Daniel Heller-Roazen

Daniel Heller-Roazen has a gift for tracing alternative paths through intellectual history based on some aspect of language. In this case it is the creation of an "infinite naming" by prefixing words with non-. It generates a discussion of Aristotlean logic, Arabic commentaries, Kant, Hegal, Heidegger, and Freud. It's a fruitful conceit and passes through such interesting thinkers as Ammonius, Boethius, Salomon Maimon (an early Kantian), Hermann Cohen, and Rudolf Carnap. As with all Heller-Roazen's books, it's a dense and challenging read, but the rewards are many and the insights into the development of philosophy through language are revelatory.… (plus d'informations)

Like all of Daniel Heller-Roazen's books, this traces an obscure theme through pre-modern cultural history, finding implications wildly divergent from the initial thesis. In this case, it is the discovery by Pythagoras that musical harmony has its basis in simple integer ratios. The beauty of this system is incomplete and attempts to make it so run into problems of the irrational and disharmonious. Heller-Roazen traces this theme through Boethius and medieval musicologists up to the aesthetics of Kant and the cosmology of Kepler, showing how time and again the sounding of the "fifth hammer" undermines the perfect harmony of their systems. The book ends somewhat abruptly, without a conclusion, and that last few chapters feel like separate essays rather than integrated parts of a whole. I'm not sure if this is a benefit or a liability, but certainly requires the reader to make connections that the author only implies.… (plus d'informations)

The fifth in a series of cultural investigations by Daniel Heller-Roazen dealing with subjects that lie between the usual categories of such studies. This one deals with hidden forms language that create a population of initiates by subverting and masking the normal rules of communication. It starts by recalling Marcel Schwob's study of 15th century cant as practiced by a group of criminals known as the Coquilliars. There are chapters on riddles in Norse sagas and the names used by the gods for places and things in Homer's epics. It moves on to Ferdinand de Saussure's conjectures about aural "anaphones" in the enigmatic Saturnian lyrics of early Rome and Roman Jakobson's further development of those thoughts. Finally, there is a chapter on Tristan Tzara's theory of symmetrical anagrams in the verse of Villon.

The implicit idea is that poetry is defined, in part, by hidden language. But Heller-Roazen is more of a historian than he is a philosopher. He never really pursues a thesis so much as he presents eccentric theorists (Tristan Tzara!) wrestling with concepts that refuse to be coalesce. The results are provocative and entertaining. His books float between academic treatises and popular miscellanies, eluding classification as much as his subjects.
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I've recently read several interesting short story collections from antiquity, namely The Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. Each of them has inspired enough academic articles to fill a library, so I'm not going to delve into their historical import or the ways each has influenced future literature, but I think its valuable to consider how they compare to each other in approach and how I saw them as stories.

First, The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer's unfinished collection provides a great window into what life was like in the middle ages, more specifically England in the 1300s. By providing a diverse cast of story tellers as the vehicles for the stories themselves Chaucer is able to explore many professions and various points on the social hierarchy, satirizing and criticizing all the flaws he saw in his society. To an extent these are interesting, but social satire does not always age well. While it certainly gives you a sense of how England looked through Chaucer's eyes (a den of corruption and hypocrisy for the most part, especially when discussing the religious institutions), it can be hit or miss as to whether the critique has aged well. Critique on chivalry in The Knight's Tale? I'm in. Critique of alchemists wherein pages and pages of ingredients are listed? Yawn. Additionally, the majority of the tales aren't that deep, with many being raunchy stories of pure entertainment and others being morality tales with blatantly obvious messages (pride is bad and fortune is fickle, we get it). The message of one tale was flat out stated to be "beware of treachery." Was there someone at the time arguing that treachery wasn't that big a deal and we should just ignore it?

In reverse chronological order the next up is Arabian Nights. This collection is amorphous enough that many tales pop up in one edition and not another, which in my opinion weakens the arguments I see about the collection having a set of coherent themes or messages. The sole theme that I found to be consistent was the power of storytelling- it appears in the frame narrative, of course, but also the stories themselves often showcase the ability of stories to trick the powerful, and oftentimes stories lead to sub-stories and so on, like nesting dolls. Toward the end of the collection the descriptions began to get to me: if I never see someone described as being "as beautiful as the moon" with "lips like coral" and other features like various gems I'll be a happy reader. The Norton Critical addition showed its worth by providing many additional pieces inspired by the Arabian Nights, as well as critical analyses of the text (some of which I found less than convincing, but always interesting). More so than the other two collections Arabian Nights just struck me as a bunch of stories, many of which of course were intended to edify, but mostly its purpose was to entertain. It more or less accomplished this.

The earliest, and also the best, of the three collections was Ovid's Metamorphoses. Chaucer references the classic explicitly several times in his work, and it's no wonder: Ovid is the master that Chaucer tried and failed to match. What put this collection above the others for me was that Ovid not only had a consistent theme to the stories (transformations, as the title would suggest), but also stories flow from one to the next, mostly with an organic feeling that makes the work take on a grander scale. Ovid's not just telling stories, he's tracing the history of the world, explaining how the world became populated with the birds and plants and animals that fill it, and connecting the past all up to what was then the present day. It also serves as the source for much of what we know of Greek/Roman mythology, as Ovid was also setting down an account of the actions and behavior of the gods. Framing narratives can be used to great effect, just look at If On a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino for a phenomenal example, but Canterbury Tales creates such a framing narrative only to leave it incomplete, and Arabian Nights slowly siphons away the importance of the frame narrative until it is forgotten entirely. In comparison, Ovid's Metamorphoses connection of his tales makes his work stand on a grander scale, and makes it feel like a more coherent whole. A note on translations, I found Charles Martin's work to be very strong in general, although he makes a few bizarre choices. Translating a singing contest into a rap battle was a clear mistake. Overall, though, I feel confident recommending him so long as you want a more modern take on the text.

All three collections have stood the test of time, and each is an essential read to understand the ages and cultures they arose out of. Between the three of them, though, Ovid's Metamorphoses is the most worthy of your time in my opinion.… (plus d'informations)