Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice
ISBN 978-1515084778 | | |
Preceded by | Chivalry | |
---|---|---|
Followed by | The Line of Love |
Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice is a
The book and its reception
The eponymous hero, who considers himself a "monstrous clever fellow," embarks on a journey through ever more fantastic realms in search of a parodized version of
.The novel became more widely known after the
In 1922, Guy Holt, his editor and publisher who was also named in the court case, published Jurgen and the Law, A Statement. With Exhibits, including the Court's Opinion, and the brief for the Defendants on Motion to Direct an Acquittal.[2] There were one thousand and eighty numbered copies printed, with only one thousand for sale.
Cabell took an author's revenge. The revised edition of 1923[citation needed] included a previously "lost" passage in which the hero is placed on trial by the Philistines, with a large dung-beetle as the chief prosecutor. He also wrote a short book, Taboo, in which he thanked John S. Sumner and the Society for the Suppression of Vice for generating the publicity that gave his career a boost.
Writing in the Pacific Review in 1921, Vernon Louis Parrington praised Jurgen, and described Cabell as "one of the greatest masters of English prose."[3] Aleister Crowley called Jurgen one of the "epoch-making masterpieces of philosophy" in 1929[4] – the book contains a parody of Crowley's Gnostic Mass.[5] Crowley's famous phrase from The Book of the Law, "There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt"[6]—or its source, Rabelais's "there was but this one clause to be observed, Do What Thou Wilt"[7]—is parodied as "There is no law in Cocaigne save, Do that which seems good to you."[8]
Reviewing Cabell's later novel, Hamlet Had An Uncle, Basil Davenport called Jurgen "a masterpiece."[9]
Filmmaker Jürgen Vsych was named after Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, which was her father's favorite book.[10]
Footnotes
- ISBN 978-0-7553-6086-4.
- ^ "Jurgen and the Law, A Statement. With Exhibits, including the Court's Opinion, and the brief for the Defendants on Motion to Direct an Acquittal". Internet Archive. 1922.
- ISBN 0807130974(p. 140).
- ISBN 0-7100-0175-4. Chapter 7.
- ^ Thelema Lodge Calendar for June 1998 e.v
- ^ Liber AL, III:60
- ISBN 978-0-679-43137-4
- ^ Jurgen, ch. XXII
- ^ "In the Lineage of Jurgen" by Basil Davenport (Review of Hamlet Had an Uncle, by James Branch Cabell) The Saturday Review, January 27, 1940, p. 11
- ISBN 0-9749879-0-5
References
- Bleiler, Everett(1948). The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Chicago: Shasta Publishers. p. 70.
External links
- Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice at Standard Ebooks
- Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice at Project Gutenberg
- Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice public domain audiobook at LibriVox
- "Notes on Jurgen" (a 1928 fan book of footnotes to accompany the novel), by James P. Cover, through HathiTrust or in hypertext format
- "Banning Jurgen," James Branch Cabell: Literary Life and Legacy, Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries