ANIMAL LANGUAGES

Will we ever be able to communicate with our friends—hold that—our kinfolk, the animals? It seems highly unlikely, but that does not mean that they don’t have some sort of language among their own kind. Meanwhile it is of interest to note our attempts to capture their language in our language, if for no other reason out of respect for their individuality.

It is clearly difficult to reproduce those animal sounds, which strike different nationalities differently. That may not be surprising; what is surprising is how peculiar some nations’ perceptions are, but also how many similarities there exist after all.

One of my professors once spent some time eliciting and examining these renderings from his students, and covering the blackboard with them. I can’t go that far, but do wish to speculate about those that I do know, the degree of plausibility attesting to different degrees of sensitivity to language of any kind from nation to nation. And that is a matter of indisputable interest.

Animal sounds can be rendered as a verb or a noun, or a mere exclamation, as in the Anglo-American version of a pig’s alleged oink-oink. This seems to me particularly misguided, its persistence a proof of, dare I say it, pigheadedness. No pig would be caught dead saying oink, an arbitrary coinage by tone-deaf observers.

What do pigs (highly intelligent animals, by the way) really sound like? Germans hear it as “quieken” or “quieksen,” which may be apt, although it makes a creature built like an Italian tenor sound like a soprano. I prefer the Hungarian verb, “roffogni,” with its masculine roughness, although based on an admittedly unscientific assumption, even if I did once, as a boy, briefly enjoy a piglet as pet. I am ultimately partial to the Russian version, which is “hryu-hryu,” with the vowel sound as in foot, not boot.

Almost unique agreement, or near-agreement, prevails about the cat sound: meow to us, “miau” in German, and “miaou” the Franch noun, although French also has the more Racinian—or is it Molieresque?--sounding verb form “miauler.” Italian offers the noun “miagolo” and the verb “miagolare,” which gives the sound a Tuscan, not to say Dantesque, quality.

Serbian, if I recollect correctly, calls it “mrnjao,” with the j pronounced as our y. (More about that r anon.) Only Hungarian wants to be different with its verb “nyavogni,” although a remote resemblance remains. What matters, however, is the universal similarity, attesting to our close attention to this beloved pet. Of interest too is the earlier English rendering of the cat verb as “mew,” from the Middle English “meuen,” as in Hamlet’s “The cat will mew.”

There is no such agreement about the other cat sound, which English renders not unpersuasively as purr. Here the French too does nicely with the verb “ronronner,”  the repeated “ron” syllable conveying the monotony of the purr. Notable is the presence of the apt r-sound, also in the German “schnurren,” although that “sch” is clearly more Teutonic than feline.

Interestingly, there is no such near-unanimity when it comes to our other domestic pet, the dog, onomatopoetically the bowwow. What there is, however, in most languages is the plosive b, as in bark, “bellen “ (German), and “aboyer,” (French). But not so in the Serbian “lajati” or the Hungarian “ugatni,” which strike me as off target. Here too the Spanish departs, what with the verb “ladrar” and the noun “ladrido.” Only the two a’s in the verb seem moderately apt.

Moving out of the house into the yard, we find some correspondences again. Thus the rooster’s crowing is “krahen” in German; the French roosters actually sing, “chantent,” with a droll lyric, “cocorico,” which becomes in German “kukuriku,” and in English, rather too fancifully, cock-a-doodle-do. There is also some agreement about the donkey’s braying, heehaw in English, “ia” (pronounced ee-ah) in German.

Regardless of differences, though, it is nice that there are words in all these languages for animal sounds. This is not so obvious when you consider that every language has certain words for which there are no equivalents in other ones.

Take the verb frown, for which you would expect every major language to have  its one-word term. Not so. In both French and German it takes three words to convey that, translatable literally as wrinkle the brow. Can anything be concluded from such a phenomenon—say, that frowning comes more readily, more naturally to English speakers? I rather doubt it. Well, maybe to the British, but not to us happy Americans.

What it seems to mean is that different nations have latched on to different things to focus their atention on and coin a word for. Indeed there are words for which there is not even a three-word equivalent. I think of the wonderful Hungarian term for an irresistible melody, “fulbemaszo,” literally crawling into the ear, four words.

Or what about the German “zum knochenkotzen,” something not just vomitory, but so awful it makes you vomit solid bones? Or take a word that is so germane to a language, so perfect in it, that another language just takes it over as is. Thus the French “gaffe” and “faux pas,” both of which synonyms have become adopted by English, which did not have their equivalent, though misstep would do. Yet it was appropriate to go for those French words, French people being such an elegant, formal, ceremonious sort, as to be especially sensitive to breaches of good behavior.

Amusingly, sometimes a borrowing from another language results in a mistake. Thus the Hungarian took over “smoking” from the British, thinking misguidedly that it meant tuxedo, or what we prefer to call dinner jacket. It also took over, with the correct meaning, the dish called ham and eggs, but turned it into “hemendeks.” Similarly, it adopted football (i.e., soccer) with the Magyarization “futbal,” informally “ foci.” Serbian came up with “fudbal,” while German made it truly Germanic as “Fussball.”

But let us get back to animals. Here the letter r tends to sound especially ferocious, hence the roar of the lion becomes a “rugissement” in French. But the English is not that specific: roars can come from all kinds of nonleonine sources  And the German verb, “brullen” is a sound emitted by an unhappy infant as readily as by a lion’s maw.

Now for something very curious. While other German songbirds sing, “singen,” the nightingales do something else, “schlagen.” But that verb primarily means to beat, yet why on earth would that delicate, most musical song of the nightingale be a beating? Nightingale, by the way, is a comely word, as is the German “Nachtigall,” similarly based on the fact that nightingales sing at night. Some parallel obtains in Romance languages, too, where the French nightingale is a “rossignol,” and the Spanish one a “ruisenor,” with a tilda on the n, which may subsume “ruido” (sound) and “senor” (gentleman) implying that this bird and its sound are aristocratic.

English has two very good, onomatopoetic words for bird language: chirp and twitter, the latter even better in German: “zwietschen.”  And the horned owl, in German, is the “Uhu,” a real hoot. But other owls, in any language I can think of, have no onomatopoetic names, unless you make something of the “ou” in the French “hibou.”

Most birds in many languages simply cry, which is very human of them. I can think, however, of one amusing divergence, what the thrush does in Hungarian: he whistles: “fucsul,” with umlauts on both u’s. That conveys a whistle sovereignly, but does a thrush really whistle? In Hungarian, he apparently does, and so does the canary, for which the term surely fits.
  

ABSTRACT ART?

What could be more pointless at this late date than protesting against abstract art? As soon complain about the ballpoint for dislodging the fine fountain pen. Not, by the way, that earlier protests would have landed on less deaf ears. Abstract art is in, and figurative art is seriously imperiled.

There is some hope to be gleaned from the state of music, where the twelve-tone kind seemed to be taking over, only to be nowadays pretty much abandoned. But then music is music and fine arts are fine arts, and it is dangerous trying to find analogies between them. Especially since a great composer like Alban Berg managed to transcend categories almost imperceptibly. Whereas abstract art cannot pretend to be anything else, perhaps not even art.

I can well understand the rise of abstraction: the feeling that painting had already done it all, and what it couldn’t, photography did. Of course, originality remains open to major talent, and no one would mistake a Renoir nude for a Rubens, even though both painters favored chubby women. It is the plethora of lesser artists that has muddied the stream, leaving still other lesser artists wondering what is left.

 A sense of being latecomers prevails for both the artists and their followers, and drives them into something different, however desperate. So a Kandinsky or Mondrian, who could do other things, jump into abstraction. And the same holds for the sculptors. Consider the trajectory from Rodin to David Smith. But there were painters who, bless them, worked between reality and abstraction, and managed to be Nicolas de Stael or Maria Vieira da Silva, and even the kind of abstractionists that still were able to keep a toe in reality, like Pierre Soulages.

But when we come to full-fledged abstraction, I bridle. Several problems present themselves. Anyone genuinely cherishing a work of abstraction and not merely responding to some hype, must find in it something ineffable to respond to. But what if he can’t? Must he take someone else’s word for it? And what if two viewers like the same thing for vastly different reasons? Doesn’t that cast some doubt about

it? Or is art meant to be some kind of Rorschach test, make from it what ever your id wishes?

Another problem is: why should I consider something art if I, a non-artist, could do it just as well? Or if a small child or chimpanzee could do it too?  Any drip can dribble paint, and whether you call it in fancy French tachisme, or in plain Amurrican action painting, why can’t I say it’s spinach and to hell with it?

Thus in the January 10th New York Times there was a color reproduction of a painting by Ellsworth Kelly called “Black Red-Orange,” part of a many-million-dollar request promised to the Philadelphia Art Museum. It is a rectangle whose top third is solid black, and the other thirds something between plain red and orange. Anyone could have daubed it if he lacked the good sense not to bother, or perhaps if he had the good sense to bother, since this pitiful artifact was clearly worth millions.

To me, some of the archenemies are Pollock and Rothko, though of course there are countless others of their persuasion. Nor am I impressed by the usual defense: “Ah, but Pollock knew how to dribble: how many colors, how much of each, how big a canvas.” I would wager that even if he had dribbled entirely differently, or indeed blindfoldedly, the thing would have drawn the same adulation, the same claims for its perfection, as long as the same great name was attached to the work.

I keep repeating something I wrote long ago: the history of art stretches from Anonymous to Untitled, from when only the work mattered and the maker not at all, to when only the signature matters and the work not at all. Hordes of contemporary artists spew out Untitleds, usually appending numbers to them, otherwise not even they would know whether this was Untitled 147 or Untitled 191. This is not the same as when Whistler calls a specific portrait or townscape “Arrangement in Grey and Black” or “Symphony in White,” wishing to call attention to color harmonies, although that too is pretty show-offy.

I personally have some respect for an abstraction by Wols as opposed to one by Franz Kline, but how can I prove to someone with the opposite taste that he is wrong and I am right? And, in any case, I would gladly trade my Wols, if I had one, for a figurative Magritte, Delvaux or Ensor to name only some Belgians. To anyone who says one can no longer be figurative and great. I submit such names as counterproof.

There are in fact any number of ways one can still be figurative and great. Take the alternative universe of Klee that still has recognizable figures and features often comic, irrelevant titles; or the world of impossible juxtapositions, fragmentations, and rearrangements of realities as in Magritte. Or the subtle perversion of Balthus’s provocative Lolitas, langorously effete youths, and demoniac cats—or even the bizarre Balthus cityscapes and off-kilter landscapes that are just real enough.

What I am finally asking here comes down to this: to what standard is a piece of abstract art answerable? By what authority is it proclaimed art? With figurative art, no problem. Even though it may have needed the endorsement of the court, the church, the rich citizens, it had, has, something bigger than that: pleasing the onlookers, whoever they be.

Whether a painting had the delicacy of Raphael, the forcefulness of Michelangelo, the faint mystery of Leonardo, one recognized in it something beyond mere representation of life, though certainly also that. This Lehmbruck or Giacometti may be thinner than life, this Barlach or Lachaise thicker than life, this obese Botero or pockmarked Kokoschka a comment on life, but somewhere behind all these works lurks humanity, however much some aspect of it is over- or underplayed.

There is also originality: no one else has done it quite like this before. There is a temerity behind these works: this Schiele is significantly more tormented than ordinary reality; this assemblage of imaginary beasts and triangular humans in Wilfredo Lam is a comment on the human jungle.

But what does a piece of abstract art have to do with, to say about life; at best I’d have it be a piece of wallpaper, or, stretching it, the blur with which the newborn perceives the world. Or could it be an unreliable view of subatomic particles? Or, more likely, none of the above. But let it be signed Philip Guston or Helen Frankenthaler, and it becomes a respected commodity, like a car signed Cadillac, or a computer signed Mac.

But no matter how signed they are, I refuse a Rothko or Pollock the status of art. I will even reject some phases of Picasso, which I would gladly trade for a Hopper, a Burchfield or a John Singer Sargent. Or, to show how far to the left I will go, I proclaim a fondness for Andre Beaudin (1895-1979). The influence of his master, Juan Gris, that most lyrical cubist, is evident, but this is a cubism lighter, more fluid, with an almost breathable airiness.

As Jacques Lascagne has written, “Beaudin is a painter of pure light as it appears  emerging from the night. His art, in its limpidity never escapes from honest reasoning. It is full of subtle poetry. Whether it takes as its model horses fighting, a horse race, or the varied faces of Paris, or the flight of a bird before an open window, he liberates the universal quality while at the same time adorning the image with the subtlest nuances of the passing moment. With a few simple lines, harmonizing with cold, vivid colors, he depicts the birth of day or its various hours.”

Or here is another source: “Whatever his subject, Beaudin decomposes and recomposes it to suit himself, stripping the world of its external characteristics, its inertia and weight. And replacing them with a subtle, coherent ensemble of line and color. His work also includes tapestries [I have seen and admired them], etchings, lithographs, sculptures, and illustrations for the works of a number of poets.”

I do wish to emphasize that airiness that somehow seems to lift the painting off the canvas, and convey its feeling like that of a cool fruit juice to the parched throat. As Reynold Arnould has written, “These are colors rather murmuring the way a spring emerges from the earth. And they are, also naturally, used sparingly in each work.” Beaudin has become a major, duly rewarded artist, earning the Grand Prix National des Arts in 1962.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

SEQUELS

There are in my view both real sequels and quasi sequels. A real sequel is when the author of a book, say, Margaret Mitchell, or someone else writes a novel about what happened to Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler after Gone With the Wind. A quasi sequel is really a repeat appearance, as when Conan Doyle or J. K. Rowling writes another Sherlock Holmes or Harry Potter fiction, about the hero’s further, new adventures.

Both phenomena come about when a beloved protagonist elicits a repeat performance of some kind. Personally, I am no great fan of these procedures. But sequels of either kind have been wildly successful, and are in fact a tried old stratagem, as the careers of, for example, Balzac and Alexandre Dumas pere compellingly illustrate.

All very understandable, given the hard world in which fiction writers operate, although the same phenomenon prevails in spades at the movies and, to some extent, even in the theater, just ask Neil Simon. And now there is a stage version of Harry Potter in the planning. But isn’t a novel, say, a complete entity, self-sufficiently featuring a beginning, middle and end, and in no need of further elaboration any more than a lyric poem does. Although there is such a thing as a sonnet sequence—just ask William Shakespeare.

What is it exactly that hates endings and gives rise to sequels?  First of all, it is popularity. Why wouldn’t the cherished scoundrel Vautrin figure in several Balzac novels? Why shouldn’t beloved Harry Potter make more millions for J. K. Rowling? Why shouldn’t there have been a series of ever longer novels about the three beloved musketeers—really four, counting d’Artagnan—and their descendants?

Popularity, i.e., sales, have much to answer for, as well as the fact that it is safer to bring back a well-regarded fictional hero than to invent a new one. But something else also plays a part here: human inquisitiveness. Just as we are curious to know more about friends, enemies, celebrities, we are curious about what happened to fictitious characters after, say, they married and “lived happily ever after.” Tolstoy to the contrary, happy families are not all alike, if for no other reason than that, in real life, they seldom remain blissful forever. If, God forbid, there were a sequel to War and Peace, would everything be hunky-dory for Pierre and Natasha?

And to think that even Goethe saw fit to write a sequel to the so very satisfactorily completed Faust part one with a Faust part two. And, as we all know, Shakespeare brought back the rogue Falstaff in a sequel, The Merry Wives of Windsor, whether or not, as reputed, at Queen Elizabeth’s request, hardly matters. (The groundlings’ request, more likely.) Success plus curiosity begets sequels.

But there is a further trigger for sequels: our fear of mortality, our conscious or unconscious wish to live forever. Somehow or other, the persistence through sequels of a fictitious character translates into a sense of our own not coming to an end. I fully believe that young persons reading about Huck Finn’s striking out for the Western Territories suggests to them that he is immortal, and that they themselves will be around reading about his further adventures someday, somewhere.

To be sure, there are readers who don’t want sequels of contemporary novels. They are the ones aware of the backlog of great classics they haven’t read yet and want to catch up with more Dickens or Dostoevsky or D. H. Lawrence. They are very happy that, for instance, Robert Graves stopped at two Emperor Claudius novels: one sequel was quite enough.  But young readers especially crave sequels, and thus for example Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking novels have had sequels upon sequels in print, film and television series. For young German readers, there were (are?) the Wild West novels of Karl May that kept bringing back the great white hunter Old Shatterhand and his Indian chief friend, Winnetu. They can be thought of as very persistent, very numerous sequels.

And sequels persist. They may have not much more in common than an imaginary town or region, as the audiences of Horton Foote or readers of William Faulkner well know. It could be argued that a Steinbeck locale is at least as real as his characters, and that geography itself can provide sequels. In any case, continuum is a great human desideratum, and sequels of whatever kind cater to it.

Speaking for myself, I’d be perfectly happy if there were no more sequels, though I can also live with them. Among sequels I now include also revised second editions of previously published books. Scholarly works, dictionaries, encyclopedias keep coming out in new, more up-to-date, or merely expanded, improved editions, and such reissues can be infuriating.

What am I to do if I spent a tidy sum on, say, a history of the printed book, or of Shakespeare stagings, or of the Paris underworld through the ages, and out comes a new, presumably improved edition a few years later? Throw out the previous version, even though it was a first edition, and maybe had a finer binding, wider margins, better paper and larger print? Do I simply ignore the revised version and merely scowl at the one on my shelf as a sort of intellectual coitus interruptus?

I count myself lucky for not being a completist, and can ignore such sequels as the complete Waverly novels of Sir Walter Scott. Yet I cannot but admire anyone who  has read them all. Then again, there was the fellow who, seeking employment in a college English department, spouted excerpts from the least known ones among them, thereby conveying the impression that he knew the whole lot intimately from alpha to omega--without even having glanced at the rest.

And then there is that most pernicious kind of sequel, as when a major author revises a lengthy fiction of his own and both versions are considered important enough for us, if we are serious academics, to have to read hundreds of pages in quasi duplicate. This is very much the case of Moerike’s Maler Nolten. Or what about Great Expectations, for which Dickens first had a less happy ending, but at Bulwer-Lytton’s urging came up with a happy one? We have here a work that is its own sequel, and are we now, as teachers, responsible for both versions?

Nor let us forget that late nineteenth-century novels tended to come out on the installment plan, several chapters at a time over a long period, earning payment for each segment, and so prompting the author to make his novels doorstoppers. Robert Graves memorably came up with a considerably shortened version of one of the Dickens novels (David Copperfield, as I recall)) just by cutting the word “little” each time it occurred.

The matter of sequels makes one wonder: Is shorter better? Would Proust’s magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time, be better if it were less literally magnum? It is really a series of novels, each a sequel of the preceding and sizable in itself, with quite a parade of more or less ancillary characters. Yet these sequels with their large casts are in order, for we thus get a panorama of how personalities evolve and relationships change, and how memory in pursuit of the past rounds out our brief term on earth. Better than perhaps anyone else, Proust has validated the sequel.

But this does not mean that we want sequels from lesser writers. Do we need a tetralogy from Jeffrey Eugenides? Do we want Erica Jong to dredge up her checkered past for us in ever more novelistic searches? How many times do we wish Margaret Attwood to reinvent herself? Isn’t even late Hemingway an unnecessary sequel to  earlier Hemingway? To say nothing of Thomas Mann’s Joseph novels, of which even one may be de trop. How many epigones will grind out posthumous James Bond tomes? How often did Updike have to go Rabbiting without a strong case of sequelitis?  But at least his are bona fide, thought-through sequels. We have too many writers nowadays who don’t even know that they are writing sequels.