Truth and fiction

[sartorias]

Buccaneers and pimpernels, memoirs and silence.

Comments

[whswhs]

Your contrast between Victorian and eighteenth-century views of carriage rides makes me think of Kipling's poem "The King," which has people all the way back to the cavemen nostalgic for the lost romance of the earlier generation's technology. It seems prescient of him, in an almost sfnal way, to end with the dull, businesslike railroad-

"Romance!" the season-tickets mourn,
"He never ran to catch His train,
But passed with coach and guard and horn-
And left the local-late again!
Confound Romance!" . . . And all unseen
Romance brought up the nine-fifteen.-because, what, now, is a more romantic image of travel for us than a long journey by rail, as opposed to traveling much faster by air? But not many other people in 1894 saw that coming

[sartorias]

Yeah . . . the story of what happened to this memoirist's young husband (called up and sent to the Russian front as a teen, then taken prisoner for five or six years) is really grim. When the memoir was written, PTSD was not generally recognized, but wow, she describes the classic symptoms right down the line.

[marycatelli]

You notice that we can much more easily accept a fantasy magical train than a fantasy magical car.

Part of it's that we have had more time to see writers do it, laughingly or in seriousness, but part the pick up of romance.

[starshipcat]

I was also struck, seeing many citations of documents from official Polish archives, by how many of them used the word "Niemiecki," which looks like a cognate of a Russian word that etymologically means "mute"-that is, it seemingly originated as an ethnic slur akin to "barbarian" [the bar-bar-bar people]Yes, the East Slavic and West Slavic languages' term for "German" does come from a root meaning "mute," and was once a general term for "foreigner, barbarian, someone who doesn't speak our language." At the same time, the word "Slav" comes from a root having to do with speech, as if to say, "we are the speaking people." (My undergraduate major was Russian language and literature, and if things had gone differently, I might well have become a professional Slavist. By the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, I must have dimensional twins who did attain that dream

[sovay]

Buccaneers and pimpernels, memoirs and silence.

YAY PIMPERNEL SMITH.

I adore that movie and recommend it to people whenever I get the chance.

[sartorias]

Oh, yes!

[asakiyume]

Yes, I've wanted to see it ever since you talked about it.

[marith]

That is very interesting, both your post and the comments, and now I am determined to engineer a friendgroup viewing of this Pimpernel Smith movie. Thank you!

and yes, I heard the Kipling poem too (as sung by Leslie Smith) in my head while reading the carriage/train paragraphs :)

[sartorias]

:-)

[seajules]

That was a very interesting read. I know you focused on WWII, but something I've wondered since I learned about Tolkien's WWI experience is when the major war of my childhood, the Viet Nam War, will start to be synthesized in this way. I also find it interesting to compare the relative amount of time it takes for an era to be romanticized in different types of art; fashion, for instance, seems set on a very rapid cycle. I mean, current designers have managed to put nostalgia for the '80s, of all things, on the runway, and have it lauded. Meanwhile, it feels like major trends in fantasy fiction are only now starting to get into this century. I do wonder how much of that is the result of detailed memoirs now surfacing as the people who could be wounded by them pass away.

[sartorias]

That is a good point. I have seen this trend in some 1830s memoirs, which romanticize a great deal of Napoleon's empire, overlooking the terrible cost in lives caused by his so-called vision for France, leading to the Second Empire of his nephew.

The rapid-cycle fashion reminds me of the late 1700s/Early 1800s, where they cycled through "Grecian" and "egyptian" and Merveilleuse, etc, fashions, within a very few years of one another. All the more remarkable as everything had to be made by hand. Jane Austen, in her letters, makes some ironic comments about where the waist and bust are located this year.

[seajules]

I was also thinking about how much the eliding of the sucktastic parts of the past is the result of childhood nostalgia and lack of awareness. Because it's usually not a generation that wasn't around at the time who starts the romanticizing; it's people who were kids and therefore have some blinders about what was happening outside of their purview. Again I'll mention the Viet Nam War. Even with my military family, I had no idea what was happening or what references to it meant. Granted, I'm of Scandohoovish stock and we're a rather close-lipped lot, but as observant as kids can be, we also tend to discard a fair amount of information we don't understand, never mind that adults often work to limit our exposure to the bad stuff.

[sartorias]

Yes. That, and a certain amount of justification that gets passed down . . .

[anna_wing]

Tolkien and WWI: a major example of "write what you know".