Crinoline

Slavoj Zizek recommended three authors as true poets during his 2016 seminar at the European Graduate School: Andrei Platonov, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett (who bettered his master James Joyce’s attempts). There was a fourth whom I could not fully make out but deduced to be Italo Svevo (Aaron Hector Schmitz) because his Zeno’s Conscience revolves around psychoanalysis. I was finally convinced of my deduction by a quote on page 435 that Zizek seems to have plundered for his Mary Magdalene vagina/Jesus joke: “Unlike other sicknesses, life is always fatal. It doesn’t tolerate therapies. It would be like stopping the holes that we have in our bodies, believing them wounds. We would die of strangulation the moment we were treated.” Jim Harrison claimed plundering your fellow scribe was par for the course.

But that’s not what I wanted to write about, rather what triggered the thought process that eventually led back to Zizek, Zeno’s trigger word: “crinoline,” by which he meant a skirt stiffened with hoops (see Wikipedia). While Zeno pondered his need for the crinoline in order to feel the urge to disrobe a woman, I pondered the capitalistic incentives for creating a bulky cascading garment, which led me to compare “crinoline” and “stock exchange” (which Zeno calls the Bourse) using Google Books Ngram Viewer:

"Crinoline" was once hotter than the stock market, and a comparison with “textile” perhaps tells us why:

It seems the crinoline was (re)introduced to create an immediate increase in demand for textiles made abundant by industrialization, not out of any inherent need to dress up or, in Zeno’s case, undress women (which are more questions of marketing). Around 1840 construction began on the largest textile factory in England at the time, the Brunswick Mill, Ancoats. By 1850, the mill had 276 carding machines, 77,000 mule spindles, 20 drawing frames, 50 slubbing frames and 81 roving frames (see Wikipedia). I added the word “machinery” to the Ngram mix to emphasize this point, though it does not necessarily prove my theory:


Ngram is only as accurate and good as the comprehensiveness and integrity of its database, and Google has inordinate power to control the narrative--just as autocorrect suggests, often times erroneously, what are words or the appropriate words. However, at present, one can make some interesting comparisons using the profiling tool. For example, while I was doing my documentary on physician assistants in 2017, the American Association of Physician Assistants allowed its members to write prescriptions for Suboxone, a drug used to treat opioid addiction containing buprenorphine and naloxone. I compared these ingredients to the words “opioid,” “oxycodone” and “fentanyl”:

While knowledge of opium goes back before the time of Hippocrates to the Neolithic, all major discussion of the terms associated with the current opioid situation go back to at least the 1960s, when many returned from Vietnam addicted to morphine and the poppy products of the Golden Triangle. Yet it appears by the cursor dated 1929, the existence of the terms precedes that time, and in fact, Martin Freund and Edmund Speyer developed oxycodone at the University of Frankfurt in 1916 (see Wikipedia). As such, any pharmaceutical company, government regulator or doctor would be a hypocrite to claim that the current opioid “crisis” is anything but a manufactured epidemic. I will leave the reader/researcher to make their own conclusions, but I will say it again: crinoline.

Which brings me back to Zizek and one of the three poets he recommended: Andrei Platonov, a master at messing with vocabulary. Overall, Ngram has been useful to me in choosing era-appropriate words when translating “The Behidden Man (Сокровенный человек),” a story Platonov published in 1927 that led to his subsequent Quixotic masterpiece on the Russian Civil War: Chevengur. That said, in the end, it helps to already have a wealth of words squirreled away in your noggin from having read a crinoline or two of books. 

For an excerpt of my ongoing translation work, see the previous post.



 

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