WRB—May 20, 2026

“the land of novels”

You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him the Managing Editorship of the Washington Review of Books,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?

Links:

• In Engelsberg Ideas, Jared Marcel Pollen on the Voynich Manuscript and the search for a universal symbolic system:

  Whereas Descartes joked that a universal language was never likely to exist, except perhaps dans le pays des romans (“in the land of novels”), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz spent much of his life trying to chase down such a language. In his Dissertatio de arte combinatoria (1666), Leibniz began to elaborate the idea of a characteristica universalis, “a kind of alphabet” that could express mathematical, metaphysical and ontological concepts at once and in a way that would be universally intelligible. He described it as “ . . . a general algebra in which all truths of reason would be reduced to a kind of calculus . . . this would be a kind of universal language or writing, though infinitely different from all such languages which have thus far been proposed . . . ” At the time he was writing his Dissertatio, Leibniz was immersed in Polygraphia Nova (1663), a treatise on cryptology by none other than Athanasius Kircher, who proposed polygraphy as “all languages reduced to one” and who, at that very moment, was likely in possession of the Bacon Cipher. If Marci’s letter is to be believed, Kircher was the last known owner of the manuscript before it vanished for centuries, until it was discovered again by Voynich.

  [R.I.P. René Descartes you would have loved “The Library of Babel.” —Steve]

• In Prospect, Jeremy Noel-Tod on J. H. Prynne:

  Prynne’s work took its inspiration from the possibility that the music of poetry could be true to the fact that “we live / with sounds in the ear / which we shall never know.” In his critical prose, he sought metaphors for a dynamic vision of language as something more beautiful than “our credit-card view of the speech act”, in which meaning is transferred with maximum efficiency. An essay from 1994 on Chinese poetry, for example, begins, magnificently: “Within the great aquarium of language the light refracts and can bounce by inclinations not previously observed.” It then develops this image of words as things of glinting, fluid meaning with a deliberate ambiguity: “if you can imagine staff notation etched on the glass you can read off the scales.” Staff notation is how we conventionally represent music; but, etched on an aquarium, those “scales” become fishy, too.

  • Victoria Moul on Prynne (comparing him to Geoffrey Hill): “But all the same, what Prynne does, over and over again, is to take his strange, uprooted (re-rooted?) words, and make music of them.”

  • Prynne, in “Moon Song”:

    I know there is more than the mere wish to
    wander at large, since the wish itself diffuses
    beyond this and will never end: these are songs
    in the night under no affliction, knowing that
              the wish is gift to the
              spirit, is where we may
              dwell as we would
    go over and over within the life of the heart
    and the grace which is open to both east and west.
    These are psalms for the harp and the shining
    stone: the negligence and still passion of night.

    [Some of the passage from Triodes Moul quotes at the end of her piece is also relevant here:

    he wrongs, he is wronged, he advised,

    he deliberated, they seized, they were quarreling,

    grasping one another, they rage,

    they went on a rampage,

    whew, those boys act primitive right at

    the verbal root with a cap . . .

    From the exercise of being given an active form of a verb and being asked to supply the passive (“he wrongs, he is wronged”) Prynne derives a little narrative “right at / the verbal root.” —Steve]

Reviews:

• Two in the TLS; first, Muriel Zagha reviews an anthology of romances (Stories for Lovers, edited by Lucy Evans) and a book about romance novels (In Love with Love: The Persistence and Joy of Romantic Fiction, by Ella Risbridger, 2025 in the UK):

  In Love with Love is a book that seeks to include rather than exclude. The tone is chatty. Risbridger starts off by encouraging the reader to “picture me in the way so many heroines start off their stories: stripy pyjamas, glasses, messy hair up in one of those grabby claw-clip things”, and she knowingly peppers her book with the niceties of contemporary romance—lists, humorous footnotes, exclamation marks. Is it a deflecting strategy on the part of the author to drape herself so resolutely in the romantic flag? Quite possibly. Risbridger is acutely aware of the snobbish unease about romance fiction, which she skewers in a thoughtful footnote: “Fleabag would like the cultural pulling power of romantic fiction but without any of the humiliating, cloying, historical connotations of romantic fiction, and for that reason I will never truly love it.” She observes that the romance novel, rooted as it so often is in Austenian issues of money, property and one’s place in the world, is a social history of the time that made it.

  [Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984) (a WRB classic) argues that this reading of romance as social history is precisely backwards. Romance novels are not investigations of bourgeois attitudes towards marriage and money; they reflect instead the desires their readers have for what they are not obtaining in their real-world relationships. And to put the romance novel in the tradition of Jane Austen is not about “pulling power” (whatever that is) or historical connotations but something far simpler: insisting that the novels are good. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• How to write words good

• Brian Wilson and our Romantic moment

• K. T. on a Poem by Stephan Torre and rivers

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]