GILGAMESH AND ENKIDU

Or how old is the myth of Narcissus? 

In the epic, Gilgamesh is described as an oppressive, arrogant and tyrannical ruler. Two-thirds a god and one-third a human, the son of king Lugalbanda and goddess Ninsuna, he has a super-human kind of strenght.

The gods create Enkidu to moderate the king's excesses and they end up befriending each other. 

However, that fact alone becomes Enkidu's future disgrace.

They both kill Humbaba, turn the forest into a desert and anger the gods. They will both also kill the celestial bull sent by Anu (supreme sumerian god) to cause great devastation, as a revenge for the rejection of the love goddess Inana by Gilgamesh. 

The gods decide Enkidu will die and he becomes severely ill. After his mirror and loyal friend dies (because of him), Gilgamesh instead of mourning his friend launches himself on an endeavour to try and become immortal! Talk about narcissistic traits. 

Utnapishtim, the only survivor of a great flood that wiped out all humanity, tells Gilgamesh about a plant growing underwater, in the sea, which will grant him immortality... He can get the plant, however a serpent steals it from him (his own vanity?) - the Sumerians believed that snakes shed their skin because they are immortal. He then returns to Uruk where he finds his incredible lasting work: the great walls ...Another type of mirror?

Photo: © Angelo Bozac, Gilgamesh

ON TADZIO, THE ADORABLE TEENAGER, AND T. MANN'S WORKS

Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912) is so often presented as the perfect novel and a rich source of examples for aesthetic studies worldwide, with the adorable Tadzio serving as an archetype of classic beauty, having the eternal Mademoiselle of the seas as an ideal scenery... But the kind of approach that most academics usually do to it worries me much, since we all know it was an autobiographic novel. In fact, well, it's no secret that the real Tadzio (Wladyslaw Moes) was just 11 years old and Mann met him in Venice, hotel De Baignes, while staying there in 1911 with his wife and brother.

To tell the truth, that city of Venice, its disease, can be interpreted as a metaphor of the empire's decadence, the old Germany of those times, rotten and socially hill. Mann tries to use the beauty of Tadzio, the "pure" Arian, to save him from that, but he is not well succeeded because that adoration is part of what is rotten. In my perspective, Mann's sexuality (a preference much for young men, it seems, more than a mere attraction to men) explains much about his defense of nazism. His compassion by Hitler and his defense of nationalism, romanticism and the bourgeois ideal are a defense from facing and revealing himself at the same time. Inclusively his racism has its origin in the belief that his homosexuality was genetic, as Mann's mother had "exotic" ascendance: brazilian, portuguese and native american, and that miscegenation was associated by the hypocrites of those times with an exacerbated and dangerous sensuality. I'm planning to write a more extensive article on Helsinki's Gallery Magazine about how Mann may have taken advantage of his young love "objects'" achievements and abilities to develop his own work, the lasting hypocrisy and silence of academics on this issue, the reasons for his troubled relationship with his brother Heinrich, Goethe's works and their influence on Mann, and Death in Venice's symbolism and rationalizations (in terms of the book's content).

ANACONDA

On the disturbing and asphyxiant environment in the tales of Horacio Quiroga. Serpent matters and jungle life forms... or a way of telling about human beings' destructiveness and the fascination of Quiroga with the violence involved on the dark side of the world? Violence and suffocation... from an author definitely not at peace with himself. Still a master of short stories.

WHO IS THIS GUY AFTER ALL?

It became a common place to affirm that «we all are Don Quijote de la Mancha, in a way or another»... Even the ones who never read the book seem to feel miraculously identified with Cervantes' hero (or especially these ones).

As the saying goes, «We all have something of a doctor and something of a fool»... but something of Don Quijote?

By inventing this old madman, Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra intended to write a parody on the cavalry books (the pink editions of those days), very popular among the readers... Alonso Quijano lost his reason by leafing through that kind of works.

Above: painting by Carlos Pereira da Silva.

DOJOJI'S KIYOKO

Possibly one of the dumbest characters Yukio Mishima may have created, on a passage of his «modern No Theatre plays»: Dojoji. Kiyoko's obsession for the cupboard in which her ex-lover died after betraying her is not the main reason for that dumbness, though. Actually, she wants to lock herself inside the cupboard until she becomes "old and awful".

Above: one of Ito Shinsui's pre-Second World War prints (Ohmi Gallery collection).

Kiyoko thinks her beauty and youth represent all her wealth... She hadn't noticed that Spring was around either, at least not before she threatened to spill acid on her face inside the same cupboard, which is now (we get to know) placed inside the shop of an antiques dealer. She gives up from such dramatic intent once she admires her own beauty on the cupboard's mirrors, and stops trying to bargain the price of the cupboard as well - she no longer wants to buy it. Finally, she goes away to meet a guy who will tear her heart apart (she knows it since the beginning...), just because she had noticed, with this episode, that her face will remain the same, independently of love's misfortunes (is that so?!). How superficial can a character be? The surprising answer is: maybe not quite as much as a real human being... Mishima seemed to know that.

THE WIND-UP BIRD

In Toru Okada's version, his wife Kumiko named the wind-up bird, the unfortunate sound of a mechanical cry which would follow him in his misadventures. Foretells for all those who heard the bird are not auspicious - we will know that ahead in the book. A Murakami's invention, the wind-up bird is a kind of invisible dark sorcerer specialized in characters who vanish and the (apparently casual) meeting of other characters. Demonic powers and their connection with the scars of the World War II in modern Japan are always present.

The wind-up bird - a delusional childhood dream or a metaphor for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki airplanes? The author seems to tell us that beauty can coexist with horror, dreams with reality, the lightness of natural shapes with the weight of mechanical and social gears, emotion with rationality, destiny with free will (the wind-up bird presages can coexist with a stubbornly open narrative, which annoyed some critics). Meanwhile, death is seductive, evil is ambitious - and fragment-built. Just like hope.

THE EMPEROR'S NEW CLOTHES AND THE PROBLEM OF NUDITY, CREDIBILITY AND POWER

Hans Christian Andersen was born 202 years ago this week. The man with the tail coat, big nose, uncommon erudition and special sensitivity whose life's details the biographers and scholars still dispute (in part because of his supposed condition of illegitimate Danish prince, in part because of his dyslexia and strongly because of his bravely assumed homosexuality) managed to create an exemplary story on how group pressures can condition one's socially exposed point of view.

Amongst his travelogues, fairytales and artistical typical-puppet-show-scenery paper cuttings, Andersen described the story of a king who was cheated, terrified about assuming his mistake, plus who wanted to impose a ridiculous lie to his entire people. The straightness of the facts uncovered the king's pretentiousness and made him turn preposterous. The starting point was a child's innocent and neutral observation.

Andersen focuses masterfully on how someone who socially has power/status can try to impose an obvious and senseless fallacy to a vast majority, many times only in order to increase his/her own power over others. This craving for power becomes blind (even to visual evidences) and, also because of its blind eyes, it can easily be deceived, then becoming a theme for social mockery. Power corrupts even intelligence and transforms the absurd into something obvious. Finally, social pressures impose lies, as individuals want to feel that "they belong" to somewhere or something at any cost, that they share common principles and world perspectives, perhaps even the most idiotic ones. Fear of the collective strenghts and brainless group behaviors play a big role in social conformity and communal acceptance of absurdities.

In the end, this tale launches another challenge: daring to examine and understand why in occidental societies nudity became a matter of shame and a denial of (almost an infamous attack to) political power pretensions. On the other hand, some media stars begun to use it and abuse of it as a power (ie, money and political influence) instrument.

BRAVE NEW WORLD'S LENINA CROWNE

Lenina Crowne is Aldous Huxley's femme fatale in the strangest New World of all. A London Central Hatchery worker, some critics say that Lenina's supposed promiscuity as a Beta female is the core aspect of her existence as a character. Although promiscuity is faced as a virtue in the New World - or precisely because of that -, Lenina's behaviors which approximate her from monogamy seem more interesting and defying to discuss considering her New World context than the Old World's polemics around the many Alpha males she was sexually involved with.

It's ironic to notice how Lenina approaches some kind of proto-humanity (she has been breaking some New World's love codes - if we can call love, in a broad sense, to sexual intercourse - before that, like when she was dating exclusively Henry Foster for "too many months" according to the New World's patterns, i.e., four...), and the slightly human traces of Lenina are acquired when in contact with and attracted to a reserved "old-fashioned" character named John the Savage, an outcast (both in the Reservation and the New World) viviparous who is the only civilized person around and the true hero of Huxley, a representative of the Old Man who admires Shakespeare's works just like Huxley did and demands to live according to their humanity, dramatically and joyfully feeling it all.

«- (...) Whoever it was, he/she was happy while living. Nowadays everyone is happy [Henry]. - Yes, nowadays everyone is happy said Lenina, like an echo. They had listened those same words repeated one hundred and fifty times every night, for twelve years in a row». Hypnopaedia teached Lenina - but not only Lenina - the sentences she had to know, so that she wouldn't have to think about the World State. Still what will make her resemble a real human being are feelings like suffering when John doesn't want to see her, or even the wish to be left alone. She gains density and richness as the text evolves.

«(...) Talking very slowly, he [Helmholtz] asked: - Did you ever feel the sensation that you have something inside which only waits for an opportunity to get out? Any excess of strength with no use? You know how it is; like, for example, the excess of water which flows in waterfalls instead of going through the turbines (...) I think in a weird sensation that I feel sometimes, the sensation of having something important to say and the power to express it, but not knowing what, and not being able to use that power. If there was any other way of writing. Or other subjects to write about... (...) It is not enough that the formulas are good; what is done must also be good.» Helmholtz, a lecturer in a Department of Writing can here be compared to some kind of Huxley's alter ego in the New World, a writer missing something to write about.

Above: illustration by Brian Ashmore

THE BAHAMUT FISH

Bahamut's fame arrived to the Arabian deserts, where men transformed it from elephant or hippo into a fish swimming in groundless eternal waters, above which stand a bull, a ruby mountain, an angel, six hells, the earth and seven heavens.

"We can read in a legend reaped by Lane: «God created the earth but the earth didn't have a ground, thus He created an angel beneath the earth. But the angel didn't have a ground and under the feet of the angel God created a cliff made of rubies. Still the cliff didn't have a ground and beneath the cliff He created a bull with four thousand eyes, ears, noses, mouths, tongues and feet. But the bull didn't have a ground and beneath the bull God created a fish named "Bahamut", and under the fish He put water, and beneath the water He placed darkness, and human science cannot see beyond that point.»

Jorge Luis Borges & Margarita Guerrero in The Book of the Imaginary Beings (1967) 

Above this text: illustration by Kim Schrag.

WHITE TEETH'S CLARA BOWDEN

Zadie Smith came up with an ironical, cosmopolitan and multicultural glimpse to London's modern society. In this endeavour, a woman character was born, Clara Bowden (or should we say Clara Jones?), whose story resembles the life path of many girls having former british colonies' ascendants. The exclusion and depressive atmosphere of the suburbs, the way how their growth and education becomes sometimes sinuous (the opposite of Zadie's dignified education - perhaps Clara is the girl Zadie could, under different circumstances, have been...), the identity and xenophobia issues, they all are approached in a clever manner.

 

Clara is a tall black-caribbean origin girl disappointed with her first red-haired british boyfriend, who treacherously converted to her mother's Jehovah sect. That's when Archibald Jones comes into her life, an older man whom she meets during a hippie new year's eve party, the day after Archie attempted suicide by carbon dyoxide intoxication inside his car in the middle of nowhere ("nowhere", here , means London's ugliest suburbs...), after a disturbing divorce from an italian woman. Clara's father has been a paralised mumb for years, a home statue sitting on the couch for days with his mouth open, dribbling while watching tv. So for Clara, who wants to run away from her ex, Archie becomes the perfect refuge, a protection, an older male figure, the possibility to own her own apartment and to have a "home". And for Archie, an average man, Clara represents the youth's freshness, but something else. Clara will join two indian women related with Archie's best friend to start wondering and to unite on the path of building their own destinies.

INSPECTOR CHACALTANA

Félix Chacaltana Saldívar is the "loser" chosen by Santiago Roncagliolo, the peruvian writer who became the youngest winner ever of the Alfaguara Prize, to be one of the protagonists of his thriller "Abril Rojo" (Red April, 2006). Inspector Chacaltana is the assistant district inspector in Huamanga province and he believes in law, he believes in order, he believes that we will all be happy if we respect the procedures established on the civil code, which he knows how to quote by memory.

«During my creative work, I have been obsessed with two types of figures:», Santiago explains, «psychopaths and losers. Psychopaths are willing to ignore any acquaintanceship norm to satisfy their individual appetites. Losers, by respecting norms so much, don't even satisfy their own basic emotional needs. This novel is a confrontation between both types».

As a matter of fact, in this novel Chacaltana faces a serial killer who considers cutting an art, and sculpts his victims with religious Holy Week motifs, a kind of criminal not foreseen by the juridic order, who makes the tight borders between which the inspector tries to enclose the world crack. «I've always wanted to write a thriller», Roncagliolo continues, «That is, a bloody police story with serial killers and monstrous crimes. And I found the necessary elements in my country's history: a war zone, a death celebration like the Holy Week, a city populated with ghosts. What else could I ask for?».

Solitary, milk livered, a lover of poetry and traditions, this observant and fairly unhappy protagonist, an archetype of innocence with an obsession about his dead mother, who "had never done anything which was not stipulated on the regulations of his institution", has to approach the irregular methods of the Peruvian police and army. Slowly, Inspector Chacaltana converts into an undesirable person for everyone and a stranger to himself. Abril Rojo does not dissimulate the barbarism of Sendero Luminoso terrorism, nor the horrors of the dirty war against terrorism, nor the Church connivance, nor the brutality of the farmers. As Inspector Chacaltana progressively changes in front of our eyes, he loses his innocence, he becomes more violent, he feels tempted by the power previleges and enjoys the domination sensation which violence gives him, and we are induced to think that no one is left unscathed after stepping down on a living hell. This mix of dark thriller with social and political novel presents the serial killer story (with exquisite details of millenial and ritual meaning) and, perhaps more importantly, the brutal and funny contrast between innocence and corruption. The result is powerful and effective.

TÖRLESS, THE PUPIL

The famous author of The Man Without Qualities (1930), the austrian writer Robert Musil, published his first novel The Confusions of Young Törless (1906) while studying in Berlin. Törless story resembles in many aspects the one of its own author in youth years. The somewhat abnormal, unnatural and perverse relationships which evolve between the people living isolated inside a military institution with a rigid discipline, which belongs to the former austrian-hungarian empire, during the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, are the main theme of the book. As an intern on this school ("collegium"), Törless, away from his family like all the other students, observes the dehumanizing routine and writes long letters to his family in an attempt to recover some of the past's balance, feeling nostalgic of his own family's "healthy" environment. Still the hate and irrationality conquer their own ground and end up dominating the relationships among and between students, teachers, school workers. In such a way that the stronger ones unite to damage and humiliate the weak, the sick environment of blackmails expands itself, sexuality follows the possible and tortuous paths, sadism governs and masochism attends. Nobody nor anything reigns, except brutality and hostility. We should finally situate this novel in time, and perceive how the pre-1stWW tensions are so influential and present on the criticisms to the military system and to the way how this one abandons boys to a cruel self-growth.

THE GREEN GODDESS

Mika Waltari's Green Goddess from the Island of the Setting Sun (1926) short story is a symbol of irresistible attractiveness and divinity's evil - or the gods' faithfulness towards those who worship them. But she's also the possibility of turning stone into flesh, through the power of desire - which seems to be immense.

 

"This effigy truly was more beautiful than all mortal women", the narrator affirms, and immediately one feels impelled to think that this strange, carved green figure of a foreign goddess found by the heartless Viking-descendant sailors whom the narrator (a king) commanded when looting a distant island is Miss Immortality herself. Could we say, in fact, that evilness is immortal and gods use, seduce and revenge on men? Who believes in the power of the holy curses? "Her love was destructive, but its wonder was great", Waltari wrote, and through sentences like this one we are thrown into a sado-masochistic type of relation, a tale of passion, power and violence.

Curiously, Green Tara, as a Feminine Goddess Archetype in Hindu Mythology and the consort of the Dhyani Buddha Amogasiddhi, is known, on the contrary, for her active compassion and is incarnated in all good women. Tara governs the Underworld, the Earth and the Heavens, birth, death and regeneration, love and war, the seasons, all that lives and grows, the Moon cycles (Luna) and feminine creation. Typically, Tara is seen as a slender and beautiful woman, with long hair and blue eyes. She is also the most popular figure on the Tibetan pantheon of deities, the beautiful goddess Tara, (pronounced tah' rah) whose name means 'Star' - originated by Indian Hinduism as the Mother Creator, her numerous representations spread from Ireland to Indonesia under many different names.

Could it be that Waltari inspired himself on Tara deity to create this cursing goddess? "I drew my sword and so the blood of my closest friend flowed to a black puddle on the floor and I saw the fire in his upturned eyes die away. Yet I felt no remorse, for I could see that the goddess had turned her head and was smiling at me and on her face there was an expression I could not fathom. (...) And I knelted on the cold floor and vowed to foresake my kin and the place of my birth and everything that once I had cherished, if only she would love me. And at this the goddess stepped down from her pedestal." The Mother Creator, when provoked and turned into the goddess of a vanquished people can, after all, show what amount of destruction creativeness might require.

MACUNAÍMA: THE HERO WITH NO CHARACTER AT ALL

The "hero without a character" created by the brazilian novelist Mário de Andrade in 1928 remains a classic and incomparable literary achievement. Andrade reelaborates themes of the indigenous mythology on this novel where one can find dadaism, futurism, expressionism and surrealism traces all combined. The invention of the language (expressed by neologisms, modernist techniques, onomatopoeias, multiple style resources and the general primal environment) accompanies this idiosyncratic version of the creation of the world, based on a profound knowledge of the native legends and on the celebration of invention as a (r)evolutionary matrix.

 

Trying to "conceive Brazil as a homogeneous entity, from the literary point of view", Andrade mixes (sometimes even just through the use of enumerations) dialects, expressions and traditions from distinct geographic regions. The super-humanity of the hero, the prevalence of marvellous/fantastic elements and the magic atmosphere around which the novel unfolds, they all turn Macunaíma into a special book and a prototype of the latter magic realism style tendencies.

Curiously, the narrative path follows the inverse direction of the 16th century chronicists' narratives: from the woods to the big city, and then back to the woods - unlike the "navigators" who left the European civilization to "discover" the New World.

Painting: "The Baptism of Macunaíma", Tarsila do Amaral, 1956.

Thus Macunaíma as a hero is full of contradictions and happily enjoying them: he is the anti-hero also, the character with no character intended to represent and sinthetize some kind of national identity: Andrade wrote that the brazilian people, as a trait and general rule, had no character (not only in the moral and european sense of the word, but mainly in the sense that brazilians had no "century-old own civilization" nor a "tradition consciousness", still spontaneously acted as the rich inheritors of a yoruba civilization, an indigenous civilization and a european civilization). In fact, Macunaíma is an unpredictable character with no conscience dilemmas nor morality on the european traditional and religious sense of the word, he is free-minded as a 20-year old should be and acts accordingly: he is light and rich and full of opportunities, with all the surprisingly creative possibilities of a brand new society which is trying to build and invent itself.

ORLANDO

Virginia Woolf's creation became a classical of debates on gender issues and reflexions about female and male social roles but, in my opinion, it also represents a prototypic metaphor addressing the possibility of putting oneself on the shoes of an Other. Orlando became an androgyne model for feminists, transsexuals and lesbians, maybe more thanks to the life of Vita Sackville-West, whose biography inspired Woolf's book, than to the literary work itself. Perhaps what Woolf wanted to emphasize in her book - more than androgyne behaviors as some kind of virtue which should be acclaimed over more extreme gender definitions - were, not only social class discrepancies and vices (often clearly satirized), but the irreconcilable differences between men and women in Elizabethan times as well, and the necessary effort (in former epochs, mainly on men's behalf...) to understand the perspective and be sensible to the problems of the other gender and face women as fellow human beings with brains, intellect and equal rights. Summarily, Woolf criticizes stereotypes of all kinds, including both gender and social class ones.

In fact, even if written during a short period of time and considered a light-handed work, the book is organized in a way which should be carefully examined: Woolf even added theatre play rehearsal-like, dramatic pictures of the main characters to the first edition's pages - there is a whole acting and discussion around the text, in some sort of book-play-performance with the engagement and connivance of several close accomplices.

THE A BAO A QU

"In order to contemplate the most beautiful landscape in the world, it is necessary to get to the last floor of Victoria Tower, in Chitor. There exists a round terrace from which one can dominate the whole horizon. Snail-shell shaped stairs take us to the terrace, but only the ones who don't believe in the fable dare to climb them. The fable is like this: Since the beggining of times the A Bao A Qu lives on the stairs of Victoria Tower, sensible to the values of human souls. It lives in a lethargic state, on the first step, and it only enjoys conscient life when someone climbs the stairs. The vibration of the person who approaches infuses it with life and an interior light insinuates inside it. At the same time, its body and its almost translucent skin beggin to move. When someone climbs the stairs, the A Bao A Qu places itself almost on the visitor's heels and it climbs stuck to the edge of the round steps, worn out by the feet of generations of pilgrims. On each step its colour becomes more intense, its shape gets more perfect and the light which it irradiates becomes more and more bright.

A testimony of its sensibility is the fact that it only achieves its perfect shape on the last step, when the one climbing is a spiritually evolved being. If not, the A Bao A Qu gets paralised before arriving there, its body incomplete, its colour undefined, its light vacillating. The A Bao A Qu suffers when it cannot form itself completely and its complaint is just a perceptible rumor, similar to the silk scuff. But when the man or the woman who revive it are full of purity, the A Bao A Qu can reach the last step already completely formed, irradiating a blue lively color. 

Its comeback to life is very brief, because when the pilgrim steps down the A Bao A Qu spins and it falls to the first step where, already off and similar to a lamp with vague contours, it awaits for the next visitor. It is only possible to see it well when it gets to the middle of the stairs where the prolongation of its body, helped by some sort of little arms when climbing, defines itself clearly. Some say it sees with its whole body and it resembles peach skin when touched. Along the centuries, the A Bao A Qu reached perfection just once. Captain Burton registers the A Bao A Qu legend in a note of his One Thousand and One Nights version."

Jorge Luis Borges & Margarita Guerrero in

The Book of the Imaginary Beings (1967), referring themselves to

the malayan legend of the A Bao A Qu

TRISTANA'S DEFENCE

V. is a woman I met some two weeks ago and I can’t help writing about her. I decided I would name her Tristana instead. She has an incredible life, more astonishing than the life of most fictional characters I know… A sad story at the same time, still incredible and touching. She used to be a translator in Rotterdam. She was raised by a dictatorial, militaristic father who made her run and exercise when she didn't want to, have martial arts and boxing classes, and an affective (not at all affectionate, but cold and distant if not abusive) mother – she only got to know her mother wasn’t her biological mother aged 16. Tristana’s biological mother was a neighbour of hers, in fact. One of her brothers became a mercenary. Tristana says her brother "has no heart" and she can’t understand how he could have had a daughter either (knowing she could become an orphan easily).

Tristana had a daughter herself at 19, who is now 13. She had her daughter home alone, 10 months(!) into her pregnancy and she single-handedly decided to have a shower after labour (while waiting for the midwife to finally arrive…), then she passed out on the bathtub and "forgot to cut the baby's umbilical cord"... She is not to blame, she was just a kid not knowing what was happening with her own body. Before, she remembers labour’s time: she was walking on the corridor and felt her baby coming, had to hold the head of the baby and "her daughter still has green marks bellow her eyebrows because of Tristana’s fingers holding her in, back then", while getting back to bed so that the baby would not fall on the floor and be massively injured. Just a week after her daughter was born, Tristana travelled alone to Malta with her baby. The two of them kept travelling together during the whole childhood of Tristana’s daughter. They still do. And they naively but insanely love each other. Somehow, together they form a rock island carved out of affection, an island as beautiful as Malta  –  at least that's what I thought while listening to Tristana's amazing adventures. She did not repeat the story of the past and I kept thinking how strong she was.

MERMAIDS AND THE MYTH OF SEXUAL BEAUTY AS A TEMPORARY TROPHY

For centuries, mermaids and mermen have been around to remind us there could be unknown or "parallel worlds" just beneath our ocean’s salty waters or the most dangerous storms raging wild waves. Since the 20th century's early decades, as human imagination grew wings and planes became a reality, aliens and ufos from outer space have replaced the "underwater imaginary societies" and other latter legendary beings, as embodiments of the unknown or the uncharted/mystery trails. Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast (1938) marked a significant turn point in this process of change.

From symbols of perdition and sin, representatives of unexplored worlds, mermaids have been firstly transformed and reduced into old-fashioned, slippery and somewhat exotic, “deviated” sexual symbols. Nowadays they are assumed as icons by sexuality movements and love diversity activists. Since the Babilonians' mermaid arose from the sea to teach the men the arts and sciences, since the times when Chinese and Japanese legends on sea-dragons and dragon-wives prevailed (some sort of mermaids' distant cousins...) or the martyrdom of Ulysses (tied, waxing his sailors' ears) was described, a lot has changed. But somewhere along the way the sexual liberation and Cousteau’s Calypso intervened, to transform the obstacle of a dangerous temptation into an envied award and a single mermaids' classical characteristic (their physical beauty/sexy voice) into the core trophy for liberation (or liberation itself) and a goal to achieve.

THE CANTERVILLE GHOST

I have a crush on ghosts (literarily speaking)... and this one is no exception. Poor fellow. He gave his best to scare the American minister modern family, but when he got acquainted with the evil twins, the pragmatic Washington, their materialistic parents and, more importantly, with the impertinent, independent young Virginia - he had no chance but to fall asleep once and for all. He was sympathetic in his old fashioned style, poorly sophisticated in a charming way (I was just thinking about the hours he would spend in front of the cupboard, perfecting his outfits and building more or less terrifying “characters”… all that effort in vain), though this wasn’t enough to touch the discourteous Otis, who actually found it cool to have a (preferably quiet) spirit meandering around in their new place.

Thus, the Canterville ghost is a character rich in sub-characters, all of them united in a meta-personage with symbolic meaning. Old England is for sale, the New World has come to invade the colonialist, respecting no blood colours. Also the former romantic types of horror (based on fears inspired by religion and antichrist-like figures) are threatened, just as the once very talented "actor" represented by the phantom becomes outrageously ridiculous in his performances. Poor old spectrum.

TOM THUMB AND TOM HICKATHRIFT: THE "DWARF AGAINST GIANT" DILEMMA

Grimm Brothers' Tom Thumb became well known as a witty character, some sort of prince of miniatures or elf taking advantage of his own size - not bigger than his father's thumb - to achieve wealthiness and travel around the world for free, tricking nature inside wolves or cows' stomachs and snail shells, riding dormouse backs, orchestrating butterflies on the meadows. 

This Tom Thumb version is a hymn to cleverness and childhood dreams - adventuresome, he's a little fellow who remained just the same size as when he was born, though always knowing pretty well what he was about.

Tom Hickathrift was eight feet high at age ten and his hand resembled a shoulder of mutton. As an adult, he had more strenght than twenty men, would make anyone fall down with a single blow. An hero from the 18th century British folklore, Tom fought and killed the club giant, cut off his head and went into his cave, where he found great treasures stored.

But can the world's readers believe there is no Thumb inside the giant nor Hickathrift in a dwarf's mind?

PIPPI LONGSTOCKING

[Blog contribution by Max Ryynänen*, Helsinki-based scholar - thanks Max: for once offering me a book by Mario Perniola, for the arts and culture discussions and for motivating me to write this blog]

"Pippilotta Viktualia Rullgardina Krusmynta Efraimsdotter Långstrump [1], more commonly known as Pippi Långstrump, was my childhood idol – and still is, as long as even a trace of the child of me survives.

Since the first of Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi books was published in 1945 this anarchistic, animal loving child has been considered to be both a negative, disobedient role model for children, and a carnevalistic feminist icon.

Neither of these normative interpretations (of which the latter is more constructive) conveys the transitory nature of this miracle girl who beats Superman not only by being way cooler, but also by being capable of enjoying life to its fullest.

Pippi meets prejudices and people who try to educate her. A teacher wants to nurse her. The police wants her to act like other children – to reinforce order in society (like there wouldn’t be an overdose of it in Sweden). Of course Pippi is cooler because she is a girl, but in the end she transcends Western metaphysics, and does not fight against it anxiously.

Like the first butterfly of May she is closer to Buddha than to most ‘revolutionary’ characters of Western literature."

*Max Ryynänen is a Helsinki-based scholar with one foot in philosophical aesthetics and the other in cultural studies: http://maxryynanen.net/.

 [1] Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Mackrelmint Efraim’s Daughter Longstocking.

MONTANO'S MALADY: Literary Sickness And The Characters' Birth... A Paternity Metaphor

Montano is one of the most famous, baffling and hilarious characters ever born from the hands of the catalan writer Enrique Vila-Matas: simultaneously bewildered, absent-minded, enraged and strangely perplexed, Montano is a lively literary puzzle. One can approach a comprehension of Montano's complexity by stressing the existence of different levels of fluency or "contamination": on a first level, Montano's disease is nothing more than the extreme permeability and sensitiveness to most literary works produced; on a second level, Montano is also a Shakespeare's Othello character (the young Cyprus governor) suffering, in Vila-Matas' novel, from a Hamlet-type of disease; on a third level, Montano is the narrator's son and this narrator is Vila-Matas' literary incarnation presented as "literature sick" though "not thinking about himself, but about his son", whose literary blockage ("It seemed to me like a useful idea, the one of transferring to an invented son some of my problems") he will intend to solve. 

When the son surpasses his blockage by writing a short story in which several writers are inhabited by the personal memories of other authors, Montano infects his father, who will then, "more ill than ever", feel the temptation of converting himself into literature's memory.