The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm Read online

  4. Gustave Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet, Saturday, 12 June 1852 (19 June in the Pléiade edition): “Je retrouve toutes mes origines dans le livre que je savais par coeur avant de savoir lire, Don Quichotte, et il y a de plus, par dessus, l’écume agitée des mers normandes, la maladie anglaise, le brouillard puant.” In Correspondance.

  5. Gustave Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet, 22 November 1852: “Ce qu’il y a de prodigieux dans Don Quichotte, c’est l’absence d’art et cette perpétuelle fusion de l’illusion et de la réalité qui en fait un livre si comique et si poétique. Quels nains que tous les autres à côté! Comme on se sent petit, mon Dieu! comme on se sent petit!” In Correspondance.

  6. Gustave Flaubert, letter to Guy de Maupassant, Croiset, 4 May 1880: “L’importance attachée à des niaiseries, le pédantisme de la futilité m’exaspèrent! Bafouns le chic!” In Correspondance.

  7. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary:“Ce qui le séduisait par-dessus tout, c’était le chic.”

  8. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, chap. IX: “Elle lut Balzac et George Sand, y cherchant des assouvissements imaginaires pour ses convoitises personnelles.”

  9. A. S. Byatt, “Scenes from a Provincial Life,” The Guardian, 27 July 2002.

  10. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote or The Adventures of Arabella (1752) (London: Pandora Press, 1986).

  11. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Viking Penguin, 2001).

  12. Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care About Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp. 246–47.

  13. G. K. Chesterton, “Dombey and Son,” in Chesterton on Dickens, Introduction by Michael Slater (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1992).

  INDEX

  Abel (biblical), 36

  Abraham (biblical), 18

  Abraham a Sancta Clara, 95, 97

  Adam (biblical), 73

  Aeneas (mythological), 17

  Amram (biblical), 9

  Anthony, Saint, 18

  Aquinas. See Thomas Aquinas, Saint

  Aristotle, 2, 40, 60

  Ashurbanipal, 11

  Augustine, Saint, 16–17, 21, 44, 46, 87, 94; Dante and, 34, 35, 37–40; on incarnate reading, 113; on memory and expectation in reading, 19–20, 48; Scripture reconciled with pagan classics, 75–76; on words and reading, 72–73

  Balzac, Honoré de, 115, 117

  Bate, Jonathan, 80

  Beatrice (Beatrice Portinari), 32, 33, 35

  Bettelheim, Bruno, 93

  Blades, William, 132 n.5

  Blake, William, 19

  Boethius, 100

  Bonaventure, Saint, 16, 39, 40

  Borck, Caspar W. von, 81

  Borges, Jorge Luis, 78

  Bosch, Hieronymus, 53, 55, 59

  Botticelli, Sandro, 36

  Bradley, A. C., 68–69

  Brant, Sebastian, 94, 95, 101

  Browne, Sir Thomas, 12–13

  Browning, Robert, 67

  Bulattal, 25

  Bunyan, John, 18, 19

  Burckhardt, Titus, 31–32

  Byatt, A. S., 116

  Cain (biblical), 36

  Carey, John, 65–66

  Carr, Nicholas, 87–88

  Carrión, Rabbi Sem Tob de, 108

  Carroll, Lewis, 89

  Cassien, Jean, 124 n.35

  Cervantes, Miguel de, 105, 106, 116, 119

  Chantepie, Mademoiselle de, 111, 112

  Chesterton, G. K., 119

  Churchill, Winston, 56

  Cicero (Tully), 2–3, 58, 109

  Cixous, Hélène, 102

  Clamanges, Nicolas de, 80

  Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 74–75, 78, 81

  Colet, Louise, 114

  Curtis, Tony, 101

  Curtius, E. R., 32, 124 n.35

  Dahl, Roald, 99

  Dante Alighieri, 26, 28–40, 43, 49, 58, 112, 124 n.35; electronic text and, 47; sense of transience and, 44

  Democritus, 56–57, 61, 87

  Derrida, Jacques, 75

  Dido (mythological), 17–18, 94

  Dürer, Albrecht, 94

  Duvet, Jean, 14

  Eco, Umberto, 93

  Eliot, George, 52

  Enkidu (mythological), 27

  Enlil (Mesopotamian god), 23, 24

  Enmerkar, 11

  Erasmus, 79, 86, 95–96

  Eve (biblical), 73

  Ezekiel (biblical), 15, 16

  Ficino, Marsilio, 59–60, 63

  Flaubert, Gustave, 111–14, 119, 133 n.1

  Forster, E. M., 45

  Frye, Northrop, 72

  Galileo Galilei, 33–34

  Gérard, Jean Ignace Isidore. See Grandville, J. J.

  Gielgud, John, 67, 70

  Gilgamesh (mythological), 21–25, 27, 50

  Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 59, 82

  Goya, Francisco, 105

  Gramsci, Antonio, 84–87

  Granada, Luis de, 8

  Grandville, J. J. (Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard), 91, 92, 94, 103

  Greenblatt, Stephen, 78

  Gründgens, Gustav, 67, 82–83

  Habakkuk (biblical), 15

  Handke, Peter, 62–63

  Heraclitus, 7

  Herberay, Nicholas de, 92–93, 118

  Herder, Johann Gottfried, 81

  Herod, King, 9

  Hildegard von Bingen, 1

  Hippocrates, 57

  Hitler, Adolf, 65

  Hölderlin, Friedrich, 61

  Hooke, Richard, 97, 98

  Horace, 32, 112

  Hubbard, John, 41

  Hugo, Victor, 64

  Ibn al-Arabi, 42–43

  Jacob (biblical), 18

  James, C. L. R., 86

  James, Henry, 128 n.15

  James of Compostela, Saint, 38

  Jason (mythological), 36

  Jerome, Saint, 58–59

  Jesus, 10, 37, 53, 73

  Jochebed (biblical), 9

  John, Saint, 12, 14, 15, 100–101

  Jung, Carl Gustav, 61

  Kafka, Franz, 84, 87

  Keller, Wolfgang, 81–82

  Kyd, Thomas, 71

  Leah (biblical), 127 n.3

  Le Goff, Jacques, 78–79

  Lennox, Charlotte, 116

  Léon, Fray Luis de, 51

  Leopardi, Giacomo, 61

  Mallarmé, Stéphane, 84, 116

  Manilius, 32

  Mann, Klaus, 82

  Mark, Saint, 103

  Maupassant, Guy de, 114

  Milton, John, 41

  Miriam (biblical), 9

  Monroe, Marilyn, 101

  Montaigne, Michel de, 45, 61–62, 87, 133 n.1

  Montreuil, Jean de, 80

  Moore, George, 66

  Moses (biblical), 9, 10, 15

  Müthel, Lothar, 82

  Nashe, Thomas, 71

  Naudin, Bernard, 111

  Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1

  Ninurta (Mesopotamian god), 23

  Nooteboom, Cees, 42–43, 45, 46

  Nuttall, A. D., 81

  Olearius, Paul (Jacob Wimpfeling), 94, 96

  Ortega y Gasset, José, 66

  Pamuk, Orhan, 42

  Parker, Dorothy, 101

  Pascal, Blaise, 45

  Paul, Saint, 99

  Petrarch, 44

  Philo de Biblos, 16

  Pierrot, Alain, 48

  Plato, 60, 102, 107, 108, 118

  Plotinus, 12

  Priest, Alexander Barclay, 95

  Propertius, 32

  Quevedo, Francisco de, 63

  Rabelais, François, 61

  Rachel (biblical), 127 n.3

  Racine, Jean, 99

  Riess, Curt, 82

  Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin, 64, 87

  Sand, George, 115

  Sarkozy, Nicolas, 102

  Sarzana, Jean, 48

  Saturn (Greek god), 56

  Seneca, 65

  Shakespeare, William, 63, 70, 71, 74–77, 86; ivory tower and, 80, 87;
Third Reich and, 81–82

  Simeon the Stylite, 57

  Sin-leqi-unninni, 23

  Slavitt, David, 100

  Smith, Logan Pearsall, 111

  Socrates, 118

  Statius, 32, 33, 39

  Stendhal, 99

  Stevenson, Robert Louis, 49, 94

  Stoppard, Tom, 77–78

  Sue, Eugène, 115, 117

  Thomas à Kempis, 90

  Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 38, 39, 72–73, 78–79, 127 n.3

  Tolstoy, Leo, 116

  Ulysses (mythological), 49, 58

  Vermeule, Blakely, 118

  Vigny, Alfred de, 64

  Virgil, 17, 29, 33–35, 39

  Virgin Mary, 3, 9–10

  Wandering Jew (legendary figure), 36–37

  Weigel, Johann Christoph, 97

  Wimpfeling, Jacob (Paul Olearius), 94, 96

  Woolf, Virginia, 87

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to David McKnight and the board of the University of Pennsylvania for asking me to deliver the Rosenbach Lectures, which led me to write this book. Thanks to the several librarians at the Free Library, the Rosenbach Library, the University of Pennsylvania Library, and the Jewish Center Library of Philadelphia for their hospitality and generosity during my visit. Special thanks to Fr. Lucien-Jean Bord, chief librarian at the Abbey of Saint-Martin in Ligugé, who generously guided me through the stacks and helped me with many essential suggestions. Above all, thanks to Jerry Singerman, who, with intelligence, erudition, and kindness, proved my prejudices against editors shamefully wrong.