A Different Kind of Burden Shirt

I've been thinking for awhile now that the Belastunghemd (or burden shirt from Fn 5, pg 52) might be related to a couple of things.  In doing some research on types of fiction, sometimes references are only a close approximation to the object, idea or person being referenced. The specific example I found came from an academic paper (about Finnegans Wake), but unfortunately I can't find it again.  I have found a list of references to two characters in Finnegans Wake here to give you an idea.

To give you another example, I can create one using James Joyce, author of Finnegans Wake and Ulysses.  In Gaelic, his surname would be Seoighe (shoy).  Suppose somehow he is connected to archery, whether it be through word play or the sport.  Archer in gaelic is saighdeoir (sijue, long i).  The two words somewhat resemble each other but different enough that only someone who understands the connection that I am making would get it.  I suspect that there are these kinds of connections in S. that need to be found, too.

Back to the burden-shirt.  Mystimus and Geekyzen have talked about its possible connection to the shirt of Nessus. When I first came across the term, the first thought that came to my mind was the hair shirt worn by Thomas Becket, who was famously matyred when still wearing his (you can blame my high school literature teacher for this one), and the mystery plays of the middle ages.

The hair shirt or cilice, is an object worn by the faithful as an act of penitence or atonement; or as a way to assume some of the suffering of Christ.  The whole point of the garment is to make the wearer uncomfortable and/or to cause pain.  Although mostly associated with the Christian faith since biblical times, the practice has been traced to prehistoric cultures; the practice in Christianity comes from the biblical tradition of wearing sackcloth and ashes during mouring and debasement.  Related to this is the biblical tradition of rending one's clothes to expose a broken heart.  More recently, the hair shirt metaphor was applied to one of the Lost Generation writers; Virginia Woolf compared T. S. Eliot's wife, Vivienne, to "a bag of ferrets" worn around his neck.  It might also be that the burden shirt is a reference to five mourners; or to five sinners who need to atone for their sins.

It makes sense then that the play Belastunghemd performed by children is a morality play that takes place on Ash Wednesday.  Medieval European religious festivities at some point evolved into the formal dramas called mystery plays, using content taken directly from the bible.  They were sometimes performed around important holidays. Later, as mystery plays fell out of favor, morality plays became the form of entertainment popular in the 15th and 16th centuries.  Sometimes containing a moral or sometimes not, morality plays, often called interludes, were allegories in which the protagonist is encouraged to choose a Godly life through interactions with virtues shown in human form.

Using the same loose logic that I connected Joyce to the archer, I think Belastunghemd may also be a reference the literary genre bildungsroman, that originated in Germany in the 18th century from Goethe.  Goethe, who is probably most famous for his Faust (which also contains allegory), is credited for writing the first coming of age novel.  The term comes from the german meaning "novel of formation/education/culture"  Bildungsroman "is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood."  Which makes sense as becoming an adult comes with its own trials and responsibilities. In order to become an adult, one must give up childish things and assume the burdens or burden-shirt of maturity.


(8/17/14 edits for grammar and tags added)

Daring, Vivid, Exciting! and another T.S. Eliot reference

Edit: I have a cold today and it's muddled my head.  I listed the wrong magazine as the source of the original reference ad.  The magazine that should have been listed is The Saturday Review and has been corrected in the text below as well.

On December 19, 2013 Doug Dorst uploaded two pictures of the Ship of Theseus review by Edsel B. Grimshaw. Geekyzen and Mystimus both written excellent blog posts about the review. 

I was intrigued by the ad next to the review (2nd page) for the fictional book Moonlight.  @0bFuSc8 on twitter found links to additional ads and posted them on twitter and in the comments of the SFiles22 blog.

Here is the ad as it appears in the review: 

Asking the google, I was able to find the original ad that was adapted for use in the review.  It comes from the August 26, 1950 edition of The Saturday Review.

"German general kidnapped from Crete by Englishmen and partisan guerillas..."

It's interesting in that the ad gives another us another link to Greece (Santorini Man) and the author also wrote a book titled Bats with Baby Faces which is reference taken from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.  I was unable to find any additional information on the book other than it was published by Harlequin Books (1951) and appears to be pulp fiction.  I welcome any additional information that readers may have to offer. 

(Fair use under U.S. Copyright law allows for the use of copyrighted works for non-commercial educational purposes)

(7/31/14, tags added and edited for grammar)

The Violin Player, Notes on Footnote 6, Chapter 1 (page 26)

In my last couple of posts I briefly talked about the Lost Generation. Hemingway was in that circle, as was John Dos Passos and many others. Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot are often included in discussions of Lost Generation poets.

Ezra Pound was one of the premier poets of the period until he lost himself in a stew of racism and insanity. World War II had come around and Pound by this time had made over one hundred radio broadcasts in support of Hitler and Mussolini. Hemingway had made it clear in a letter to Archibald MacLeish that Pound deserved punishment, disgrace and mostly ridicule. Pound was fortunate, he was tried for treason, but sent to a mental institution. Although he repudiated his support of Fascism, he never lost his racist streak.

But I need to back up a bit. Although Pound was married to Dorothy Shakespear, he did have several affairs; his longest running affair was with Olga Rudge, which lasted 50 years.

Rudge was a world class violinist. She had spent World War I playing in concerts to raise money for the British and French war efforts. Eventually Rudge had made her way to Italy and met Pound in the early 1920's. This was still at Pound's peak, he was one of the luminaries of the Lost Generation and mentor to Hemingway. Around this same time, Rudge became acquainted with George Antheil, a young American composer.

Around this time, Pound was still promoting Vorticism as a style of poety. To Pound, Vorticism is described as "The image is a radiant node or cluster; it is ... a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing." Pound worked with Antheil to develop Vorticism in musical compositions for the violin. Pound wrote Antheiland the Treatise on Harmony to help promote Antheil.

As an interesting aside, Antheil wrote the murder mystery Death in the Dark under the pseudonym Stacey Bishop. It was actually a collaborative effort including Antheil, T. S. Eliot, Franz Werfel, W. B. Yeats, and Pound.

Eventually, Antheil was forced to disavow Pound, probably in part due to Pound's increasing collaboration with the Fascists.

In later years Antheil made his way to Hollywood and scored several films, including The Pride and the Passion, starring Cary Grant and Sofia Loren.

On a side note, it was Antheil's pseudo-expertise in endocrinology that brought him in touch with the screen actress Hedy Lamar. Antheil and Lamar worked together on a way to encrypt radio signals to torpedoes to prevent them from being jammed. The idea used frequency hopping and the idea was based on the mechanics of a player piano. The idea was patented, but initially the Navy dismissed the idea. Eventually the technique was used by the U.S. military after the patent expired and frequency hopping is now widely used. 


(edited for grammar 7/31/14 and tags added)