Apples and Oranges. Maarten Asscher
basin. Just as the author did in going from part I to part II, he continues his argument with different means. His narrative descriptions and anecdotal digressions are now based on the countless names ascribed to the Mediterranean Sea, the multitude of ideas used to describe its individual gulfs, bays, and coves, and their etymological and historical roots. In doing so he not only uses encyclopedias and nautical handbooks, but also ships’ logbooks and travel accounts. Together with the author, we lament the loss of the ten volume Peri limenon (On Ports) by Timosthenes of Rhodes, admiral in the navy of Ptolemy ii Philadelphus.
Matvejević helps us compensate for the loss with his combination of evocative curiosity and imaginative associations. On the etymological relationship between ports as harbors and ports as doors or gateways, on sunken harbors as necropolises, on maritime cemeteries and their significance as a source of Mediterranean history. And islands, of course, including their historiographical and toponymic associations with classical, medieval, and later figures, up to and including Napoleon, Goethe, Trotsky, D.H. Lawrence, and Lawrence Durrell. This leads to incidental, but no less memorable nuggets of information, like the observation that the less a fish is valued as food the more names it tends to have. The author makes similar observations about the names and functions of herbs and olives, market squares and boulevards, souks and bazaars, weights and measures. This leads in turn to a fine reflection on the temperamental difference between the oriental bazaar and the Latin market. But a couple of pages later we’re back to the influence of crickets on the prosody of Hellenistic poetry and the question of which part of a seagull actually touches the surface of the water first: its breast, its claws, its beak, or its wings?
Such matters are important. They can keep you busy as you stare out to sea while the waiter brings you another glass of tea, an ouzo, or a local fig distillate. It’s hard to draw conclusions from them, but conclusions aren’t really necessary. In truth, and if we are to believe the book, nothing is necessary, but everything is worth studying and thinking about.
Matvejević’s breviary was clearly wasted on Kees Fens, as is unequivocally evident from his review. At the beginning of his piece he notes that he spent an entire day with the book, but ‘didn’t achieve perfection’. He diagnoses ‘verbal dandruff’ on the part of the author, a ‘mania for collecting and explaining’. He even opines here and there that he’s dealing with parody (without attempting to answer the interesting question: of what might the book be a parody?). He considers the book to be a sort of catalogue, but one that ‘means nothing’ and affords the reader no—new—insights. The book appears extremely profound, according to Fens, but ‘in fact it’s almost empty’. In his opinion it doesn’t provide any ‘real information’ and is little more than a ‘chain reaction of words’. ‘I’ve rarely read an author,’ he concludes admittedly with some wit, ‘who allows himself to be towed along by words to such a degree. […] There appears to be a lot. But if you read carefully there’s nothing to read.’ Fens explains this by arguing that ‘there is an absence of clarity and its associated pedagogical demands’. His final words: ‘Matvejević’s helmsmanship is the reason why the ship keeps turning on its axis. We never move forward. […] I was constantly thinking […] about the end of the journey. In the hope that its uniqueness would dawn on me. But there was no lighthouse up ahead, no beacon, no buoy, no harbor, no quay, no mooring berth. In short: there was nothing to hold on to. Nothing, that is, except the extraordinary talents of the translator Tom Eekman’.
In contrast to my own enthusiastic reading of Predrag Matvejević’s book, what Kees Fens’ brutal critique reveals is not only a difference of taste, of someone who admires a book vis-à-vis someone who detests it. There appears rather to be evidence of an unbridgeable divergence of minds. For Kees Fens, Mediterranean Breviary should have had a beginning as well as a middle and an end. More precisely, it should have had an ‘outcome’ that would have made ‘perfection’ achievable. Only then would the book have had meaning for him—mindful of the ‘pedagogical demands’—and only then would the reader have been granted something to ‘hold on to’ at the end of the book. But the very thing that draws me to Matvejević’s book and continues to enthrall me is its rambling character, its aimlessness, not its linearity (from beginning to end), but its circularity (rambling as a goal in itself). Its words move forward like waves suggesting a sea in the form of a book. After Fernand Braudel and hundreds of other authoritative histories of the culture, history and geography of the Mediterranean, what’s the point of more ‘useful information’ about ‘our sea’? I honestly wouldn’t know. But the fact that the inhabitants of Herculaneum didn’t swim on their backs or bellies but on their sides, as Erwin Mehl’s Antike Schwimmkunst (Munich, 1927) informs us, is the kind of unforgettable detail I particularly like to indulge, and of such details Matvejević is a most successful collector. So what inspired the horror that evidently took hold of Fens and refused to let him go for two hundred pages? The answer, it suddenly dawned on me, had to do with the difference between the Mediterranean and the North Sea, with Zandvoort on the North Sea coast, Kees Fens’ former hometown, and with the cultural differences that distinguish such a northern seaside resort from the southern reality of the Mediterranean.
In a country like the Netherlands, where the tulips line up every year, where the trees serve in the first place as protection against the wind from the sea, and where people think of the sea in terms of tides (and the climate in terms of rain), a book needs to offer something to hold on to, prove its perfection in the space of a day on the basis of the ‘useful information’ it yields. More than anything else, it has to ‘mean something’, otherwise it’s nothing. Don’t forget those ‘pedagogical demands’! Kees Fens painstakingly reminds us of these rigid rules and he’s right to proclaim them for all to hear, in the Netherlands that is. But in the culture of the Mediterranean, from which this book emerged and into which it immerses itself anew after reading, such practical necessities don’t count. A book doesn’t need to move from a to b in the Mediterranean. A Mediterranean book writes its own language drawing from the countless alphabets that have come into existence on its shores across the centuries. Instead of mercantile tulip bulbs, the Mediterranean has useless but glorious mosaics that have been waiting under the same sun for thousands of years for nothing in particular. The Mediterranean sun that reigns on high warms the tideless and capricious sea, inviting you to bob around in it without purpose until you decide with equal caprice that it’s time to get out of the water. Not because you’ve arrived at your destination, but because the position of the sun or the hollers from the pier suggest it. Or because you caught sight of a palm tree or a pine offering some welcome shade.
People go to the North Sea to walk up and down the beach, to go for a dip or take the ferry to England. And when they’ve done what they came to do, they go home. The Mediterranean Sea, by contrast, is a means rather than an end, a resource for life, a way of deciding where you stand with respect to the past and the present. The only pedagogical lesson it has to teach—and no one ever put it better than Kafavis—is that we’re always on the move, that perfection is not to be found in the goal of our journey, but somewhere along the way, and that it’s better to enjoy as much of what life has to offer as we live it. Otherwise there’s a danger that you’ll realize when you reach the end that you passed perfection long ago and didn’t notice. It sounds like a clash of clichés, and perhaps it is, but they’re clichés ‘kept for re-order’, as the old-fashioned photographer’s studio would have it.
The shortest summary of the gulf I’ve been describing is perhaps found in the Ladino saying Matvejević quotes on the last page of his book: ‘Dame al mazal e etcha me a la mar’, or ‘Make me happy and throw me into the sea’. For those who feel at home in Zandvoort on the North Sea, the idea of being ‘thrown into the sea’ will elicit thoughts of an involuntary cold bath to be resisted at all costs. But readers more inclined to the Mediterranean will happily yield to Predrag Matvejević and let him throw them into the Med. For no reason at all.
THE CLEVERINGA SCALE
Two Ways to Be a Lawyer
Leiden University professor R.P. Cleveringa, who made history with a public lecture on November 26th, 1940, when he vehemently protested the