Jabu Khan

Ludwig Wittgenstein?

Ecrasez L'infame

In one of his posts Chris talks about us forming schools around various ideas. I suspect his objective is to show how our preconceived opinions get reinforced as we make additional discoveries, even on something trivial. Then he'll unveil the answers - shazam! - and we'll all see what prize fools we were, apply the lesson to the rest of our lives, and be better people as a result. OK - I'll play. Here goes.

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HYPOTHESIS 1: the passage is fiction. It reads like that, and certainly everyone who's posted here has assumed it is - nobody is saying it's Marcus Aurelius, for example; and if, as someone suggested, it's Nietzsche, then it's Nietzsche by someone else in a (psychological) novel. Moreover, it doesn't feel like script - try reading it aloud, it's very gluey - no, not theatre, not even Strindberg. But it reads fluently as prose because we're reading the next sentence while working out the previous. So, in short - a novel or short story. (I'll call it a "novel" for brevity).

The following seems a good start:

ASSUMPTION 1: Chris's posting the challenge in BC&H is relevant - that it's not JUST that he likes us more - which seems to suggest:

THEORY 1: the passage is directly quoting biblical or classical characters in a novel.

So, we lose the Nietzsche theory here. Too bad. It fitted the paradoxical text quite well - "I've put up a facade, I've a weak will". Priceless.

COROLLARY: the novel was written in the mid-nineteenth century or later - nobody would have dared tackle biblical characters before then.

Somebody on the Lounge thread has done work on "phoney". Apparently in existence from about 1900, but only in common use post-Catcher. So, it seems we have:

FACT 1: the passage was either written in or translated into English after that about 1950.

Now, is it a translation? It seems yes - as someone pointed out in another post, the style is anachronistic (in the sense that it jumps from period to period): "phoney" and "best in my field" are both modern, but the word order is deliberately old-fashioned - "but I live yet", "have I none", and many other examples. Some modern writers do sometimes try to write in an arcane way for effect - Mailer in Ancient Evenings, for example, and Jeffrey Archer in his latest masterpiece on Judas. It seems to me the passage can not be by a good writer like Mailer - such writers usually take care about anachronisms, and both "phoney" and "best in my field" are pretty conspicuous; and it can't be by a bad writer like Archer - there's an intelligence behind the words that shows great self-understanding... and so, the only possibility is:

THEORY 2: the passage is a post-1950 translation into English of a novel written after 1850.

(Translators don't always worry about anachronisms, since they want to convey the meaning of the text as best they can to their current generation of readers.)

HYPOTHESIS 2: the original text is NOT well known - if it WERE the Grand Inquisitor or the Last Temptation, somebody would have it by now. (I hope someone's checked the Last Temptation - I haven't read it).

It doesn't follow that the original author is NOT well known. True, Chris just about says as much - he says "known" means known to him, which at face value seems to rule out Dostoevsky, Kiekergaard, Tolstoy, Camus, Kafka (not K's style, anyway). But all those wrote some ghastly and obscure books - and if it were someone truly obscure, I think the whole exercise wouldn't be fair. So based on

ASSUMPTION 2: Chris is playing fair.

... I deduce the author is someone fairly well-known - someone any educated person ought to have heard of, at least, if not actually read.

Now, what do we know about the characters in the passage? There are some simple facts concerning the speaker X and the interviewer or other half of the dialogue Y ("dialogue" is a conversation between exactly two parties - isn't it?).

FACT 2: Y - and by implication the world at large - regards X as "great". That means someone we should have learnt about at school as great: an important king, emperor, founder of a religion, or philosopher. It would exclude (for example) someone like St Peter.

HYPOTHESIS 3: X is male. This is suggested by Theory 1 and Fact 2 - the number of great women from the Bible can be counted on the fingers of zero hands. From now on I shall refer to X as "he".

FACT 3: At the time of the passage, X does not currently have children - or does not think he does - but allows for the possibility that he will have at some future date. Hence he is still quite young... twenties or early thirties at most.

FACT 4: X has known love - by implication, romantic love.

FACT 5: X believes in some kind of afterlife of reward (that is, not the grey Tartarus or Sheol), and expects himself to take part in it.

COROLLARY: X is not pagan, nor Sadducee, nor Heriodian.

CONCLUSION: X is Jesus, as represented as a very human being in a modern novel. As Alex said - Jesus speak.

So, Chris, it seems that I've used fairly rigourous arguments to demonstrate my own preconceptions - is that the point of the exercise?

Robert

Ecrasez L'infame

Very interesting. So in the absence of anything solid we just have to throw our hands up and say we can't know anything for sure? Even that it's not a forgery by Chris himself? Or do we try and do the best we can, even tho' we may end up being completely duped?

The more I think about, the more I think this little game is very relevant to BC&H.

Ecrasez L'infame

Another thought: I *like* the speaker of the excerpt. I wouldn't at all mind getting to know him (unlike the Jesus of the NT, who I'd run a mile from). So, by Holden Caulfield's own test, it is indeed good writing. A little at odds with the current literary style perhaps, but good in itself.

Robert

Rick Sumner

"To die is to gain" is Socrates, as quoted by Plato, Apology 40, but I'm not sure that the phrase is identifiable enough anymore to draw much from that. I suppose if I were so inclined I could track down which translation used it first, and get more information about the dates from it, but beyond that, not much.

"To the core" is a very recent idiom ("rotten to the core" not known before 1804, which I'd venture is the original form). With that in mind, the citation absolutely cannot be later than 1804, and more likely substantially later--we need enough time for "to the core" to be understood widely without "rotten." We could safely say no earlier than 1850, though I'd tend much later. 1950 at the earliest. If it's a translation, however, it could be much earlier than that at its conception, with such literary clues telling us nothing beyond the millieu of the translator.

"And yet at the same time" is redundant. Dropping "at the same time" would have conveyed the same sentiment. If it's a translation, it's inelegant. If it's not, we're looking at either an amateur, or perhaps someone with more of a bent toward technical writing. Other clues in this vein are the use of "it'll" or "who'll", colloquialisms that sound clumsy in this context.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Clivedurdle

Comment on other thread about Dickens made me think is it HG Wells?

Then the comment about dialogue - is it a film? George Bernard Shaw play?

Hollywood script?

Dickens was originally serialised, so something in a weekly?

Lucretius

It has the "feel" to me as being a translation possibly not a very good one which would explain the mixture of "modern" expressions such as "I'm a fraud. I'm a phony" alongside "But I live yet. And what of faith? Have I none, " which appear to be of an "older style".
Perhaps I am showing my own bias but "Love has pained me before; it's a trial, a terrible calamity, a curse. It's a blessing as well, a boon to life, the reward if cultivated right. It heals. That's love." could almost be a translation of some lines of Catullus however that would not fit in with the assertion that this is a dialogue
"And these tears I shed every night contain some glimmer of hope, that even though I know that to die is to gain, perhaps I can still live longer before I go" is certainly poetical as opposed to the more prosaic parts aslo here
I am completely "lost " as to what this is however I would hazard a guess that it is a tranaslation from Latin or classical Greek (probably more likely Greek as I hope I would recognize at least part of it if it were a Latin text)

Solo

Written by someone who had Henri Bergson's élan vital in his little finger ?

Jiri

Chris Weimer

Known to me doesn't necessarily mean known to you. Otherwise, you guys are doing fantastic. Keep up the great work.

Finally glad to wake up with a genuine smile on my face.

RED DAVE

I skimmed Norman Mailer's The Gospel According to the Son, and unless I missed it, no dice.

RED DAVE