Joe Fineman, who some here may remember, suggests consulting Leigh Hunt's "The Fish, the Man, and the Spirit." Surreal stuff, and Hunt's dates are given as 1784-1859. Amazing how you can dig back before the Victorians and find all these modern-seeming forms of expression.
I wonder if those first stanzas could have inspired the shuddery fish riddle in "The Hobbit".
Posted by Martha Bridegam at May 17, 2004 05:01 PM
What I don't get is...why does the fish turn into a man and then a spirit? Isn't one enough?
Reminds me of a joke I think I heard in Poland. Unfortunately it can't be done effectively without visuals.
As for finding modern-seeming forms of expression before the victorians, I've always thought that early medieval literature seemed to prefigure a lot of what we call postmodernism. Interesting to think of postmodernism as, without realizing it, attempting to cast off literary concepts that in the middle ages do not seem to have had much currency. Maybe "deconstruction" isn't such a meaningless bit of jargon after all.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at May 18, 2004 09:55 AMMaybe writers think they're rebelling against "the way things have always been" when they're really rebelling against the Victorian and mid-20th-century social clampdowns. I think the way people talk about women's rights is like that too, as though the idea of human equality had been invented in the 1960s. It's wonderful, in getting to know social and literary history better, to find that repression, like rebellion, comes in waves that have beginnings as well as ends. "It Wasn't Always Like This" is a powerful encouragement.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at May 18, 2004 10:32 AM