The revolutionaries of May

[Rob Jackson]

Hi Janos

Along with the two sources listed on the Wikipedia page, here are a  
few more links which seem to confirm the details in the Wikipedia  
entry, both the inclusion of St Mamertus in some folk traditions and  
the discrepancy between the Julian and Gregorian calendars:

http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/511611/

http://www.bartleby.com/81/8702.html

http://askville.amazon.com/Chilly-Saints-hear/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=33953474

http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/feature/ne150501.htm

http://www.irishtimes.com/weather/eye/2007/0510/index.html

The last two are from a British Weather Online site and 'The Irish  
Times'.

And this page cites academic references:

"Historically, the most studied singularity in European weather lore  
is an alleged cold period during 11-14 May, popularly known as the Ice  
Saints, named after the last killing frosts that seemingly tend to  
occur on days dedicated to Saints Mamertus, Pancras, Servatius, and  
Boniface on the ecclesiastical calendar (e.g., Buchan 1867; Talman  
1919; Huschke 1959).

http://www.cimms.ou.edu/~schultz/thaw/thaw.html

I don't think that it could be as clear-cut as the Wikipedia entry  
makes out, for the simple fact that all those national borders shifted  
over the centuries and there are different cultures and communities  
and traditions within all of those nominal nationalities.

However, the striking thing for me was that Pynchon's listing of the  
Ice Saints in the novel, and the dates that they can be traced to in  
the context of 1945, are an exact match to the listing for the  
specifically Polish tradition of Eis Heiligen described on the  
Wikipedia site.

And the capital letter used in the paragraph ("War years", as opposed  
to "war years") indicates a proper noun (e.g., "World War II", as  
opposed to "wartime").

with best regards


On 28/07/2009, at 9:03 PM, János Székely wrote:

> Hi Robert,
>
> this begins to takes the shape of a fascinating reception-theory
> problem for me, something I had to think over (and over again) while
> translating GR.
>
> From my POW (not in the Wikipedia sense) the English article on the
> Ice Saints is particularly slipshod for the single reason that the
> phenomenon is not a real-life experience in English-speaking
> countries. E.g., St. Mamertius is unknown in Hungary, it's the regular
> Pancrace, Servatius, Boniface here; there is no evidence of such folk
> tradition from the era preceding the Gregorian calendar; no-one has
> noticed any delay, while there is a separate saint for late May
> frosts, St. Urban (May 25), to whom quite a few of chapels are
> dedicated in wine-growing regions. The "delay" in Switzerland may be
> due to the fact that they simply adopted the tradition from lower
> south German and Austrian regions, while they themselves simply don't
> have such a problem, as the vegetation period begins a bit later.
> (Sudden cold fronts are common throughout the year; the reasons why
> the Ice Saints are noted is not meteorological but agricultural in
> nature as buds and flowers can freeze when cold air from the northwest
> invades Central European low-pressure areas. Switzerland is cooler in
> general and not really in the way.)
>
> The point is that for me (and the hypothetical Central European
> reader) the Ice Saints are not a matter of learning but a part of real
> life, something we get accustomed to from childhood, a kind of
> atmospheric counter-revolution after weeks of walking around without
> overcoats among trees (and vines) in blossom. Something that you
> instinctively attribute to arbitrary ill-will, which is such a regular
> feature of "war years".
>
> best,
>
> János
>
>
> 2009/7/28 Rob Jackson <jbor at bigpond.com>:
>> Just cleaning up the formatting of this post and resetting the  
>> "plain text"
>> function. I think that those accents in Janos's name make my email  
>> program
>> switch over to rich text (not Janos's fault, of course).
>>
>> And I do agree with Paul about the beauty of the imagery in that  
>> opening
>> paragraph of Part 3 and the way it serves as a figurative or symbolic
>> rendition of the war's end which "we", characters and readers  
>> alike, are
>> about to experience.
>>
>> best wishes
>>
>>
>> Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2009 04:25:17 +1000
>> From: Robert Jackson <jbor at bigpond.com>
>> Subject: Re: The revolutionaries of May
>>
>> On 28/07/2009, at 2:07 AM, J=C3=A1nos Sz=C3=A9kely wrote:
>>
>>> Rob:
>>>
>>> As a native I can testify that the three "Eis-Heiligen" plus Sophie
>>> plus Urban (May 25) are  not specifically Polish. In GR you can find
>>> the German term (as it relates to southeast Germany)but we have them
>>> in Hungary too and as far as I remember the late Igor Zabel from
>>> Slovenia also mentioned them as an element of folk meteorology. They
>>> denote a quirk in Central European Continental climate, i.e.  
>>> frequent
>>> mid-May morning frosts after several warm weeks (deep in the  
>>> flowering
>>> period) that you don't have elsewhere.
>>>
>>> On the other hand, I have never met any texts that called the Warsaw
>>> Ghetto fighters "revolutionaries". It was an act of wartime  
>>> resistance
>>> rather than something intended as a social revolution.
>>>
>>> J=C3=A1nos
>>
>>
>> Hi Janos
>>
>> The trusty Wikipedia blurb on the Ice Saints has it that:
>>
>> "The Ice Saints is the name given to St. Mamertus, St. Pancras, and  
>> St.
>> Servatus in Hungarian, German, Austrian, and Swiss folklore. They  
>> are so
>> named because their feast days fall on the days of May 11, May 12,  
>> and May
>> 13 respectively. The period from May 12 to May 15 was noted to  
>> bring a brief
>> spell of colder weather in the Northern Hemisphere under the Julian
>> Calendar. With the change to the Gregorian Calendar, however, the  
>> equivalent
>> days would be May 19-May 22."
>>
>> And then it describes the three holy days, followed by "die kalte  
>> Sophia",
>> which Pynchon refers to at the beginning of 'In the Zone', being
>> specifically Polish:
>>
>> "In Poland, the Ice Saints are St. Pancras, St. Servatus and St.  
>> Boniface;
>> St. Boniface's feast day falling on May 14. The trio are known  
>> collectively
>> as the 'cold gardeners', the three days culminating in 'Zimna  
>> Zo=C5=9Bka'
>> (Cold Sophia's), the feast day of St. Sophia which falls on May 15."
>>
>>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Saints
>>
>> And the Wikpedia entry also refers to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as  
>> the "the
>> largest single revolt by the Jews during the Holocaust." NB the use  
>> of the word
>> "revolt". The Jewish resistance fighters in Warsaw had the support  
>> of the
>> Polish Home Army and the Communist People's Guard.
>>
>>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_ghetto_uprising
>>
>> In that first paragraph in Part 3 where he refers to "the  
>> revolutionaries of
>> May", Pynchon specifies a context: "In certain years, especially  
>> War years";
>> which is why I went looking for something that fit the bill.
>>
>> 1968 wasn't a "War year", and I think that "revolutionaries" is an  
>> apt
>> enough term for fighters in the Ghetto Uprising, which was an  
>> extremely
>> significant social and historical event of the "War years", and  
>> which just
>> happened to be put down by a Nazi "rear guard". According to  
>> Wikipedia, the
>> "suppression of the uprising officially ended on May 16, 1943."
>>
>> Whatever one might think of Wikipedia, the info is generally  
>> sourced from
>> somewhere; in just the same way that the historical detail in GR is  
>> sourced
>> from somewhere.
>>
>> Part 3 of GR has Slothrop wandering through "the Zone", and up to  
>> the Baltic
>> on the border of Poland.
>>
>> I think there is perhaps a resonance in the phrase "the  
>> revolutionaries of
>> May" with les Evenements in Paris '68, and the opening paragraph is
>> certainly metaphorical. But the textual details, and subsequent  
>> events and
>> settings in Part 3, certainly seem to support a WWII context for the
>> opening.
>>
>> It was an interesting and new connection that you had made which  
>> made me go
>> back to the text and check out the details and look for potential  
>> historical
>> referents. They're generally there to be found. As well as being
>> "historiographical metafiction", GR is also very much a  
>> postmodernist take
>> on the traditional "historical novel".
>>
>> all best
>>