Unrequited

Unrequited (pronounced uhn-ri-kwahy-tid)

(1) Of love, not returned or reciprocated.

(2) Not avenged or retaliated.

(3) Not repaid or satisfied.

1535–1545: The construct was un- + the past participle of requit (ie +-ed).  The un- prefix was from the Middle English un-, from the Old English un-, from the Proto-West Germanic un-, from the Proto-Germanic un-, from the primitive Indo-European n̥-.  It was cognate with the Scots un- & on-, the North Frisian ün-, the Saterland Frisian uun-, the West Frisian ûn- &  on-, the Dutch on-, the Low German un- & on-, the German un-, the Danish u-, the Swedish o-, the Norwegian u- and the Icelandic ó-.  It was (distantly) related to the Latin in- and the Ancient Greek ἀ- (a-), source of the English a-, the Modern Greek α- (a-) and the Sanskrit अ- (a-).  The verb requite dates from circa 1400 in the sense of "repay" (for good or ill), the construct being re- (back) + the Middle English quite (clear, pay up), an early variant of the verb quit preserved in this word.  The –ed suffix was from the Middle English –ede & -eden, from the Old English –ode & -odon (weak past ending), from the Proto-Germanic -ōd- & -ōdēdun.  It was cognate with the Saterland Frisian -ede (-ed) (first person singular past indicative ending), the Swedish -ade (-ed) and the Icelandic -aði.  The suffix was used to form past tenses of (regular) verbs. In linguistics, it remains used for the base form of any past form.  Unrequited is an adjective.  In English, from the 1540s, the earliest reference of the Middle English requiten (to repay), from Old French requiter, is to love affairs.

Probably few were as suited to the calling of suffering as Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) so in taking Ted Hughes (1930–1998; Poet Laureate 1984-2008) as a husband, she made a good career move.

When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn't want it, you cannot take it back. It's gone forever.  Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963).

Path's only novel, The Bell Jar was first published in the UK under the pen-name "Victoria Lucas" and is usually described as "semi-autobiographical", names of people & places changed to protect the innocent and the guilty, a literary genre known as a Roman à clef (from the French and literally "novel with a key"), the notion of the "key" being that certain knowledge allows a reader to "unlock" the truth, a instance of "reading between the lines" and the technique has widely been used for reasons both personal and legal.  Within a month of publication, Plath would take her own life and it wasn't until 1967 The Bell Jar was re-released under her name.  Dr Heather Clark's (b 1974) recent biography of Plath (Red Comet (2021)) was outstanding.

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) receives insufficient credit for inventing the modern emo and there are more strands of her in them than there are of the brooding German romantics who tend to be more acknowledged.  Were they here today, Cathy and Heathcliff would be in their darkened bedrooms, on their phones, friending and un-friending each other.

You loved me-then what right had you to leave me? What right-answer me-for the poor fancy you felt for Linton?  Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.  Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847).

Her only novel, Wuthering Heights was first published under the ambiguous pen name "Ellis Bell", a hint at the attitudes of many in the literary establishment (and not a few publishers) towards women writers.  Tellingly, critics at the time were often not kind and while the power of the text was noted, for most it seems to have been too raw to be thought "respectable" fiction and it's latter day reputation as one of the classics of English literature evolved only in the twentieth century under the influence of modernist writing and proto-feminism.  Wuthering Heights is one of those books best read when young because if too long delayed, the historic moment may have passed.  That said, there have probably been some young ladies who read it while at their most impressionable and never quite recovered.

There are many portraits of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) but all are of at least dubious provenance and although there is a contemporary reference to a painting or drawing existing during his lifetime, it's thought all known images were probably created after his death.

If asked to distil from Shakespeare’s works the two most frequent themes, one might suggest "low skulduggery" and "unrequited love" though that’s something which might be said of many literary traditions.  In unrequited love Shakespeare saw comedic potential as well as tragedy because it’s as present in Much Ado About Nothing (1598) & All’s Well that Ends Well (1602) as it is in Romeo & Juliet (1594) where youthful agonies are laid bare.  Sometimes there’s overlap between the tragic and the comic: Malvolio’s desire for the affections Olivia in Twelfth Night (1602) are played for laughs although there’s something cruel about the way things end.  In Cymbeline (1609), it’s a tangle with a flavour of a modern TV talk show, Cloten besotted with Imogen, his mother’s husband’s daughter (ie his step-sister).  Queen Katharine (Catherine of Aragon) in Henry VIII (1613) was the first of the king’s many wives and was both abandoned and bewildered why her love was unrequited but Henry had his own agenda and was in some was perhaps closer to Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597) where it’s really an unrequited lust.  Low skulduggery and unrequited love are both explored in Othello (1603), Roderigo’s longing for Desdemona rendering him vulnerable to manipulation by the evil Iago who harbours his own desires.  In Measure for Measure (1603) there’s a reward for Mariana enduring “five years” of unrequited love for “thou cruel Angelo” who cancelled their engagement because he dowery wasn’t enough: “Her promised proportions / Came short of composition”.  Angelo however is outwitted and Mariana gets her man.  In that case, for her at least, all was well that ends well.  So in Shakespeare there is plenty of unrequited love but he seems to have found the Norse and other Germanic myths emotionally over-wrought and was more pragmatic:

Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate!
O any thing, of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1594)

The Roman Poet Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso; 43 BC–17 AD) in the 814 line Remedia Amoris ("Love's Remedy", circa 2 AD) offered a cure for pining youth suffering the pangs of unrequited love.  His solutions included travel, teetotalism, gardening and, without any apparent sense of irony, the avoidance of love poets.

Lindsay Lohan, Something That I Never Had from Speak (2004).

Do you see me?

Do you feel me like I feel you?

Call your number

I cannot get through

You don't hear me

And I don't understand

When I reach out

Well, I don't find your hand

 

Were they wasted words?

And did they mean a thing

And all that precious time

But I still feel so in-between

 

Someday, I just keep pretending

That you'll stay

Dreaming of a different ending

I wanna hold on

But it hurts so bad

And I can't keep something that I never had

 

Well, I keep tellin' myself

Things can turn around with time

And if I wait it out

You could always change your mind

Like a fairytale

Where it works out in the end

Can I close my eyes?

Have you lying here again

Lindsay Lohan's Something That I Never Had was a tale of the agony of unrequited love.  She should have read from Part XIII of Ovid's Remedia Amoris:

Remembering reopens love, the wound’s newly re-opened:
trifling errors damage the weak-minded.
Consider how, if you touch ashes that are almost dead
with sulphur, they revive, and a tall flame comes from nothing.
So, if you don’t avoid whatever reawakens love,
the flames will light again that once were quenched.

Solemncholy

Solemncholy (pronounced sol-uhm-kol-ee)

(1) Solemn; serious.

(2) Solemn and melancholic.

1772: The construct was solemn +‎ (melan)choly.  The element –choly was never a standard suffix and was a Middle English variant of –colie used in French.  The Middle English adjective solemn dated from the late thirteenth century and was from solemne & solempne, from either Old French or directly from the Late Latin sōlennis & sōlempnis or the Classical Latin sōlemnis, a variant of sollemnis (consecrated, holy; performed or celebrated according to correct religious forms) which has always been of obscure origin although Roman scholars thought it could have come only from sollus (whole; complete), the derivative adjective formed by appending the noun annus (year), thus the idea of sollemnis meaning “taking place every year”.  Not all modern etymologists are convinced by that but acknowledge “some assimilation via folk-etymology is possible”.  In English, the extension of meaning from “annual events; sacred rites, ceremonies, holy days” to “a grave and serious demeanor; mirthless” was associative describing the behaviour expected of individuals attending such events.  Over time, the later sense became dissociated from the actual events and the original meaning became obsolete, surviving only in a handful of formal ecclesiastical calendars.  The word, without any reference to religious ceremonies meaning “marked by seriousness or earnestness” was common by the late fourteenth century, the sense of “fitted to inspire devout reflection” noted within decades.    Solemncholy is an adjective and no sources list the noun solemncholic or the adverb solemncholically as standard forms although, by implication, the need would seem to exist.  Emos presumably apply the adjectival comparative (more solemncholy) & superlative (most solemncholy) and perhaps too (during emo get-togethers) the plural forms solemncholics & solemncholies.

Melancholy was from the Middle English melancolie & malencolie (mental disorder characterized by sullenness, gloom, irritability, and propensity to causeless and violent anger), from the thirteenth century Old French melancolie (black bile; ill disposition, anger, annoyance), from the Late Latin melancholia, from the Ancient Greek μελαγχολία (melancholia) (atrabiliousness; sadness, (literally “excess of black bile”)), the construct being μέλας (mélas) or μελαν- (melan-) (black, dark, murky) + χολή (kholḗ) (bile).  It appeared in Latin as ātra bīlis (black bile) and was for centuries part of orthodox medical diagnosis and the adjectival use was a genuine invention of Middle English although whether the used of the –ly as a component of the suffix was an influence or a product isn’t known.  Pre-modern medicine attributed what would now be called “depression” to excess “black bile”, a secretion of the spleen and one of the body's four “humors” which needed to be “in balance” to ensure physical & mental well-being.  The adjectival use in Middle English to describe “sorrow, gloom” was most associated by unrequited love or doomed affairs but this is likely more the influence of poets than doctors.  As the medical profession’s belief in the four humors declined during the eighteenth century as understanding of human physiology improved, the word was in the mid-1800s picked up by the newly (almost) respectable branch of psychiatry where it remained a defined “condition” until well into the twentieth century.

The physicians from Antiquity attributed mental depression to unnatural or excess "black bile," a secretion of the spleen and one of the body's four "humors," which help form and nourish the body unless altered or present in excessive amounts. The word also was used in Middle English to mean "sorrow, gloom" (brought on by unrequited love, disappointment etc).  In antiquity it was a concept rather than something with a standardized systemization and there existed competing models with more or fewer components but it’s because the description with four was that endorsed by the Greek physician Hippocrates (circa 460–circa 370 BC) that it became famous in the West and absorbed into medical practice.  The four humors of Hippocratic medicine were (1) black bile (μέλαινα χολή (melaina chole)), (2) yellow bile (ξανθη χολή (xanthe chole)), (3) phlegm (φλέγμα (phlegma)) & (4) blood (αἷμα (haima)), each corresponding with the four temperaments of man and linked also to the four seasons: yellow Bile=summer, black bile=autumn, phlegm=winter & blood=spring.  Since antiquity, doctors and scholars wrote both theoretical and clinical works, the words melancholia and melancholy used interchangeably until the nineteenth century when the former came to refer to a pathological condition, the latter to a temperament.  Depression was derived from the Latin verb deprimere (to press down) and from the fourteenth century, "to depress" meant to subjugate or to bring down in spirits and by 1665 was applied to someone having "a great depression of spirit", Dr Johnson (Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784) using the word in a similar sense in 1753.  Later, the term came into use in physiology and economics.

What was for over two-thousand years known as melancholia came gradually to be called depression, a reclassification formalized in the mid-twentieth century when mental illness was subject to codification.  The first edition of the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM (1952)) included depressive reaction and the DSM-II (1968) added depressive neurosis, defined as an excessive reaction to internal conflict or an identifiable event, and also included a depressive type of manic-depressive psychosis within the category of Major Affective Disorders.  The term Major Depressive Disorder was introduced by a group of US clinicians in the mid-1970s and was incorporated into the DSM-III (1980).  Interestingly, the ancient idea of melancholia survives in modern medical literature in the notion of the melancholic subtype but, from the 1950s, the newly codified definitions of depression were widely accepted (although not without some dissent) and the nomenclature, with enhancements, continued in the DSM-IV (1994) and DSM-5 (2013)

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the earliest known instance of solemncholy in text dates from 1772 in the writings of Philip Vickers Fithian (1747–1776), peripatetic tutor, missionary & lay-preacher of the Presbyterian denomination of Christianity, now best remembered for his extensive diaries and letters which continue to provide historians with source material relating to the pre-revolutionary north-eastern colonies which would later form the United States of America.  His observations on slavery and the appalling treatment of those of African origin working the plantations in Virginia remain a revealing counterpoint to the rationalizations and justifications (not infrequently on a theological or scriptural basis) offered by many other contemporary Christians.  Those dictionaries which include an entry for solemncholy often note it as one of the humorous constructions in English, based usually on words from other languages or an adaptation of a standard English form.  That’s certainly how it has come to be used but Fithian was a Presbyterian who aspired to the ministry, not a breed noted for jocularity and in his journal entries its clear he intended to word to mean only that he was pursuing serious matters, in 1773 writing: “Being very solemncholy and somewhat tired, I concluded to stay there all night.”

So it was an imaginative rather than a fanciful coining.  In contemporary culture, with mental health conditions increasingly fashionable, solemncholy (although still sometimes, if rarely, used in its original sense) found a new niche among those who wished to intellectualize their troubled state of mind and distinguish their affliction from mere depression which had become a bit common.  In a roundabout way, this meant it found a role too in humor, a joke about someone’s solemncholy still acceptable whereas to poke fun at their depression would be at least a micro-aggression:

Q: Victoria says she suffers from solemncholy.  Do you think that's a real condition?

A: Victoria is an emo; for her solemncholy is a calling.

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December 2011.

The companion term to solemncholy is the sometimes acronym leucocholy (a state of feeling that accompanies preoccupation with trivial and insipid diversions).  The construct of leucocholy was leuco- + (melan)choly.  The leuco- prefix (which had appeared also as leuko-, leuc- & leuk-) was from the Proto-Hellenic λευκός (leukós) (white; colourless; leucocyte), from the primitive Indo-European lewk- (white; light; bright), the cognates including the Latin lūx, the Sanskrit रोचते (rocate), the Old Armenian լոյս (loys) and the Old English lēoht (light, noun) from which English gained “light”.  In the Ancient Greek, the word evolved to enjoy a range or meanings, just as in would happen English including (1) bright, shining, gleaming, (2) light in color; white, (3) pale-skinned, weakly, cowardly & (4) fair, happy, joyful.  Leucocholy is said to have been coined by the English poet and classical scholar Thomas Gray (1716–1771) whose oeuvre was highly regarded despite being wholly compiled into one slim volume and he’s remembered also for declining appointment as England’s Poet Laureate, thereby forgoing the both the tick of approval from the establishment and the annual cask of “strong wine” which came with the job.  What he meant by a “white melancholy” seems to have been a state of existence in which there may not be joy or enchantment but is pleasant: unfulfilling yet undemanding.  In such a state of mind, as he put it:  ca ne laisse que de s’amuser (which translates most elegantly as something like “all that is left for us is to have some fun”).

Purgatory

Purgatory (pronounced pur-guh-tree (U), pur-guh-tawr-ee (non-U) or pur-guh-tohr-ee (non-U)

(1) In the orthodox theology of the Roman Catholic Church (and in some other Christian denominations), a condition or place in which the souls of those dying penitent (in a state of grace) are purified from venial sins, or undergo the temporal punishment that, after the guilt of mortal sin has been remitted, still remains to be endured by the sinner.

(2) In the Italian Purgatorio (pronounced poor-gah-taw-ryaw), the second part of Dante's (Dante Alighieri (circa 1265–1321)) Divine Comedy (1320), in which repentant sinners are depicted.

(3) Any condition or place of temporary punishment, suffering, expiation, or the like; any place of suffering, usually for past misdeeds.

(4) Serving to cleanse, purify, or expiate.

1160-1180: From the Middle English purgatorie (place or condition of temporal punishment for spiritual cleansing after death of souls dying penitent and destined ultimately for Heaven), from the Old French purgatore & purgatorie, from the Medieval Latin pūrgātōrium (means of cleaning), noun use of neuter of the Late Latin pūrgātōrius (purging, literally “place of clensing”), the construct being pūrgā(re) (to purge) + -tōrius (-tory), the adjectival suffix, from purgat-, past-participle stem of pūrgāre (to purge, cleanse, purify).  The adjectival form developed in the late thirteenth century, independent of the evolution in Church Latin.  The figurative use (state of mental or emotional suffering, expiation etc) dates from the late fourteenth century, originally used poetically especially despairingly when speaking of unrequited love, or (and this may seem a paradox to same and merely descriptive to others), of marriage.   In old New England it was used of narrow gorges and steep-sided ravines, a reference to the difficulties to be dad when negotiating such terrain.  Purgatory, purgatorium & purgatorian are nouns and purgatorial is an adjective; the noun plural is purgatories.

Mankind's Eternal Dilemma: The Choice Between Virtue and Vice (1633) by Frans Francken the Younger (1581–1642), Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston.

In the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, the purgatory is the condition of souls of the dead who die with punishment but not damnation due them for their sins committed on Earth.  Purgatory is conceived as a condition of suffering and purification that leads to union with God in heaven and is something thus inherently temporary and has always been a bit of a theological problem because it’s not mentioned (or even alluded to) in the Bible.  The usual rationalization of this scriptural lacuna is the argument that prayer for the dead is an ancient practice of Christianity and one which has always assumed the dead can be in a state of suffering, something which the living can improve by their prayers.  Theological positions have hung on thinner strands than that and within Roman Catholicism, purgatory has never attracted the controversy which so excited critics of limbo, a rather more obviously unjust medieval conjecture, but many branches of Western Christianity, notably the Protestant tradition, deny its existence although among the more ritualistic, there are those who conceive purgatory as a place and one often depicted as filled with fire.  The transitory nature of the condition has often encouraged misunderstanding for it is not a place of probation; the ultimate salvation of those in purgatory assured, the impenitent not received into purgatory.  Instead, the souls in purgatory receive relief through the prayers of the faithful and through the sacrifice of the mass, the confusion perhaps arising from the imagining the destructive nature of fire on Earth whereas upon the soul with no earthly attachment, it can be only cleansing.

So purgatory is the state of those who die in God's grace but are not yet perfectly purified; they are guaranteed eternal salvation but must undergo purification after death to gain the holiness needed to enter heaven.  The purgatory, the framework of which was fully developed at the Councils of Florence (1431-1449) and Trent (1545 and 1563), is totally different from the punishment of the damned who are subject to a cleansing fire, the scriptural explanation being "The person will be saved, but only through fire" (1 Corinthians 3:15) but even then the Church recognized degrees of sin as Pope Gregory I (Saint Gregory the Great, circa 540–604; pope 590-604) helpfully clarified: "As for certain lesser faults, there is a purifying fire."  The possibilities were made explicit during the Council of Trent in the statement “God predestines no one to hell” which made clear that damnation is visited upon sinners only by a persistence in mortal sin until death and God would much prefer "all to come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9).   In the Roman ritual, the relevant line is "save us from final damnation and count us among those you have chosen" and through purgatory, souls "achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven".  Mortal sin incurs both temporal punishment and eternal punishment, venial sin ("forgivable sin” in this context) incurs only temporal punishment. The Catholic Church makes a distinction between the two.

Dante and Virgil Entering Purgatory (1499-1502) by Luca Signorelli (circa 1444-1523), Chapel of San Brizio, Duomo, Orvieto, Italy.  The pair are shown in the first terrace watching souls of the prideful being made to cat stones on their backs.

The noun purgatory appeared perhaps between 1160 and 1180, giving rise to the idea of purgatory as a place but the Roman Catholic tradition of purgatory as a transitional condition has a history that pre-dates even the birth of Christ.  There was, around the world, a widespread practice of both caring for and praying for the dead, the idea that prayer contributed to their purification in the afterlife.  Anthropologists note the ritual practices in other traditions, such as the way medieval Chinese Buddhists would make offerings on behalf of the dead, said to suffer numerous trials so there is nothing novel in the practice which is mentioned in what the Roman Catholic Church has declared to be part of Sacred Scripture, and which was adopted by Christians from the beginning, a practice that pre-supposes that the dead are thereby assisted between death and their entry into their final and eternal abode.

Whether purgatory is actually a place has in Roman circles been discussed for centuries.  In 2011 Pope Benedict XVI (b 1927; pope 2005-2013, pope emeritus since), speaking of Saint Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510), said that in her time the purgatory was pictured as a location in space, but that she saw it as a purifying inner fire, such as she experienced in her profound sorrow for sins committed, such a contrast with God's infinite love.  The failing of man she said was being bound to the desires and suffering that derive from sin and that makes it impossible for the soul to enjoy the beatific vision of God.  Noting that little appeared to have changed, Benedict noted "We too feel how distant we are, how full we are of so many things that we cannot see God. The soul is aware of the immense love and perfect justice of God and consequently suffers for having failed to respond in a correct and perfect way to this love; and love for God itself becomes a flame, love itself cleanses it from the residue of sin."

The Eastern Catholic Churches are Catholic churches sui iuris of Eastern tradition, (in full communion with the Pope) but there are some differences with Rome on aspects of purgatory, mostly relating to terminology and speculation.  The Eastern Catholic Churches of Greek tradition do not generally use the word "purgatory", but agree that there is a "final purification" for souls destined for heaven and that prayers can help the dead who are in that state of "final purification".  In neither east nor west are these matters thought substantive and are regarded as nuances and differences of tradition.  The Eastern Catholic Churches belonging to the Syriac Tradition (Chaldean, Maronite and Syriac Catholic), generally believe in the concept of Purgatory but use a different name (usually Sheol) and claim there is contradiction with the Latin-Catholic doctrine.  Rome appears never to have pursued the matter.

La Divina Commedia di Dante (Dante and His Poem), oil on canvas by Domenico di Michelino  (1417–1491) after Alesso Baldovinetti  (1425–1499), collection of Florence Cathedral, Italy.  This work, in depicting the seven terraces in the form of the mountain were one approach to Dante's Purgatory, the other a focus on one level. 

The Eastern Orthodox Church rejects the term "purgatory" but does admit an intermediate state after death, the determination of Heaven and Hell being stated in the Bible and it notes prayer for the dead is necessary.  The position of Constantinople and environs is that the moral progress of the soul, for better or worse, ends at the very moment of the separation of body and soul; it is in that instant the definite destiny of the soul in the everlasting life is decided.  There is no way of repentance, no way of escape, no reincarnation and no help from the outside world, the eternal place of the soul decided forever by its Creator and judge.  Thus the Orthodox position is that while all undergo judgment upon death, neither the just nor the wicked attain the final state of bliss or punishment before the last day, the obvious exception being the righteous soul of the Theotokos (the Blessed Virgin Mary), "who was borne by the angels directly to heaven".

Generally, Protestant churches reject the doctrine of purgatory although more than one Archbishop of Canterbury may have come to regard Lambeth Palace as Purgatory on Earth.  One of Protestantism's most cited tenets is sola scriptura (scripture alone) and because the Bible (from which Protestants exclude deuterocanonical books such as 2 Maccabees) contains no obvious mention of purgatory, it’s therefore rejected as an unbiblical and thus un-Christian.  There are however variations such as the doctrine of sola fide (by faith alone) which hold that pure faith, apart from any action, is what achieves salvation, and that good deeds are but mere manifestations of that faith so salvation is a discrete event that takes place once for all during one's lifetime, not the result of a transformation of character.  What does seem to complicate that is that most Protestant teaching is that a transformation of character naturally follows the salvation experience; instead of distinguishing between mortal and venial sins, Protestants believe that one's faith dictates one's state of salvation and one's place in the afterlife, those saved by God destined for heaven, those not excluded.  Purgatory is thus impossible.

Divina Commedia, Purgatorio (circa 1478), illuminated manuscript commissioned by Federico da Montefeltro (1422–1482), Vatican Library collection, Rome.  Again, the carring of stones on the first terrace, the style is recognizable in the later schools of mannerism and surrealism.  

Wishing to excise any hint of popery from religion, purgatory was addressed in two of the foundation documents of Anglicanism in the sixteenth century.  Prayers for the departed were deleted in the 1552 revision to the 1549 Book of Common Prayer because they implied a doctrine of purgatory (it was the nineteenth century Anglo-Catholic that saw them restored to some editions) and Article XXII of the the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1571) was most explicit: "The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory . . . is a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God."  In the twenty-first century, the Anglicans, finding it hard to sit anywhere but on the fence, now say “Purgatory is seldom mentioned in Anglican descriptions or speculations concerning life after death, although many Anglicans believe in a continuing process of growth and development after death.”  The post-modern church writ small; one wonders if the PowerPoint slides of Anglican accountants and Anglican theologians greatly differ.

In Judaism, Gehenna is a place of purification where, according to some traditions, sinners spend up to a year before release.  For some, there are three classes of souls: (1) the righteous who shall at once be written down for the life everlasting, (2) the wicked who shall be damned and (3), those whose virtues and sins counterbalance one another shall go down to Gehenna and float up and down until they rise purified.  Other sects speak only of the good and the bad yet, confusingly, most also mention an intermediate state.  There’s also variance between the traditions regarding the time which purgatory in Gehenna lasts, some saying twelve months and others forty-nine days, both opinions based upon Isaiah 66:23–24: "From one new moon to another and from one Sabbath to another shall all flesh come to worship before Me, and they shall go forth and look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed against Me; for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched"; the former interpreting the words "from one new moon to another" to signify all the months of a year; the latter interpreting the words "from one Sabbath to another", in accordance with Leviticus 23:15-16, to signify seven weeks.  Whatever the specified duration, there are exceptions made for the souls of the impure which prove resistant to the persuasions of the Gehenna.  According to the Baraita (a Jewish oral law tradition), the souls of the wicked are judged, and after these twelve months are are consumed and transformed into ashes under the feet of the righteous whereas the "great seducers and blasphemers" are to undergo eternal tortures in Gehenna without cessation.  The righteous however and, according to some, also the sinners among the people of Israel for whom Abraham intercedes because they bear the Abrahamic sign of the covenant, are not harmed by the fire of Gehenna even when they are required to pass through the intermediate state of purgatory.

Relief sculpture on a side wall at the Chapel of Souls, (Capilla de Animas) in Compostela, Spain.  These are the souls of the lustful on the seventh terrace, praying for release, which they have been promised will (eventually) be granted by the cleansing flames, something dependent on true repentance.

It was the Florentine poet Dante (Dante Alighieri, circa 1265–1321) who, in the second cantica of the epic poem Divine Comedy (1320) gave the world a vivid depiction of the place he called Purgatorio.  Dante described Purgatory as a mountain which rose on the far side of the world, opposite Jerusalem, with seven terraces, each corresponding to the one of the seven deadly sins, each terrace a place of purification for souls who are penitent and seeking to cleanse themselves of their sins, so to be judged worthy of entering Paradise.  In the valley at the base of the mountain is Ante-Purgatory and here sit the souls of the excommunicated and those who delayed repentance (the so called the “late repentant”) as they await their turn to begin their ascent of the terraces.  Throughout Purgatory, angels and guides assist the souls and Dante's guide is the Roman poet Virgil (symbolizing human reason).  Virgil leads Dante until they reach Earthly Paradise where Beatrice (representing divine wisdom) takes over as the guide to Heaven.

The seven terraces

First Terrace (Pride): Here the souls are humbled by being made to carry heavy stones on their backs, forcing them to bend and contemplate humility.

Second Terrace (Envy): Envious souls are punished by having their eyes sewn shut with twists of iron wire so they may learn to appreciate the beauty of charity and generosity.

Third Terrace (Wrath): Souls of the wrathful Souls enveloped in a thick smoke that blinds them, teaching them to cultivate patience and peace.

Fourth Terrace (Sloth): The slothful are punished by being forced incessantly to run, encouraging diligence and zeal.

Fifth Terrace (Avarice and Prodigality): These souls have to lie face down in the dirt and weep, teaching them to balance their desire for material wealth with the virtues of generosity and moderation.

Sixth Terrace (Gluttony): The gluttonous are starved so extreme hunger and thirst constantly will remind them of the importance of temperance.

Seventh Terrace (Lust): Souls here walk through walls of flames, purging the sin of lust, teaching chastity and love for God.

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December 2011.

That all sound rather grim but at the mountain’s summit sits the reward: Earthly Paradise (the Garden of Eden).  Here, in this place of peace and beauty, symbolizing the restored innocence and grace, souls are purified completely and ready to ascend to Heaven.  So, the purpose of Dante's Purgatory is less the punishments which must be endured than the possibility of redemption from sin through repentance to purification, leading ultimately to the soul's readiness for Paradise. In this it contrasts with the eternal sufferings which are the fate of those souls condemned to the circles of Hell.

Narratology

Narratology (pronounced nar-uh-tol-uh-jee)

The study of narrative & narrative structure and the ways these affect human perception (with some mission creep over the years).

1967: The construct was narrate +‎ -ology, an Anglicization of the French narratologie, coined by Bulgarian-French historian, philosopher & structuralist literary critic Tzvetan Todorov (1939–2017), it first appeared in his book Grammaire du Décaméron (1967), a structural analysis of Decameron (The Decameron (1348-1353)) by the Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375).  Although once thought an arcane appendage to literature and a mere academic abstraction, structuralism and narratology in the 1970s and 1980s became a very popular (and controversial) field and while postmodernism’s historic movement may have passed, the tools are an important part of the “learning” process used by generative AI (artificial intelligence) to produce meaning from the LLM (large language models.)

Title page from a 1620 printing of Decameron.

Boccaccio’s Decameron (literally “ten days”) was a collection of short stories, structured into a hundred tales of seven young women and three young men who had secluded themselves in a villa outside Florence, seeking to avoid the Black Death pandemic (1346-1353) then sweeping Europe.  Although not too much should be made of this comparison, the work in some aspects is not dissimilar to reality television, being a mash-up of erotic scenes, set-piece jokes, suspense and unrequited love.  Todorov’s Grammaire du Décaméron was a literary analysis of the work but “grammaire” must be understood as meaning “grammar” in the sense of the structural or narratological principles rather than as its used in its “everyday” sense.  Historians and literary scholars have for centuries regarded Decameron as a valuable document because, written in the Florentine vernacular of the era, although fictional, it’s a kind of “snapshot” of life in what was one of Europe’s many troubled times.  It was Boccaccio who dubbed Dante’s (Dante Alighieri (circa 1265–1321)) Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy (circa 1310-1321)) “divine” (in the sense of “very good” rather than “holy”).

Narrate (to relate a story or series of events (historically in speech or writing)) may for years (or even decades) have been in oral use in English before the first known use in print in 1656, etymologists noting that until the nineteenth century it was stigmatized as “Scottish” (long a slur among the more fastidious) although it’s thought it was derived from the “respectable” narration.  Narrative ((1) a story or account of events or (2) the art, process or technique or telling the story) was in use by the 1440s and was from the Middle French noun & adjective narrative, from the Late Latin narrātīvus (narration (noun) & suitable for narration (adjective)), the construct being narrāt(us) (related, told), past participle of narrāre (to relate, tell, say) + -īvus (the adjectival suffix).  Again, like “narrate”, narrative was once used exclusively of speech or writing but in recent decades the terms have been more widely applied and not restricted to describing the efforts of humans.

Since the nineteenth century, “-ologies” have proliferated.

The suffix -ology was formed from -o- (as an interconsonantal vowel) +‎ -logy.  The origin in English of the -logy suffix lies with loanwords from the Ancient Greek, usually via Latin and French, where the suffix (-λογία) is an integral part of the word loaned (eg astrology from astrologia) since the sixteenth century.  French picked up -logie from the Latin -logia, from the Ancient Greek -λογία (-logía).  Within Greek, the suffix is an -ία (-ía) abstract from λόγος (lógos) (account, explanation, narrative), and that a verbal noun from λέγω (légō) (I say, speak, converse, tell a story).  In English the suffix became extraordinarily productive, used notably to form names of sciences or disciplines of study, analogous to the names traditionally borrowed from the Latin (eg astrology from astrologia; geology from geologia) and by the late eighteenth century, the practice (despite the disapproval of the pedants) extended to terms with no connection to Greek or Latin such as those building on French or German bases (eg insectology (1766) after the French insectologie; terminology (1801) after the German Terminologie).  Within a few decades of the intrusion of modern languages, combinations emerged using English terms (eg undergroundology (1820); hatology (1837)).  In this evolution, the development may be though similar to the latter-day proliferation of “-isms” (fascism; feminism et al).

A narrative is a story and it can run to thousands of pages or appear in a few words on a restaurant menu describing their fish & chips: “Ethically sourced, line-caught Atlantic cod, liberated from the frigid depths, encased in a whisper-light, effervescent golden shroud of our signature micro-foamed artisanal lager batter and served with hand-sliced, elongated potato batons fried to a crisp perfection in sustainably produced vegetable oil.”  In the age of every customer being able to post from their phone a rating and review of a restaurant, wisely, some institutions include a footnote along the lines: “These narratives are a guide and because natural products vary greatly, there will be variation.”  That’s an aspect of narratology, a process which is not the reading and interpretation of individual texts but an attempt to study the nature of “story” itself, as a concept and as a cultural practice or construct.

Crooked Hillary Clinton's book tour (2017).

Narratologists know that what to a narrator can be a narrative, a naratee will receive as spin.  In What Happened (2017), a work of a few dozen pages somehow padded out to a two-inch thick wad of over 500 using the “how to write an Amazon best-seller” template, crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013) explained who was to blame for her loss in the 2016 US presidential election (spoiler alert: it was everybody except her).

Presumably not comparing what they’re doing with making “fish & chips” sound like something expensive, politicians and their operatives will often describe something they offer as a “narrative” although were mush the same stuff to come from their opponents it might be dismissed as “spin”.  A political narrative functions as a cognitive schema intended to simplify complexity, motivate support and legitimizes particular courses of action.  The concept has a long history but in recent decades the emphasis has been on “simplicity”, something illustrated by comparing a narrative like The Federalist Papers (1878-1788; a collection of several dozen essays advocating the ratification of the Constitution of the United States) with how things are now done (mostly fleshed-out, three-word slogans endlessly repeated).  That descent doesn’t mean both are not narratives in that both are crafted interpretive frame rather than objective descriptions although the extent of the deception obviously had tended to change.  Political spin can also be a narrative and should be thought a parallel stream rather than a tributary; variations on a theme as it were.  Although the purpose may differ (a narrative a storyline intended to set and define and agenda whereas spin is a “damage control” story designed to re-shape perceptions.  Given that, a narrative can be thought of a “macro-management” and spin “micro-management”, both providing fine case-studies for narratologists.

Narratology is a noun; the noun plural is narratologies.  The derived forms are the noun antenarratology (the study of antenarratives and their interplay with narratives and stories), the noun antenarrative (the process by which a retrospective narrative is linked to a living story (the word unrelated to the noun antinarrative (a narrative, as of a play or novel, that deliberately avoids the typical conventions of the narrative, such as a coherent plot and resolution)), the noun  econarratology (an approach to literary criticism combining aspects of ecocriticism (the interdisciplinary study of literature and ecology) and narratology), the noun narratologist (one who (1) studies or (2) practices narratology), the adjective narratological (of or pertaining to narratology) and the adverb narratologically (in terms of narratology).  Remarkably (given the literary theory industry), the adjective narratologistic seems never to have appeared; it can be only a matter of time.

Tzvetan Todorov on the rooftop of Casa Milà (La Pedrera), Barcelona, Spain, November 2014.

Although not a lineal descendent, what Todorov did in Grammaire du Décaméron was in the tradition of Aristotle’s (384-322 BC) work, especially ποιητικῆς (Peri poietikês (De Poetica De Poe in the Latin and traditionally rendered in English as Poetics).  Poetics is notable as the earliest known study of the structure of Greek drama and remains the oldest known text written exclusively in the form of what now would be called literary theory.  To a modern audience the word “poetics” can mislead because the author’s focus was ποιητική (literally “the poetic art”, from ποιητής (poet, author, writer) and his scope encompassed verse drama (comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play), lyric poetry, and the epic.  For centuries, Poetics loomed over the Western understanding of Greek theatre; it was revered by scholars of the late Medieval period and especially the Renaissance and their influence endured.  As far as is known, the Greeks were the first of the tragedians and it’s through the surviving texts of Aristotle that later understandings were filtered but all of his conclusions were based only on the tragedies and such was his historic and intellectual authority that for centuries those theories came to be misapplied and misused, either by mapping them on to all forms of tragedy or using them as exclusionary, dismissing from the canon those works which couldn’t be made to fit his descriptions.  However, as well as being an invaluable historic text explain how Greek theatre handled mimesis (imitation of life, fiction, allegory etc), Poetics genuinely can be read as proto-critical theory and in it lies a framework for structuralism.

Paintings of Claude Lévi-Strauss: Portrait de Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1991 (1991), oil on panel by Bengt Lindström (1925-2008) (left) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (undated), oil on other by Cal Lekie (b 1999).

Narratology as a distinct fork of structuralism does pre-date Todorov’s use of the word in 1967, the seminal work in the parameters of the discipline by Russian folklorist & literary historian of the formalist school Vladimir Propp (1895-1970) who doubtlessly never anticipated “formalism” would come to be weaponized by comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953).  Indeed, by the late 1920s the school of formalism had become unfashionable (something which in the Soviet Union could be dangerous for authors) and their works essentially “disappeared” until being re-discovered by structuralists in the 1950s.  In the West, the idea of narratology as the “theory, discourse or critique of narrative or narration” owes a debt to Belgian-born French anthropologist & ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) who defined the structural analysis by narrative as its now understood.  His landmark text Anthropologie structurale (Structural Anthropology (1958)) suggested myths are variations on basic themes and that in their totality (which runs to thousands) their narratives contain certain constant, basic and universal structures by which any one myth can be explained.  In that way, myths (collectively) exist as a kind “language” which can be deconstructed into units or “mythemes” (by analogy with phonemes (an indivisible unit of sound in a given language)).  Although he didn’t pursue the notion of the comparison with mathematics, others did and that (inherently more segmented) field perhaps better illustrates “structural roles” within language in elements which, although individually standing as minimal contrastive units, can be combined or manipulated according to rules to produce meaningful expressions.  As in formal language theory, in mathematical logic, the smallest units are the primitive symbols of a language which can be quantifiers, variables, logical connectives, relation symbols, function symbols or punctuation.  Broken into the individual parts, these need have no (or only minimal) semantic meaning but gain much meaning when assembled or otherwise handled through syntactic combination governed by a recognized grammar (ie although conceptual primitives rather than “building blocks”, complex meaning can be attained by applying axioms and rules).

Azerbaijani folk art, following Layla and Majnun (1188), a narrative poem by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi (circa 1141–1209), printed in Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928) by Vladimir Propp.  In something of a Russian tradition, there are no known photographs of Propp smiling.

Levi-Strauss’s contribution was that myths can be read in relation to each other rather than as reflecting a particular version, thus the his concept of a kind of “grammar” (the set of relations lying beneath the narrative’s surface), thus the general principle of the “collective existence of myths”, independent of individual thought.  That was of course interesting but the startling aspect was the implication myths as related to other myths rather than truth and reality; they are, in a sense, “outside” decentred, and possess their own truth and logic which, when contemplated in a “traditional” way, may be judged neither truthful nor logical.  In that, Levi-Strauss applied something of the method of Propp who, in Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928), “reduced” all folk tales to seven “spheres of action” and 31 fixed elements or “functions” of narrative.  In Propp’s scheme, the function was the basic unit of the narrative “language’ and denoted or referred to the actions which constitute the narrative while the functions tend to follow a logical sequence.  The concept would have been familiar to engineers and shipbuilders but genuinely there was some novelty when applied to literature

Lithuanian semiotician A. J “Julien” Greimas (1917–1992) was among the many academics working in France who found Propp’s reductionism compelling and in Sémantique Structurale Recherche de méthode (Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method (1966)) he further atomized things, apparently seeking something like a “universal macro language”, a grammar of narrative which could be derived from a semantic analysis of sentence structure.  That was as ambitious as it sounds and to replace Propp’s “spheres of action” he suggested the “actant” (or role): a structural unit which is neither character or narrative.  To handle the mechanics of this approach he posited three pairs of binary oppositions which included six actants: subject/object; sender/receiver; helper/opponent.  The interactions of these binary oppositions served to account for or describe the three basic patterns which are to be found in narrative: (1) desire, search or aim (subject/object), (2) communication (sender/receiver) and (3) auxiliary support or hindrance (helper/opponent).

An eleven-volume first edition of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (published originally in seven (1913-1927); in the the original French it contained some 1.267 million words.  By comparison, Leo Tolstoy's (1828-1910) War and Peace (1898) ran ran (depending on the edition) to 560-590 thousand.

While Greimas didn’t explicitly claim his model successfully could be mapped on to “any and every” narrative, he does appear to have built his model as a general theory and while not all critics were convinced, it seems generally to have been acknowledged his toolbox would work on a much wider range than that of Propp which did break down as narrative complexity increased.  Another French literary theorist associated with the structural movement was Gérard Genette (1930–2018) and in choosing a case study for his model he described in Discours du récit est un essai de méthode (Narrative Discourse: An essay in method (1972)) he selected Marcel Proust’s (1871-1922) À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) (originally translated in English as “Remembrance of Things Past” and of late as “In Search of Lost Time”) which spans many volumes and narrative streams.  This time the critics seemed more convinced and seem to have concluded Genette’s approach was “more accessible” (these things are relative).  Noting the distinctions made in Russian Formalism between fabula (story) & syuzhet (plot), Genette distinguished between récit (the chronological sequence of a narrative’s events), historie (the sequence in which the event actually occurred and narration (the act of narrating itself); atop that framework, he built a complex discussion.  Being a French structuralist, he of course added to the field some new jargon to delight the academy, concluding there were three basic kinds of narrator: (1) the heterodiegetic' (where the narrator is absent from his own narrative), (2) the homodiegetic (the narrator is inside his narrative, as in a story told in the first person) and the autodiegetic (the narrator is inside the narrative and also the main character).  Genene’s approach was thus relational, envisaging narrative as a product or consequence of the interplay of its different components, meaning all and all aspects of narrative can be seen as dependent units (or, debatably, layers).

Narrator & protagonist: Lindsay Lohan as Cady Heron in Mean Girls (2004).  What in literary theory is known as homodiegetic narration is in film production usually called “subjective narration” or “first-person narration”, realized usually in a “voice-over narration by the protagonist”.

In formulating his three categories Genene nodded to Aristotle and Plato (circa 427-348 BC), the ancient worthies distinguishing three basic kinds of narrator: (1) the speaker or writer using their own voice, (2) (b) one who assumes the voice of another or others and (3) one who uses both their own voice and that of others.  These categories need not be exclusive for a story may begin in the voice of a narrator who may then introduce another narrator who proceeds to tell the story of characters who usually have their own voices and one or more of them may turn to narration.  Structurally (and even logically), there’s no reason why such a progression (or regression) cannot be infinite.  Although it’s obvious the term “narrate” denotes the person to whom a narrative is addressed, just because there is a narrative, it need not be axiomatic a narratee is present or ever existed, T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) in The Three Voices of Poetry (1953-1954) discerning three modes (voices) of poetic expression: (1) the poet speaking to himself, a personal, often obscure meditation, (2) the poet addressing an audience, aiming to teach, persuade, or amuse and (3) the poet creating a dramatic character, as in verse drama, something demanding complex communication between imagined characters.  Eliot argued that “good” poetry often was a blend of these voices and distinguishing them helps in understanding a poem's social and artistic purpose, beyond its mere self-expression.  However, Eliot did note that in “talking to himself”, the writer could also be “talking to nobody”.  He was at pains also to point out that when speaking in the third voice, the poet is saying not what he would say in his own person, but only what he can say within the limits of one imaginary character addressing another imaginary character.  More than many, Eliot knew narrative was not always reliable but the techniques of narratology (and structuralism generally) exist for purposes other than determining truth.

Roland Barthes (2015), oil and acrylic on canvas by Benoit Erwann Boucherot (b 1983).

Layers in narrative structure were identified by the French philosopher & literary theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980) and his work had great appeal, something of an academic cult once surrounded him and, almost half a century after his death, he retains a following.  In Introduction à l'analyse structurale des récits (Introduction to Structural Analysis of Narrative (1966)), Barthes presumed a hierarchy of levels existed within narrative, suggesting that, up to a point, they can be discussed separately.  Narrative (at least for this purpose), he conceived as a “long sentence”, just as every constative (in linguistics, pertaining to an utterance relaying information and likely to be regarded as true or false) sentence can be the “rough outline” of a short narrative.  Barthes’ model was more building block-like in that he selects basic units of narrative (such as “function” & “index”, functions constituting a chain of acts while indices are a kind of metadata containing information about characters.

François Mitterrand (1984), acrylic on canvas by Bryan Organ (b 1935).

On X (formerly known as Twitter), one tweeter analysed the images on Barthes which exists and the indexed web, finding in 72% he was smoking a cigarette or cigar.  The statistical risks associated with routinely inhaling a known carcinogen have for decades been well-known but Barthes didn’t live long enter the age of “peak statistical risk”.  In February, 1980, having just taken lunch with François Mitterrand (1916–1996; President of France 1981-1995) in a restaurant on Paris’s Rue des Blancs-Manteaux, Barthes was using a zebra crossing on the Rue des Ecoles when knocked down by a laundry van; never recovering from his injuries, he died a month later.  The van’s driver was one Yvan Delahov, of Bulgarian nationality who tested positive for alcohol, but his reading of 0.6 fell below the legal maximum of 0.8; admitting he was late delivering his shirts, he claimed he’d not exceeded 60 km/h (37.3) mph.  At the time, Barthes was carrying no identity documents but was identified his colleague, the philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984).

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (first edition, 1957).

Finally must be acknowledged the contribution of Canadian literary critic & literary theorist Northrop Frye (1912–1991) whose Anatomy of Criticism (1957) is regarded still as one of the more “remarkable and original” (in the words of the English historian and critic J.A. Cuddon (1928-1966)) works of literary theory in the English-speaking world.  In the narrow technical sense, Frye's theory is not structuralist (something which doubtless burnished its reputation among many) but it certainly contains strands which can be seen as structuralist.  Frye positioned literature as an “autonomous verbal structure”' unrelated to anything beyond itself, a world which contains “life and reality in a system of verbal relationships”.  In this “self-contained literary universe”, there were four radical “mythoi” (plot forms and basic organizing structural principles) which corresponded to the four seasons of the natural order and constitute the four main genres of comedy romance, tragedy and satire.  For those non-postmodernists who still long for l'art pour l'art (art for art's sake), Frye’s mythois are there to be used and he proved their utility in a wide range of texts, including the Bible.