George Sorel

2 November 1847 to 29 August 1922 

I'm finishing up the most excellent John C. Thirlwell book In Another Language, which has turned my uninformed negative opinion about Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter completely around. * The last thing I expected to find in this book about a translator was trenchant political commentary that reached out beyond the grave (the book was published in 1966) and into the heart of Trump's America...but that's what I found.

First, Mrs. Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter's take on Georges Sorel (from the 1948 essay, "Doctor Faustus":

"This was in fact the crass and inflaming prophecy of Sorel's book: that popular myths, or rather those proper for the masses, would become the vehicle of political action: fables, insane visions, chimeras, which needed to have nothing to do with truth or reason...." (166)

That was enough to get me to backtrack to find out who this Sorel fellow was. Turns out he was Georges Sorel, and the book that Mrs. Lowe-Porter was referring to was Reflexions sur la violence, published in 1907. I started thinking I was going to need to find that book, but I put that thought on the back burner and continued to read the essay. But I barely got onto the next page before I had to stop again, this time for what I thought was a direct quotation from Monsieur Sorel's book:

"The fantastic thing was the mighty apparatus of scientific witness quite futilely invoked to prove that humbug was humbug. For the dynamic, the historically creative fiction, the so-called lie, was simply inaccessible to this line of attack. Science, truth--good God! The group could scarcely contain its mirth at the desperate campaign waged by a reason and criticism against wholly invulnerable belief." (167)

But in attempting to find those lines, I ended up in Doctor Faustus (374, Everyman's Library).

Well, I thought I was going to need to read Doctor Faustus at some point. Looks like that point just drew nearer. But I think I'm still going to be needing that Georges Sorel, too. 

And two bits of good news on that: (1) the Louisville Free Public Library has a copy, and (2) it is OUT at the moment. Hooray! I get worried when it seems like every book I go to check out is stored in Remote Shelving and immediately available.

Along the way to all of this I found a blog entitled Regieren (HERE) which looks interesting. The description says, in part,  "Welcome to Regieren, a blog for people interested in The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann...." Well, that sounds like me. So there's another thing for me to have a look at.

Reading is a fissionistic process. 

* To such an extent that I just went out and bought her translation of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain--the same book which I had previously read the John E. Woods translation of so that I could avoid Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter's version.

P.S. Picture of Georges Sorel is Public Domain.