In The Once and Future King, the boy Wart, who will become King Arthur, is going on and on about the glory of fighting. Merlyn argues with him, then "seems to change the subject" and asks Wart which he had liked better, the ants or the wild geese. The chapter ends there. When I read the book as a child, I took that literally: Merlyn was frustrated with the Wart and changed the subject.
When I re-read the book as an adult, I realized that the geese were peaceful and didn't believe in national boundaries, and the ants were totalitarian and had the motto "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." Merlyn wasn't changing the subject, he was winning the argument... but the Wart, like me, missed the point.
More recently, I listened to Watership Down on audio, read by Peter Capaldi. I had mixed feelings about his performance, but while listening I suddenly understood something that I never had before, and I must have read that book twenty times.
In the warren of the shining wires, Silverweed recites a poem. It's quite beautiful and initially seems fantastical, with a rabbit asking to accompany the stream and become rabbit-of-the-water, accompany the falling leaves and become rabbit-of-the-earth, accompany the wind and become rabbit-of-the-wind. Finally, he openly asks to join Frith and die. Fiver is horrified at the poem (the others don't understand it) and says it's taking something true (all rabbits must die) and making it into something twisted and perverse (making the pursuit of death seem beautiful).
I always wondered about that poem. The final verse is straightforwardly what Fiver says the whole poem is about, but the earlier verses aren't clearly about death - they seem much more in the vein of other rabbit legends where magical things happen. I had puzzled over it, and finally decided that they're in the real world, so asking to be a magical being like a rabbit of the water or a rabbit of the earth was asking to go to the magical realm after death. But that never felt quite satisfactory to me.
Then, listening to Capaldi read the poem, I suddenly understood. Silverweed is talking very poetically about something that isn't a fantasy or metaphor at all. When he says he wants to go down with the leaves and be rabbit of the earth, he means that he wants to die and have his body decay and literally become part of the earth, and eventually, as it breaks down more and more, the water and the air. No wonder Fiver was horrified!
Have you ever understood things in books long after you first read them?
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Okay, this is super useful to me too, thank you! Because I had, in the course of my reading, encountered all these different mindsets in different places, and figured they coexisted (just like different mindsets have coexisted in all periods), but it's helpful to have it spelled out explicitly by someone who knows what they're talking about, so I can stop second-guessing whether I'm piecing the evidence together correctly.
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Cf, well, things like Mercrutio's lengthy discourse about Rosalind's meddlars: this was NOT an Allusive and Complex reference to the vulva, this was like making really really obvious jokes about large roosters and lovely cats, and while yeah, Mercrutio's being coarse as hell (and would have been viably in for being punched in the face if Romeo had wanted to take offense), this isn't considered Too Lewd to be in a play that was performed widely and incredibly popular, and performed for the court and all the worthies of the land.
One will have the occasional story like the idea that Anne of Cleves was too ignorant of sexuality to know that the king had to do more than kiss her and then sleep beside her to end up with her pregnant, but the honestly relevant part of that story is the extent to which literally everyone around her was " . . . . . . " about her being that ignorant - whether true or not (and it might have been), what's fairly obvious is that her level of ignorance would have been extraordinary and strange.
The prudery around TALKING about the subject would come later, mostly.
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It certainly hadn't come by the 18th century. It's hilarious and kind of a trip to read prefaces written by 19th and early 20th century editors of 18th century texts: they either defend their decision to bowdlerize their text as sheer decency demands, or they defend both their decision not to bowdlerize as well as their subjects' respectability. "She was totally a lady! Ladies could talk about these things in those days without being seen as coarse! It was just a less refined age." You can see these editors reaching for their smelling salts.
And not just sex, but bodies in general (menstruation, sweating, bowel movements), as well as men being over-the-top emotional. "He was extremely masculine!" protests the poor editor. "It was just the fashion to read sad poetry and cry all the time." Things that we as a society still haven't gotten to the point of being to do and talk about as openly as they did all the way up to the 18th century, but we've at least come far enough that editors don't feel the need to be so dramatic in their efforts to convince their readers that this is not a reason not to read whatever it was they just edited.
Of course, the "It was the times!" protest continues to apply to "He was extremely het! Heterosexual men just professed undying devotion to each other in those days" to this day. The problem, of course, is that it's true: 18th century correspondents did write elaborate phrases of devotion to each other with no more genuine emotion than us writing "Dear Hiring Manager" today (the anonymous hiring manager not being especially dear to you), but also many of them were extremely gay and those were totally love letters. And there was also a whole lot more socially acceptable middle ground allowing things like "romantic friendship" to develop and be expressed comfortably.
All of which makes it easy to whitewash all passionate declarations of love as totally platonic if you're so inclined, and difficult to sort out who actually was attracted to whom even if you're looking for it.
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unless it's Lehndorff we're talking aboutFrom:
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For those who don't know, Lehndorff was SO openly bi in his diaries that one of his descendants went through the texts with an intent to publish them, tried changing the "he"s and "him"s of his love declarations to "she"s and "her"s, then gave it up as a lost cause. The diaries were not published until later, with "he" and "him" left in, along with obligatory "everyone was this emo then!" disclaimers. To quote from Selenas's write-up:
I have to tell you, the introduction is worth reading because that, too, is a document of its times. The Editor (writing in the year 1907) tries to be gentle and prepare his readers for all that rococo shamelessness, saying he’d have cut it but for historical considerations, for lo, it seems that (Fritz-derived) image historians had of the Prussian court only turning sensual and adulterous once FW2 the playboy got on the throne? Is wrong! The Fritzian court was not a bastion of chaste stoic Prussian masculinity after all. On the other hand, we’re told to keep in mind everyone is emo in those days, so Lehndorff bursting into tears when his beloved Heinrich isn’t around for a few days is UTTERLY NORMAL. Oh, and about 800 letters from Heinrich to Lehndorff have never been transcribed. (As of the publication of these journals.) „Doubtlessly,“ the editor tells us, „the King himself bears some of the blame, due to the nature of his married life. We have suppressed some names and cut the worst passages, though.“