|
 |
 |
|
|
|
** This is an archived, static copy of the Casebook messages boards dating from 1998 to 2003. These threads cannot be replied to here. If you want to participate in our current forums please go to https://forum.casebook.org **
Archive through March 10, 2001
Casebook Message Boards: The Diary of Jack the Ripper: General Discussion:
College course tackles the Diary:
Archive through March 10, 2001
Author: Stephen P. Ryder
Thursday, 01 March 2001 - 10:19 pm |        | There is a college English course in San Mateo, California, currently debating the Maybrick Diary.
http://www.gocsm.net/murphy/english165/default.htm
Would be interesting to see what the students come up with.  |
Author: Stephen P. Ryder
Thursday, 01 March 2001 - 10:21 pm | | Sorry, that url should be:
http://www.gocsm.net/murphy/english165/lesson3.htm |
Author: Paul Begg
Friday, 02 March 2001 - 03:19 am | | | Isn't that astonishing! I wonder how well we'd all do on that course. I rather wish I could take it. |
Author: Caroline Anne Morris
Friday, 02 March 2001 - 05:57 am | | Hi All,
And we are constantly being told that the subject is only still being debated in this strange place! I often wondered how anyone could know that for certain. :-)
Just shows you should never believe anything you hear without question, no matter how reliable the source may appear.
Love,
Caz |
Author: Madeleine Murphy
Thursday, 08 March 2001 - 01:08 am | | Hi all!
I'm the person who teaches the course, over here in balmy (and I do mean "balmy") San Mateo, just south of San Francisco. I think we're keeping sales of the book alive in the Bay Area.
It's a critical thinking course--i.e. a course in argument and basic logic. The students read the diary in the course of studying the basis of logical argument: distinguishing between statements of fact, inference & judgment; identifying incomplete arguments & unearthing hidden assumptions; learning, above all, how to be skeptical--that is, how to apply the scientific method: by seeking not to prove your hypothesis (which gets you nowhere) but to rule out the other options, a la Sherlock Holmes. You can imagine that this is a really useful text. All this and serial killing too. I've been using the diary for about two years and have become quite interested.
You're all welcome to browse around, and if I've said anything untoward or massively wrong (highly likely!) please feel free to give me a hard time! Their discussion boards tend to be pretty lowkey and quiet, since they're not voluntary Ripperologists, but comments do occasionally appear.
Interesting, they are almost ALL convinced by the diary and become quite annoyed when I pepper their essays with cries of "So what?" and "Is this the most likely inference?" etc.
I myself am an utter skeptic. I am sure that I know virtually nothing about the subject compared to all of you!! but I don't know of any evidence that would tie Maybrick to the murders other than the diary. And apart from all the various problems with the diary--it just sounds wrong to me. It doesn't sound Victorian. It sounds like a modern recreation of Victorian prose, sans the really obscure slang ("buckled," for instance, or "stow hooking it," or things like that.) Also, I note it contains no bad swear-words and no graphic reference to body parts. Real Victorians did swear and get graphic; it's just BBC ones that don't.
This is a cliched character too, isn't it? The evil serial killer, all mania and chortling and cries of "Ha Ha!" It reads like something you'd find in the airport bookstore, a sort of RSC-style "Hannibal Lecter." As my students say, puh-leaze.
Sorry for the long post: it's hard to resist the chance to vent a bit!
Madeleine |
Author: Madeleine Murphy
Thursday, 08 March 2001 - 01:10 am | | P.S. Paul, you're welcome to take the course!
I'm running a special on "A" grades too this semester--just $100. Order NOW and get a free poster of Inspector Abberline or the Scotland Yard sleuth of your choice. ;) |
Author: Christopher T George
Thursday, 08 March 2001 - 07:16 am | | Hi, Madeleine:
I am pleased that you have clarified that you yourself think the Diary is a forgery. You are of course exactly correct that the Maybrick-as-serial-killer portrayed in the Diary is a stereotypical melodramatic killer (all that is missing is the twirling of the mustachios!!!  )and that the hoaxer has shamelessly borrowed the phraseology of the genuine (if almost undoubtedly hoax) Ripper communications of 1888. I think that introducing your students to the Diary morass is a legitimate way to train your students to use their heads and employ logic. Keep us posted, do, on developments with the course, won't you?
Best regards
Chris George |
Author: Paul Begg
Thursday, 08 March 2001 - 10:44 am | | Hi Madeline
I just might take you up on that offer about taking the course, but I don't know that I could take failing it!
I take your point about the absence of obscure Victorian slang, but if there had been a smattering of slang terms wouldn't the argument then be that the forger had used them to make the forgery look authentic? |
Author: Madeleine Murphy
Thursday, 08 March 2001 - 02:56 pm | | Hi Paul & Chris!
Paul, you're quite right--real Victorian slang wouldn't *prove* the diary genuine at all; it would only suggest a slightly more sophisticated forger. But then, that's all one can do really. We can't prove the diary genuine--we can only gauge how sophisticated, lucky and well-equipped the forger would need to be, until we get to the point where it is simply more reasonable to conclude that the document is genuine. I guess I'm just saying how far we are from that point.
--Chris, that's so true. The whole diary is an extended riff on the Dear Boss letter, seasoned with allusions to famous Ripper "clues" (kidney, graffito, etc.) I'm just surprised it's not garnished with cryptic references to the Masons, midwives and mad hairdressers.
madeleine |
Author: Martin Fido
Friday, 09 March 2001 - 12:02 am | | Madeleine -
Join the small club of us academics with some training in Victorian linguistics who think on stylistic grounds the diary proves itself fake.
Martin Fido |
Author: Paul Begg
Friday, 09 March 2001 - 02:24 am | | Hi Madeleine and Martin
I didn't mean that the slang would prove anything. I was only suggesting what people would have argued if the slang had been there, the 'diary' debate being distinguished by argument and counter argument.
If linguistically it isn't of Victorian composition, I wonder what date linguistically it can be dated to, bearing in mind that apparently it doesn't contain any anachronistically modern words or phrases such as 'hoover' or 'it was like way cool'. Does this mean that the author was (a) lucky, (b) clever enough to think of the linguistic issues and check words that seemed to him questionable, presumably overlooking 'one-off', (c) writing in the language of his time (i.e., writing before the present), or (d) none of the above.
I was going to write more, but suddenly realised that I was sounding like I was setting questions for Madeleine's class! |
Author: John Omlor
Friday, 09 March 2001 - 07:13 am | | Hi Paul, Madeline and everyone.
Madeline,
Congratulations on the fine syllabus and the intriguing project. I used to teach a "critical thinking" course like the one you are describing and the Diary and its surrounding issues are certainly natural subjects for it. This whole thing seems to me to be an excellent pedagogical fit.
Paul,
(NOTE: This is only random speculation here, for fun...)
My guess at the most likely answer would be "d" -- none of the above. Funny thing: the more I read the diary, the more I realize that perhaps I could have written it  . I am certainly *not* speaking here about knowledge of the Ripper and Maybrick stories. I would have had to do quite a bit of research there, of course. But the actual writing, the creation of this particular dramatic voice would not, I think, have been at all hard and, once you got going, it would have been a cinch to keep rolling. It's a very rhythmic and repetitious voice and would not have needed even that much editing after the fact for effect. I can sit down now and write a page of it that I think would fit fairly seamlessly into the book. Of course, this is a bit unfair, since I have the "original" from which to work. But there is a definite pattern and pace to the entries. They read almost as a rambling monologue and once they get going they seem to me to alter in tone surprisingly little.
All of this proves absolutely nothing, by the way, except my own possible psychosis, but I thought I would offer it up here as we chat.
Afterwards, of course, it would have been a fairly quick matter to proof-read to make sure that I had kept my vocabulary appropriate -- and here again, keeping the voice and the things written fairly simple, repetitious, and fragmented would have been the key to decreasing my risk of historical use problems.
Of course, I might then complicate everything for myself by pasting into all of this a line of poetry that also happens to appear excerpted in the middle of an essay in the middle of a book on literature that I (or someone I know) happen to own and that happens to fall open uncannily to just that page; a line that originally comes from, of all things, the middle of one of Crashaw's reworkings of sacred Latin hymns. (An aside: nowhere else in the text of the diary, that I can find, is there anything remotely like the Crashaw line -- no other literary quotes, no other religious poems or thoughts, nothing. It just sits there as a moment of cut and paste that seems somewhat obvious given the other place we know the line is excerpted.)
In any case, I think that's one possible reason the answer might be "d." But I have never been very good with multiple choice.
--John |
Author: Christopher T George
Friday, 09 March 2001 - 08:40 am | | Hi, John and Madeleine:
I would like to address John's point that “nowhere else in the text of the diary, that I can find, is there anything remotely like the Crashaw line -- no other literary quotes, no other religious poems or thoughts, nothing. It just sits there as a moment of cut and paste that seems somewhat obvious given the other place we know the line is excerpted.”
The writer of the Maybrick Diary attempts a number of examples of doggerel which appear to emulate similar rhymes in some of the Jack the Ripper letters. Previously the only direct quotation from a poem that might be deemed to be of literary merit is the line “Oh costly intercourse of death,” which Melvin Harris has identified as coming from an obscure poem by English 17th century poet Richard Crashaw. The other possible echo is in such lines as “three whores all have died” which is similar to the song in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado about the "Three little maids from school..." Could the writer of the Maybrick Diary though have been influenced by one of the twentieth century’s major poets—T. S. Eliot—which would provide an indication that the Diary could not have been, as claimed by Shirley Harrison and Paul Feldman, written by Liverpool cotton merchant James Maybrick in 1888-1889? Specifically, are there indications in some of the statements and lines of poetry in the Diary that might indicate that whomever wrote the the Diary had read a poem of T. S. Eliot’s published in 1917? If this is so, does this provide a further indication that the Maybrick Diary is a hoax?
T. S. Eliot was born in the United States, in St. Louis, Missouri, on 26 September 1888, when the Whitechapel murderer was in the midst of his bloody reign. Five years before the 1922 appearance of The Wasteland, arguably his poetic masterpiece or certainly his most famous and controversial work, Eliot published in 1917 Prufrock and Other Poems.
Just like the title poem of that book, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the Diary is an extended dramatic monologue in which the speaker delves into his psyche to examine his thoughts about the world and circumstances, his fears, and his frustrations.
One of the famous couplets in “Prufrock” that appears twice is:
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The Diary author writes, in a line repeated three times:
May comes and goes
In the dark of the night
Another of the famous lines in “Prufrock” is Do I dare to eat a peach?
In two passages of the Diary, the speaker says in killing his victims, "the bitch opened like a ripe peach" and "Like the other bitches she riped [sic] like a ripe peach."
On a poetry site that I frequent a poster recently used the phrase, "the peach juice of unbounded eroticism." Certainly a peach, an exotic fruit originally from China, appears to be a known erotic image in poetry. The peach image "Prufrock" appears to reinforce the theme of the speaker’s repressed sexuality where the narrator is not sure if he dares “to eat a peach." Maybrick on the other hand dares to rip open his victim “like a ripe peach.”
John, I would be interested in your reaction to my thought that whomever wrote the Diary (not James Maybrick) may have studied and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in school, and therefore the Diary cannot have been written in 1888-1889 as it is should have been if actually written by James Maybrick.
Best regards
Chris George |
Author: Madeleine Murphy
Friday, 09 March 2001 - 10:24 am | | Hello all! I can see this is going to interfere with my work. Ah well. I've got tenure--they can't stop me now.
I think I also choose (d), John--None Of The Above--and for the same reason. This reads like pastiche, i.e., parody without the funny bits. Lots of people have a facility for good pastiche: it's a matter of getting into the "voice"--a kind of parrotting ability. Not too hard to do, so long as an obvious clunker doesn't mess up the sound:
"Dear god my Head aches with the thrill, I can see nothing before me but the whore's face. Next time I shall slice it, and would that not be a fine joke, ha ha. Had no time to compose myself after my last for I had stopped at Starbucks for a grande latte with triple espresso, I do believe it weakens my strength."
Etc.
Martin, I too studied Victorian lit (Dickens Dickens Dickens) in graduate school which is probably why I have a sense this feels wrong. But I'm not enough of a scholar to put my finger on what's wrong right away. It's an intuition--namely, an impression whose origins and evidence I have not yet organized and articulated.
madeleine |
Author: Madeleine Murphy
Friday, 09 March 2001 - 10:35 am | | P.S. -- Paul, I wonder if linguistics *can* set a date. Like so many things, one can use it to rule out (references to "dotcoms" would be a bit of a giveaway), but not to *assert* with the same confidence.
I think the T.S. Eliot connection is a bit of a stretch. "Come and go" is a fairly common term. On the other hand... Maybe this means T.S. Eliot was the Ripper! I've never liked him. And look how he treated his poor wife.
madeleine |
Author: John Omlor
Friday, 09 March 2001 - 10:53 am | | Chris,
Strange, I just finished teaching Eliot this week! Prufrock and Waste Land, too. (I did have one student, incidentally, advance the idea that the "eat a peach" line was an expression of concern on Prufrock's part that he might stain his "white flannel trousers" if he bit into a peach while walking on the beach. Thus, in addition to everything else, Prufrock apparently has a fear of laundry problems. Of course, I'm still waiting for the one who suggests that it means that Eliot is an Allman Brothers fan -- too late for that now, I think, they barely remember the Allman Brothers , let alone Eliot.)
And of course Eliot was the great champion of the Metaphysicals and played a significant role in restoring them, including Crashaw of course, to the canon through essays that resulted finally in them being more widely taught and more widely anthologized than they had been in the second half of the 19th century.
But, in any case, I had not stopped to think about signs of Eliot in the diary, and now I have a golf game to rush off to. But I will look back at the pages and give you some thoughts when I return to these boards.
Indeed, Madeline, whenever we get to the "My nerves are bad tonight" section of WL and I tell my students about Vivian and her problems and her fate at the hands of her poet husband, many of them are quite horrified. But his tragic inability to deal with her difficulties does also, in an oblique way, account for some of what is most fascinating and disturbing in his work, no?
Anyway, have a fine and fun day, all,
--John |
Author: Martin Fido
Friday, 09 March 2001 - 11:56 am | | Does Tom Robbins' splendid coinage 'peachfish' suggest that the peach might have some Jungian archetypal significance as a positive image of female parts? And if it does, would it have any relevance to the thinking of the creator of the diary? Or not?
Martin Fido |
Author: John Omlor
Friday, 09 March 2001 - 04:38 pm | | Madeleine ,
Sincere apologies for mispelling your name. I try to be careful about such things, but yours slipped past me.
More about Eliot and peaches and archetypes and all tomorrow perhaps.
"I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones."
--John |
Author: Madeleine Murphy
Friday, 09 March 2001 - 07:45 pm | | I don't know about Jungian archetypes, but I should think peaches have been used as a metaphor for fragrant flesh for as long as, well, as long as there have been peaches. I mean, they're fuzzy, soft, juicy, skin-colored, and look a bit like a bottom. In a way. Sort of.
John, no problem--what with the prominence of red-headed Madeline, I usually go by the 'e'-less ticket! Poor TS. Actually though his poetic vision annoys me more than his marital inadequacies, on which personal matter I reckon far too much judgment has been passed. But perhaps we should start a TSE thread....!
madeleine |
Author: Christopher T George
Friday, 09 March 2001 - 10:20 pm | | Hi, Madeleine & John:
There is a lot of imagery in Eliot's early poems that evokes the time of Jack and his era: "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" with the sputtering gas light, the cat in the gutter eating rancid butter, the final line that reads, "The last twist of the knife." The primeval quality of Sweeney who appears in a number of these earlier poems and whose name alone evokes memories of the murderous London barber Sweeney Todd. So we have, for example, the wording in "Sweeney Erect" where the character "Jackknifes upward at the knees" and "Tests the razor on his leg / Waiting until the shriek subsides." And again in "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" the images of fog, as in Prufrock's "The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, / The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, / Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening" which is sensuous and threatening at the same time.
But I digress. What about my suggestion that there is some suggestion that the composer of the Diary had read "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"?
Chris George |
Author: shirley harrison
Saturday, 10 March 2001 - 04:51 am | | | Madeline...hello. I guess you must be using the original hardback - this is way out of date....coulod you Email me on shirleyharrison1@hotmail.com and Ill see if there is anything I can do to help. ...good luck...shirley |
Author: Paul Begg
Saturday, 10 March 2001 - 05:10 am | | Hi Madeleine/All
Whilst linguistics can say that a document was written after the use of a word became common, as would be indicated by your example of dotcom, I seem to be being told that the conclusion that a document isn’t of the date it's supposed to be is based on it not feeling right to those who are trained and experienced or sufficiently knowledgeable about Victorian literature to make that judgement. I wonder, then, whether someone with similar knowledge for later periods could say whether the text “feels” right or wrong for the 1920s, 1940s, 1980s or whatever.
I suppose my purpose in asking the question above was that if the questioned document doesn’t contain any modern words, phrases or contextual uses, can anything worthwhile be deduced from that fact? As said, can we deduce that the forger was lucky, capable/experienced, or writing at a time when the ‘modern’ words and uses weren’t used?
If the answer is (d) then it would seem that the linguistic content doesn't indicate the date of composition - or the ability of the forger - other than indicating when it wasn’t written.
An additional point, for whatever it is worth, which probably isn't very much, is that some commentators, such as Dr David Foreshaw, was that the text did “sound” genuine within their field of speciality, either being written by someone genuinely feeling the emotions expressed or by a writer of some ability who had done the necessary research. Pretty much the same opinion was voiced by writer Bruce Robinson, although he was judging from a literary perspective rather than a medical one. Such judgements might held in helping us judge whether the text was composed by someone like Mike Barrett (and in turn having a bearing on the Crashaw lines). Others, of course, regard the text as a piece of unimpressive old tat. Argument and counter argument, alas. |
Author: Martin Fido
Saturday, 10 March 2001 - 07:53 am | | Paul - Madeleine is quite right to suggest that our sense that this is a not-very-widely-read 20th century writer's attempt at Victorian pastiche depends more on 'general feel' than the sort of check-point 'rules' learned when starting to learn Shakespeare dating (heavy end-stopping and rhyme means early; lots of colons in Cymbeline, etc).
You're asking for a very high degree of literary sensitivity if you want the diary's composition to be placed within a decade, as can be done with a certain amount of unfaked writing. Would you expect an art expert who could'sense' that a hitherto unidentified Van Meegeren was a 20th century fake to put his finger on the decade when it was done? Would I be able to assert that any of the parody passages in Joyce's 'Oxen of the Sun' section were early 20th century if I didn't know beforehand? I doubt it. certainly not on pure stylistic grounds. Stylistic sensitivity may pick up 'something wrong', but without a clear giveaway blooper is unlikely to be able to specify 'wrong in the manner of a particular period's faking' - especially if the period is in or very close to the present, because in that case the faker will certainly be drawing on an intuitive 'sense of the imitated period' one shares with him.
All the best,
Martin |
Author: Paul Begg
Saturday, 10 March 2001 - 11:16 am | | Hi Martin
I had in mind someone being able to say that the story had a "feel" about it of Raymond Chandler or Stephen King or whoever, which would enable us to suggest a composition date after that person began writing. Or whether there were any linguistic contexts - such as the use of one-off in the broad sense we use it today instead of the sample specific use in Victorian times - that might indicate a date (i.e., composition would be after 'one off' started to have its current use). Whilst accepting that the document can be said not to “feel” Victorian, I was wondering whether there was anything else we could infer from the linguistic evidence, in particular whether anything could be deduced from the absence of modern words or contextual uses. In other words, how hard would it be to write something without using a modern word or context? If anything but absolutely dead easy, does the absence therefore tell us anything about the author? Is the absence indicative of a ‘clever’ forger, as would seem indicated by the views of David Forshaw and Bruce Robinson. If it is, how does that effect our assessment of Mike Barrett as the forger? That was really the question I was posing. |
Author: Madeleine Murphy
Saturday, 10 March 2001 - 11:53 am | | | Chris, I should think it's pretty likely the diarist had read "Prufrock." But then, successful literary parodists usually do read a lot; and "Prufrock" is in every anthology and syllabus. A literary-minded person would be hard put to *avoid* reading "Prufrock." God knows I tried. So I'm not sure it really narrows anything down. |
Author: John Omlor
Saturday, 10 March 2001 - 12:05 pm | | Hi Madeleine,
I love these sentences about peaches,
"I mean, they're fuzzy, soft, juicy, skin-colored, and look a bit like a bottom. In a way. Sort of."
The trailing off made me smile happily.
You are generous and kind to TS about his "marital inadequacies." They were both understandable and most regrettable, I think. I appreciate your reaction to his work, although I've always felt his vision was very much of his time and, in the early work at least, was powerfully expressed; but this is not the place....
I do think that his "inadequacies," and his inability specifically to deal with Vivian's "female troubles," her "nerves" (all these euphemisms he no doubt used) and her bleeding suggests something else. That is, I do not think anything about Eliot or Prufrock as he is presented leads me to believe that eating the peach is in fact strictly an objective correlative for any specific sexual image or act or even necessarily the repressed desire for one. Prufrock can barely bring himself to "ask the question," or to "presume." As he begins to obsess about his age, I do not see him suddenly thinking about the tasting the wet, sloppy joys of sexual abandon.
But maybe he is. Perhaps he has a genuine moment of out of character, lusty sensual imagining and the line is not simply a remark about fear of aging and lost opportunities for simpler, sensory pleasures and the ways in which he remains bound to his own fastidiousness and excessive caution.
The reason it might important for us, though, is Chris' discussion of Eliot in the diary.
(There will be no talk of archetypes, Jungian or otherwise, on my part Martin. I'm afraid I remain an active reader but a non-believer.)
Chris,
The fog is behaving like a cat, of course. Eliot unfortunately (my opinion here, folks) gave us the book that gave us Cats and had a thing for them and their movement. I did have a student once tell me that another teacher was teaching them that these early cat images suggested that the poem was actually detailing Prufrock's first nervous visit to a whorehouse (cat-house, get it?), so there's some more potential Ripper stuff...
You are right, I think, that Victorian London shows up regularly ("Unreal city") and that there are plenty of rats creeping about, although by the time it becomes the Modern London after the war in the same poems, it has become dry, shattered, decayed, and fragmented -- thirsting for spiritual renewal and leaving its residents with only fragments to shore up against their ruins. By that time, as The Waste Land suggests, "I can connect nothing with nothing."
In any case, I can't quite see how one would demonstrate that the diarist might have read Eliot, since the poetic conceits you are describing are in no way historically specific or quite unique enough in expression to clearly show influence. And Eliot is a particularly difficult case to make here, since nearly every line of many of his poems is rooted in and a reference to or variation on lines from the tradition. There are enough re-written lines from Marvell, Donne, and Shakespeare in The Waste Land alone to keep students busy for weeks -- and that doesn't even mention all the Dante and Kyd and Greek myths and just obscure references to popular songs and his friends and the uses of Weston and F.H.Bradley, etc....
So pinpointing the influence of Eliot would be a problem unless there were clear indications of specific and unique expressions or lines (ironically a point in favor of his own ideas about influence and re-writing in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" even though there, I think, he is completely mistaken).
And because of his methodology, because of his use of common, everyday objects in the world that might somehow relate to a specific emotion or idea ("I should have been a pair of ragged claws...") and his fondness for the language of vegetation and water and decay, his words are likely to be easy to spot elsewhere and in other contexts without there being any necessary influence. His juxtaposition of phrases does not seem to me to be quite as idiosyncratic as (to echo a moment of Martin) Joyce's.
Now, if the Diary contained the line "Stately, plump brother Michael.." -- Hey! Wait a minute, Martin... Kindey... Frying kidneys... "I intend to fry it and eat it later ha ha." "Four shining farthings..." "On coronation day?..." "Ghoul! Chewer of Corpses!..." Of course!
Finally, I don't think the Crashaw line in any way suggests any specific level of familiarity with literature in the diary. It stands strangely alone and the rest of the thing, as Madeleine has suggested, seems rather simple, like pastiche. But yes, these are "gut" reactions, and I certainly wouldn't say I had any gut feeling about the decade of its creation yet. But I will, of course, read it a few more times.
I am still at the point where I can say only that I do not know what I know about this text. So I guess I end up ending all of this, as the man says, "not with a bang, but whimper."
--John
(I know, I know. Horrible cliche. A favorite moment in Apocalypse Now: Kurtz is reading Eliot -- Dennis Hopper tells Martin Sheen "Look at this sh*t, man. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper. And with a whimper... I'm f*ckin' splittin', Jack." |
Author: Madeleine Murphy
Saturday, 10 March 2001 - 12:29 pm | | Paul, you have hit the nail on the head:
"the linguistic content doesn't indicate the date of composition - or the ability of the forger - other than indicating when it wasn’t written. "
That's what I mean by linguistics being able to rule out a document, but not being able to establish it with the same certainty.
But you're right. A document which sounds very Stephen King, for instance, might well date itself a little more actively (even though this can't be conclusive, of course).
In fact, you've helped clarify some of my doubts. This diary does indeed echo a stereotype of the serial killer which is *modern*: post-Zodiac killer, post-Hannibal Lecter. If you ask a group of American college kids today to profile the average serial killer, they will most likely produce this kind of picture of the controlled madman. Had you asked people in, say, the 1920s, to conjure up their image of Evil, they would probably have come up with something a little different. And in both cases, their impressions would have been based not on actual studies, but on fictional portrayals. That's probably why Philip Marlowe never does battle with Black Dahlia-style killings. That kind of random murder hadn't seized the public imagination in the way it has today.
I know Forshaw thought the diary "felt" real. But--and I know I'm speaking from ignorance and hope I'm not being rude!--I've always thought that his impression rested on two fallacies. The first is the belief that the diary reflects expert knowledge of serial killers and/or drug abuse. There's no symptom in this text that you couldn't glean from watching a few sensationalist documentaries, or for that matter, watching "Silence of the Lambs." As for addiction, sadly, very many people don't need a book to know what an addict is like. In short: there is nothing here that surprises me, indeed, even as a layman, the diary strikes me as a stereotype from a cheesy movie.
The second fallacy is that because the diary portrays the "serial killer" symptoms (rage, moodiness etc.) that it therefore resembles the kind of thing such a person would produce.
Luckily the FBI profiler Douglas voiced all my criticisms in his recent book so I've got some back up: (1) the diary reads like a portrait of a serial killer, not the voice of one; (2) it doesn't present a convincing picture of this kind of killer, since it suggests that Maybrick suddenly decided at 50 to slaughter prostitutes, which--according to Douglas, and one can assume he ought to know--just doesn't happen without some real preamble; (3) it doesn't resemble in any way the kind of detailed, matter-of-fact record that a serial killer might keep.
All of which is a long (sorry!) confirmation of that intuitive feeling Martin and I have about the diary: It is literature. This is like Yeats writing, "I will arise now and go to Inisfree," and painting a beautiful and convincing portrait of bucolic peace. But he didn't arise. He sat down and wrote a poem about arising. There's a big difference.
This is such an interesting discussion! Thank you all--
Madeleine |
Author: Christopher T George
Saturday, 10 March 2001 - 01:56 pm | | Hi, Paul, John, and Madeleine:
Thank you all for your musings about the linguistical content of the Diary. John and Madeleine, I thank you for your feedback on whether the author of the Diary had ever read "Prufrock." As you say, there is nothing definitive to prove that he or she may have, and as John well points out, Eliot himself based much of his writing on prior writers. Thus, for all I know the couplet "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo" (which according to my theory may have influenced the writer of the diary to say, "May comes and goes / In the dark of the night") might be based on lines by some prior couplet writer, say Alexander Pope or John Dryden.
Paul, I wanted to address myself to your question about dating the linguistical content of the Diary. As John and Madeleine have said, there seems to be nothing in the Diary that would directly tell us it was written in a certain decade of the twentieth century, but by the same token I believe, as they also indicate, there is much that tells us it was not likely to have been written by Maybrick. One of these items is run-on sentences that I think are unlike you would expect from a Victorian, e.g., "Time is passing much too slowly, I still have to work up the courage to begin my campaign." "My mind is clear I will put whore through pain tonight." "I cannot stop shaking, my body aches." "Summer is near the warm weather will do me good." All these examples, from the opening pages of the Diary, and many more of them, are written the way a person in our own time would write and think. A Victorian would use two sentences for each of these double thoughts, or at least a word or punctuation between them. That is, "Summer is near and the warm weather will do me good." or "Summer is near. The warm weather will do me good." or "Summer is near; the warm weather will do me good."
These examples might also betray the fact that the Diary is not written by a middle class Victorian as it purports to be but by a later twentieth century working class person. A further example might be, "The whore seen her master today it did not bother me." This contains the ungrammatical "The whore seen" and again is a the run-on sentence inconsistent with the way a Victorian middle class businessman would be expected to write.
Just some thoughts to throw into the Hopper. (Dr. Arthur Hopper who attended to James Maybrick & a witness at Florie's trial ha ha). Yes, I agree, this is a most interesting discussion.
Best regards
Chris George |
Author: Madeleine Murphy
Saturday, 10 March 2001 - 03:02 pm | | I am fresh from our class discussion where I advised students to check out these pages!
Yes indeed Chris: the language of the diary is pure "Dear Boss;" the punctuation, pure "From Hell."
Mind you, my recollection of my British education is that the run-together sentence is not considered a grammatical error--merely a style choice that may or may not work. Am I right, British readers?
madeleine |
Author: Martin Fido
Saturday, 10 March 2001 - 03:08 pm | | Just a general point on the diary-forger and Eliot. To me the striking illiteracy - bad spelling, bad grammar - is one of the key points of the diary. And it doesn't suggest anybody with sufficient command of or interest in language to struggle with Eliot (who is, still, let's admit, frequently very difficult. In my own teaching experience I found that a good deal of time spent on simple exegesis was absolutely essential if even good undergraduates were going to get anything worthwhile out of 'Four Quartets').
So I think the diary's 'apparent' echoes of Eliot testify to TSE's extremely successful impressionistic realization of early 20th century urbanism's mixed intimidating pseudosophistication and bleak dullness. And something similar will inevitably come to mind if anyone else tries to describe a Babbittish mind formed by the successes of Victorian and Edwardian capitalist industrialism. 'Prufrock' is both perfectly and entirely a north-eastern seaboard mildly fashionable resort, and the half-baked mind anywhere in the upper middle class English speaking world c.1910-1939. I would expect anybody without a particularly bookish turn of mind to get some of the feel of this if, at any time over the next half-century, they tried to create the mind of a late-Victorian Liverpool cotton-broker, with some pretensions to gentility, but an actual preference for the racetrack and the brothel for his entertainment.
As for how this relates to Mike Barrett's ability to write the diary - as I guess you know, Paul, by the time I met Mike the Demon Drink was taking its toll so heavily that it's never been possible for me to imagine him writing anything at all, let alone Anne's having married him (as she herself has told me)in a Great Love Match.
All the best,
Martin F |
Author: Madeleine Murphy
Saturday, 10 March 2001 - 03:24 pm | | That's as elegant a summary of TSE as I've read, Martin!
You'd have to be a pretty sophisticated forger indeed to make punctuation choices part of your trail of "clues." However, perhaps the bad grammar is affected, but for a different reason: perhaps it was intended as a literary device to suggest the dishevelled and loosely-knit mind of a madman. That would be a fairly easy device, just one step up from things like DOING THIS and this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
madeleine |
Author: Jade
Saturday, 10 March 2001 - 03:31 pm | | Hello John,
‘Wayne Booth argues, in the Rhetoric of fiction (1961), that there is nevertheless a sense in which we recognise the values and attitudes of an author quite independently of our sense of the narrator’s identity. He calls this sense of the author’s voice the ‘implied author’ – an ‘official scribe’ or the author’s ‘second self’. This ‘author’ is not the actual author, but rather the author we construct by implication from the values expressed in the fiction’.
Therefore what can you , tell us about the values and attitudes of this particular author as an unreliable narrator of both Maybrick and Jack the Ripper, rather than looking at the stylistics, anachronisms and psychological profile already discussed? Could the author mask his attitudes and values, and reinvent those he thinks might be attributed to Jack the Ripper or James Maybrick, in a literary sense that is, and pull it off? (I understand the author has done this anyway to a certain degree, but it would be useful to have a literary critique of the diary) and you write interesting and illuminating posts in a literary sense. Or is there anything in the authors verbal devices that gives the sense that he isn’t who he says he is?
Thanks
Jade |
Author: John Omlor
Saturday, 10 March 2001 - 04:29 pm | | Hi Jade,
It's a very interesting question. I'm afraid Booth seriously oversimplifies and forgets, somewhat, about the complications added to the equation when you factor in differences among readers and scenes of reading and the problems inherent in the disseminative operations of language. But that's a debate for another place and time. Your question remains a valid one.
"Could the author mask his attitudes and values, and reinvent those he thinks might be attributed to Jack the Ripper or James Maybrick, in a literary sense that is, and pull it off?"
Sure, and especially with our help. The Diary assumes that we are reading it thinking it is The Diary of Jack the Ripper. Even if we are skeptical or downright negative about this, as we read, even if we "know" it is a forgery as we read, for most of us this announcement of the supposed author's identity will at least leave the traces of expectation, especially regarding certain plot and voice conventions that Madeleine has already convincingly suggested have been even better established in more recent times. Now, for people with an already established interest in Ripper studies, and especially for those who have something directly at stake in the words on the page and their status as genuine, this trace of expectation and resistance is likely to be even more complicated. There is, of course, no such thing as an unmediated reading.
Filtering out all of these desires, interests, expectations, and tendencies is, finally, I suspect, an impossible task, and so we are left with the ideologically informed and interested readings that remain. As I say, I think this is inevitable.
It would not surprise me if we found out that the writer of the diary had shared many of the feelings expressed within it, even to a lesser degree (the paranoia, the hostility, the resentment, the insecurity, etc). But it would certainly not be necessary. Creation of a voice and a psychology is one of the tasks in which fiction regularly engages and when it is very good, these voices and psychologies are very convincing. But you needn't be a Poe or a Flaubert (or a Joyce) to sit down and decide to pour out frustrated ravings and failed doggerel and lascivious memories of murder. As several people here have suggested, once you got the ball rolling it would be easy to let the voice and the imagination take over and write "in character," as they say, especially once memory is allowed to play a role in the creation of the character (and I'm not sure there is any way to stop it from doing so). Since the specific Maybrick and Ripper information in the diary suggests that at least a certain amount of reading and research was done, the diarist must have had at least a somewhat ordered mind and therefore was clearly creating the relative violence and disarray of his character's language after the fact for the sake of the drama. This is all assuming, of course, that we are reading a forgery.
The problem, I am beginning to think, is not that the diarist did too good a job; but that he or she, in a way, didn't do a good enough job. Though perhaps they amount to the same thing. By finally deciding (or by only being able) to put together a string of entries that forced in the necessary information about the crimes and the people and then adding a few verbal quirks and the ramblings of a jealous and frustrated mind; the writer ended up with such a sketch of a work, such a botched book, that there is finally not enough meat to be chewed, so to speak -- that we finally don't have enough different types of material to confidently evaluate its authenticity beyond "a sense" or "a gut reaction." Either the writer knew an important lesson about editing and about crime, and therefore left things out on purpose and never allowed themselves to say too much or go too far, or they were simply unable to create a comprehensive reconstruction of the journal of a madman and so were inevitably left with bits and pieces of melodrama that they had proofed somewhat carefully for historical accuracy and a lack of anachronisms.
I'm not sure yet which I think is more likely. I personally know nothing about the people involved or those suspected. I know that there are clearly moments of strange inconsistency in the voice (the Crashaw moment is one of these), but because the diarist can write from the perspective of a madman, he or she wouldn't really have to worry about this, since psychology, especially psychopathology, like profiling, is an inexact art.
I realize this in no way answers your question, Jade, because I am not yet sure I know the answer, because I have not read the Diary enough times or with enough care to be comfortable answering your question. But I thought I'd give you a quick, slightly toasted, preliminary reaction. Please feel free to disregard it as the rantings of a madman whose head aches and who still remembers God the thrill of it all and their running around like chickens ha ha.
--John (who is only now realizing what fun it is to type "ha ha ha.") |
Author: Jade
Saturday, 10 March 2001 - 05:24 pm | | Thank you John
It is a very constructive reply, and throws some light on my difficulty in reasoning the focus of the omniscient author problems I have with the diary, which as you say are difficult to interpret because the author seems to possess a great deal of factual information on both Maybrick and Jack the Ripper. The other issues you cover also make sense, re: the profiling and Psychopathology. I hope if you ever decide to write a critique you post it here on the casebook.
Regarding Booth I was thinking that relating his theory to a document of this type rather than dealing with authors that write fiction would be difficult. I suppose it is a lot easier to discuss a well known author by means of literary critique, because we know their identities, styles etc, but the diary seems to refute any kind of theory thrown at it, except for the pragmatic assertions based on some obvious incongruities that give a convincing if somewhat inconclusive evidence in support of the diary being a fake.
Thanks again John
Jade |
Author: Christopher T George
Saturday, 10 March 2001 - 05:37 pm | | Hi, Madeleine:
As I was writing my last post, I had in mind, as you said, that the pro-Diary crowd would of course say that the faulty punctuation was because the Diary was the product of the "dishevelled and loosely-knit mind of a madman" as you put it. I would contend, however, that there is a good likelihood that whomever wrote the diary, wrote with run-on sentences on a daily basis, and that such sentences are not contrived to show the mind of a madman. I also think that more than likely this is their usual handwriting and that the handwriting has not been disguised. The reason that I say this is that the handwriting varies little throughout the 63 pages. Although variances in the size of the handwriting appear, the same idiosyncracies and oddities in the script lettering appear throughout. I believe that this consistency in the handwriting throughout the 63 pages is also a good argument to refute the contention of Harrison and Feldman that the handwriting is that of a person with multiple personalities, a claim they use to explain why the writing does not match the known handwriting of our favorite arsenic-addled cottonbroker. IF this really was a document written by a person with multiple personalities, I would expect the handwriting to vary throughout, and it does not.
I would contend that, as I mentioned in my last, that the phraseology in the Diary is linguistically consistent with it having been written by a twentieth century working class man rather than a middle class Victorian like Maybrick. Whether that working class man could have been Mike Barrett is another question. If it was not written by Barrett, I would say it was probably written by somebody with a working class background very like Barrett's. If Barrett did not actually put pen to paper, the psychological trait of wanting to impress seen in Barrett is consistent with the text of the Diary.
So, the speaker in the Diary is constantly telling us how "clever" he is. This seems consistent with the trait seen in Barrett, for example, in his April 1999 Cloak and Dagger Club appearance, to want to impress the audience. But just as a bad writer "tells" rather than "shows" Barrett during his appearance constantly stated that he had the proof that the Diary had been forged but failed to come up with the proof.
Throughout the Diary, one of the repeating themes is that the speaker keeps pounding into us how "clever" he is. Indeed, he is obsessed with his own cleverness and the cleverness of others, such as Michael Maybrick and Inspector Abberline.
So, going through the Diary from the top, we have, "All who sell their dirty wares shall pay, of that I have no doubt. But shall I pay? I think not I am too clever for that."; "was that not clever?"; "I said I am clever, very clever."; "I will be clever."; "I was clever and brought up the subject. . ."; "Am I not clever?"; "Once again I have been clever, very clever."; "I curse Michael for being so clever, I will outdo him"; [in the rhyme re the Chapman murder repeated twice] "One ring, two rings, / a farthing, one and two, / Along with M ha ha / Will catch clever Jim"; [and directly after] "Am I not indeed a clever fellow?"; [re Stride murder] "but I was clever, they could not out do me."; [in a list of words after mention of the Eddowes murder], "bastard / Abberline / bonnett / hides all / clue / clever / will tell you more";[in a rhyme that directly follows] "Oh Mr Abberline, he is a clever little man / . . . . ask clever Abberline, could tell you more / . . . . He believes I will trip over / . . . . Am I not a clever fellow [the cleverness of Abberline is repeated in a subsequent rhyme but not the "Am I not a clever fellow"]; [re being angry with his wife Florie, after striking her] "If it was not for my work, I would have cut the bitch up there and then. But I am clever." [In regard to the murder of Mary Jane Kelly] "I left it there for the fools to find but they will never find it. I was too clever." "I will go on [murdering,] damn Michael for being so clever the art of verse is far from simple. I curse him so. Abberline, Abberline, I shall destroy the fool yet. . . ." [Another rhyme] "ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha / Am I not a clever fellow / out foxed them all, / they will never know"; "My God am I not clever? Indeed I am." [After Christmas 1888, nearing the end of the Diary narrative, as he is feeling ill but entertaining thoughts of killing once again and asserting himself over Florie.] "I relish the thoughts of striking the bitch once more. Am I not a clever fellow. I pride myself no one knows how clever I am. I do believe if George was to read this, he would say I am the cleverest man alive. I yearn to tell him how clever I have been. . . . more chickens running around with their heads cut off, ha ha I feel clever." [Another rhyme] "This clever Sir Jim / he loves his whims"; [At the Grand National race with Florie and her lover Alfred Brierly] "Am I not a clever fellow, the bitch gave me the greatest pleasure of all. Did not the whore see her whore master. . . . I was clever. George would be proud of me. . . . I have decided that next time I will take the whores eyes out and send them to that fool Abberline."
I realize the above is highly repetitive but I do think there is utility in isolating some of the elements in the Diary and examining them in detail. You can see that the theme of Maybrick's cleverness and his resentment of his brother Michael and of Abberline is constant. I also found it useful to give the Diary a close reading again, which I had not done since I initially bought Shirley Harrison's hardback in 1993.
Another observation I have after reading through the Diary text is that I believe the writer of the Diary knew Maybrick was going to die in May 1889 (he died on May 11), something that James Maybrick himself could not have known, and thus it heightened the pathos of the story by having Maybrick say, "I yearn for my favorite month [of June], to see flowers in full bloom would please me so. Warmth is what I need, I shiver so. . . ."
Best regards
Chris George |
Author: John Omlor
Saturday, 10 March 2001 - 05:47 pm | | Jade,
Just one other little thought. Literary criticism and theory and even linguisitic theory and philosophy of language as disciplines are not really designed to determine "authenticity" or reveal forgeries. In fact, several of them are often engaged precisely in the interrogation of concepts like "authenticity" and "authorship" and their history, so they are probably not the best or most efficient tools to use in an investigation that seeks after the identity of an author.
It's funny, whenever I tell my friends about this case, their first reaction is usually, "Well, can't the scientists just authenticate it? I thought those new technologies for dating and stuff were able to do all that nowadays." People seem to assume that this should be a scientific problem, not an interpretive one (though of course, as we have seen clearly in this case, science is *always* already engaged in interpretation).
Perhaps science will finally solve this one, or perhaps legal investigation or careful reading, not explicitly of the critical sort, but of the patient, detailed, analytic sort, will finally unmask the writer(s).
Strangely, sometimes I almost feel that I would like the diary to be genuine. I think it would be a great story and a great textual moment and I personally would lose nothing of my fascination for the case if I knew who the Ripper was. But I suspect we are probably going to have to be satisfied with the intriguing story of how the hoax was perpetrated, when and if the details are ever revealed.
In the meantime, as you can probably tell, for my own no doubt perverse reasons, I delight in not knowing and, so far, in not being able to know.
--John |
Author: John Omlor
Saturday, 10 March 2001 - 05:51 pm | | Synchronicity.
I just wrote,
"Perhaps science will finally solve this one, or perhaps legal investigation or careful reading, not explicitly of the critical sort, but of the patient, detailed, analytic sort, will finally unmask the writer(s)."
...like the careful reading Chris was doing, apparently, as I wrote these words.
--John |
Author: Madeleine Murphy
Saturday, 10 March 2001 - 08:45 pm | | John, that's exactly right: lit crit, especially criticism mulling over the nature of authorship & readership and so forth, doesn't help you discern forgery.
I think, Jade, that the question you're posing really is this: Can a person assume the voice of another so well as to convince most readers? I'd say the answer is, Hell Yeah. As John says, you don't need to be Joyce or Poe. Thousands of ordinary paperback writers can do it.
But can a person assume that voice well enough to get the experts all talking? I'd say, Double Hell Yeah. They (we) WANT to talk about the Ripper, or about books, or about authorship. So long as we're not rebuffed by some utter anachronism, we're likely to keep searching. However, crime specialists (I'm thinking of Douglas again) who aren't remotely interested in the Ripper, but who are interested in *solving* cases, tend to dismiss it much more easily, because there's just nothing here by way of real evidence. Maybe the writer really shares these feelings. Maybe he doesn't. Maybe he is mad and maybe he's not. As long as the discussion is all argument and counter-argument, as Paul says, you've really got nothing you can take into criminal court.
Trust the "college course" board to go down a literary analysis path...!
regards all,
madeleine |
Author: Madeleine Murphy
Saturday, 10 March 2001 - 09:08 pm | | Chris--
Great point about that sense of doom creeping in on Maybrick, a doom he couldn't have foreseen; another cause of my "intuitive" sense becomes clear.
It's possible that the diarist harped on the "the fools, I'll show them" cliche because it struck a personal chord. But then, maybe he harped on it because he didn't have a great imagination and chose 2 or 3 major cliches and hammered them home. Or maybe he harped on it because he had a particular serial killer in mind when he sat down to compose. Or, of course, maybe the diary is all true. Or....
As all cops know, this and a buck will get you a ride on the subway!
madeleine |
Author: Christopher T George
Saturday, 10 March 2001 - 09:28 pm | | Hi, Madeleine & John:
The Diary is certainly extremely repetitive. As John said, the writer seems to have latched onto certain set themes and simply repeated them. One would expect that if the Diary was written by a "real person" as it purports to be, i.e., by James Maybrick, there might be more variety. In compiling my list of passages where the speaker tells us he is "clever" or refers to Abberline or Michael Maybrick as being "clever" I noticed as many mentions of the speaker's "funny little rhymes." He has to make the allusion to the police acting like chickens with heads cut off about four times. The taking of lodging in Middlesex Street "which is in itself a joke" occurs at least twice. I now think that the ripping of the peach image occurs about four times. This is a poetic way to describe a murder, but probably is not what a real murderer would write. And if he writes that the ripping "thrilled" him once he has to do it a score of times through the 63 pages. So, I think we can say that although the narrative is persuasive on a certain level, it is not persuasive in its lack of variety of images and motifs, i.e., it comes across as we have said as a pastiche that a writer has stuck together not as an authentic narrative by a serial killer.
Best regards
Chris George |
|
|
|
|
