The Novel

by Steven Moore

  Although it reads like a liberated woman’s sex manual, a tale of female self-empowerment and of the subversion of unrealistic, male standards of behavior, the fact the Dialogues was written by a man casts doubts on its legitimacy, which Chorier tried to avoid (along with legal prosecution) by pretending this was the work of a 16th-century Spanish woman named Luisa Sigea, translated into Latin by Johannes Meursius. Male authorship also casts doubts on how we are to interpret the proactive female characters: their attitude toward sex sounds enlightened and healthy, but while Tullia defends lesbianism, she condemns male homosexuality (and anal sex) and argues that the ideal sexual position for a woman is beneath a man. The word sotadica in the title means homosexual (after the ancient Greek poet Sotades), so this “sotadic satire” may be at the expense of educated women, not in praise of them. Chorier’s novel appeared around the same time as Molière’s Les Précieuses ridicules (1659), and Elizabeth Wahl suggests Chorier is ridiculing his two smarty-pants cousins, reinforcing “misogynistic beliefs about the pretensions of educated women for the pleasure of a highly-educated, elite, and largely male audience” (220). Either way, Chorier’s novel is an intellectually stimulating work, brainier than the merely physically stimulating porn pumped out by hacks. There may be other erotic Neo-Latin novels nearly as good, but for reasons given in the next chapter (see pp. 239–40) I’m not going to pursue them.

  With one exception, the remaining Neo-Latin novels of the early modern period have not been deemed worthy of translation. The Dutch Catholic theologian Antoine Legrand (1629–99) wrote yet another Morish utopia “in confusing, crabbed” Latin about an ideal monarchy called Scydromedia (1669).160 Showing a little creativity, the German educator and scholar Johann Ludwig Prasch (1637–90) wrote Psyche Cretica (1685) to please his pious young wife Susanna. At the age of 23, she published an essay entitled “Réflexions sur les romans” in which she complained that modern novels were inferior to classical ones and wallowed too much in “l’Adultere & la Sodomie,” with the exception of Argenis and Giovanni Francesco Biondi’s L’Eromena.161 So her 47-year-old husband set out to write one to her taste. He adapted Apuleius’s story of Cupid and Psyche (from The Golden Ass) to explore the concept of natural law: “actions that are obligatory in a human being by virtue of the fact that he is human.”162 Set in ancient Greece, the novel describes the efforts of an Athenian prince to reunite Psyche of Crete with Cupid, which happens only at the end when she ascends to heaven. Equating natural law with the Christian concept of caritas, Prasch produced a spiritual allegory that Samuel Gott would have got behind, but which doesn’t sound very appealing. I hope Susanna liked it.

  Other admirers of Barclay resorted to his roman à clef format to track the final century of the Holy Roman Empire under the Habsburgs. There’s Anton Wilhelm Ertl’s Austriana Regina Arabiae (1688), the anonymous Aeneas Habspurgus (1695), Andreas Dugonic’s Argonauticorum sive de vellere aureo (1778)—which Jozef IJsewijn describes as “a huge mythological narrative under which, it seems, is hiding the Eastern policy of the Austrian emperors” (255)—and, closing out the 18th century, Christoph Friedrich Sangershausen’s Minos sive de rebus Friderici II apud inferos gestis (1797–99). Heinz Hoffmann diplomatically says these political novels are “still awaiting closer study and interpretation” (11)—perhaps after the restoration of the Holy Roman Empire.

  The one translated exception is The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground (Nicolai Klimii iter Subterraneum, 1741) by the Danish-Norwegian author Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754), who also wrote histories and plays. This is the crowning achievement of the Neo-Latin novel, the one exemplum an educated reader should know. Though nowadays it’s classified as science fiction, one of the first on the hollow-earth theme,163 it’s better understood as a stinging Menippean satire and as a radical contribution to the Enlightenment.

  The protagonist is a recent college graduate who can’t find a job. Exploring a Norwegian cave one day in 1665, Niels Klim tumbles down into the ether of the subterranean universe, which consists of the planet Nazar, its sun, and the Firmament (i.e., the underside of Earth). After orbiting for three days and killing a pesky griffin, Klim lands in Nazar’s principal country of Potu (a reverse utopia), inhabited like the rest of the planet by intelligent, mobile trees. In the first half of the novel, Klim records his experiences there: after he learns the Potuan language, Klim hopes for a royal appointment suitable to his high opinion of himself—he carries his college diploma with him, a comfort in times of frustration—but instead he is appointed the king’s messenger, for this biped can move more quickly than the trees. In this capacity, he learns much about Potu, a conservative but reasonable commonwealth far superior to anyplace in Europe. The rest of Nazar, not so much: in chapter 9, Klim tours the arboreal world and encounters various versions of utopia: the inhabitants of one land enjoy perfect health, but are indolent as a result; the leafy citizens of Lalac don’t have to labor, so they squander their lives in enervating luxury; the rich trees of Kimal spend all their times nervously guarding their riches, and so on. In Cocklecu, gender roles are reversed, to Klim’s disgust. (The queen keeps a seraglio of 300 handsome men, and Klim makes like a tree and leaves for fear of being added to them.) Mascattia is populated by absent-minded philosophers who let everything go to waste; the Land of Reason “languished for want of fools,” and the Land of Innocence is so dull that Klim feels he’s in a quiet forest back home. Tension, contrast, difference is missing from all these utopias, ironically the very irritants from which utopians want to escape. After visiting a dozen more distinct countries—all of this a parody of the grand tour of Europe wealthy graduates took at the time—Klim returns to Potu no wiser than before. To attain a higher position, he proposes a new law banning females from the Potuan government, allegedly for the greater good of the country, but frankly admitting “that my own private interest and a desire for revenge were the primum mobile of this project.”164 The king is shocked: “we are of the opinion that is it absurd and unjust entirely to exclude trees of the finest talents from public honours, especially as Nature, who does nothing in vain, can never be supposed to have given them all those notable advantages to no purpose” (9). (Remember, Holberg was writing in 1741, when the idea of women serving in government was almost unthinkable.) Consequently, Klim is banished to the Firmament, conveyed there by a giant bird.

  The second half of the novel tracks Klim’s “progress” from a lowly servant of the monkey king of Martinia (a parody of France) to the conqueror of the entire Firmament. The variety of lands there is more fantastic than those on Nazar: a land of corrupt jackdaws; Crotchet Island, inhabited by bass fiddles with arms and hands who communicate by playing themselves; other regions populated by animals enacting the symbolic roles European poets have given them; and Pyglossia, where people speak out of their fundaments, anticipating by two centuries the Talking Asshole in Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. (Holberg intended his fundamentalists to parody those who talk dirty in public.) The most primitive land Klim visits, to his humiliation, is the only one inhabited by humans like himself. A cultural imperialist of the worst sort, he imposes his European values on these simple people, teaching them warfare and weapons-manufacturing, and leads them into war against other Firmament nations, resulting in some 100,000 casualties. Chafing under his ruthless tyranny, his subjects rebel and drive him into hiding, where he finds a tunnel that leads him back up to Earth, 12 years after he left. He tells his story to an old friend, who advices him to keep it to himself and helps him find a modest position as a country curate. Klim’s manuscript is discovered after his death and published by his children.

  Niels Klim is the most novelistic of the Neo-Latin utopias because it is character-driven. Klim is not a passive transmitter of the sights but a character struggling with his sense of self-worth, exacerbated by his failure to find a job after graduation. His tutors in Potu judge him “extremely quick of apprehension, but of so weak and uneven a judgment that he hardly merits to
be considered as a rational creature” (3). Klim wants to show the king his college diploma in protest, but the king agrees with his tutors; another tells Klim “you only see the surface of things, and not the substance” (3). During Klim’s travels, he is quick to see how Potuan culture differs from European, but he is too much a victim of his pedantic education to grasp its superiority. He is surprised when everyone laughs after he boasts that in college he “had written three dissertations upon the slippers of the ancients,” and throughout the novel he shows off his useless classical education by quoting snippets from Latin authors (Ovid, Juvenal, Horace, Virgil), often misquoting them and/or misapplying them in the self-aggrandizing manner of Barclay’s Euphormio.165 Klim is exposed as the worst kind of European: superficial, provincial, misogynistic, closed-minded, imperialistic (his actions replicate the violent colonialism underway in the 17th century), and consequently he is the perfect narrator for Holberg’s sweeping indictment of European culture—of human nature, really, for the parade of folly on display here is still going strong today.

  There are obvious parallels between Niels Klim and Gulliver’s Travels—which likewise is as much a character study as a cultural satire—but Holberg’s novel has a greater affinity with novels of the French Enlightment like Montesquieu’s Persian Letters and Voltaire’s “philosophical romances.” Montesquieu’s epistolary novel comes to mind in a brilliant metafictional move in chapter 13 when Klim comes across a book entitled Tanian’s Journey to the Superterranean World, a looking-glass reversal of Niels Klim’s Journey to the Subterranean World narrated by a Tanachite (a nation of “rational tigers”) who visited Europe and reported back. The 11-page selection from Tanian’s book makes explicit the implicit criticism of European countries in Klim’s narrative, and (like Persian Letters) takes full advantage of the defamiliarization of a culture when seen through alien eyes. But instead of being humbled and enlightened by Tanian’s tigerish critique, Klim stops reading when the narrative reaches his homeland in Scandinavia:

  Thus far I patiently attended, but my indignation was now raised and I would hear no more, declaring that these were fictions of a partial writer, and one who was overrun with spleen. But when my heat a little abated, I began to form a more favourable judgment of this itinerary as I saw that the author, though he appeared in many places to be partial and not to have had the best regard to truth, was not, however, mistaken in his judgment, but had often hit the nail, as we say, on the head. (13)

  That doubles as Holberg’s summary of his achievement, one seconded by later writers. The novel was translated into all the major European languages in the 18th century, influenced Casanova’s own hollow-earth novel (see pp. 390–93 below), was partially translated by Thomas de Quincey, and is included in Roderick Usher’s occult library. In this case, Holberg’s choice of Neo-Latin was a wise one, for had he written Niels Klim in Danish, it would be even less known than it is now. Nevertheless, by the time Holberg published this fascinating novel, Latin had lost favor with the cultured classes, who had adopted a new lingua franca, if not yet in the world of science and scholarship, then certainly in le beau monde.

  Notes

  1 I’ll use DQ1 and DQ2 henceforth to distinguish between the two, and reserve Don Quixote only for the combined work. All quotations are from Grossman’s smooth translation (unless otherwise noted), and refer to volume/chapter.

  2 This is derived from datable events in the captive’s tale (1.39–41), though Cervantes paid little attention to chronology and makes an irreconcilable mess of it. See the article “Chronology in Cervantes’ works” in Mancing’s Cervantes Encyclopedia (145–46), a worthy squire for any scholarly knight.

  3 Lectures on Don Quixote, 55.

  4 This 16-year-old beauty falls for and runs away with a flashy ex-soldier who robs her and abandons her in a cave. He is characterized by an obstreperous fashion sense, “decked out in a thousand colors and wearing a thousand glass trinkets and thin metal chains.” For an illuminating sociological treatise on this phenomenon, see Jay Louis’s Hot Chicks with Douchebags (NY: Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2008).

  5 “Prettiest Girl of All Time,” an acronym from Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

  6 Ioan Williams argues that this story of a man driven crazy by suspicions of his wife’s chastity is a realistic version of DQ’s basic plot: the husband “reveals himself to be effectively mad because he allows an obsession with the relationship between concept and reality to destroy his whole life” (13).

  7 “Partial Magic in the Quixote,” in Labyrinths, 194.

  8 Page xxx in her edition of Exemplary Stories.

  9 Lacey, The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, 87.

  10 “Foreword” to Nabokov’s Lectures on Don Quixote, xiv.

  11 In his exemplary story Rinconete and Cortadillo—which is mentioned in 1.47—Cervantes describes a Seville crime syndicate modeled on a religious fraternity; its members are practicing Catholics, and its newest member Rinconete is “astounded at how certain and confident they were that they would go to heaven as long as they did not neglect their devotions, while their lives were dedicated to robbery, murder, and crimes against God” (p. 105 in Lipson’s edition). Lurking behind this story and probably Don Quixote as well is Erasmus’ Manual of a Christian Knight (Enchiridion militis christiani [1503], translated into Spanish in 1526), which urges Catholics to practice their religion’s ethics and not to limit themselves to its rites and observances. The scholarly consensus is that Cervantes’ religious views were influenced by those of the Dutch humanist.

  12 While “the book of Judges presents an extraordinarily rich collection of thrilling war stories and tales of individual heroism in the battles between the Israelites and their neighbors . . . [it] has very little to do with what really happened in the hill country of Canaan in the Early Iron Age”—Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 99, 122.

  13 This should go without saying, but some get so carried away with the idea of Don Quixote that they neglect the text that contains him. (He’s a literary character, not a Rorschach test.) Davenport says he knew a professor who taught the novel without ever having read it (xiv).

  14 The first scene in Western literature: in the late-16th century Chinese novella Scholar Liu’s Quest of the Lotus, a student goes to a bookstore to buy some porn novels (Wang, Ming Erotic Novellas, 93).

  15 Pricksongs & Descants, 79. This is from the prologue to his “Seven Exemplary Fictions.”

  16 But rationality isn’t everything, and Sancho is hardly an admirable character. He abandons his family without informing them to accompany Don Quixote, he is greedy, a liar (especially regarding Dulcinea), an eager supporter of the African slave trade (1.29), “a mortal enemy of the Jews” (2.8), illiterate, and a vulgar materialist: “You’re worth what you have, and what you have is what you’re worth” (2.20). As governor of his “island,” he speaks like a right-wing conservative: “I intend to favor those who labor, maintain the privileges of the gentry, reward the virtuous, and, above all, respect religion and the honor of the clergy” (2.69). Cervantes knew he would have been banished from Sancho’s plutocracy.

  17 Of almost no value—except as a cautionary example of how religion can erode a fine mind—are the essays of the Spanish Catholic philosopher Miguel de Unamuno gathered under the title Our Lord Don Quixote. For example, he passes over the key book-burning chapter (1.6) because “It is a matter of books and not of life” (52), blind to the glaring fact Don Quixote is all about the influence of books on life and the crucial importance, therefore, of choosing wisely among them.

  18 Beyond Good and Evil, section 154, in Kaufmann’s Basic Writings, 280. What did Nietzsche think of Cervantes’ novel? “Today we read Don Quixote with a bitter taste in our mouths, almost with a feeling of torment, and would thus seem very strange and reprehensible to its author and his contemporaries: they read it with the clearest conscience in the world as the most cheerful of books, they laughed themselves almost to death over it”�
��On the Genealogy of Morals (2.6), in Basic Writings, 502–3.

  19 Book 4, chap. 13 in the faithful Weller/Calahan translation, hereafter cited by book/chapter.

  20 See Williamsen’s “Beyond Romance: Metafiction in Persiles,” which includes a chart depicting the novel’s nesting, Russian-dolllike narrative structure (112).