Manuel Vilas e 'Islandia'

 

The Cuban episode

A psychodrama with 5 main characters: Ernest Hemingway, Adriana Ivancich, Dora Ivancich, Mary Welsh Hemingway and Gianfranco Ivancich:

 

"The Cuban episode presented a psycho-drama with five characters in the style of playwright Tennessee Williams: The main actor reduced to a tragic, ridiculous figure; the young girl, fascinated by the world famous writer, letting herself being exploited as the object of desire, not fully understanding the consequences; the mother irresponsibly supporting her daughter in her role; the wife, accepting the impossible situation, and losing part of her self-respect; the brother profiting as a substitute of love. And there is the general public that can follow what happens on the scene and backstage."

From Jobst C. Knigge,

Hemingway's Venetian Muse Adriana Ivancich: A Contribution to the Biography of Ernest Hemingway. New version 2012. Online at e-doc Server - Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.*

         https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/18452/14177/2338BeAlC0Lcw.pdf

El Mapa y el Territorio: Espectáculo de autor

 

"El Mapa y el Territorio: Espectáculo de autor." https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/elmapayel.pdf

Henry Fielding

 Fielding, Henry (1707-54), the son of a lieutenant (who later became lieutenant general), born at Sharpham Park, the house of his maternal grandfather in Somerset. His mother died when he was 11, and when his father remarried Henry was sent to Eton. There he was happy, enjoyed his studies, and made lifelong friends of *Lyttelton, who was to become a generous future patron, and of *Pitt the elder. At 19 he attempted to elope with a beautiful heiress, but failing in this settled in London, determined to earn his living as a dramatist. Lady M. W. *Montagu, a distant cousin, encouraged him, and in 1728 at Drury Lane his play Love in Several Masques was successfully performed. In the same year he became a student of letters at Leiden, where he remained about 18 months, greatly enlarging his knowledge of classical literature. On his return to London he continued his energetic but precarious life as a dramatist, and between 1729 and 1737 wrote some 25 assorted  dramas, largely in the form of farce and satire, and including two adaptations of Molière, The Mock Doctor and The Miser. In 1730 three of his plays were performed: The Author's Farce, Rape upon Rape, a savage satire on the practices of the law, embodied in Justice Squeezum; and the most successful of all his dramas, *Tom Thumb (which was published in a revised form the following year as The Tragedy of Tragedies, or The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great), one of several extravagant burlesques modelled on Buckingham's *The Rehearsal, of the turgid fashionable tragedies of the day. *Hogarth designed the frontispiece, and a long and close friendship began. Don Quixote, a satire which is in part a tribute to *Cervantes, appeared in 1734. In the same year Fielding married Charlotte Cradock, who became his model for Sophia in *Tom Jones and for the heroine of Amelia, and with whom he enjoyed ten years of great happiness until her death. His improvidence led to long periods of considerable poverty, but he was greatly assisted at various periods of his life by his close and wealthy friend R. *Allen, who became, with Lyttleton, the model for Allworthy in Tom Jones. In 1736 Fielding took over the management of the New Theatre, for the opening of which he wrote the hightly successful satirical comedy Pasquin, which aimed at various religious and political targets, including electioneering abuses. But The Historical Register for 1736 was fiercer political satire than *Walpole's government would tolerate, and the Licensing Act of 1737, introducing censorship by the lord chamberlain, brought Fielding's career in the theatre to an end.

He entered the Middle Temple and began to read for the bar. In 1739-40 he wrote most of the columns of the *Champion, a satirical and anti-Jacobite journal. In 1740 he was called to the bar but his health began to fail and he suffered acutely from gout. In the same year Richardson's Pamela appeared and enjoyed tremendous popular success. In 1741 Fielding expressed his contempt in his pseudonymous parody An Apology for the Life of Mrs *Shamela Andrews. Meanwhile, because of increasing illness, he was unable to pursue his legal career with any consistency. Instead, in 1742, he produced The Adventures of *Joseph Andrews and His Friend, Mr Abraham Adams, for which he received from his publisher £185 11s. In 1743 his old friend *Garrick put on Fielding's The Wedding Day, and in the same year Fielding published three volumes of Miscellanies, which included *A Journey from This World to the Next and a ferocious satire, The Life and Death of *Jonathan Wild the Great. In 1744 he suffered a terrible blow in the death of his wife, and for a year or so he wrote little except a preface to his sister Sarah's novel *David Simple, and some journalism, particularly the True Patriot and the Jacobite's Journal. In 1746 he probably began The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, and in 1747 caused some scandal by marrying his wife's maid and friend Mary Daniel. With the aid of Lyttelton, he was appointed JP for Westminster in 1747 and once again joined battle, now from the inside, with legal corruption and the 'trading justices' who imposed and embezzled fines. In 1749 Tom Jones was enthusiastically received by the general public, if not by *Richardson, *Smollett, Dr *Johnson, and other literary figures. In the same year his legal jurisdiction was extended to the whole county of Middlesex, and he was made chairman of the quarter sessions of Westminster. From his court in Bow Street he continued his struggle against corruption and lawlessness and, with his blind half-brother and fellow magistrate Sir John Fielding, strove to establish new standards of honesty and competence on the bench. He wrote various influential legal enquiries and pamphlets, including a proposal for the abolition of public hangings. In 1751 he published Amelia, which sold the best of all his novels. He returned to journalism in 1752 with the *Covent Garden Journal, and published in 1753 a Provision for the Poor. He organized and saw successfully implemented a plan for breaking up the criminal gangs who were then flourishing in London. But his gout, asthma, and other afflictions were now so far advanced that he had to use crutches, and in 1754, in hope of improvement, he set off with his wife and one of his daughters for Portugal. *The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, published poshumously in 1755, describes in unsparing detail the departure and journey. He had prepared it for the press ('a novel without a Plot') before he died in Lisbon in October.

Fielding is generally agreed to be an innovating master of the highest originality. He himself believed he was 'the founder of a new province of writing,' and Sir Walter *Scott commended him for his 'high notions of the dignity of an art which he may be considered as having founded'. His three acknowledged masters were *Lucian, *Swift, and Cervantes. In breaking away from the epistolary method of his contemporary Richardson, and others, he devised what he described as 'comic epics in prose', which may be characterized as the first modern novels in English, leading straight to the works of *Dickens and *Thackeray. The standard biography is M. C. Battestin, Henry Fielding (1989). The standard edition is the Wesleyan Edition (1967- ) with 11 volumes printed as of 1997.

—oOo—

Tom Thumb,  a Tragedy, a farce by Henry Fielding, performed and published 1730, and published in in a different version in 1731 under the title of The Tragedy of Tragedies, or, The Life and Death of Tom Thum the Great.
    The most successful of Fielding's many plays, this is an exuberant farce in the mock-heroic manner, ridiculing the 'Bombastic Greatness' of the fashionable grandiose tragedies of authors such as Nathaniel *Lee and James *Thomson, and similar in form to Buckingham's *The Rehearsal. It was published with a heavy apparatus of absurd scholarly notes, and a frontispiece by *Hogarth. *Swift declared that he had laughed only twice in his life, once at a Merry-Andrew and once at a performance of Tom Thumb.


A Journey from This World to The Next, the second volume of Miscellanies, by Henry *Fielding, published 1743.
    The author purports to have found an almost indecipherable manuscript, consisting of a series of 'Epistles', which was left in an attic by someone now departed to the West Indies. The soul leaves the body in its lodgings in Cheapside and finds itself, guided by Mercury, in a stage-coach with other departing souls. They pass through the City of Diseases and past the black marble Palace of Death, on to the Wheel of Fortune. At the door of Elysium Minos dictates who shall be permitted to enter; the generous and the honest are favoured, whatever their station, while the cruel and hypocritical are rejected. In the Elysian Fields heroes and writers of antiquity converse animatedly with Shakespeare, *Milton, *Dryden, *Addison, Fielding's own *Tom  Thumb, and many others. The spirit of Julian the Apostate appears and, for the major part of the book, discourses in several guises as slave, Jew, courtier, and statesman. The tale (the last part of which, about Anne Boleyn, may have been by Sarah *Fielding) comes to a somewhat haphazard end with the excuse that the rest of the 'manuscript' has been unfortunately burned. It was edited by C. Rawson, 1973; the best text is found in Miscellanies, by Henry Fielding, ed. Hugh Amory and Bertrand A. Goldgar (vol. ii, 1993).


Covent-Garden Journal, a periodical issued twice a week during 1752 by Henry Fielding containing some of the best work of his journalistic career. Under the name of Sir Alexander Drawcansir, Censor of Great Britain, Fielding attacks political abuses, scandal, hypocrisy, meanness, sexual morality, fashion, and many other targets. It contained an attack on Smollett's *Peregrine Pickle and *Roderick Random, to which that author replied in a slanderous pamphlet, A Faithful Narrative of . . . *Habbakuk Hilding, Justice, Dealer, and Chapman.

A Digression on Vanity

 

—oOo—

Jane Austen

Hilary Mantel dies

 

BBC News. "Wolf Hall Author Hilary Mantel Dies Aged 70." BBC News 24 Sept. 2022.*

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-63007307

         2022

Autor, Autor, Autor

 

Being Zuckerman

 

From Philip Roth's The Counterlife (319-20)

I suppose it can be said that I do sometimes desire, or even require,  a certain role to be rather clearly played that other people aren't always interestd enough to want to perform. I can only say in my defense that I ask no less of myself. Being Zuckerman is one long performance and the very opposite of what is thought of as being oneself. In fact, those who most seem to be themselves appear to me people impersonating what they think they might like to be, believe they ought to be, or wish to be taken to be by whoever is setting standards. So in earnest are they that they don't even recognize that being in earnest is the act. For certain self-aware people, however, this is not possible: to imagine themselves being themselves, living their own real, authentic, or genuine life, has for them all the aspects of a hallucination.

I realize that what I am describing, people divided in themselves, is said to characterize mental illness and is the absolute opposite of our idea of emotional integration. The whole Western idea of mental health runs in precisely the opposite direction: what is desirable is congruity between your self-consciousness and your natural being. But there are those whose sanity flows from the conscious separation of those two things. If there even is a natural being, an irreducible self, it is rather small, I think, and may even be the root of all impersonation—the natural being may be the skill itself, the innate capacity to impersonate. I'm talking about recognizing that one is actually a performer, rather than swallowing whole the guise of naturalness and pretending that it isn't a performance but you.

There is no you, Maria, any more than there's a me. There is only this way that we have established over the months of performing together, and what it is congruent with isn't "ourselves" but past performances—we're has-beens at heart, routinely trotting out the old, old act. What is the role I demand of you? I couldn't describe it, but I don't have to—you are such a great intuitive actress you do it, almost with no direction at all, an extraordinarily controlled and seductive performance. Is it a role that is foreign to you? Only if you wish to pretend that it is. It's all impersonation—in the absence of a self, one impersonates selves, and after a while impersonates best the self that best gets one through. (....)

All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self. It certainly does strike me as a joke about my self. What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself—a troupe of players that I have internalized, a permanent company of actos that I can call upon when a self is required, an ever-evolving stock of pieces and parts that forms my repertoire But I certainly have no self independent of my imposturing, artistic effects to have one. Nor would I want one. I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.

 

 

—oOo—

The Gift for Theatrical Self-Transformation

(from Philip Roth's The Counterlife, p. 210):

"What people envy in the novelist aren't the things that the novelists think are so enviable but the performing selves that the author indulges, the slipping irresponsibly in and out of his skin, the reveling not in 'I' but in escaping 'I', even if it involves—especially if it involves—piling imaginary afflictions upon himself. What's envied is the gift for theatrical self-transformation, the way they are able to loosen and make ambiguous their connection to a real life through the imposition of talent. The exhibitioinism of the superior artist is connected to his imagination, fiction is for him at once playful hypothesis and serious supposition, an imaginative form of inquiry—everything that exhibitionism is not. It is, if anything, closet exhibitionism, exhibitioinism in hiding. Isn't it true that, contrary to the general belief, it is the distance between the writer's life and his novel that is the most intriguing aspect of his imagination?"

Historia de varios padres

David Copperfield

 

300 Years of Laurence Sterne

Virginia Woolf (Academy Media)

'El Mapa y el Territorio': Espectáculo de autor

El Mapa y el Territorio: Espectáculo de autor