From the issue dated January 23, 2004
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Hesperus Readers Must Be Accompanied by a Minor
Among those binary opposites hated by postmodernists and poststructuralists everywhere -- but loved by the common folk -- are "major" and "minor." Truth be told, we (the people) know some kind of distinction like this makes sense. We like to congratulate the pitcher headed to the majors, and to commiserate with the deteriorating outfielder demoted, in baseball's euphemistic legerdemain, to Triple-A ball. Keeping things straight between "major" and "minor" candidates in political campaigns helps make democracy manageable. Distinguishing between major and minor chords helps keep music comprehensible. Separating major from minor writers enables us to streamline survey courses, maintain Norton anthologies at somewhere under 5,000 pages, and pay the also-rans diddly squat when they come to campus to read. What, though, is that happy cliché of literary criticism, a "minor" work? Surely not, prima facie, a work by a minor writer, since we're told major writers produce their share. Yet if major writers produce minor works without losing their mark of heaven, doesn't fairness dictate that minor writers can produce major works without losing their stigmata? Issues of that sort emanate from one of the most beguiling publishing start-ups in recent times, England's Hesperus Press (distributed in the United States by Trafalgar Square Books, in North Pomfret, Vt.). Alessandro Gallenzi and Elisabetta Minervini, the Italian husband-and-wife translating team who started the line in London two years ago, say their beautiful paperbacks are "dedicated to bringing near what is far -- far in both space and time." Their specialty? "Works by illustrious authors, often unjustly neglected or simply little known in the English-speaking world." Hesperus, of course, is the Latin name for the evening star, and the tagline that appears on the title page of every book, Et remotissima prope, amounts to a motto: "To bring near what is far." Are these texts distant from our notice, however, because they're, well, not major? Hesperus books come in bunches. The 14 just released for the beginning of 2004 cross over lines of language, genre, and nerve, and will disconcert the reader accustomed to associating almost all these authors with more familiar titles: The School of Whoredom, by Pietro Aretino; With the Flow, by Joris-Karl Huysmans; The Marquise of O, by Heinrik von Kleist; Memoirs of an Egotist, by Stendhal; Fellow-Townsmen, by Thomas Hardy; Rappaccini's Daughter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne; In a German Pension, by Katherine Mansfield; The Fatal Eggs, by Mikhail Bulgakov; Arctic Summer, by E.M. Forster; A Perfect Hoax, by Italo Svevo; Monday or Tuesday, by Virginia Woolf; Incognita, by William Congreve; Directions to Servants, by Jonathan Swift; and The Touchstone, by Edith Wharton. With such prestigious introducers as Doris Lessing (Memoirs of an Egotist) and Simon Schama (Rappaccini's Daughter), they follow fast upon the more than 30 titles released in Hesperus's American maiden year of 2003. Some of the more inspired choices there included Leonardo da Vinci's Prophecies, Tolstoy's Hadji Murat, Baudelaire's On Wine and Hashish, Chekhov's The Story of a Nobody, and the Marquis de Sade's Incest. The quality of the fare puts the major-minor distinction directly in play. Does size count? All the Hesperus titles weigh in at 100 pages, more or less, and a uniform price of $12. Is Hadji Murat necessarily minor because it's a welterweight compared with War and Peace? No, because we know Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea may be major, and Islands in the Stream minor. Maybe we should think of Hesperus titles as the Allen Iversons of literary history, little folks bursting with talent and suddenly able to dominate when allowed to play. Could Hesperus be a subversive effort to revise the canon not by exchanging authors, but by exchanging texts? To show us that assumptions about enduring writers and their works don't hold up? Gallenzi and Minervini aren't saying, but regular wandering through the Hesperus line over a year or so wonderfully unsettles the mind. Schama is surely right when he observes that the "Yankee lit-lingo" of Rappaccini's Daughter came as "something utterly new in the world" that, added to its imaginative plot, will likely shake non-American readers who know Hawthorne from The Scarlet Letter and think of him as "the epitome of New England austerity and demon-driven repression." One's sense of Huysmans's "minor" status fades in the face of With the Flow and its companion piece, the short story "M. Bougran's Retirement," thumbnailed by the publisher as follows: "M. Folantin is a young government employee who is overwhelmed by the pettiness of life. M. Bougran is a government clerk who has just been prematurely retired. Together, Huysmans's two studies of institutionalized boredom brilliantly evoke the social fetters that force us to go 'with the flow.'" In fact, Folantin's disgust at his menial work, lack of physical presence, and quotidian solitude capture "nausea" long before Sartre's Roquentin. With the Flow not only deserves to be a staple of the existentialist canon, but reminds one that Huysmans, celebrated in France at his death in 1907, hardly deserves the Triple-A status into which he's slipped outside that country. Hesperus, then, challenges regimented canon thinking in regard to "major" authors not with a jobs program for other writers waiting on the bench, but with slighted literary achievements that complicate our sense of a noted author's slam-dunks and missed jumpers. Of course, one could complain that Hesperus avoids the true risk in major-minorland -- the classification of writers, not texts. Hesperus's all-stars, if not always household names (in educated households) à la Chekhov and Swift, almost always rank as anointed names in the wider world of literature. Wouldn't a truly brave rover series, meant to bring the distant near, display not just the critical bite of James when he judged Our Mutual Friend the "poorest" of Dickens's works (for its "poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion"), but that of Conrad when he opined that Melville "knows nothing of the sea"? Wouldn't it need the courage before established reputation shown by Nietzsche in labeling Dante "a hyena," or Sean O'Casey, in immortally taking down P.G. Wodehouse as "English literature's performing flea"? Politicians like to say that one should not allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good. The Hesperus library -- consider knocking off one slim text a day on your mass-transit commute -- serves as a lasting inoculation against industrially canned literary judgment. Relativists, Derrideans, and the like, please look the other way as an archaic compliment is bestowed: Gallenzi and Minervini, you possess exquisite taste. It's certainly true that the pair face enough prospective material to understandably want to avoid deciding which of two kinds of editors they are: those who think there are two kinds of writers in the world, and those who don't. Let it be noted that perhaps the only man of letters to officially opt for nonmajor status was George Ryall, the long-time New Yorker contributor who published under the nom de plume "Audax Minor." Never heard of him? He'd understand. He did, after all, write the "Race Track" column. Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches literature at Herzen University and philosophy at St. Petersburg State University, both in Russia. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 20, Page B12 |
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education