Mental Mixup in the Life and Learning of Iras Cignavojo
Disclaimer: Feel free to ignore this if it befuddles you as much as it bedazzles me
Tarassei tous Anthropous ou ta Pragmata,
alla ta peri ton Pragmaton, Dogmata.
John Bunyan and Samuel Richardson, Pamela and Shamela and Joseph Andrews, Shaftesbury and Aphra Behn (and Virginia Woolf), Tom Jones and Roderick Random, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher and The Knight of the Burning Pestle, the quixotic ways of Gil Blas translated by Smollet who also wrote himself - Tristram Shandy who influenced Wilhelm Meister by Lawrence Sterne, who was a Quixote without a Sancho, or was it Tristram without an Iseult, like Frodo without a Sam? Lady Arabella by Charlotte Lennox on whom I wrote here in Livejournal, and who reappears somehow in Northanger Abbey... where the Rake's Progress obviously doesn't end, as Hogarth would have it that it ends in Fleet or in Bedlam... Will I end in Bedlam too, trying to sort all this - and their interrelations and intertextuality - out and bring forth a system which is more clearly understandable than what Prof. Bauer presented? Why did Alexander Pope write the epitaph to John Gay who wrote the Beggar's Opera - and what did he write? Didn't Jonathan Swift himself suggest to Gay "A Newgate pastoral might make an odd pretty sort of thing", thus inspiring something which John Rich 1728 brought to stage, so "It made Gay rich and Rich gay"? Could I forget Walpole, the harsh master against whom so many of these have stood up - or should have? Like Caliban did or Oroonoko?
You may ask yourself: "WTF???" - Sorry, I have to do an exam on all this today and try to get a mindmap-cloud of what is in the exam. (Oh, and the greek quote above is from the title of Tristram Shandy. A Greek scholar strongly advised that I should complete my Graecum exam studies to round up my education, given the time.)
You must have a little patience. I have undertaken, you see, to write not only my life, but my opinions
also; hoping and expecting that your knowledge of my character, and of what kind of a mortal I am, by
the one, would give you a better relish for the other: As you proceed farther with me, the slight
acquaintance, which is now beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that unless one of us is
in fault, will terminate in friendship.--O diem praeclarum!--then nothing which has touched me will be
thought trifling in its nature, or tedious in its telling. Therefore, my dear friend and companion, if you
should think me somewhat sparing of my narrative on my first setting out--bear with me,--and let me go
on, and tell my story my own way:--Or, if I should seem now and then to trifle upon the road,--or should
sometimes put on a fool's cap with a bell to it, for a moment or two as we pass along,--don't fly off,--but
rather courteously give me credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon my outside;--and as we jog
on, either laugh with me, or at me, or in short do any thing,-- only keep your temper. (Tristram Shandy, Ch.1.VI.)
You may now continue reading the post:
And if I think of this statesman, and of going back to politics, questioning myself whether I'm up to the task, should I not look upon this task of sorting all this out and think of the quote, not from the "Essay on Man" and not from Daniel Defoe, who besides his Robinson Crusoe (to mock his schoolpal Timothy Cruso, who wrote bunyanesque travel books, and to pick up the "Cruising Voyage Round the World" on Alexander Selkirk) also wrote "The Political History of the Devil" - but as I said, the quote I should think of now, when asking myself, is from Gay, not Defoe:
"And the Statesman, because he's so great
thinks his trade as honest as mine"