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Eclogues: Eight stories
Mixtures of myth and fable, these tales have their origins in Plutarch, Montaigne, The Acts of the Apostles, Theokritos, and the daily newspaper. Eclogues is a delight, and Guy Davenport proves a companionable and witty guide.
238 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
dropped
November 2, 2011OK, I didn’t give Guy much of a chance, but I could see where it was going. Endless Greek references, academic indulgence, unbearable polyglot showboating. Bah. Bah. I like random Greek and German phrases and words like boondoggle and whoopdedo as much as the next reader—OK, I don’t—but these difficult stories went over my head, and don’t fall into my corner of the avant-garde, where Sorrentino and Queneau hang out quipping and smoking. I hear his essay collections are the bees knees, so I’ll try those instead.
December 17, 2008
oh me oh my! i've never read a collection of stories anything like this one. in fact, we probably shouldn't even call these stories but we don't have a word for the things that davenport makes so we call them stories, for now.
January 29, 2024
What if Cormac McCarthy, but fruity? Ok, that's bait, but it almost isn't, if you squint real hard: both writers were friends and kept a long correspondence through the years (there's that famous picture of them, Davenport looking like a guy from just right now while McCarthy looks like if the costume department from "That 70’s Show" just went filthy with it). There's an affinity in both writers for the extremely brainy and erudite (even though it doesn't appear explicitly in McCarthy's books), and what I'm trying to say is that both made me check the dictionary more than I'm comfortable to admit.
The pair of writers could be related (by a lazy reviewer grasping for easy schemata like myself) to the Eros-Thanatos binomial. If McCarthy is readily associated with Thanatos, Davenport appears as his Eros counterpart. There's a constant attentiveness to the sensual in his style (not only in the sexual sense, but in that sense too), rich with smells, tastes, colors and movement. In his less restrained moments, Davenport's prose, anything but prosaic, stretches semantic relationships almost to breaking point, employing audacious metonymic bridges that give the sense of new language testing its muscles, vibrating with new energy. At times, the text seems to lose all weight and float up dispersing like the beads of an unraveling necklace. At its most felicitous, the effect is of constant inebriation. This is a book which revels in language like a third path to areté besides war and sports. Paralleling the Greek athletes and warriors that appear in some of its stories, it happily accepts the risks of the agon: at times it dangerously tiptoes the line of affectation (just like with McCarthy, by the way); it gets too rich, in the culinary sense, too precious for my taste. But it hits consistently, way more than it misses, and it pays off beautifully, as you watch language blossoming to the point of bursting like overripe figs in a buzz of wasps (last sentence being my clumsy attempt to ape Davenport's style but also a faithful synesthetic perception that I get from his text).
The stories are not always concerned with narrative; two of them, taking place in modern times, are somewhat static (and ecstatic) descriptions of places and moments frozen in time with minimal action, related almost as ekphrasis — not too much of an exaggeration, as one of the stories is even named after a painting. Painting being, along with philosophy, two major points of interest to Davenport, who often mentions artists, philosophers and their work throughout the stories. Llight, being literal and figuratively ("the light of reason") the element through which art and philosophy happen, assumes prominent place in stories such as "Lo Splendore Della Luce a Bologna". I rather like it, as it comes close to the ideal of aesthetic appreciation which one finds in modernists like Joyce, or certain poems of Wallace Stevens which transfigure static reality in an image of pure ideas.
What you're (mostly) in for: fascinating resurrections of ancient Greece, its modes of life and language, in adaptations and elaborations of archaic texts (St. Paul and St. Barnabas are received as miracle-working gods in Lystra only to be chased out of the city upon their insistence on being mere men; a group of Thebans orchestrates a coup to overthrow Spartan rulers; a horny potter takes an interest in Diogenes and his philosophy; two shepherds face off in a song contest). As usual, these short descriptions are useless, and provide only the most general layout of what you'll actually find. Like a spinning coin showing the effigy of Apollo in one side and a satyr in the other, the stories superimpose two opposed images, one of the examined life, as characters expound on the weighty themes of socratic philosophy; the other, of the unexamined life, as characters just live, pure bodies open to the sensual experience.
What kept me from fully enjoying the book was Davenport's cosmopolitan (gay) take on sexuality, which shows itself on what feels to me like a sinister avuncular interest in the sexual development of children. William Burroughs’ seasons in Tangier are a litmus test for this subject: you're either fine with it or repelled by it. Not being the cosmopolitan (gay) type, I belong to the second group. There's two stories where this aspect features prominently: in the first, "The Death of Picasso", an older man and a hypersexualized teenage boy live together in a wood cabin on a secluded island. Despite an abundance of interesting references and musings about art, philosophy, metaphysics, astronomy etc, the fulcrum of the story happens when the boy offers himself naked to the older man. "A scrunch in my scrotum", relates the narrator, evincing the well known cosmopolitan (gay) mix of sleaze and sophistication that can't produce anything other than nausea.
There's a pattern where stories like this always take place in a removed space outside the real world; for an American, the liberal countries of northern Europe stand in for Utopia. The story is subtitled "An Erewhonian Sketchbook". "Erewhon", "nowhere". This was a persistent element in old cosmopolitan literature: the notion that that particular disorder needed its own secret world, protected from the boorishness and prejudice of the outside. Undoubtedly a quaint notion by today's standards (I wonder how many gay writers predicted that the same disenchantment that killed God would also kill whatever seemed special about their proclivities, their little secluded paradises).
The sense of unreality is compounded by the characters: the parents are enlightened to the point of caricature, the children are impossibly brilliant and beautiful. In this Davenport evinces a blind spot common to all sexual liberators: of course people don't become magically sexualized only upon turning eighteen, and sexual discovery is a natural part of the very process of growing up, but that doesn't mean that weird adults that start breathing funny when children are nearby should be incentivized to hover around just in case they're needed to lend a hand, so to speak. Of course, that's a talk about sexual morality, which is absent in Davenport's stories (which perhaps explains his fixation with ancient Greece). I wonder if this is the same blind spot that made him write a child character saying "You must remember none of this happened", which is, ironically, worryingly similar to something an adult abuser trying to do damage control would say to a terrified child, post-facto (as an aside, while there's no sexual morality in Devenport's stories, he seemed to be quite sensitive to depictions of violence, even voicing his distaste for "Blood Meridian" due to Mccarthy's apparent lack of condemnation of the violence in the book).
Speaking personally, the angle of my forehead, lack of high education and decidedly small-minded bourgeois stance on pedophilia ("Pedo, Don't Let The Sun Set On You", basically) prevented me from fully taking in a lot of what Davenport has to offer (I've heard his essays are nonpareil, and am planning to check them out). Still, there are plenty of things to admire in this book. Only, perhaps, not to love.
The pair of writers could be related (by a lazy reviewer grasping for easy schemata like myself) to the Eros-Thanatos binomial. If McCarthy is readily associated with Thanatos, Davenport appears as his Eros counterpart. There's a constant attentiveness to the sensual in his style (not only in the sexual sense, but in that sense too), rich with smells, tastes, colors and movement. In his less restrained moments, Davenport's prose, anything but prosaic, stretches semantic relationships almost to breaking point, employing audacious metonymic bridges that give the sense of new language testing its muscles, vibrating with new energy. At times, the text seems to lose all weight and float up dispersing like the beads of an unraveling necklace. At its most felicitous, the effect is of constant inebriation. This is a book which revels in language like a third path to areté besides war and sports. Paralleling the Greek athletes and warriors that appear in some of its stories, it happily accepts the risks of the agon: at times it dangerously tiptoes the line of affectation (just like with McCarthy, by the way); it gets too rich, in the culinary sense, too precious for my taste. But it hits consistently, way more than it misses, and it pays off beautifully, as you watch language blossoming to the point of bursting like overripe figs in a buzz of wasps (last sentence being my clumsy attempt to ape Davenport's style but also a faithful synesthetic perception that I get from his text).
The stories are not always concerned with narrative; two of them, taking place in modern times, are somewhat static (and ecstatic) descriptions of places and moments frozen in time with minimal action, related almost as ekphrasis — not too much of an exaggeration, as one of the stories is even named after a painting. Painting being, along with philosophy, two major points of interest to Davenport, who often mentions artists, philosophers and their work throughout the stories. Llight, being literal and figuratively ("the light of reason") the element through which art and philosophy happen, assumes prominent place in stories such as "Lo Splendore Della Luce a Bologna". I rather like it, as it comes close to the ideal of aesthetic appreciation which one finds in modernists like Joyce, or certain poems of Wallace Stevens which transfigure static reality in an image of pure ideas.
What you're (mostly) in for: fascinating resurrections of ancient Greece, its modes of life and language, in adaptations and elaborations of archaic texts (St. Paul and St. Barnabas are received as miracle-working gods in Lystra only to be chased out of the city upon their insistence on being mere men; a group of Thebans orchestrates a coup to overthrow Spartan rulers; a horny potter takes an interest in Diogenes and his philosophy; two shepherds face off in a song contest). As usual, these short descriptions are useless, and provide only the most general layout of what you'll actually find. Like a spinning coin showing the effigy of Apollo in one side and a satyr in the other, the stories superimpose two opposed images, one of the examined life, as characters expound on the weighty themes of socratic philosophy; the other, of the unexamined life, as characters just live, pure bodies open to the sensual experience.
What kept me from fully enjoying the book was Davenport's cosmopolitan (gay) take on sexuality, which shows itself on what feels to me like a sinister avuncular interest in the sexual development of children. William Burroughs’ seasons in Tangier are a litmus test for this subject: you're either fine with it or repelled by it. Not being the cosmopolitan (gay) type, I belong to the second group. There's two stories where this aspect features prominently: in the first, "The Death of Picasso", an older man and a hypersexualized teenage boy live together in a wood cabin on a secluded island. Despite an abundance of interesting references and musings about art, philosophy, metaphysics, astronomy etc, the fulcrum of the story happens when the boy offers himself naked to the older man. "A scrunch in my scrotum", relates the narrator, evincing the well known cosmopolitan (gay) mix of sleaze and sophistication that can't produce anything other than nausea.
There's a pattern where stories like this always take place in a removed space outside the real world; for an American, the liberal countries of northern Europe stand in for Utopia. The story is subtitled "An Erewhonian Sketchbook". "Erewhon", "nowhere". This was a persistent element in old cosmopolitan literature: the notion that that particular disorder needed its own secret world, protected from the boorishness and prejudice of the outside. Undoubtedly a quaint notion by today's standards (I wonder how many gay writers predicted that the same disenchantment that killed God would also kill whatever seemed special about their proclivities, their little secluded paradises).
The sense of unreality is compounded by the characters: the parents are enlightened to the point of caricature, the children are impossibly brilliant and beautiful. In this Davenport evinces a blind spot common to all sexual liberators: of course people don't become magically sexualized only upon turning eighteen, and sexual discovery is a natural part of the very process of growing up, but that doesn't mean that weird adults that start breathing funny when children are nearby should be incentivized to hover around just in case they're needed to lend a hand, so to speak. Of course, that's a talk about sexual morality, which is absent in Davenport's stories (which perhaps explains his fixation with ancient Greece). I wonder if this is the same blind spot that made him write a child character saying "You must remember none of this happened", which is, ironically, worryingly similar to something an adult abuser trying to do damage control would say to a terrified child, post-facto (as an aside, while there's no sexual morality in Devenport's stories, he seemed to be quite sensitive to depictions of violence, even voicing his distaste for "Blood Meridian" due to Mccarthy's apparent lack of condemnation of the violence in the book).
Speaking personally, the angle of my forehead, lack of high education and decidedly small-minded bourgeois stance on pedophilia ("Pedo, Don't Let The Sun Set On You", basically) prevented me from fully taking in a lot of what Davenport has to offer (I've heard his essays are nonpareil, and am planning to check them out). Still, there are plenty of things to admire in this book. Only, perhaps, not to love.
November 11, 2022
unselfconscious celebration of homosociality and the mutual JO in extraordinarily self-conscious, precise prose, showoffy in the best way. a treat so rich with reference and the strangeness of any given image of reality that i had to take it slow. FFO dl guys
March 9, 2025
The first and last story are the only readable stories and they are just okay. Difficult for the sake of being difficult, not much to enjoy.
May 19, 2025
***4.5 stars***
Read
July 11, 2008Love his essays. I'm sure I don't understand these stories.
July 23, 2024
the last story really sticks!!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews