Saturday, June 9, 2018

The Legacy of Mata Hari


Here are four books on Mata Hari which arrived to me this week - new additions to my collection. The newest (Femme Fatale) was published in 2007, the oldest (the one in black and white, by Baumgarten) was published in 1934. 

It is amazing that this woman left to us so little and her memory still reverberates so much. Of her, we have some pictures, a few articles on newspapers, scattered letters to different people, and unsubstantiated stories and rumors. And yet, books about her have been written starting shortly after her death, in 1917, and continue being written.

Mata Hari's memory seems to be growing instead of shrinking. It is the power of mythopoiesis which makes ideas and memories invade the vast space that Aboriginal Australians call Dreamtime and grow bigger over the years.

There is at least another case of a person who is still very well known two thousand years after his death and who left us very little except stories and legends, and some words written in the sand that no man ever read.  The immense power of mythopoiesis.


Sunday, May 6, 2018

The Mata Hari Obsession

The Last Days of Mata Hari - a Novel by Giuseppe Scaraffia (2015, in Italian)


One of the characteristics of Mata Hari is that, a hundred years after her death, she can become an obsession. More than one writer fell under her spell and one of them is Giuseppe Scaraffia, author of this "The Last Days of Mata Hari" - published in Italy in 2015.

For a writer, being obsessed with the subject one writes about means the obsessive (indeed) search for all the details about it. When it is a historical subject, you do that combing all the possible sources and putting together all the details. There is a risk in this attitude - it is what Voltaire said, "the art of boredom consists in telling everything"

This is clearly a risk that Scaraffia faced with this book: an incredibly detailed report on what the famous people of a century ago were doing while Mata Hari was marching toward the firing squad. I have to confess that, at the beginning, I felt I was reading something akin to a phone book. A long list of names, Marinetti, Hemingway, Lawrence, Colette, and so on. Every name a few pages. How can you even dream of putting together a novel in this way?

But no, the book is a little steep at the beginning but, eventually, it works as a consistent narrative. And it works very well. It gives you a vision of the world as it was at the time of Mata Hari's death, a difficult, dark, and under many respect hopeless world. A world which, unfortunately, still lives in our age, although in a somewhat different form.

Then, the best thing in the book is how a consistent portrait of Mata Hari comes up. She is believable, strong, sensual, determined - exactly the way we can imagine she was. Unique, as someone said "we couldn't get another one like her, not even if we could clone her." And that's the way she is described in this book.

All writing is, eventually, an act of love toward what one writes about. And this book is one more act of love toward Mata Hari, whom we keep remembering still today.




Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Tales from Novel-Space: the Sumerian Waitresses of Planet Pluto




My exploration of novel-space is leading me to an endless series of discoveries. Novels may be a way to probe the human mind, or simply a way to peer into new and different universes. And, I must say, highly chaotic universes. Yet, as Terence said, "nothing human is alien to me", then there has to be a logic even in the weirdest novels I can put my hands on. Recently, I found myself reading in parallel two novels which couldn't be more different. One was "Diligent Waitress" by Yewande Erinle (2010), the other "Into Plutonian Depths" by Stanton Coblentz (1933).

Beware: reading these two novels together may short-circuit your mind and generate the "Necronomicon Effect" - you surely know about the metabook imagined by Howard Lovecraft which drives mad whoever reads it. I think I survived the effect, but let me go on.

Let me start with the "Diligent Waitress." This is a book that I wouldn't believe could exist if I didn't have it in my hands. To explain what I mean, let me report an excerpt from the introduction:
The Lord is looking for men and women who will wait on Him, just like a waiter would on you. He wants us to wait on Him always with our trays filled with praise and worship for him. As you approach him with your tray, he begins to take in the sweet aroma of what's on ite and He comes down for a better view of what you have chosen to serve Him with. He delights in what's on your tray and more importantly He loves it when you wait for Him to finish ejoying His meal. He wants to hear you ask Him for His needs and He wants you to keep Him company, too. God has desires too. 
I don't know if you find this as amazing as I do. This is pure Sumerian: it is the concept that humans are the "stewards of the Gods" - an idea invented some 5 thousand years ago. In the myth of Enki, we read that the Gods decided to create humans in order to serve them. And there is more in Ms. Erinle's book: the protagonist, Hadassah, speaks with God all the time, she hears Him giving her good advice and that's the normal thing in her world: everybody she knows (that is, the good people) hear the voice of God. This is a phenomenon described by Julian Jaynes in his book, "The Origin of Consciousness" (1976). An attitude that was typical of ancient civilizations, long ago people spoke with their Gods and they spoke to them. Today, most of us would find it strange to hear the voice of God ringing in our head but, at the same time, we think it is normal to keep speaking to Him, although he doesn't answer.

I don't know if Ms. Erinle is an expert in Sumerian culture. But we don't need to be Sumerians to chat with God. Read the book by Tanya Luhrmann, "When God Talks Back" (2012) and you see how this idea is common with American Evangelicals. Why such an attitude is re-emerging today in our Western civilization is hard to say, but it does. In any case, as a literary piece, "Diligent Waitress" moves on slowly, but with a certain inner logic. It is the story of Hadassah, nice, Christian girl who learns how to speak with God, becomes a diligent waitress, marries her boyfriend, and in the end becomes the owner of three restaurants. Not exactly the "epic" genre, but it has a certain charm that makes it much more readable than ancient Sumerian Hymns.


Then, let's go to the other book: Into Plutonian Depths. I think I can say that this is one of the worst novels I ever read. The problem is not so much because it is poorly written - it is, but it is not so bad. Nor because it is a boring book: it is not. It is a book full of inventions and the plot moves onward at a fast pace. And you have to recognize to Mr. Coblentz a remarkable originality. In 1933, the idea of extraterrestrial civilizations was an novelty, barely explored by H.G. Wells' story "The First Men on the Moon," clearly a source of inspiration for Coblentz, but revisited in many different ways.

It is a bad novel, rather, because it is about such nasty characters. The protagonists are two Americans named Andy and Dan (Coblentz was not so original in naming his characters). They travel a billion miles to Pluto to find a sophisticated and gentle civilization existing in the depths of the planet. But the Earthlings don't seem to be especially impressed and they do sll they can to behave horribly in various ways. Just to give you an idea, the Plutonians are said to be vegetarians and the two Earthlings don't like the food they are served. So, they feel entitled to kill, roast, and eat an animal they happen to stumble upon - something that their hosts correctly find gross and disgusting. But the worse deed they perform is seducing a poor Plutonian girl only to leave her alone to her destiny while they manage to get back to their ship and go back to Earth.  

Really, these two guys went all the way to Pluto to behave like hooligans in a trip to follow their football team. You could say that this novel is "entertaining" but it is the kind of entertainment that you could get from kicking people's butts. And if you think of it as a metaphor of how Westerners tend to behave with non-Western people, well, it is nasty but correct in many respects. If Mr. Coblentz had written a sequel to this novel (fortunately, he didn't) he might have described how the Earth forces invaded Pluto in order to bring democracy to the Plutonian, exterminating most of them in the process.

So, why did I put together these two novels, Plutonian Depths and Diligent Waitress? One reason is that, as I said, novel-space is an incredible place, full of the strangest things. It is amazing that the authors are creatures belonging to the same species (homo sapiens) - you would rather think that one of the authors is Plutonian, the other an Earthling. So, both novels are completely absurd if compared to the real universe: do you find stranger that Pluto is inhabited by human-like creatures or that an all-powerful, invisible being cares about what you serve Him at his table? But that's the miracle of literature - the impossible is possible in novel-space.

Perhaps the point I find most interesting is that there is an unexpected link between these two novels. You know what is metafiction, I guess. It is the contamination of plot elements and of characters from a novel to another - the equivalent of DNA mixing in biology. And there is a metafiction element that links the Pluto novel to the waitress novel. In a sense, the Christian protagonists of Enrile's novel look like the Plutonians of Coblentz's novel. They are gentle, nice, good, law abiding, and a little boring. Plutonians are not said to have a religion, but they have a sort of lamp on their head that makes them look in part as fireflies, but also like the Christian saints as they are depicted in paintings, with supernatural "auras" around their heads. Metafiction at the extreme level! Plutonians and Evangelical Christians, what can you ask more?

In the end, Ms. Erinle's novel may be a little boring, but it is immensely superior to the entertaining but nasty novel by Coblentz. Never forget that the meek will inherit the Earth (and perhaps also Pluto)




Sunday, April 29, 2018

The Mata Hari Meme



Sarah Lewison hit onto something with her idea of the "Mata Hari syndrome", in which she compared Mata Hari to a virus inoculated into the European society of her time. It was, clearly, a highly infectious virus and its effects are still felt, nowadays. In more recent terms, we could say that Mata Hari was a powerful meme. She expressed trends which were taking shape during her time: exotism, oriental religions, female power and much more.

Here is an excerpt of the text by Lewison that you can find on "carbonfarm"


The attractions of Mata Hari consist of unaligned components, each a symptom of the time. Narcissism meets a rudimentary familiarity with exotic religion, flows into a fascination for difference, courses through the salon of a retired opera singer, and washes up in numerous bedchambers. She takes advantage of opportunities the way a parasite infests a host, feeding her enormous appetite for popular trends, and she becomes very big, big, enough that she can host her own soirees. A courtesan is also a hostesse

But we are not finished with the metaphor of river or wash. An underground tributary forms from love juices and coins and trinkets which tumble down, down, through beds covered with the flags of hostile nations. Deep underground, they form a nourishing microbial soup, which sustains her, soup that is also a trap, a quicksand waiting for the wash-up of her career. The microbial soup, a syndrome in itself, becomes infested as a current ofparanoia, preferences and dire circumstances run together. Like an organism, she has generated a process, which must fulfill its own life cycle.








Sunday, April 22, 2018

Whence Fantasy Female Warriors? You can't imagine who was the first one of modern times



The death of Camilla, the Italic warrioress described by Virgil in his "Aeneid". This image shows the interest in female warriors that started in mid 20th century and also one of its typical features: these warrior women had to be punished for daring to take a role traditionally reserved to males. But who exactly started the trend of inerest in female warriors during the 20th century? You probably can't imagine it.  Read on!



Those of us who are interested in long-term trends find endless delight in perusing Google "Ngrams" viewer. This time, I propose to you the evolution of the concept of "woman fighter" or "female soldier". There are several variations on the theme, but the result is always the same: a great rise of interest started during the past 50 years or so. The interest in warrioresses is a modern phenomenon, but what do we know about this matter?

The recent discovery of the tomb of a female Viking warrior generated a lot of interest, But, apart from this and other Viking warrioresses, the archeological evidence of female fighters is practically non-existent in the West. How about fictional warrioresses? In the Western Epic tradition we have the Amazons, often mentioned, but rarely described in detail in ancient literature. They are supposed to have fought at the siege of Troy, but they are never mentioned in Homer's Iliad, where we read only of male warrriors. The Romans may have fantasized about female warriors, since it is reported that female gladiators would fight in the arenas. Virgil gave to us the figure of Camilla, the Latin warrioress who fought against Aeneas and the Trojans. As it often happens, her destiny was to die - just like the Amazons, overwhelmed by more powerful male warriors and punished for having dared to challenge them.

Modern fictional female warriors are clearly different. Usually, they are strong, they are confident, they are brave. Xena, the warrior princess, is possibly the most typical example. Xena is often shown slaying male warriors. Often she wears full body armor, but sometimes she indulges in the habit of wearing the typical armor of fantasy warrioresses, leaving the belly naked for the enemies' lances or swords to hit. Silly, but that doesn't prevent Xena and her sisters from being good fighters.



So, where do we find the origin of this modern phenomenon? Well, I can't say for sure, but perhaps the earliest example of a fantasy female warrior goes back to 1905 and - guess who she was? None less than Mata Hari, the stripper, the dancer, the pretended priestess, the spy who wasn't.

She was aggressive besides being transgressive and the pictures we have of her early dances show her yielding a spear. Here she is, a young Mata Hari in a "Danse Guerrière".

Also in the pictures we have of her very first performance at the Musée Guimet, in Paris in 1905, she was yielding something that looks like a spear.


In later times, Mata Hari mellowed quite a bit and we don't see anymore lances or spears in her hands - she seems to have preferred to engage in languid strip-teases. Still, she was perhaps the first fantasy female warrior in Western culture. Another facet of her always surprising personality.

Like Camilla, the Italic princess, Mata Hari was eventually punished for her assertive role. But she left a long lasting imprint and, as a good warrior should do, she faced her death without fear





Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Wonderful Mata Hari


A splendid interpretation of Mata Hari's story in a series of comic books published by Berger Books. An absolutely stunning visual feast which captures the trasgressive and aggressive character of Mata Hari. A characteristic for which she had to pay dearly later on but, until she could, she burned her candle with a beautiful flame.



Monday, April 16, 2018

Mata Hari's execution scene. Never accurate, but always dramatic




A recent dramatic image by Thierry Marchand, probably inspired by a much older (1931) image, see below. Neither image is historically accurate, but Mata Hari's memes move in the human mindspace with a life of their own.