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appears to Manuel at the pool of Haranton. There, he convinces Manuel to abandon his job as a swineherd—that is, to rebel against the elemental forces of life—and to pursue
knight-errantry in seeking the beautiful yet unattainable Lady Gisele. Eager to make a fine 48
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figure in the world, Manuel repudiates his lover Suskind, a mysterious creature who represents the unconscious desires of the libido, and sets forth, unaware that he is being victimized by Horvendile, the diabolical spirit of romance. On his journey, he has a series of encounters with allegorical women. He first meets Niafer, a rather plain kitchen servant, who symbolizes worldly wisdom and domesticity. Dressed as a boy, she accompanies Manuel
on his quest until, when faced with his own death unless he gives up Niafer, Manuel de-
cides to sacrifice her to Grandfather Death. His next encounter is with the Princess
Alianora, who represents political power, worldly position, and the undercurrent of sexual excitement that accompanies them. Manuel surrenders to lust, but eventually rejects
Alianora, discovering the limitations of self-seeking gallantry. His third important en-
counter is with the supernal Queen Freydis, who symbolizes creative inspiration. Using
magic, Manuel persuades her to leave her realm of Audela and enter the ordinary world.
She does so out of love for him and animates a set of clay figures that he sculpted as a swineherd. These eventually enter history as major writers.
Manuel soon discovers that Freydis cannot give him fulfillment; only Niafer can, so he
submits to thirty years of slavery to The Head of Misery to bring Niafer back from the
dead. Then he settles down to a comfortable existence as a husband, father, and the Count of Poictesme. One day, however, while watching his wife and daughter through the window of Ageus (Usage) in his palace study, he discovers to his horror that their figures are only scratched on the glass—that beyond the window is a chaos containing the images of
preexistence, including the disturbing Suskind. Manuel must then choose whether to die
himself or to allow his child Melicent to die in his place, while he resumes his relationship with Suskind. Acting decisively, he murders Suskind, bricks up the study window, and departs with Grandfather Death. In the last chapter, Grandfather Death accompanies him to
the River Lethe, where he watches the images of his life as they sweep by him. Then the
scene blurs, as Cabell moves his readers back to the pool of Haranton where Manuel be-
gan his quest. He repeats the dialogue of the first chapter, in which Miramon refers to
Count Manuel, who has just died. Thus, Cabell ends with an appropriate reminder of his
view of life as a cycle in which one life passes into other lives through heredity.
Manuel is Cabell’s man of action, driven by dreams of a better life than that of a swineherd, yet the pursuit of dreams proves frustrating. Even in the mythical realm of
Poictesme, Cabell constantly emphasizes through allegory the realities of death, misery, and madness. Life, Manuel learns, is full of obligations: to Alianora, Melicent, and especially to Niafer. Indeed, Cabell underscores this lesson by structuring his episodes into five books titled “Credit,” “Spending,” “Cash Accounts,” “Surcharge,” and “Settlement.”
It is in confronting his obligations, however, that Manuel finds fulfillment. The romantic quest results in a comic exposure of man’s limitations, but the final picture is of human dignity in accepting those limitations. Manuel can never completely obliterate discontent, but he decides that the human possessions of a kingdom, a wife, and a family, even if they are illusions, are better than a return to the primitive unconsciousness. Thus, although he 49
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never achieves the object of his initial quest, he does transcend experience through belief in his destined role as the Redeemer of Poictesme and his ultimate rejection of lust for love.
Figures of Earth, because of its confusing cast of characters—some of whom are figures of earth and some unearthly—and the artificialities of Cabell’s prose, makes difficult reading. The effort is rewarding, however, for Cabell offers some intriguing insights into man’s values: that the demands of the family and the aspirations of the individual often conflict; that the world is duplicitous; and that the search for perfection involves paradoxically the self-realization of imperfection. The work is thought-provoking and timely.
Jurgen
Jurgen follows the same movement as Figures of Earth: the pursuit of perfection, the discovery that it does not exist, and then the satisfaction achieved through accepting actuality; it merely views these ideas from a different perspective. The controlling concept is justice, which to Cabell’s title character, a poetry-producing pawnbroker, means that in the universe, every idealistic desire should have a means of being fulfilled. Jurgen’s problem, however, is that existence is unjust; since man’s intellect increases as his physical prowess diminishes, he can never completely realize his potential. Granting Jurgen a temporary respite from his dilemma, Cabell allows his middle-aged poet to retain his youthful body and then lets his reader see the subsequent effects on his protagonist’s values.
Jurgen began as a tale titled “Some Ladies and Jurgen,” which Cabell published in The Smart Set in 1918. His novel simply expands on the narrative of that story. The hero meets a monk, who curses the devil for causing him to trip over a stone. Jurgen, playing the
devil’s advocate, defends evil. Shortly thereafter, he meets a black gentleman who thanks him for the defense and expresses the hope that his life will be carefree. When Jurgen replies that such a life is impossible, since he is married, the stranger promises to reward him. The reward turns out to be the disappearance of Jurgen’s wife, Dame Lisa. When he
returns home, she is gone; he later learns that she has been seen near a cave outside town.
Feeling an obligation, he goes there, only to encounter the black gentleman—who, he
learns, is Koshchei the Deathless, the controller of the universe. Koshchei tempts Jurgen by evoking three women that he feels would be more suitable for a poet: Queen
Guenevere, Queen Anaïtis, and Queen Helen—standing respectively for faith, desire, and
vision. Jurgen rejects each, however, and asks for Dame Lisa back. She appears, lectures him, and then leaves for home. In response, Jurgen praises her as a source of poetic inspiration more valuable than faith, desire, and vision, and then follows her home.
Expanding his narrative for the novel, Cabell added two fantasy sequences that would
explain Jurgen’s ultimate attraction to Lisa. In the first, Jurgen visits the Garden between Dawn and Sunrise, where he relives falling in love with Dorothy la Désirée, one of the
daughters of Manuel. She destroys his romantic bliss when she marries the wealthy
Heitman Michael and then engages in adulterous affairs. Because of Dorothy’s behavior,
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Jurgen marries Lisa. In the second episode, Jurgen, having been granted by Mother Sereda the recovery of a bygone Wednesday, fantasizes about how his relationship with Dorothy
might have developed. He imagines himself killing Heitman Michael and claiming her,
but as the Wednesday ends, he finds himself embracing the Dorothy of reality, an aged
femme fatale.
Cabell also expanded his original tale by depicting Jurgen’s adventures in five realms:
Glathion, Cocaigne, Leukê, Hell, and Heaven. Throughout these episodes, Jurgen as-
sumes the roles of charlatan and womanizer, as he tests historical systems of values. In Glathion, he examines the medieval tradition of Christian chivalry, but rejects it as being irrational. In Cocaigne, he becomes equally
dissatisfied with hedonistic paganism. Leukê, a stronghold of the Hellenic tradition, teaches him the danger of the realm of utilitarian Philistia. In Hell, Jurgen learns of the sin of pride, and in Heaven he encounters selfless love. Feeling the shadow of worldly wisdom trailing him, Jurgen finally decides to give up his youthful body and return to the domestic comforts that Dame Lisa can provide. He
trades the ideal for the actual, yet in so doing bestows romantic value on his ordinary
existence and his ordinary wife.
Although entertaining, Jurgen lacks clarity of design. The reader who is steeped in mythology may enjoy Cabell’s manipulation of the legends of Faust, Don Juan, King Arthur, Troilus and Cressida, and Ulysses and Penelope, but somehow, the integration of the hero’s adventures with the narrative line exploring the feelings between husband and wife is incomplete. The episodic looseness of the novel is distracting. Thus, modern readers, like those titillated readers of the 1920’s, may be absorbed by Jurgen’s amorous exploits without fully considering Cabell’s analysis of the values that make life worth living.
Cabell’s great achievement is that he celebrated the illusion-making capacity of the
mind while simultaneously exposing man’s follies in pursuing dreams. He merged the tra-
ditions of humanism and skepticism. Reacting against naturalism, Cabell had the courage
to present a transcendent view of life—one that acknowledged not man’s impotency, but
his potential. A meticulous craftsman, a daring iconoclast, an imaginative thinker, Cabell deserves recognition as a major writer of the twentieth century.
Lynne P. Shackelford
Other major works
short fiction: The Line of Love, 1905; Gallantry, 1907; Chivalry, 1909; The Certain Hour, 1916; The Music from Behind the Moon, 1926.
play: The Jewel Merchants, pb. 1921.
poetry: From the Hidden Way, 1916.
nonfiction: Branchiana, 1907; Branch of Abingdon, 1911; Beyond Life, 1919; The Judging of Jurgen, 1920; Joseph Hergesheimer, 1921; Taboo, 1921; Straws and Prayer-Books, 1924; Some of Us, 1930; These Restless Heads, 1932 (includes two short stories and personal reminiscences); Special Delivery, 1933; Ladies and Gentlemen, 1934; 51
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Of Ellen Glasgow, 1938; The St. Johns, 1943 (with A. J. Hanna); Let Me Lie, 1947; Quiet, Please, 1952; As I Remember It, 1955; Between Friends: Letters of James Branch Cabell and Others, 1962 (Margaret Freeman Cabell and Padraic Colum, editors); The Letters of James Branch Cabell, 1975 (Edward Wagenknecht, editor).
Bibliography
D’Ammassa, Don. “James Branch Cabell: No Fit Employment for a Grown Man.” In Dis-
covering Classic Fantasy Fiction: Essays on the Antecedents of Fantastic Literature, edited by Darrell Schweitzer. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1996. Essay on
Cabell’s fantasy fiction is part of a collection of essays focusing on the exploration of the origins of the modern fantasy genre. Contributors discuss how late nineteenth and
early twentieth century writers’ creation of places and people who could exist only in
the imagination laid the groundwork for subsequent novels by J. R. R. Tolkien and
others.
Davis, Joe Lee. James Branch Cabell. New York: Twayne, 1962. Reliable biography also presents analysis of Cabell’s writings. Includes a list of bibliographical references.
Ginés, Montserrat. “James Branch Cabell: Quixotic Love, the Exercise of Self-Decep-
tion.” In The Southern Inheritors of Don Quixote. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Analyzes the work of five southern writers—Cabell, Mark Twain,
William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Walker Percy—whose fiction expressed the ide-
als and spirit of Don Quixote. Describes how the writers were sympathetic to idealistic
characters who tilted at windmills and points out the similarities between the Spain of
Miguel de Cervantes and the social and economic conditions of the American South.
Himelick, Raymond. James Branch Cabell and the Modern Temper: Three Essays. New
York: Revisionist Press, 1974. Explores realism and romance, the fact and the dream,
in Cabell’s novels. Himelick sees Cabell as an antiromantic whose novels convey his
understanding of life as a “grotesque comedy.”
Inge, Thomas M., and Edgar E. MacDonald, eds. James Branch Cabell: Centennial Es-
says. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. Compilation of essays, originally presented at a celebration of the centennial of Cabell’s birth at Virginia
Commonwealth University, provides both biographical information on the author and
critical analysis of his works. Includes a bibliographical essay.
MacDonald, Edgar E. James Branch Cabell and Richmond-in-Virginia. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Very detailed, authoritative biography focuses on how
Cabell was influenced by living in Richmond, Virginia, in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. MacDonald is a senior Cabell scholar at the James Branch Cabell
Library at Virginia Commonwealth University. Includes an excellent bibliography.
Riemer, James D. From Satire to Subversion: The Fantasies of James Branch Cabell. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. Devotes separate chapters to The Cream of the Jest, Jurgen, Figures of Earth, The High Place, The Silver Stallion, and Something About 52
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Eve—these books, Riemer argues, represent Cabell’s greatest achievements. Includes an introduction that provides a good overview of the writer’s career.
Tarrant, Desmond. James Branch Cabell: The Dream and the Reality. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967. Critical study of Cabell’s work examines the author as
mythmaker. Discusses both Cabell’s early and later writings.
Van Doren, Carl, H. L. Mencken, and Hugh Walpole. James Branch Cabell: Three Es-
says. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1967. Valuable contribution to studies on Cabell presents criticism of a very high standard—both erudite and entertaining—by
three eminent authors. Included in the appendix is a sampling of reviews of Cabell’s
works.
53
LEWIS CARROLL
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
Born: Daresbury, Cheshire, England; January 27, 1832
Died: Guildford, Surrey, England; January 14, 1898
Also known as: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
Principal long fiction
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1871
Sylvie and Bruno, 1889
Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, 1893
The Wasp in a Wig: The “Suppressed” Episode of “Through the Looking-Glass
and What Alice Found There,” 1977
Other literary forms
Before and after writing his novels for children, Lewis Carroll published volumes in his primary vocation, mathematics: A Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry (1860), An Elementary Treatise on Determinants (1867), Curiosa Mathematica, Part I: A New Theory of Parallels (1888), Curiosa Mathematica, Part II: Pillow Problems Thought During Wakeful Hours (1893), and Symbolic Logic, Part I: Elementary (1896). His gift for light verse, demonstrated in his novels, also led to four books of poems, with some duplication of content: Phantasmagoria, and Other Poems (1869), The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits (1876), Rhyme? and Reason? (1883), and the posthumous Three Sunsets and Other Poems (1898). His literary and mathematical sides were fused in A Tangled Tale (1885), a series of mathematical word problems in the form of short stories, and Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879), a closet drama in which Euclid is defended by various scholars and spirits.
Achievements
In 1898, a few months af
ter Lewis Carroll’s death, the Pall Mall Gazette published a survey of the popularity of children’s books, and the overwhelming front-runner was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Queen Victoria enjoyed Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland so much that she asked Carroll to dedicate his next book to her (ironically, his next book, An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, proved to be nothing like the whimsical adventure the queen had admired).
Carroll encouraged the stage versions of the Alice books that appeared in his lifetime,
though he was dismayed at his lack of legal control over adaptations. The Alice books
have been translated into dozens of languages and are quoted more often than any English work, after that of William Shakespeare. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is noteworthy for more than its popularity, however; it was the first work of literature for children that did 54
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Carroll, Lewis
Lewis Carroll
(Library of Congress)
not have an overtly didactic or moralistic nature. In fact, Carroll parodied didactic children’s works in verse, such as “You Are Old, Father William” in Through the Looking-
Glass and What Alice Found There, and through characters such as the Duchess in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Writers as abstruse and complex as British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and Irish novelist James Joyce were drawn to the deeper implications of Carroll’s work, especially the lighthearted sense of play and the role of nonsense in human thought. The absurdist writers of the twentieth century saw Carroll as their prophet, and a few of his nonsense words, such as “Boojum,” “Jabberwocky,” and “chortle,” have become seemingly permanent parts of the English language. His term for a particular
method of coining compound words, “portmanteau,” has since become a standard
linguistic name for the process.
Biography