web analytics

Category: Literature

Categories
Autobiography Hojas Susurrantes (book) Literature Oracle of Delphi Psychology Stefan Zweig

New literary genre

“Know thyself” (gnōthi seafton)
Delphic maxim in the Temple of Apollo

 

I started Hojas Susurrantes (HS) in 1988 and added the last touchups last year. It is neither a novel nor an essay; nor memoirs in the traditional sense nor a pamphlet or poetry. It is difficult to define this non-fictional genre in few words. My first reader, Andreas Wirsén, a Swede lover of literature, wrote in an online forum that I am “a pioneer developing a new sport.”

As stated in Day of Wrath which contains a Spanish-English translation of the longest chapter of HS, Stefan Zweig wrote in Adepts in Self-Portraiture that when Western literature began with Hesiod and Heraclitus it was still poetry, and of the inevitability of a decline in the mythopoetic talent of Greece when a more Aristotelian thought evolved. As compensation for this loss, says Zweig, modern man obtained with the novel an approach to a science of the mind. But the novel genre does not represent the ultimate degree of self-knowledge:

Autobiography is the hardest of all forms of literary art. Why, then, do new aspirants, generation after generation, try to solve this almost insoluble problem?

[For a] honest autobiography […] he must have a combination of qualities which will hardly be found once in a million instances. To expect perfect sincerity on self-portraiture would be as absurd as to expect absolute justice, freedom, and perfection here on earth. No doubt the pseudo-confession, as Goethe called it, confession under the rose, in the diaphanous veil of novel or poem, is much easier, and is often far more convincing from the artistic point of view, than an account with no assumption of reserve. Autobiography, precisely because it requires, not truth alone, but naked truth, demands from the artist an act of peculiar heroism; for the autobiographer must play the traitor to himself.

Gnothi_seautonOnly a ripe artist, one thoroughly acquainted with the workings of the mind, can be successful here. This is why psychological self-portraiture has appeared so late among the arts, belonging exclusively to our own days and those yet to come. Man had to discover continents, to fathom his seas, to learn his language, before he could turn his gaze inward to explore the universe of his soul. Classical antiquity had as yet no inkling of these mysterious paths. Caesar and Plutarch, the ancients who describe themselves, are content to deal with facts, with circumstantial happenings, and never dream of showing more than the surface of their hearts.

Zweig then devotes a long paragraph to St Augustine’s Confessions, the thinker I abhor the most of all Western tradition and whose theology about Hell caused massive psychological damage in my own life (also recounted in HS). Then Zweig wrote:

Many centuries were to pass before Rousseau (that remarkable man who was a pioneer in so many fields) was to draw a self-portrait for its own sake, and was to be amazed and startled at the novelty of his enterprise. Stendhal, Hebbel, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Amiel, the intrepid Hans Jaeger, have disclosed unsuspected realms of self-knowledge by self-portraiture. Their successors, provided with more delicate implements of research, will be able to penetrate stratum by stratum, room by room, farther and yet farther into our new universe, into the depths of the human mind.

This quote explains why I decided to devise a hybrid genre between the self-portraiture that betrays the author and thus penetrates beyond the strata pondered by Romantic autobiographers. Over the boards anti-Nazis have been making fun about my experiences in London last year. They have no idea what I am trying to say because they completely lack context. Together with the Zweig quote my December 31 entry, “Etiology,” provides a bit of the context of what I’m trying to say in the book I’m presently writing.

Categories
Inquisition Kevin MacDonald Literature Metaphysics of race / sex Miscegenation Women

On Spain and literature – V

retrato de soledad anaya
 
My Mac broke down again (I didn’t fix it properly the previous time for lack of funds) but I’ll use a borrowed laptop because I’ve read a classic in Spanish literature and would like to say something about it.

Quoting Julio Rodríguez-Puértolas, on page 7 of The Culture of Critique Kevin MacDonald wrote:

A prime example is The Celestina (first edition dating from 1499) by Fernando de Rojas, who wrote “with all the anguish, pessimism, and nihilism of a converso who has lost the religion of his fathers but has been unable to integrate himself within the compass of Christian belief.” Rojas subjected the Castilian society of his time to “a corrosive analysis, destroying with a spirit that has been called ‘destructive’ all the traditional values and mental schemes of the new intolerant system. Beginning with literature and proceeding to religion, passing through all the ‘values’ of institutionalized caste-ism—honor, valor, love—everything is perversely pulverized.”

I confess that I found La Celestina quite boring, but I am not sure if it would be proper to catalogue this comedy—because it is a comedy—as “destructive” in the sense that MacDonald (who doesn’t seem to have actually read it) put it.

en la estacaHowever, it is true that Fernando de Rojas felt alienated in the late 15th century Spain. Some of his biographers even claim that, when Rojas was a bachelor studying in Salamanca, he received the tragic notice that his father, a Jew converted to Catholicism, had been condemned to die at the stake by the Inquisition.

As crypto-Jews usually did, Rojas married a converso woman; i.e., an ethnic Jewess, the daughter of Álvaro de Montealbán. De Montealbán also suffered a trial by the Inquisition and, although Rojas was a very successful lawyer by profession, he was not allowed to defend his father-in-law because Rojas was also of Jewish heritage, and therefore suspicious.

La Celestina was a huge bestseller of the time, even in translations outside Spain, but Rojas was always scared for having written it in his youth and, for forty years, remained silent about his authorship.

See my recent entry about the Spanish Catholic Kings Ferdinand and Isabella, who in 1492 promulgated a law to expel those Jews who didn’t want to convert to Christianity. The Jews who had lived in Spain for centuries had to go and the conversos who stayed became second-class citizens for the next centuries. The mission of the Inquisition was to keep under close scrutiny the conversos and see if they continued to practice their religious ways in secret.

Except for the first act, which was not authored by Rojas but by a non-Jew (either Juan de Mena or Rodrigo de Cota), as I said I found the comedy boring. Whatever the influence of this searing exposé of the Neo-Platonic idealization of women, an idealization so common in popular authors those times such as Petrarch, it probably didn’t go beyond the similar exposé by Cervantes of the chivalric novels of the age. To my taste mentioning La Celestina in the first pages of The Culture of Critique is a little off the mark, especially when taking into account that the most hilarious pages against women were authored by a gentile.

Rojas died in 1541, four years after Pope Paul III granted the bachelor soldiers in America permission to mix their blood with Amerind women. Now that I’ve just read the book I’d say that, although there’s a ring of truth in what MacDonald quoted, it should be obvious that the Spaniards’ lust for gold (see my previous entry about my teacher of literature), together with Catholicism, were the main cause of their racial suicide in the Americas. In those centuries conversos rarely got—as Rojas did—positions of cultural influence in this society that seriously tried to get rid of the subversive tribe. For those knowledgeable of the history of Spain and of Spanish literature, it would be laughable to hear that the book written by Rojas was a factor in the mestization of the New World.

Categories
Literature Poetry

On Spain and literature – IV

retrato de soledad anaya
 
Apropos of what I said in my previous post about blaming the Iberians’ lust of gold for their inter-breeding in the Americas, let me quote a translation of some lines of one of the poems of Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645), “Poderoso caballero es don dinero,” that I reread recently in the book of my teacher Soledad Anaya (pic).

When Quevedo writes, “in the Indies did they nurse him” he means of course that gold is found in the newly-conquered West Indies, the lands of New Spain (now Mexico); and when he says “in Genoa did they hearse him” he means that the gold is buried as jewelry with the corpses of the wealthy merchants of the Italian city Genoa.

Mother, unto gold I yield me,
He and I are ardent lovers;
Pure affection now discovers
How his sunny rays shall shield me!
For a trifle more or less
All his power will confess,
Powerful knight is don money.

In the Indies did they nurse him,
While the world stood round admiring;
And in Spain was his expiring;
And in Genoa did they hearse him;
And the ugliest at his side
Shines with all of beauty’s pride;
Powerful knight is don money.

Noble are his proud ancestors
For his blood-veins are patrician;
Royalties make the position
Of his Orient investors;
So they find themselves preferred
To the duke or country herd,
Powerful knight is don money.

Never meets he dames ungracious
To his smiles or his attention,
How they glow but at the mention
Of his promises capacious!
And how bare-faced they become
To the coin beneath his thumb
Powerful knight is don money.

I’m not sure if the translation of “…to the duke or country herd” conveys accurately the meaning. In the original Spanish it says that the yellow metal “hace iguales al duque y al ganadero,” makes the duke and country herd equals.

You can imagine how the young and ambitious commoners in those times (like Cortés) looked for chances of upward mobility in the “West Indies.”

See Dr. William Pierce’s take on this very subject: here.

Categories
Aryan beauty Literature Poetry

On Spain and literature – III

retrato de soledad anaya

The reason I almost never include poetry in this blog is simple. Very, very rarely a poem reaches the innermost of my soul. The first poem that reached me was one by Luis de Góngora, which I read in the textbook of Miss Anaya (photo) in my middle teens.

Góngora was a Baroque poet of the golden age of Spain. He, and his contemporary Francisco de Quevedo (about whom I have to quote something in the future), are considered the most prominent Spanish poets of all time. Góngora flourished by the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries, when the Spanish language reached its maximum degree of perfection. Anaya, my former school teacher, tells us in Literatura Española that later in his life Góngora became a priest and lived in a chaplaincy of honor in Madrid in the palace of King Philip III.

Góngora composed his Sonnet LCXVI when he was twenty-one years old:

Mientras por competir con tu cabello
Oro bruñido el sol relumbra en vano,
Mientras con menosprecio en medio el llano
Mira tu blanca frente al lilio bello;

Mientras a cada labio, por cogello,
Siguen más ojos que al clavel temprano,
Y mientras triunfa con desdén lozano
Del luciente cristal tu gentil cuello,

Goza cuello, cabello, labio y frente,
Antes que lo que fue en tu edad dorada
Oro, lilio, clavel, cristal luciente,

No sólo en plata o vïola troncada
Se vuelva, más tú y ello juntamente
En tierra, en humo, en polvo, en sombra, en nada.
 

Following is Edward Churton’s translation. Góngora’s urgent appeal to a young blonde nymph to enjoy her youth before time destroys her made a huge impression in the lad I was:
 

While to contend in brightness with thy hair
Sunlight on burnished gold may strive in vain,
While thy proud forehead’s whiteness may disdain
The lilies of the field, which bloom less fair,
While each red lip at once more eyes will snare
Than the perfumed carnation bud new born,
And while thy graceful neck with queenly scorn
Outshines bright crystal on the morning air:

Enjoy thy hour, neck, ringlets, lips, and brow;
Before the glories of this age of gold:
Earth’s precious ore, sweet flowers, and crystal bright
Turn pale and dim; and Time with fingers cold
Rifle the bud and bloom; and they, and thou
Become but ash, smoke, shadow, dust and night.

Categories
Goths Islam Islamization of Europe Literature Reconquista

On Spain and literature – I

Annoyed at the infamous TV series Toledo I tried to find some consolation in the epic film El Cid, “a romanticized story of the life of the Christian Castilian knight Don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, called ‘El Cid’, who in the 11th century fought the North African Almoravides and ultimately contributed to the unification of Spain.” But even that movie released in 1961 starts with a politically-correct scene. El Cid, interpreted by Charlton Heston, spares the live of a Moorish king in the hope that the Moor will behave in the future after an anti-Christian raid (and in fact he behaves like a gentleman in the rest of the film). Then in the royal palace El Cid has a private conversation with the woman he loved, acted by Sophia Loren, and makes a speech about his pacifist intentions when he is accused of treason for having spared the life of the Muslim king.

Well, well… What about forgetting old and new movies altogether and focus instead in the Spanish literature of the Middle Ages? What will we find there? Big surprise: the historical “Cid” found some work fighting for the Muslim rulers of Taifa of Zaragoza! This happened after his falling out of favor of Alfonso VI, king of León and Castile, who in 1081 ordered Rodrigo Díaz’s exile.

But what else can the literature of the age say about the ethno-nationalist mores, values, moral grammar and zeitgeist of medieval Spain? Let’s take a look…

retrato de soledad anaya

This is a photograph of Soledad Anaya Solórzano (1895-1978), who graduated in Spanish letters at Guadalajara in Mexico. From 1920 to 1923 she served as Director of Primary and Higher Education in the Mexican government. She also taught Spanish literature, a field that she mostly loved, and was the Principal of the Secundaria Héroes de la Libertad until her death (the Middle School in Mexico City where I studied). Of course, when Miss Anaya taught me she was in her late seventies and looked a little older than in the photo, but she still was in command of her intellectual capacities. Anaya never married and was the single author of Literatura Española (1941), a textbook of more than thirty editions that we used in her classroom and I will use below and in the coming entries on the subject of Spain. I must say that in the first chapters of Anaya’s textbook, first published during the Second World War, she unabashedly uses the word “arios” (Aryan) when referring to the first conquerors of the Iberian Peninsula.

However, about the first ancient text that Anaya analyzes, the 8th century legend of King Rodrigo and the Loss of Spain (pages 28-31), the jew-wise reader is shocked to see that no accusation is made of Jews inviting any Muslim into the peninsula. The old legend tells instead that Florinda, a Visigothic maid (a purely Aryan young woman) was seduced by King Rodrigo, another Iberian white, in Rodrigo’s castle. As revenge the Count Julián, Florinda’s father, “opened Spain to Muslim expansion” Anaya wrote: an expansion that had been previously contained by the Count himself. The Moors then invaded the peninsula “and easily destroyed the Visigothic power that already was much debilitated.” Anaya adds that “it is not known what happened to King Rodrigo, who caused so much harm” and that the “historical happenings related to this legend occurred in 711 A.D.” Note that King Rodrigo, not Count Julián (or the Moors, or a purported Jew who opened the gates) is blamed. Presumably, the accent of the legend rested on the sense of honor among the Iberians of those remote times.

Later, on pages 40-47 of the textbook I used in my middle teens, Anaya mentions the case of the legend of The Seven Infants of Lara, which recounts other Iberian whites using other Moors to take revenge about other cases of Aryan offences! This very famous medieval tale has Gonzalo Gustios, the crying father of the seven decapitated white boys in Córdova, marrying Aixa, the daughter of Almanzor (Almanzor, who had imprisoned Gonzalo Gustios, was one of the most powerful characters in the Caliphate). Mudarra González, the mongrel son of the Christian Gonzalo Gustios and the Muslim Aixa, is The One destined to avenge the father. The victim of course is not Almanzor, the Moor that ordered the decapitation of the boys on behalf of the valiant knight Ruy Vásquez. The victim is Ruy Vásquez himself that the mongrel dispatches at the end of the story.

Once more, for the medieval Spaniard race did not seem to be the central issue at all: but a knightly sense of honor, especially during in-group vendettas.

In the next chapter Anaya approaches the ancient texts about El Cid. His life inspired the most important epic poem of Spanish literature: the Cantar de mio Cid. Now that I reread her book after forty years of reading it for the first time I was shocked to see Anaya’s sentence that El Cid was “the terror of Moors and Christians” (my emphasis). When I finished the chapter I was surprised to learn that El Cid’s fame was not entirely based on the feat of expelling some Moors from the peninsula, but mainly on the chivalrous character of this historical (and legendary) figure of the Reconquista.

This, and similar cases I’ll be recounting in these brief series about the classics of Spanish literature, moves me to expand the category of this blog previously known as “White suicide” as the “Aryan problem.”

Categories
Literature

Ward Kendall’s

Hold Back This Day is a dystopian science-fiction novel about a future in which a totalitarian government promotes universal miscegenation to eliminate all racial differences—in the name of diversity, of course.

Categories
Literature

Anti-white dystopia

“We have the last unblended arrivals from Europe Zone 5—in particular from Iceland Sector 15.”

Jeff observed studiously, noting how the black students from Borneo and New Guinea were being purposely intermingled with various blondes, brunettes, and redheads of European heritage.

“As demonstrated here, these Europe Zone candidates are entirely Skintone 1s and 2s. Like their darker counterparts, they too are far removed from the government ideal that the World Gov is very near to achieving…”

“Which is a world Skintone Class 5s,” Jeff amplified, unconsciously parroting the government party line. [p. 11]

Categories
Child abuse Literature Yearling (novel)

The Yearling, 10

“Hey, Ma, Flag’ll soon be a yearlin’. Won’t he be purty, Ma, with leetle ol’ horns? Won’t his horns be purty?”

“He’d not look purty to me did he have a crown on. And angel’s wings.”

He followed her to cajole her. She sat down to look over the dried cow-peas in the pan. He rubbed his nose over the down of her cheek. He liked the furry feel of it.

“Ma, you smell like a roastin’ ear. A roastin’ ear in the sun.”

“Oh git along. I been mixin’ cornbread.”

“‘Tain’t that. Listen, Ma, you don’t keer do Flag have horns or no. Do you?”

“Hit’ll be that much more to butt and bother.”

He did not press the point. Flag was in increasing disgrace, at best. He had learned to slip free from the halter about his neck. When it was tightened so that he could not get out of it, he used the same tactics that a calf used against restraint. He strained against it until his eyes bulged and his breathing choked, and to save his perverse life, it was necessary to release him. Then when he was free, he raised havoc. There was no holding him in the shed. He would have razed it to the ground. He was wild and impudent. He was allowed in the house only when Jody was on hand to keep up with him. But the closed door seemed to make him possessed to enter. If it was not barred, he butted it open. He watched his chance and slipped in to cause some minor damage whenever Ma Baxter’s back was turned.

♣ ♣ ♣


Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
I don’t want to add more excerpts. But I must say that an incident narrated in the rest of the tale, which I read this year, shocked me. I could easily write a long, detailed entry for my blog on Alice Miller, but child abuse is a subject that does not interest the readers of WDH.

A couple of days ago I caught my father telling his grandson that instead of watching TV for hours he should be reading the beautiful literature for young people, and he mentioned the beauty of a Julius Verne novel. But he’s a hypocrite, since his grandson does exactly what my father does: watching TV for hours everyday and, even in his late eighties, still going to the theater to watch Hollywood filth.

With classics like The Yearling I find it almost a sacrilege that adults are allowing their kids to watch TV. Although I only read The Yearling as an adult, I must say that as a child Wyeth’s illustrations provided some homely zest and a sense of trust in life and in one’s own parents that is difficult to transmit in words.

If anyone actually read the whole novel and is curious about why the culmination of the story surprised me so much, let me know and we can discuss it here.

Spoilers for those who haven’t read it!

Categories
Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Homosexuality Literature Pederasty

The Satyricon

Educated homosexuals like to pull out the old Ancient Greco-Roman card that the liberals use. They project their values onto an idealized past that never existed in order to legitimize their lifestyles today.

Judge it by yourself. What could be more decadent in the Greco-Roman world than the homoerotic adventures recounted in a novel written in times of Nero or Caligula? However, classic pederasty was not meant for coeval adults, as is the LGBT movement of today.

Below I include my translation of the prologue by Jacinto Leon Ignacio to one of the Spanish translations of Petronius’ novel (ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages):

jefferson_petronius


Rome,
centuries ago

In the vast and important Greek and Roman literature from which we still live, there are just a few novelists. Maybe for an overwhelming majority of illiterates it would had been much more affordable the theater, which is enough to listen, that the written narrative which must be read. The same was true of poetry and the rhapsodies recited in public.

The fact is that in Greece there are only a few examples of novels, apart of Longus, and from the Romans only Apuleius and Petronius, whose work we offer here.

It appears that, at the time, the Satyricon enjoyed considerable popular success, for both Tacitus and Quintilian commented it in their manuscripts, although it is apparent that neither knew it directly, only from hearsay. It is likely that they did not grant it much literary value because its style and form collided with all the concepts in vogue.

However, the Satyricon was not lost and copies were kept in the Middle Ages, while jealously concealed because of its subject matter [pederasty] and for being the work of a pagan. The work continued to be ignored by the public to the point that only scholars knew its title, but believed it was lost.

Therefore, a scandal broke when, in 1664, appeared the first edition of Pierre Petit.

Soon after, the Satyricon was translated into several languages, including ours, with such success that has made it one of the great bestsellers in history. There were those who sought to take advantage that the work is incomplete, rewriting it to their liking. It was easy nevertheless to expose them.

Presumably, however, the author would not work at top speed like if we should go to a literary prize. He seems to have devoted years to this task. Do not forget that what is now known are only fragments of the original, estimated in twenty books. The author might have started writing when Caligula reigned and Nero followed, to see the publication during the reign of the next emperor. It can be no coincidence that the book mentions contemporary events known to all, or that the author considered worth mentioning many names.

This is a job too conscientious not to be the work of a professional. Moreover, the action does not take place in Rome, but in the provinces and almost none of the men are Latins. It seems as if the author had had an interest in showing the reality of the empire, a reality ignored in the capital.

The novel consists merely of the travel story of [Encolpius] and his servant Gitone through different locations. The incidents, sometimes unrelated, their adventures and the people they encounter are the text of the Satyricon, which lacks a plot as was the style of the epoch. We could actually say that it consists of countless short stories of the two protagonists. This technique influenced many centuries later the books of chivalry, the picaresque and even Don Quixote. Throughout many incidents the author reveals us an extraordinary real view of the life in the Roman provinces, although tinged with irony.

Petronius simply tells us what he saw. In a way, his novel was an approach to realism, leaving aside the epic tone of the tragedies to focus on current issues, as Aristophanes did in Greece. And that was the pattern followed by Petronius. There is a huge difference between his style and that of other contemporary writers.

Poets, despite their undoubted genius, are pompous and in the tragedies the dialogues are extremely emphatic. Petronius by contrast, remains accessible to everyone. He expressed himself in a conversational tone, which justifies the use of a first person that conveys the feeling that someone is telling us a live tale. That’s why today we can read his Satyricon with the same interest of his times and nothing of its freshness is lost.

Writing is, in a sense, a childbirth with the same joys and suffering. Both things must have accompanied Petronius in this trip with [Encolpius] and Gitone through the decline of Rome.

Categories
Julian (novel) Literature

JVLIAN excerpts – V

Julian the Apostate was the nephew of the Emperor Constantine the Great. Julian ascended the throne in A.D. 361, at the age of twenty-nine, and was murdered four years later after an unsuccessful attempt to rebuke Christianity and restore the worship to the old gods.

Julian

The Memoir of Julian Augustus

From the example of my uncle the Emperor Constantine, called the Great, who died when I was six years old, I learned that it is dangerous to side with any party of the Galileans, for they mean to overthrow and veil those things that are truly holy. I can hardly remember Constantine, though I was once presented to him at the Sacred Palace. I dimly recall a giant, heavily scented, wearing a stiff jeweled robe. My older brother Gallus always said that I tried to pull his wig off. But Gallus had a cruel humor, and I doubt that this story was true. If I had tugged at the Emperor’s wig, I would surely not have endeared myself to him, for he was as vain as a woman about his appearance; even his Galilean admirers admit to that.

From my mother Basilina I inherited my love of learning. I never knew her. She died shortly after my birth, 7 April 331. She was the daughter of the praetorian prefect Julius Julianus. From portraits I resemble her more than I do my father; I share with her a straight nose and rather full lips, unlike the imperial Flavians, who tend to have thin hooked noses and tight pursed mouths. The Emperor Constantius, my cousin and predecessor, was a typical Flavian, resembling his father Constantine, except that he was much shorter. But I did inherit the Flavian thick chest and neck, legacy of our Illyrian ancestors, who were men of the mountains. My mother, though Galilean, was devoted to literature. She was taught by the eunuch Mardonius, who was also my tutor.

From my cousin and predecessor, the Emperor Constantius, I learned to dissemble and disguise my true thoughts. A dreadful lesson, but had I not learned it I would not have lived past my twentieth year.

In the year 337 Constantius murdered my father. His crime? Consanguinity. I was spared because I was six years old; my half-brother Gallus—who was eleven years old—was spared because he was sickly and not expected to live.

Yes, I was trying to imitate the style of Marcus Aurelius to Himself, and I have failed. Not only because I lack his purity and goodness but because while he was able to write of the good things he learned from a good family and good friends, I must write of those bitter things I learned from a family of murderers in an age diseased by the quarrels and intolerance of a sect whose purpose is to overthrow that civilization whose first note was stuck upon blind Homer’s lyre.