Descartes’ Bones

There are many challenges in writing about other people, especially those whose ideas have become important to you, or more widely.  The challenge is simple:  do you talk about the ideas, and leave the author a disembodied voice, or do you address the person, a life lived, a network of relationships, and a history of events and actions?  In recent decades there has been an increasing interest in the person, sometimes to the point that revelations about the personal life and antipathies of a philosopher, historian or scientist can be used to set aside or side-step what they had said in terms of their contribution to understanding.  Russell Shorto came up with an interesting twist on this, using skeleton bones as the linking motif in his story on the history of Descartes and an exploration of his thinking.

Descartes’ Bones is a frustrating yet fascinating book.  In one sense it starts at the end.  Shorto’s account begins in 1650.  Descartes is in bed, dying in Pierre Chanut’s house in Stockholm.  Chanut was the French Ambassador to Sweden.  He was Descartes’ friend, and a worried man as it was he who had invited Descartes to visit.  Worse than that, it wasn’t just a very cold winter, but Descartes had earlier nursed Chanut as he’d been the one experiencing a fever, only for Chanut to recover and Descartes to catch the same illness.  In Descartes’ case it was a fever that was to prove fatal.  Christina, the 23 year old Queen of Sweden, had been a source of the invitation to Descartes to come to Stokholm, and she was to send her personal physician in an attempt to aid his recovery.  The physician failed to impress Descartes; he was dismissed, and the philosopher died shortly after.

However, beginning at the end isn’t always a good idea, and in this case misses out on all the activity – and hilarious issues – that surrounded Descartes as he developed his ideas.  Of course, it was relatively early in his career that he explained the result of his intensive introspection was to conclude ‘I think, therefore I am’ – a phrase which became known as cogito ergo sum and is inextricably bound to every account of his work.  His method of exercising doubt was to define this aspect of his work, which was to focus on reason.  However, while that is the Descartes we know about, Shorto makes it clear there is a lot more to be understood about his work and his approach.

In a sense, the trouble started with his book, Discourse on the Method.  He saw this as an opening salvo in a career that was to provide a basis for education, for understanding, and, most important, to replace the received wisdom of his forbears from Aristotle onwards.  Shorto tells us Descartes wanted to “reorient the way every human being thought”, and that meant influencing the approach of learning across all the disciplines pursued at the university, and in particular at the university in Utrecht.  Somewhat unwilling to jump into controversies himself, he allowed proxies to argue his approach.  Early on, this was Regius, the professor of medicine at that university, but they didn’t always agree.  Regius was happy to follow the work of Harvey on such matters as the circulation of blood in the body:  Descartes, beginning a career of arguing with all and sundry, believed the heart wasn’t a pump, as Harvey proposed, but a furnace, heating the blood which caused it to circulate.

However, the core of his approach was doubt, an approach that was almost designed to ensure that he was in conflict with most other people in the university.  They saw him as selling his approach through his own personal magnetism,  “encouraging his followers to forget what they had learnt from the ancient master”.  He was accused of emptying students minds so he could fill them with his own approach.  It was an approach to win friends!

Russell Shorto does go back to the beginning, especially the emergence of Descartes’ thinking.  He also goes well past his life, and we spend much of the book following a detective trail, seeking to find what had happened to his skeleton, and even where his skull ended up once it followed a different route from the rest of his bones.  In fact, Descartes is a small player in this book, which uses the wanderings of his skeleton as a framework to explore the emerging intellectual revolution that was to sweep through Europe.  OK, not sweep, but slowly and often controversially begin to change the intellectual path for academics, thinkers and even religious practitioners in the west.  Above all it is an amusing book, told as a story intended to be funny.  It is an enjoyable read.

However, while amusing, there are times Shorto’s account can be frustrating, as we hop back and forth in time.  It is somewhat odd to find, 154 pages in, that we are, in Shorto’s words, “back to the beginning”.  There is Descartes dying in Sweden and creating something of a problem.  It’s not just that he is far from home, as he was a Frenchman who had lived much of his life in Holland, but he was a Catholic and Sweden was Protestant.  Given his religious character, he is buried in a ‘forlorn’ cemetery, some distance away from Stockholm.  Eventually, sixteen years later, the deteriorating skeleton is disinterred, and the remains put into a two and one half feet copper coffin, ready for it to be transported to France.  This is where we learn that the French Ambassador is given permission “to take, as a personal relic, a bone of the right index finger”!

This is just one part of a very tangled story.  His skeleton got to France, but his skull didn’t make it.  Instead, the captain of the guard watching over the coffin before it was sent south decides on his own initiative that “Sweden should not ‘lose completely the remains of such a famous person’”.  The guardsman, Isaak Planström, kept the skull as “a rare relic of a philosophical saint” for the rest of his life.  However, a merchant, Olof Bång, later collected some property from the estate of a man who had died and owed him money, and one of the items was the skull.  In due course Bång’s son, Jonas Olofsson, was showing the skull to a local headmaster, Swen Hof.  The story has it, perhaps accurately, that Bång wanted to find an appropriate set of words to accompany the skull, which Hof provided, and which Bång wrote on the skull.  There on the skull, with the text in Latin, is a poem ‘celebrating Descartes’ genius and mourning the scattering of his remains.

What did this inscription say?

In Latin –

Parvula Cartesii fuit haec calvaria magni,
exuvias reliquas gallica busta tegunt;
sed laus ingenii too diffunditur orbe,
mistaque coelicolis mens pia semper ovat.

In English –

This small skull once belonged to the great Cartesius,
The rest of his remains are hidden far away in the
land of France;
But all around the circle of the globe his genius
is praised,
And his spirit still rejoices in the sphere of heaven.

Just in case you think that was all, Descartes’ skull has several other pieces of writing on it, most of which are now quite impossible to read.  It sems that once you’ve written something, others follow.  Certainly, that was evidently the case when I was young and in a London park you came across a tree where someone had carved something along the lines of:

PF loves PC

From the moment one such testimony to everlasting love was cut into a tree’s bark, others would follow, despite the fact that the collective effort for memorialise relationships could lead to the tree dying.  At least Descartes’ skull had the attribute of already being dead …  and perhaps that is similar to those people who spray paint their mutual love on walls?

There is much more to Shorto’s story than the adventures of a disembodied skull.  He reveals that Descartes was far from being a shrinking violet.  “He may have shied away from face-to-face confrontation, but his arrogance was rather spectacular, and when crossed he had a deeply malicious streak”.  We read that he considered Fermat’s mathematical endeavours as ‘shit’, and a colleague of his as writing ‘toilet paper’.  Not every comment was scatological, of course, and when writing about Pascal, he suggested that the only vacuum (the subject of the argument they were having) was a vacuum in Pascal’s skull!

He also makes it clear that Descartes had considerable belief in his own excellence, and Shorto remarks that he believed:

“The body was a machine; therefore it simply needs to be understood in all its parts in order for it to work properly.  In this regard, death was tantamount to a malfunction; locate and correct the errors and you solve the problem of death.  Descartes became convinced he would crack the body’s code and extend the human life span as much as a thousand years.  At one point in his career he was certain enough of his progress that he felt he would do it soon, provided, he wrote – and he seems to have missed the joke – that he was not prevented ‘by the brevity of life’”.

However, we also read that this ‘vainglorious’, self-centred and isolated man had one sign of a rather different perspective on family, when he fathered a daughter born out of wedlock.  That child was to be the love of his life, even though he kept the facts of her birth hidden., travelling with the mother, Helena, as his servant, and his daughter Francine as his ‘niece’. However, Francine came down with scarlet fever and died when she was five years old.

There is some evidence that this loss had a lasting effect on Descartes and his work, pushing him to take on physiology and anatomy.  This was to prove important.  Descartes had insisted that the physical and the mental were two distinct substances:  that left him with explaining how they interacted.  The puzzle was clear:  if your body needed food, how did the stomach’s need get transmitted to your mind, and then lead to other actions (walking to get something from a cupboard, for example).  It was his continuing dissections that gave him an answer.

Together with others Descartes noticed there was a small ‘nut shaped structure in the centre of the brain’, the pineal gland, and decided that this was the place where the physical and the mental came together:

“the principal seat of the soul, and the place in which our thoughts are formed.  The reason I believe this is that I cannot find any part of the brain, except this, which is not double … moreover it is situated in the most suitable place for this purpose, in the middle of all the [brain’s] concavities; and it is supported and surrounded by the little branches of the carotid arteries, which bring spirits into the brain.”

Overall, Descartes’s Bones is an enjoyable read rather than an academic review.  However, there are a couple of points that do deserve emphasis.  As a man who has been described as a wimp and a menace Descartes influence on philosophy has been considerable.  First and obviously among these, Descartes’ concept of the brain and how it was the focus of  separation between the soul and the physical body created what has proven to be an enduring ‘mind-body’ problem, which is still debated today, especially in contemporary in discussions about artificial intelligence, consciousness, and the nature of self.

In referring to its contemporary relevance, this analysis isn’t just a matter of philosophical speculation about the nature of the human mind.  His ideas still influence how we think about everything from health and well-being to personal responsibility and social dynamics.  Often referred to as ‘dualism’, his views stimulate argument and there are continuing attempts and even philosophical justifications to challenging Descartes’ divide.  Indeed, considerable contemporary research is devoted to moving beyond dualism, and to emphasizing that the mind and body are inextricably linked.  Many advocate a more integrated approach, not just as a matter of speculation, but as a basis for developing approaches into such areas as treatment for a variety of mental conditions and illnesses.  While Descartes might have lost his head through events subsequent to his death, his thinking is still alive.

Russell Shorto really is a frustrating writer as he hops between Descartes’ time, the years soon after, and then onto decades and even centuries later.  However, there is a purpose in his approach, as it encourages a focus on issues, rather than following a linear timescale and thereby having to keep several themes together.  That would be a complicated balancing act.

Instead, what he achieves is three fold.  He makes Descartes live, and instead of appearing as a dry yet brilliant philosopher, we begin to learn about the real person.  This is a dilemma, of course, as what is written should stand alone, separately from whether the author is a puritan or a drunkard.  Well, perhaps that is too idealistic a view, but the reality of the author has to be appreciated in a measured way, and not allow it to overwhelm insights and conclusions, even if they might be viewed with suitable caution.

Second, he brings home Descartes impact in a way that academic analyses often fail to achieve.  We get glimpses, albeit rather partially, that illustrate Descartes wasn’t a dry analyst, and that he spent much of his life worrying and hoping.  The worrying was evidence of his recognition that elements of what he had to say needed constant re-examination, and that nuances could sometimes get in the way of clarity.  At the same time, he was a man of curious passions and ambitions, and Shorto illustrates many of these limitations.

Third, the greatest strength of Descartes Bones is that it sets the scene – both for Descartes lifetime, and for the eras that followed – for a time in which ideas, bones, and even a skull wandered around Europe.  This isn’t philosophy, nor is it narrowly written history.  It is more an account of some of the odd figures that played a role in Descartes life and the ideas and controversies they contributed.  It’s a worthwhile book to read, and a good way to make you think about this curious thinker, offering an explanation as to why he is often seen as a wimp and a menace.  He did claim more than was justified, for certain, and he did back away from taking some of his arguments to their logical end, but he was a key thinker in a time of revolutionary ideas.

DD81 – The Wreck of Western Culture

Do I want to be thought of as a ‘grumpy old man’?  Well, I am old, and I can be grumpy.  However, it is an epithet that implies recalcitrance, stuck in the past, and unable to see what is changing and the importance of rethinking past preconceptions.  I should also confess that I remember being impressed by The Wreck of Western Culture when I first read it, back in the early 2000s.  It was sweeping, bold, uncompromising, and articulate.  Twenty years later a defence of the ‘Western tradition’ seems rather quaint, and to many people rather seriously out of touch.  However, I suggest it does deserve another visit.

The author, John Carroll, was a professor of sociology when the book appeared.  The first edition was published in 1993, bit it was updated in 2004 with a subtitle added.  The key to John Carroll’s book is in that subtitle: Humanism Revisited.  According to John Carroll, Western culture has been dead on its feet for more than a century. “By 1900,” he commented, “it is all over.” By “it”, Carroll means a culture free from what he considers to be the devastating blight of humanism.  The humanist dilemma had been summed up succinctly by George Orwell in 1945: “As long as supernatural beliefs persist, men can be exploited by cunning priests and oligarchs, and the technical progress which is a prerequisite of a just society cannot be achieved. On the other hand, when men stop worshipping God they promptly start worshipping Man, with disastrous results.”  Predicated on the view that Western high culture is in a declining if not nihilistic mode, Carroll’s Humanism traces this decline to an epistemic tyranny of reason and its subjection of all other forms of knowing and understanding what is meant by ‘being’.

A review in The Age back in 2004, on ‘assessing Western culture’s wreck’ suggested The Wreck of Western Culture is concerned with the second part of the problem outlined by Orwell. A long time dying, Western culture was poisoned during the Reformation and Renaissance, which gave rise to self-regarding art and philosophy. The so-called Enlightenment was especially damaging, says Carroll: “The deification of reason leaves much human nature in the dark. The Enlightenment was in fact rather narrow-minded, naive about human motivation, about society and politics, always in danger of barricading itself inside an arid and abstract intellectualism.”  He suggests Western culture was finished off by the combined influence of Marx, Darwin and Freud, in whose name human lives were reduced to a set of economic, biological and psychoanalytical factors. In short, ours is a culture obsessed by what is claimed to be the nature of the skull beneath the skin.  Carroll castigates Freud for misconceiving the Oedipus complex; it is the antecedent Hamlet complex, he contends, that is the more precise agent of Western cultural ruination.

At one time, John Carroll was one of Australia’s most stimulating thinkers, and together with another thinker of the time, Michel Foucault from far away Europe, he saw a crucial antecedent and warning for the onset of humanism in Velasquez’s Las Meninas(1656).  In his analysis, the painting apparently subverts not only the social order in its depiction of the Spanish royal family, but by putting the viewer at the painting’s centre, calls into question the practice of art itself. For Carroll, Velasquez is “the most subtly brilliant harbinger of Western resentment”.  However, the approach used by Carroll and Foucault is very different – and indeed ideologically they are antithetical – but they do share an underlying anti-humanism. Carroll acknowledges the advances in the West towards unprecedented levels of physical health and material wellbeing, but mourns the diminution of words such as ‘sacred’, ‘noble’ and ‘honour’.   As others have noted, these aren’t terms normally associated with Foucault, who I guess Carroll would consider a nihilist.

In Carroll’s view, in seeking to remake themselves in their own (imperfect) image, the people of the West have lost their soul. The Wreck of Western Culture thus belongs to a negative strand within the Western intellectual tradition. Since the dawn of the Western history of thought, the idea of progress has been accompanied by the idea of decline. Carroll’s guiding light through much of his story is Friedrich Nietzsche, and indeed his style evinces a taste for the apocalyptic and the sublime that is not too distant from the turbulent genius of the German master.

It is Nietzsche who asked: “What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions- they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.”

He continues, “We still do not yet know where the drive for truth comes from. For so far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries’ old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth. From the sense that one is obliged to designate one thing as “red,” another as “cold,” and a third as “mute,” there arises a moral impulse in regard to truth. The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone excludes.”

Nietzsche remains a devastating critic, and John Carroll picks of many of his points (if not his essentially subjective view of the world).  Displaying a dazzling eclecticism, Carroll shares with Nietzsche the ability to range across the width and breadth of the cultural landscape .  In the Wreck of Western Culture he makes good use of  artists’ contributions as much as that coming from philosophers and theologians.  There are many examples.  Thus the French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin can be compared with the Hollywood director John Ford;  one chapter in the book convincingly treats a clutch of Ford’s John Wayne westerns as an epic example of modern myth-making.  Carroll makes it clear what art he thinks is worthy of attention: “High culture has its own hierarchy, with a few supreme masterpieces at the top. This study concentrates on those masterpieces.” He suggests that in the relatively zombie-like state today, thinkers and artists are generating relatively little worthwhile.  After all, it is relatively easy (and cheap?) to suggest modern art is pretty much summed up by Duchamp’s urinal, and Carroll moves on from such an easy target to savage Picasso as a “misogynistic psychopath who made women weep in real life, as well as on the canvas.”

Today there is a vast industry concerned with ‘explaining’ art.  Historians show us how imagery became more faithful to what was being seen, through the increasing understanding of perspective, sight lines, reference points and so much more.  Others explain what the artist was trying to achieve, how the work related to a commission, a place where it was to be displayed, how it was informed by beliefs, values and hopes.  I can still recall my giddy excitement as I read an analysis of The Ambassadors, by Hans Holbein the Younger, in John Carroll’s The Wreck of Western Culture.  He used that painting to explore what he argued we have lost through the gradual erosion of the spiritual by the scientific.  John Carroll might have been a little didactic (actually, quite a lot), but he did make me think.  I had the same experience reading  Michel Foucault’s exploration of Velázquez’ Las Meninas in his book The Order of Things.  Intellectually fascinating.

His approach was not universally liked at the time and has lost even more support in recent years.  However, in 2005 Michael Jensen wrote a review for the Sydney Anglicans journal.  He observed, “John Carroll, professor of sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, is not afraid of big ideas. His 2004 book The Wreck of Western Culture, a substantial reworking of a 1993 effort, is a passionate, daring and sustained attack on the bloodlines of what we call “the West.”   He calls his book “a spiritual history of the West.”   He writes with a refreshing polemical zeal and with none of the hedging and over-qualifying so characteristic of academic prose.

His  claim is that “humanism” by which he means the intellectual and cultural movement originating in the Renaissance “has had its deficiencies exposed in the latter-day collapse of western culture. Most particularly, the humanist belief in the supremacy of the human free will as an alternative to obedience to God has been revealed as self-defeating not least by the devastating symbolism of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The strategy Carroll employs for demonstrating his thesis is a selectively genealogical one. In a deliberate snub of postmodern orthodoxy, he examines some of the finest works of high culture in the humanist half-millennium: Hamlet, Holbein’s The Ambassadors, Rembrandt and Poussin, Mozart and Kant, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the novels of Henry James and the films of John Ford. It is an idiosyncratic choice and an unorthodox method, which Carroll justifies because these exceptional masterpieces have “tapped the deepest truths of their time” (p.9). His interaction with these works is stimulating and masterful and makes The Wreck of Western Culture a pleasure to read”, and his comments are thought provoking, at the least.

Jensen continues: “Crucial to the history Carroll traces is the famous sixteenth century debate over the freedom of the human will between the doyen of European humanism, Erasmus of Rotterdam and the German reformer Martin Luther. Carroll bravely reads Luther as more anti-humanist than anti-Roman Catholic. The irenic Erasmus was a reasonable man. If there is no human free will”, he argues, “why should the wicked reform? But Luther’s teaching of justification by faith alone meant a complete rejection of this reliance on human will and reason. For Luther, the human being is a slave to sin and sentenced to death; and must come, empty-handed, to the cross of the crucified Christ. Mere morality was a hopeless absurdity. The heart of the Protestant reformation, rooted in the writings of Paul, is an acknowledgement of the helplessness of the human as a result of sin and death and a need for absolute dependence on God. Humanism, with its alternative diagnosis of the basic goodness of human beings and their freedom to be moral, leads inevitably to the rejection of God. There are some mealy-mouthed versions of Christianity that espouse this kind of thinking, even today: but the calamities of history must be held up against them as evidence. Man has proved a very poor god; ultimately death still undoes him.”

Jensen considers Luther’s insight is as crucial today as it ever was. What Protestant – in other words, Biblical – Christianity offers is a radically different diagnosis of the human condition. The humanist vision has been played out in full and now offers no comfort to the human soul. Carroll offers his work as a contribution to the funeral of humanism, with a warning for us not to give it another run.

But what does he offer as an alternative?  Jensen suggests Carroll wants the West to start again, to reach back into the past and recapture that right “enthusiasm for man and his works that the Renaissance attempted to enshrine”. He means by this a simple delight in place of the infatuation with the human that has bought us so badly undone. Carroll writes: “The culture of the West will not be renewed until the moment it kills Luther’s monster [i.e. death], and once again achieves a death of death”. For Carroll, it is in the art of Poussin that a particular alternative is indicated. Though the Frenchman Poussin was a Roman Catholic, Carroll claims that in his pictures he was able to represent Luther’s great ideas. He, too, sees “darkness where the light of neither law nor reason shines” (p.70). He, too, sees the necessity for life and hope to come from outside sources and to be recognised as gifts. Yet he differs from Luther, writes Carroll, in that he appeals to a radically different divinity  ‘the sacred breath moving through the mythos’”.

At this point Jensen suggests Carroll loses him somewhat, and “a bit of precise writing on his part might have helped. Suffice to say that he reads the great works of culture as reflective of ‘the body of timeless, archetypal narratives that carry the eternal truths: the big stories on which every culture is founded, ones that are then told and retold to each coming generation’. It is in this mode that he considers theology, art, literature and philosophy: they are the things that a culture needs to survive, what Carroll has called in a previous book our ‘dreaming’”.

An exciting feature of Carroll’s work was his determination to take theology seriously and to read Luther and Calvin as major thinkers in the history of the West (which indeed they are). However, Carroll hangs back from a thoroughgoing endorsement of them, or from charting a clear alternative course for the Western individual. But that is not his intention: this book is ground-clearing rather than ground-breaking. Further, I would have been fascinated to see Western culture compared with Eastern or Islamic cultures. Are these less “wrecked” than ours? Admittedly, Carroll does briefly consider the clash of civilisations through the lens of the 9/11 conflict.

In any event, I read Carroll’s work and The Wreck of Western Cultura as Jensen did: “a full-blown challenge to the decadent culture we inhabit, a culture trying ever harder to assert a basic human goodness but everywhere having to deal with the destructive consequences of our will-to-power”.  Now it is twenty years later, and I have to reconsider my enthusiasm.  Certainly, humanism is in trouble, but not so much as the challenge from Christianity.  Now we seem to have become excessively materialistic and selfish, social cohesion falling apart as modern media allows us to find others like ourselves and any desire to find common ground diminished.

Indeed, today we can see the West is falling apart, and new thinking is coming from very different sources.  The values of family, social cohesion and a unified society are promoted by countries like China, but just as we begin to get excited about these ideas, we witness the high levels of compliance and control being exercised in the Peoples Republic.  Just as we can see evidence of the ‘wreck’ of western culture on the shoals of dominant capitalism, so Eastern countries are heading into trouble, trying to bludgeon acceptance rather than finding common ground.  This year I have been facilitating a discussion group for U3A, first on Truth and now on Belief.  Reviewing the past has been fun, but contemplating the mess we are in today is disheartening.  If humanism is failing, it seems the only alternative is to live in virtual isolation, sustained by entertaining technologies?  Not a good approach?  Can you offer any alternatives?

Lolita: In Its Purest Form

In a sense, all I want to say is ‘Read this book, it’s really brilliant’.  As if it were that easy.

Is it possible to return to a book and push aside all the commentaries and  exegeses that have developed over time?  Is it possible to return to the untainted, fresh account of the original?  Perhaps it cannot be done, because in many cases later comments have shaped perceptions and understandings.  Every year we read yet another explanation of the ‘meaning’ of  Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, Great Expectations, Animal Farm or One Hundred Years of Solitude.  Novels by Jane Austen, Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens, George Orwell and Gabriel Garcia Marquez appear to be continuously re-examined and interpreted to us.  Given this, I suspect it is close to impossible to get back to an original text, the ‘ur-text’, and read it without being influenced by all those subsequent commentaries.

Of the many books on my list of ‘great and compelling’, I suspect one by Valdimir Nabokov, Lolita, might have suffered the most.  Vilified, tossed aside and often banned, it is an extraordinary novel, less read than criticised.  Many would know of the story through cinema representations, especially Adrian Lyne’s 1997 version with Jeremy Irons as Humbert and Dominique Swain as Dolores ‘Lolita’ Haze.  Unlike a previous version, Lyne’s film is close to the novel’s darker elements.  Although praised by some critics for its faithfulness to Nabokov’s narrative and the performances of Irons and Swain, the film received a mixed critical reception in the United States.  However well done, the film is not the book.

Given its place in popular culture, can we return to the novel in its purest form, as if it had never been read and criticised before?  Claire Messud in the 3 April 2025 edition of the L A Review of Books offers an insightful commentary.  Here are few observations of my own.

Before turning to the text, it might be helpful to remember something of the author.  Vladimir Nabokov was born in Russia in 1899, then lived in Cambridge from 1919 to 1922, Berlin 1922 to 1937, Paris from 1937 to 1940, and finally arrived in the USA in where he lived for just over two decades before returning the Europe, settling in Montreux from 1961 until his death in  1977.  His first nine novels were written in Russian , but he achieved international acclaim and prominence after moving to the United States, then choosing to write in English.

It was during the time between 1948 to 1959 that Nabokov was a professor of Russian literature at Cornell University.   While he was there, his 1955 novel, Lolita, appeared.  Lolita is ranked fourth on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 Best 20^th Century Novels, which appeared in 1998 and is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest works of 20th-century literature, (his Pale Fire, published in 1962, ranked 53rd on the same list).  His memoir, Speak Memory, 1951, is considered among the greatest nonfiction works of the 20th century.  Commentaries on his approach suggest Nabokov was a proponent of individualism, rejecting concepts and ideologies that curtailed individual freedom and expression.

Nabokov produced his own translations into Russian two books he originally wrote in English:  Conclusive Evidence andLolita. The ‘translation’ of Conclusive Evidence was made because Nabokov felt that the English version was imperfect. Writing the book, he noted that he needed to translate his own memories into English and to spend time explaining things that are well known in Russia; he decided to rewrite the book in his native language before completing the final version, Speak Memory.

As for the task of translating Lolita, Nabokov wrote, “I imagined that in some distant future somebody might produce a Russian version of Lolita. I trained my inner telescope upon that particular point in the distant future and I saw that every paragraph, pock-marked as it is with pitfalls, could lend itself to hideous mistranslation. In the hands of a harmful drudge, the Russian version of Lolita would be entirely degraded and botched by vulgar paraphrases or blunders. So I decided to translate it myself” (this was revealed in an interview with Alvin Toffler, Playboy, January 1964).

Nabokov’s creative processes involved writing sections of text on hundreds of index cards,  which he expanded into paragraphs and chapters and rearranged to form the structure of his novels, a process screenwriters have enthusiastically adopted since then.  He published under the pseudonym Vladimir Sirin in the 1920s to 1940s, sometimes to mask his identity from critics.   He also makes cameo appearances in some of his novels, such as the character Vivian Darkbloom (an anagram of “Vladimir Nabokov”), who appears in both Lolita and Ada.  His complex plots relied on clever word play, with daring metaphors, and a prose style often described as ‘capable of both parody and intense lyricism’.

Lolita was where he addressed the controversial subject of paedophilia.  It is prefaced by a fictitious foreword by one John Ray Jr., an editor of psychology books. Ray explains he is presenting a memoir written by a man using the pseudonym ‘Humbert Humbert’, who had recently died of heart disease while in jail awaiting trial for an unspecified crime. The underlying approach of the book itself is one of a memoir, which addresses the readers as his jury, and begins with Humbert’s birth in Paris in 1910 to an English mother and Swiss father.

Offering a perspective far more complex than the film versions, in the novel Humbert Humbert spends his childhood on the French Riviera, where he falls in love with his friend Annabel Leigh. This youthful and physically unfulfilled love is interrupted by Annabel’s premature death from typhus, which leads him to become sexually obsessed with a specific type of girl, those aged 9 to 14, whom he refers to as “nymphets”.

So, now we face a dilemma,  Should I reveal more of the plot, or should I say; ‘you have to read it for yourself’.  The first of these options precludes useful comment; the latter can make it hard to draw conclusions for yourself, without any helpful exegesis.  To be clear, this is a detailed, carefully constructed novel, full of ambiguities and subtle hints and suggestions.  At around 336 pages, (but the length varies according to type face and type size).  At same time, the complexity is a function of allusions, suggestions, some things that appear to be facts, and others might more likely be fantasies.  I suggest the web he is weaving is, in large part, a function of how Humbert wants the story to read.  The overall plot is important, and so this is adapted from the Wikipedia summary, which makes clear the key elements of the story.

After graduation, Humbert works as a teacher of French literature and begins editing an academic literary textbook, making passing references to repeated stays in mental institutions at this time. He is briefly married to a woman named Valeria before she leaves him for another man.  Before the outbreak of the Second World War, Humbert emigrates to the United States. In 1947, he moves to Ramsdale, a small New England town where he works on his book. However, his new home is burnt down, and he’s approached by a widow, Charlotte Haze, who’s looking for a lodger.  Humbert visits Charlotte’s home and was about to decline her offer when he goes into the garden and  there meets Charlotte’s 12-year-old daughter Dolores (also known as Dolly, Lo, and Lola), who is sunbathing.  For Humbert Dolores, (whom he calls Lolita), is the perfect nymphet.  He quickly decides to move in.

Wracked with passion, Humbert seeks discreet ways to fulfil his sexual urges, usually via small moments of physical contact with Dolores.  When Dolores is sent to summer camp, Charlotte writes to Humbert.   She confesses her love for him and gives him an ultimatum: either marry her or move out immediately.  Stunned, Humbert realises the advantages of being Dolores’ stepfather, and so he marries Charlotte. Humbert experiments with drugging Charlotte with sleeping pills,  planning to sedate both her and Dolores so that he can sexually assault Dolores. But Charlotte discovers Humbert’s diary, learns of his desire for her daughter and the disgust he feels towards her.  She announces her plan to leave, taking Dolores with her, and writes a number of letters to her friends warning them about Humbert and his intentions.  Disbelieving his false assurance that the diary is only a sketch for a future novel, Charlotte runs out of the house to send the letters but is hit and killed by a swerving car.

Humbert destroys the letters and retrieves Dolores from camp, claiming that her mother has fallen seriously ill and has been hospitalized. He then takes her to a high-end hotel that Charlotte had earlier recommended, where he tricks her into taking  a sedative by saying it is a vitamin. As he waits for the pill to take effect, he wanders through the hotel and meets a mysterious man who seems to be aware of Humbert’s plan for Dolores. Humbert returns to the hotel room where he discovers that he has been fobbed off with a milder drug, and Dolores is merely drowsy. He dares not risk sexual contact with her that night.

The next morning, Dolores reveals to Humbert that she engaged in sexual activity with an older boy at camp that summer.  Humbert is furious and rapes her.  Leaving the hotel, he tells Dolores her mother is dead, and they start travelling across the country, driving all day and staying each night in motels along the way.  They finally settle in a small New England town, where Humbert adopts the role of Dolores’ father and enrols her in a local private school for girls.  He controls all of Dolores’ social gatherings and forbids her from dating and attending parties.  He does agree to Dolores’ participation in the school play, but the day before the premiere, Dolores runs out of the house.  He finds her in a drugstore and she tells him she wants to leave town for another road trip. He’s delighted, but as they travel, he becomes increasingly suspicious, feeling they are being followed by someone Dolores knows.

As Humbert becomes increasingly paranoid, certain that he and Dolores are being trailed.  Dolores falls ill, and Humbert checks her into a local hospital, but from where she’s discharged by an ‘uncle’. For the next two years, Humbert keeps searching for her until, unexpectedly, he receives a letter from a 17-year-old Dolores, telling him that she is married, pregnant, and in desperate need of money. Humbert tracks her down and finds out that her abductor was the famous playwright Clare Quilty, who had crossed paths with Humbert and Dolores several times when they were travelling.  Quilty had tracked the pair with Dolores assistance, but later kicked her out when she refused to star in one of his pornographic films.

Humbert claims to the reader that it was at this moment he realized that he had been in love with Dolores all along and implores her to leave with him, but she refuses.  Accepting her decision, he gives her the money she is owed from her inheritance and then goes to the drug-addled Quilty’s mansion and shoots him dead.  Soon after, Humbert is arrested, and in his closing thoughts, he reaffirms his love for Dolores and in prison asks for his memoir to be withheld from public release until after her death.  The Foreword to the story has already told us that Humbert died shortly after the beginning of his imprisonment, as did Dolores in childbirth on Christmas Day 1952.

Variously described as erotic, lewd, and even pornographic, Lolita has been a constant target for criticism and praise, with many writers observing how popular culture accounts bear little relationship to the book.  Author Lance Olsen described Lolita in 1995 as a “Janus text”:

“The first 13 chapters of the text, culminating with the oft-cited scene of Lo unwittingly stretching her legs across Humbert’s excited lap… are the only chapters suggestive of the erotic.”  Nabokov noted in the novel’s afterword that a few readers were “misled [by the opening] … into assuming this was going to be a lewd book … [expecting] the rising succession of erotic scenes; when these stopped, the readers stopped, too, and felt bored.” 

Inevitably Nabokov was constantly questioned – and criticised – about the novel.  In a 1967 Paris Review interview we read: “Your sense of the immorality of the relationship between Humbert Humbert and Lolita is very strong. In Hollywood and New York, however, relationships are frequent between men of forty and girls very little older than Lolita. They marry—to no particular public outrage; rather, public cooing”.  He added “No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert–Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert’s sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying girls in their teens or early twenties have no bearing on Lolita. Humbert was fond of “little girls”—not simply “young girls”. Nymphets are girl-children, not starlets or ‘sex kittens’. Lolita was twelve, not eighteen, when Humbert met her. You may remember that by the time she is fourteen, he refers to her as his ‘aging mistress’”.

When asked in the same review about coming up with Humbert’s doubled name, he described it as “a hateful name for a hateful person. It is also a kingly name, and I did need a royal vibration for Humbert the Fierce and Humbert the Humble.” Critics noted that, since the novel is a first person narrative by Humbert, there is very  little information about what Lolita is like as a person, that in effect she has been silenced by not being the book’s narrator. Nomi Tamir-Ghez writes: “Not only is Lolita’s voice silenced, her point of view, the way she sees the situation and feels about it, is rarely mentioned and can be only surmised by the reader … since it is Humbert who tells the story … throughout most of the novel, the reader is absorbed in Humbert’s feelings.” (in Ellen Pifer’s OUP book, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita).

Does Nabokov objectify Lolita?  It’s a challenging question.  Brian Cox, who played Nabokov in a stage monologue based on the novel commented it wasn’t “about Lolita as a flesh and blood entity. It’s Lolita as a memory.” Elizabeth Janeway holds: “Humbert is every man who is driven by desire, wanting his Lolita so badly that it never occurs to him to consider her as a human being, or as anything but a dream-figment made flesh.” (quoted by Erica Jong in The New York Times in 1988).

I could keep on quoting those for and against the novel.  Lionel Trilling warned in 1958 of the moral difficulty in interpreting a book with so eloquent and so self-deceived a narrator: “we find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents” (in The Bostone Globe, February 2011). That year Dorothy Parker described the novel as “the engrossing, anguished story of a man, a man of taste and culture, who can love only little girls” and Lolita as “a dreadful little creature, selfish, hard, vulgar, and foul-tempered.”  Perhaps a final comment comes from literary critic Wayne Booth, who trusts that ‘skilful and mature’ readers will repudiate ‘Humbert’s blandishments’, picking up on Nabokov’s ironies, clues and ‘dead giveaway’ style, but warns many readers “will identify Humbert with the author more than Nabokov intends”, given all of the “seductive self-justification of skilful rhetoric.”  Yes, indeed.

Sometimes to attempt to write about a book in just four pages is ridiculous, almost an affront to a work that demands a significant exegesis, not a few rather cursory paragraphs of introduction.  To do so about Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1967 book in this series of blogs so briefly is close to offensive, but it is a novel I have loved, reread and constantly thought about, and I can’t leave it alone.  In Wikipedia, it is introduced as one of the supreme achievements in Hispanic if not world literature, an extraordinary example of what is often called the ‘magical realist’ style.  It has been received numerous international awards, and it was central to García Márquez’s receipt of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. According to Wikipedia it topped the list of books that have most shaped world literature over the last 25 years, based on a survey of international writers.

If you haven’t read it, and want to know something about the story, it is about the life and eventual death of a town called Macondo, isolated and almost entirely out of contact with the rest of the world (except for a group of Gypsies, who arrive once a year).  It was created by a couple who have run away from their hometown (in a fictional party of South America), emerging in the dreams of one of them, José Acadio Buedia, as a city of mirrors that reflected the world in and about it.  José decides to establish his city by the river.  Soon after it has been founded, it becomes clear Macondo is a place of extraordinary and magical events.

Eventually and several generations later, Macondo is exposed to the outside world, only to come under the control of the government of the newly independent Colombia.  Next the railway comes to the town, bringing in new technology and foreign settlers. An American fruit company establishes a banana plantation nearby, and it decides to build its own segregated village across the river. This ushers in a period of prosperity that ends in tragedy as the Colombian army massacres thousands of striking plantation workers.  By the novel’s end, Macondo has fallen into a decrepit and near-abandoned state, seemingly about to go out of existence.

Well, this isn’t a book to be presented in a summary.  As the saying goes, you will have to read it for yourself, if you haven’t already done so.  In offering this commentary, the point is not so much the content as the themes this extraordinary book explores.  In doing this, I have relied on the Wikipedia entry on One Hundred Years of Solitude as a key source.

For any reader, there are some obvious themes and metaphors.  Perhaps one of the most important is the sense of inevitability and the repetitive nature of history.  Right from the extraordinary beginning to the equally extraordinary end, the characters manage to be both real and yet the victims of ghosts, and themselves live on in unexpected ways.  Daniel Erickson explained this well in his comments of fatalism in the story: “Fatalism is a metaphor for the particular part that ideology has played in maintaining historical dependence, by locking the interpretation of Latin American history into certain patterns that deny alternative possibilities. The narrative seemingly confirms fatalism in order to illustrate the feeling of entrapment that ideology can performatively create.” (in Ghosts, Metaphor, and History, Macmillan, 2009).

A second fascinating theme is the use of colours.  Commentators have noticed yellow and gold are the most frequently used, probably because they are common symbols of imperialism.  In particular gold signifies a search for economic wealth, whereas yellow represents death, change, and destruction.  However, particularly intriguing is the image of Macondo as a glass city.  This is an image that is the basis for the original choice of the city’s location.  It is an image that comes to José Arcadio Buendía in a dream. However, not only is it the reason for Macondo’s location, but it is also a symbol of its fate. Higgins writes, “By the final page, however, the city of mirrors has become a city of mirages. Macondo thus represents the dream of a brave new world that America seemed to promise and that was cruelly proved illusory by the subsequent course of history” (in Gene Bell-Vilada’s casebook compilation of essays on the novel, OUP 2002).

Finally, the use of particular historic events and characters renders the book an outstanding work of magical realism, as Garcia Marquez compresses decades of cause and effect within the framework of his story, while drawing on Latin American history.  It is possible to read One Hundred Years of Solitude as an abbreviated history of  Latin America discovered by European explorers. The book can be read as an archive of the literature that is the foundation of Latin American history and also a decoding instrument.  It’s a clever concept, as  “the world of One Hundred Years of Solitudeis a place where beliefs and metaphors become forms of fact, and where more ordinary facts become uncertain.” (this comes from Michael Wood’s 1990 analysis of the text, published by CUP).  Within the compass of the story of Macondo, we are exposed to humankind’s actions, in every variety, whether creative, amusing, compelling, sad, funny and yet always fascinating.

Why is it magical realism?  Well, it is a fiction, with the events, the place and the story all invented, but it is also a form of myth, putting events and their consequences in the context of the realities of South American politics, economics and history.   Like the myths studied by social anthropologists, García Márquez manages to combine an account of the prosaic and everyday life of his characters with magic, with fabulous events and with almost surreal flights of fancy.  It has been described as giving literary voice to Latin America:  “A Latin America which neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration” (from The Dialectics of our America by José David Saldívar, Duke University Press, 1991).

García Márquez Is something of a magician himself.  He manages to make the fictional blend in with the real, the magical and extraordinary seamlessly intertwined.   Cleverly, much of the story is told in a laid-back style, so that it is impossible to separate different realities, different kinds of events and even the borderline between imagination and reality.  After reading for a while, what you absorb no longer seems strange or surreal:  you’ve been cleverly, almost surreptitiously, absorbed into a different world.

To quote from Wikipedia: “Perhaps the most dominant theme in the book is that of solitude. Macondo was founded in the remote jungles of the Colombian rainforest. The solitude of the town is representative of the colonial period in Latin American history, where outposts and colonies were, for all intents and purposes, not interconnected.  Isolated from the rest of the world, the Buendías grow to be increasingly solitary and selfish. With every member of the family living only for himself or herself, the Buendías become representatives of the aristocratic, land-owning elite who came to dominate Latin America, a living style in keeping with the sense of Latin American history symbolized in the novel.  This egocentricity is embodied, especially, in the characters of Aureliano, who lives in a private world of his own, and Remedios the Beauty, who innocently destroys the lives of four men enamoured by her unbelievable beauty, because she is living in a different reality due to what some see as autism.  Throughout the novel it seems as if no character can find true love or escape the destructiveness of their own egocentricity.”

Above all, A Hundred Years of Solitude is a stunning example of myth.  Anthropologists have long been interested in myths, and especially Claude Levi-Strass, who has asserted “myth is language”.  Using the approach of structural theory, he has argued “Myth is language, functioning on an especially high level where meaning succeeds practically at ‘taking off’ from the linguistic ground on which it keeps rolling.” (Structural Anthropology, page 210). He has proposed that meaning is not isolated within the specific fundamental parts of the myth, but rather within the composition of these parts. Although myth and language are of similar categories, language functions differently in myth. Language in myth exhibits more complex functions than in any other linguistic expression. From these suggestions, he draws the conclusion that myth can be broken down into constituent units, and these units are different from the constituents of language, words, structure and narrative all interwoven.

Finally, unlike the constituents of language, the constituents of a myth, which he labels “mythemes,” function as “bundles of relations. A myth is categorized sequentially and by similarities. Through analysing the commonalities between the “mythemes”, understanding can be wrought from its categories. Thus, a structural approach towards myths is to address all of these constituents. Furthermore, a structural approach should account for all versions of a myth, as all versions are relevant to the function of the myth as a whole. This leads to what Lévi-Strauss calls a spiral growth of the myth that is continuous while the structure itself is not. The growth of the myth only ends when the “intellectual impulse which has produced it is exhausted.”  The complex story of Macondo and its inhabitants is a representation of South America, its people and its character.

In other ways, García Márquez addresses some more prosaic themes.  One is his criticism of the Latin American elite through the stories of the members of a high-status family who are essentially in love with themselves, to the point of being unable to understand the mistakes of their past and learn from them, as Elsa Brendy points out (in her lecture on “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” at Hofstra University in March 20200.  Other commentators have observed how elites in Latin America do not pass down history that remembers them in a negative manner.  In the same way the Buendía family honour their unique background by using the same names for their children over and over again. “José Arcadio” appears four times in the family tree, “Aureliano” appears 22 times!  The action takes place a  Big House, or hacienda, the centre of a large land holding in which elite families lived and managed their lands and labourers.  Colombian ‘Big Houses’ were known for being a grand one-story dwellings with many bedrooms, parlours, a kitchen, a pantry and a veranda.

If some of the story is magical, and some prosaic, the key figures are similarly complex.  José Arcadio Buendía is the patriarch of the Buendía family and was the founder of Macondo.  He had left his hometown in Colombia, along with his wife Úrsula Iguarán after being haunted by the corpse of Prudencio Aguilar (a man he’d killed in a duel), a corpse which constantly bleeds from its wounds and he tries to wash it.  José Arcadio Buendía is an introspective and inquisitive man, as well as the possessor of immense strength and energy, obsessed by scientific pursuits. He flirts with alchemy and astronomy and becomes increasingly withdrawn from his family and community.

Another key figure is Úrsula Iguarán, the matriarch of the Buendía family who is both wife and cousin to José Arcadio Buendía.  She sits as the centre of One Hundred Years of Solitide, living to be well over 100 years old and overseeing the Buendía household through six of their seven generations.  Like her husband, she is a person very determined.  At the same time she fears her family will continue with incestuous practices, that her inbred relatives will tend to have animalistic features.  In keeping with the magical elements of the novel, she is reduced to a plaything for the family’s sixth generation, Amaranta Úrsula and Aureliano in her last years, slowly shrinking to the size of a newborn baby before she finally dies.

To describe the complex, fantastical and compelling character of One Hundred Years of Solitude can’t explain why it has such a hold on its readers.  García Márquez’s book isn’t short, but it absorbs many readers from beginning to end.  It’s continuing influence and dominating place among Spanish-language books is unarguable. Over 30 million copies have been sold, (second only to Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which has had a four-century head start).  It is the only other book to receive the honour of a Real Academia Española edition.  Perhaps its enduring fame is because, through magic realism, Garcia Márquez found a way to describe modern human reality in its fluidity and strangeness, life as a fever dream of history and family from which we are never more than half awake.

As Robert Kiely observed in his review in the New York Times back in 1970, “If this is a book with magical elements, there is nothing here about elves, moonbeams and slippery mountains, nor midgets and fairies.  Many books of this kind seek to forget the earth. At least that is one idea of enchantment.  It is obviously not shared by the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, who has created in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” an enchanted place that does everything but cloy. Macondo oozes, reeks and burns even when it is most tantalizing and entertaining. It is a place flooded with lies and liars and yet it spills over with reality. Lovers in this novel can idealize each other into bodiless spirits, howl with pleasure in their hammocks or, as in one case, smear themselves with peach jam and roll naked on the front porch. The hero can lead a Quixotic expedition across the jungle, but although his goal is never reached, the language describing his quest is pungent with life:

‘The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders. For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.”

This is the language of a poet”

The final character to have the name Aureliano is also the town and the family’s lone survivor, and the novel’s culminating figure of solitude. His final act is to make sense of the prophesies that surrounded him: “He began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror.” Here is a reader and a character reading the same lines at the same time. This identification between reader and character invests the novel’s abiding sense of solitude with a subtle if literal sense of fellow feeling, which makes the apocalyptic final sentence the more bearable:

“Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that [Macondo] would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment Aureliano . . . would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”

Penelope

There have been several books published recently that retell a familiar classical story, especially some of the Ancient Greek myths.  I became entranced by this genre by reading two books by Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles and Circe.  Miller’s approach is very clever, if somewhat subversive of your expectations if you know the ‘original’ myths in broad outline.  In both books she has taken a familiar story and ‘retold’ it.  In The Song of Achilles she explores the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, illuminating the core story with a focus on the relationship between the two men, rather than dwelling on the siege of Troy.  She has explained that she took a story ‘hidden in the material already’.  The result is powerful and personal.  Circe is a rather more dramatic retelling, as she takes Odysseus and his travels out as the centre of the story and tells about what happens through Circe’s perspective, an approach that gives us insight into her actions and interventions.

I found both books quite compelling.  In both cases the events involve many characters, and there are times when you need to stop for a moment, and make sure you’ve got all the names and all the relationships reasonably clear.  Fortunately, most of those retelling these famous myths often add a list of characters and relationships at the beginning, to which you can return as needed!  Helpful, but it’s the mark of an excellent writer that even if you knew the broad outline of the story from a previous version as well as a fair recollection of what took place, the text still draws you in.  Circe is particularly effective in this respect, as you are being invited to ‘re-see’ what happened.  You know that Circe has been punished for deliberately using magic on another of the Olympian gods.  She has been sent to spend eternal exile on the small island Aiaia.  In the more familiar version of her place in the Greek myths, she is a side character to Odysseus, another stage in the delays in his return to his homeland.  In this account she takes centre stage.

As has happened to me before, it takes just a couple of books in a new genre to get me seeking more and becoming somewhat addicted.  Madeline Miller took me on to Claire North, and her trilogy retelling the story of Penelope.  Claire North is a prolific novelist.  Her name is actually Catherine Webb, but she uses the pen-name Kate Griffin when she writes fantasy novels for adults, and Claire North when she writes science fiction and novels based on the works of Homer.,  She’s written 25 novels in just over twenty years, and each of the three novels about Penelope are around 400 pages long.

The trilogy covers the twenty years of Odysseus’s travels, during which time Penelope refuses to believe, or at least refuses to accept, that her husband is dead.  As a result, she has to fight of the scores of suitors who turn up in Ithaca hoping to marry her and claim the throne.  The action takes place in Ithaca, and in this version of the story we happily forget about Ulysses for much of the time, and instead follow Penelope, who proves a cunning, determined and a single-minded manager of the kingdom, while also finding ways to keep her collection of suitors at arm’s length.

The narrator of the first book, Ithaca, is Zeus wife, Hera.  This introduces us to another important shift in perspective.  It is not just the case that the focus on Penelope, but we are going to see what takes place through the eyes of one of the goddesses.  Hera was the goddess of women, marriage and childbirth, and, as we read on, was treated abominably by Zeus.  In fact, it soon becomes apparent Zeus really isn’t nice guy.  Well, if you’ve read many of the Greek Myths and Homer, you’ll know almost all of them turned out to be a nasty, devious and self-serving bunch.  It’s an interesting way to portray the ‘gods’, who don’t so much offer a vision of the good life and how to be an ethical individual, as a Christian god might, but rather provide a series of illustrations of the worst in behaviour.

Hera helped Odysseus some of the time, and when she wasn’t getting involved in his misfortunes Penelope was one of her favourite queens.  Actually, there were three queens she liked.  The second was Helen, who was hailed as the most beautiful woman in the world.  Yes, she’s the one who was kidnapped by Paris, which led to the start of the Trojan War. The third was Clytemnestra, who killed her husband Agamemnon, and then was killed by her son to avenge his father’s murder.  Let’s face it, these were ‘interesting times’!

Claire North explains that part of the challenge in these times was that any intervention by the gods in the lives of humans had to be done with care.  Subtlety was the key, as Zeus was in charge, and would get angry – and behave viciously – as he didn’t like any interference (by anyone else) taking place.  As a result, most of the time the gods are more like bystanders, just occasionally making contributions to the events taking place.  Hera is keeping an eye on the star of the story, Penelope, who proves to be remarkably cunning and smart.  She might be a hostess and a queen, a woman of little importance in formal terms, but she weaves various plots and schemes to hold the suitors at bay, while also protecting the women and old men of Ithaca, while all the other men are off fighting at Troy.

You don’t have to read far into the book to realise how quickly many suitors underestimate Penelope.  As Claire North explains Penelope “should perhaps be weaving at the square loom she is often seen with in public – but no – this is a private place, for serious business, so instead she sits with her hands in her lap, chin turned up, a little away from the men around the table, listening with an intensity that would frighten Ajax”.  That weaving isn’t incidental, as Penelope keeps the suitors away by telling them that before she contemplates marrying anyone, she must first weave a funeral shroud for her father-in-law, (who is still very much alive, incidentally).  She weaves all day, while listening, and then undoes her work every night, thereby continually dragging out the process.  Perhaps more to the point, out of sight and pursuing her estate duties, Penelope has the women of Ithaca trained in fighting, as well as in managing the farms.  It’s a feminist retelling of Ulysses and his adventures.

The House of Odysseus is the second book in the trilogy.  It continues the events at Ithaca, addressing what follows from Clytemnestra’s death:  various key players are losing their cool, and in particular Orestes is being driven to madness, watched over by the vengeful Furies, and Electra is seeking Penelope’s support as Menelaus tries to turn the precarious situation in Argos and the Western Isles to his advantage.

There is a new observer, too, and so the perspective is Aphrodite’s.  Aphrodite is, well, she’s a bit naughty.  She’s funny, she’s witty, and she’s something of a pervert, making comments about every single and eligible person in sight, let alone scrutinising any exposed bit of flesh she spots in her travels.  To be clear, her focus isn’t always on various sexual adventures or romantic love, however.  Early on we learn about the Judgement of Paris, a competition which is actually a humiliating contest set up by Zeus.  It’s another insight into his awful character, happy to seize on an opportunity to humiliate Hera and Athena:  Aphrodite has to work hard to help her two sisters through the event.

Anyway, Ithaca is getting crowded with guests, many of whom are suitors for Penelope.  One of the most interesting turns out to be Helen.  Yes, she is both delightful and beautiful, but we learn that she has a whole mountain of accessories to help her as she ages – she has an extraordinary mirror, piles of gowns and dozens of makeup lotions, potions and ointments scattered across her dressing table.  If I had been a bit smarter, I might have realised a little earlier in the story that this is all a deliberate trick, and the simpering and apparently rather vacuous Helen is putting an act, even more impressive than the face she put on each morning.  We also learn about Penelope’s ‘council’ of women in the wilds of Kephalonia, and there is a quite moving scene between Penelope and Orestes, addressing love and forgiveness.  It is quite a step away from the way this part of Ulysses story is told in the more conventional versions of the myth.

While all this is going, there are the suitors.  One of them, an Egyptian, Kenamon, seems to be the only person callable of breaking through Penelope’s reserve.  Will they go beyond almost flirting?  I guess we know they won’t, but the tension builds up.  Odysseus must be getting closer, and we are wondering if this increasingly complicated – and tense – situation is going to explode.  No, we’re not, we are wondering about the consequences of this inevitable explosion.  Naturally enough, it is at this point that the second book ends, just as Odysseus wakes up on shores of Ithaca, a little way away from the palace.  If that wasn’t a cliff-hanger (a shore lingerer?), it was also the case that the third book hadn’t been published when I finished the second!

In the final book, The Last Song of Penelope, we find ourselves with yet another goddess as our commentator and observer.  This time it is Athena. Athena is the goddess of war and wisdom, and she can foresee the gods of Greece will someday become obsolete.  We learn she is determined to be timeless, even if the other gods are not, and the only  kind of immortality she can acquire is by being part of a really good story.  She isn’t the star of The Last Song; however, she has been a guide to  Odysseus behind the scenes for the twenty years of his travels.  When he returns, she’s just around the corner as the increasingly dramatic events take place, and as it seems both Ithaca and Penelope will come to a nasty end.

Claire North turns Odysseus’ triumphant return into tragedy, an angry man smashing and destroying much of what his wife has managed and grown over the years.  It’s a very clever retelling, transforming a person who has been described as  a hero for the ages, respected wise and clever, a man who always thinks ahead, into an out-of-control destroyer.  As the wreckage piles up, we are on tenterhooks.  Is there any way he and his furious, devastated wife can survive the mayhem he’s created, and even take some steps to repair the carnage and destruction. Or, at least, find a way how to live through it.

The process is wonderfully described.  We see how Odysseus eventually calms down, gets a grip and begins to think again.  Through Penelope’s interventions and anger, we see how he tries to correct his mistakes and starts to build empathy.  We understand, perhaps better than he does to begin with, that he really loves Penelope.  He has to change and unlearn what most of the leaders in Ancient Greece thought was the ‘right way’.  In part he is driven by his own innate confidence, but as the story continues, he begins to see himself and those around him – especially the women – differently, more clearly.  He changes.  He learns.  He grows.  It’s a wonderful conclusion to an outstanding trilogy, a ‘retelling’ that recasts the story and offers a much richer view of love, relationships and failures.  In case I haven’t made it clear, please do read this trilogy!

Stepping back from the details of the three books, there is an obvious question about stories like these.  Why do we find them so engrossing?  Perhaps a better question is why, in our increasingly prosaic and mundane world, do we continue to tell and retell adventures like those of Odysseus?  Somehow, even in the 21^st Century, a part of us is still in thrall to myths and legends, let alone the complicated worlds that underpin various religions.

Is this escapism?  A quick check of the top ten movies of all time (based on income) shows that they are dominated by fantasy, and in particular by the interaction between human and other worlds (Avengers, Avatar, Black Panther, Spiderman and Star Wars).  The only one stuck on our present world was Titanic!  Escapism certainly allows our imaginations to run riot, but more importantly, it is way to imagine achieving the truly important things in life, achievements that are simply impossible in the real world around us.

It might be helpful to distinguish between legends and myths.

A legend is often described as a variety of folk tale,  consisting of a series of events involving  human actions, believed to have taken place in human history.  Stories in this genre may demonstrate some important human values, positive or negative, almost like cautionary tales.  Legends are generally never being entirely believed, but nor are they entirely doubted.  They are usually distinguished from myths in that they concern human beings as the main characters, they do not necessarily have any supernatural origins, and sometimes they can include some kind of historical basis, whereas myths generally do not.  Timothy R. Tangherlini in Western Folklore 49 (October 1990) suggested:  A ‘Legend, typically, is a short (mono-) episodic, traditional … narrative performed in a conversational mode, reflecting on a psychological level a symbolic representation of folk belief and collective experiences and serving as a reaffirmation of commonly held values of the group to whose tradition it belongs.’

In contrast I would suggest you can think of a myth as folklore that plays a fundamental role in explaining the nature of society. Myths are often endorsed by secular and religious authorities.  Many societies group myths, legends, and history together, with myths and legends seen as factual accounts of the remote past, explaining customs, institutions and often comprise  narratives about the past that symbolize the nation’s values.  The myth of Odysseus is a foundational story for Greece, its history, and its pre-eminence in the ancient world.

Given this, what does it mean to ‘retell’ a myth.  Obviously, it is a way to reframe and even change traditional views about customs, practices and institutions.  Claire North has made it clear that she is telling Penelope’s story to re-present it in feminist terms.  However, in so doing, she is speaking to contemporary perceptions about gender roles, relationships and values.  We don’t enjoy her trilogy just because it is a good story, although it is that, of course.  It’s impact and significance are wide than that.  It offers a way to help us see relationships today.  It ‘explains away’ some of the undesirable aspects of our past, and it offers us new perceptions of some key figures in our imagined past.

Finally, we don’t need to rely on ‘classical’ myths of course.  There are many wonderful new stories with the same ability to help us think and rethink.  In recent years The Lord of the Rings trilogy has been a compelling and powerful reflection on destiny, war, heroism and death.  That story also made a successful translation into film, and by that means captured the imagination and thinking of so many more people than if it had remained a series of (large) books.  The same can be said about the first Star Wars films, but there, sadly, a desire to keep adding to the core story has led us into a bewilderingly complex body of films.  I don’t mean to imply the newer films aren’t well-executed, but rather that the success of myths rests partly on their clarity.  Perhaps it is evidence I like my foundational stories kept relatively simple!

A Map To the End of Time

Serendipity.  I had just read two novels by Claire North, Ithaca and House of Odysseus.  Like two others by Madeleine Miller (Circe, The Song of Achilles), they were retelling an ancient Greek myth, in this case the story of Odysseus.  Just as Madeleine Miller had done, the two novels took a familiar story and retold it with a focus on a different character:  in this case, it is Penelope, not Odysseus, who takes centre stage.  In fact, during the time of both books Odysseus is far away, fighting at Troy, and then tangled up with Circe.

Serendipity?  Well, when I began reading Ronald Manheimer’s book, A Map To the End of Time, my initial interest was in the account he gives of setting up a reading group for older people, exactly what I have been doing for some time.  The introductory chapter, Grey Spirit Yearning, explains how Manheimer was drawn to running such courses by reading Tennyson’s Ulysses.  He tells his mentor’s wife he finds the poem inspiring.  She agrees:

“ ‘As well you should – it is inspirational.  And yet the poem misses something most important.  Wouldn’t you say?’  I didn’t know what to answer, and looked up to Shep [his mentor] for guidance.  Before he could intervene, Mrs Sheppler continued.  ‘It’s a man’s poem.  I suppose that’s only natural.  A man’s fantasy of starting over …. What’s missing is the wife, Penelope.  Tennyson discards her immediately – ‘aged wife’ is how he puts it, if I’m not mistaken.  Perhaps that was the Victorian Tennyson, downplaying the female unless to make her mysterious, untouchable, remote.  But we must forget the real thing. …. Unlike Tennyson’s, our real Ulysses does return home to his ageing wife.  He chooses history, not immortality, even if only in this Greek legend.’’’

Yes, serendipity.  Like Manheimer, I’ve enjoyed exploring readings in philosophy with somewhat ‘maturer’ people.  Ron Manheimer thought such a group would offer a path to wisdom.  Possibly, but not the kind of wisdom you acquire when younger, the wisdom of the form ‘oh, that’s what that means’.  As he makes clear, Socratic-style discussions with older people are both illuminating and yet unpredictable, sometimes hilarious, sometimes provocative and often surprising conversations.  Like Manheimer, I found they have been a source of unexpected friendships with a diverse group of people.

Manheimer adopted a helpful model for the first part of his book.  He explains how he decided to run a discussion group, how he was encouraged, and then we join him as he gets under way.  Very quickly, it is apparent he faces a challenge.  He has decided to present his small group of older participants with material he knows.  Why is this a challenge?  Quite simply, it is because he has thought about the material, and has insights to offer, explanations available.  His first session is based on T S Eliot’s Four Quartets, and he has many insights into them.  The result is like one of those strange constructions where we alternate between two perspectives:  Manheimer telling the group what he knows, and the group exploring and developing their ideas, with him becoming a commentator.

This is a far from trivial issue.  When I first began facilitating discussions based on extracts from ‘great writers’, I had benefitted from a wonderful example.  My first seminar was as a participant, and our discussions were led by a ‘moderator’.  What this meant in practice was that the moderator knew the material and he had chosen passages for us to read aloud and discuss.  However, despite eventually discovering his very considerable knowledge, he allowed the discussions to evolve as the member of the group made comments, suggestions and offered explanations.  As I watched him at work, I realised he had a plan in mind:  first, there were some critical points he would like us to confront, but without foreclosing on what we might say about them.  At the same time, he worked hard to avoid being conclusive:  he might summarise an area of discussion but sought to do so without suggesting that what he had to say was an answer.  In effect, quite often he was bringing things together by telling us ‘this is what you seem to be concluding’.

Is that what we mean by good facilitation?  There was more going on.  Since he knew the material well, including, of course, pieces that we would read later, he had a broad and fairly detailed understanding of the territory we were going explore:  in two weeks we would go all the way from Plato to 20^th Century philosophers.  At the same time, he also knew this territory was vast, and that whatever we covered, there would be so much more to discuss.  Did he have some key points he wanted us to grasp?  Perhaps, and he certainly made use of his morning summaries, when he would review the selections and discussions of the day before.  However, any shaping was subtle.  We weren’t travelling on our own, but the pieces and his highlighting of suggestions offered a kind of mud-map of the territory.  However, our journey would be ours, and another group might only cover some of the same areas.

Manheimer manages to make his views on this somewhat unclear at the start of the book.  Its title is A Map to the End of Time, which sounds at least partly structured and with a direction and destination in mind.  However, it also has a subtitle, Wayfaring With Friends and Philosophers.  Wayfaring is fascinating term.  The dictionary suggests it refers to travelling on foot, but with a bit more searching you can see it is not so much travelling to go somewhere in particular as walking around, peripatetic strolling.  It seems Manheim is offering a map that leads somewhere, and at the same time is suggesting we might simply want to walk around, itinerants, relying on what is revealed by chance or happenstance.

Once Manheim has established an initial group, of six older people, that first discussion on Eliot’s Quartets is followed by a second, discussing J S Mill.  I’ve often used an extract from Mill on Liberty, but Manheim focusses on Mill’s autobiography, and the path that led him to supporting women’s voting rights.  At the same time, Manheim allows a number of young people to join his group!  It was at this point he gives a ‘mini lecture’, a decision that made me sit back and think.  If this is wayfaring, it is travelling slowly and taking time to examine the material.  However, it appears it is also travelling with clear guidance, helping the party keep on track, as it were.

When I am exploring a reading from a writer’s work, I like to think that the material is a starting point, and that the conversation wanders as the those taking part suggest ideas and follow thoughts.  Perhaps that is both more hopeful than true, and I am more of a guide than I like to think.  I do offer comments and suggestions and will bring the conversation back to the text from time to time.  Do I also give mini-lectures?  Manheim ensures that his seminar members know quite a lot as they discuss a topic, both in terms of the material and the person who wrote it.  It makes the title of his book clear:  there is a map, and the process of exploring has a sense of direction.  The conversation is going somewhere, rather than ending up just anywhere.

Further into his book, we discover Manheim is interested in the journey of the ‘self’ and explores the ideas of the ‘narrative self’ and the ‘relational self’, and even the view that we have multiple selves.  Now there’s a challenge for our journey through time.  It offers the perspective that at different points in time we take on or emphasise one aspect of our self and leave others to one side.  That sounds rather like changing the clothes you wear, but with each set of clothes comes a different personality.  We do that, of course, in the sense of deciding to be more formal, or to change to be more aligned with a group we are meeting, or yet again to change to be more engaged with a particular pursuit.  However, do we do that and push other sense of ourselves to the side, or do we ‘play’ at different roles, always knowing the ‘real person’ inside?

Manheimer is clever.  Having seduced me with describing conversations with his discussion group, the more I read the more I understood that this was about conversations with a variety of friends, individuals, family members, work colleagues, and participants in seminars and conferences.  This wasn’t about wayfaring with one set of people, but life as a wayfarer, reflecting on philosophical discussions and others with a philosophical undertone.  The Map to the End of Time was about his journey, and what he had learnt as he grew older, a kind of autobiography, but one where we could learn from his reflections on his experiences.

Manheimer’s various conversations are intertwined with observations and humour.  There’s even the odd joke: “such as the one about the old man who picks up a magical frog – a beautiful princess who offers to satisfy his every desire if only he will kiss her.  Putting the creature into his pocket he comments, ‘At my age I’d rather have a talking frog’!”  I had to read that twice to understand it was a joke … it was in a paragraph at the beginning of an extended chapter on the role of humour.  It preceded and offered a natural bridge into the next chapter which explores the relationship between the quality of life versus the length of life.  Yes, this is what I understand to be the journey of a wayfarer, wandering without a need to end up in a specific location, and even setting aside the rules of time and space.

A Map to the End of Time is a very enjoyable book, but not for the reason I bought it and began reading it.  I thought it would offer me insights about running a discussion group.  The more I read I realised it was a ‘story’ book, a series of anecdotes, drawn from various points in the author’s life.  In some ways it reminded me of Charles Handy’s books.

Charles Handy was  a very influential figure in my life.  He, too, would offer vignettes to illustrate a point.  Quite often, the vignette would be short, and the point touched on lightly.  He had the knack of making each story very visual and memorable, however, knowing that stories like that ‘stick’, and will continue to help thinking long after you hear them.  Like Manheimer, most of his stories were drawn from his life.  However, Manheimer gives his stories in full, often relating conversations that continue over many pages and he will wander off into all sorts of interesting territory.

Both Handy and Manheimer were teachers.  Although both used stories to explore important philosophical issues, their approach was very different.  Handy relies on being provocative:  some events he describes make you stop and think, some simply lurk in the text, waiting to ensnare you pages later … “ah, I get it, that’s what that was about”.  Manheimer is a more traditional teacher, and each interaction goes into detail, both with his account of the conversations involved, but also in terms of his occasional reflections along the way.  The contrast is one that plays on my mind quite often:  instead of allowing a discussion in a seminar group to develop as serendipity play its part, perhaps I should draw more conclusions?  Reading A Map to the End of Time has prompted me to be more attentive.  My role isn’t just to bring the conversation in a group back to the topic, but sometimes it is to summarise, draw conclusions, make some key points.  Or perhaps not.  My discussion group members are smart, and have the ability to draw their own conclusions, often with more ability than I offer.  Teacher or moderator or facilitator?  Enabling adult learning is tricky.

In many ways, A Map to the End of Time is about timelessness.  It is about stories, and how we tell them and then retell them.  Each time around stories can offer new insights and perspectives, because each storyteller and their audience bring their own various past histories, interests and values into the event, and each hears aspects of the story that make sense to them.  Sometimes we hear a story, and enjoy it because it is well told, and sometimes we enjoy a story because it leaves us with something to consider.

Manheimer offers two perspectives that are particularly helpful.  The first has to do with stories and why they can enlighten us.  He is a serious philosopher, and so is careful not to be dismissive, but it is clear from the accounts of discussions he offers, he considers some interactions are more important than others.  If I explained to him that I had just been reading one of Alexander McCall Smith’s stories about Bertie, he would wait to find out why it was relevant.  Smith tells many stories, and many are light, frothy, a nice way to pass a couple of hours.  However, they can contain an episode, a confrontation, or even a conversation that remains after I’ve finished the book.  Smith labours hard to make his stories entertaining, and he knows many are ‘light’;  he is clever enough to slip a passage or two into a tale that can – and sometimes does – reverberate long after the events of which they are a part.

In A Map to the End of Time Manheimer works hard to show how an account by a historian or a philosopher can lead to a compelling discussion.  What he can’t do, of course, is replicate that at a personal level for the reader.  We might visualise and enjoy a story by McCall Smith about some events in Edinburgh.  The account might cause us to pause to think about an issue, but often the story is merely good entertainment and not much more than that.  The strength of Manheimer’s book is it constantly remind the reader it is only in talking with others you are likely to discover interesting ideas:  second-hand thoughts from a book are fine, but those developed in live discussion are more likely to strike home.  In my discussions with a group, I often learn more on the day than in any preparation beforehand.  I can only hope that the other members of the group get some similar value by taking part.

Well, that is familiar stuff about facilitating discussions.  Teaching by telling has less effect than hearing about other views.  Others’ comments and reactions to ideas are likely to have real impact.  Sitting round a table engaged in a discussion often introduces us to perspectives that are unfamiliar or challenging, and as a result more likely to help us think.

Manheimer ends on a very interesting note, when he turns to considering what we mean by ‘home’ and why it is important.  Like Manheimer, I have travelled a lot, and moved several times.  That has proven to be a benefit and a disadvantage.  On the positive side, I like the challenge of new people, new settings, new ideas, and I’ve found it hard to stay in one area of work for a long time.  Variety, challenge and unfamiliarity are, for me, very creative.  I suspect I am a little afraid of getting stuck, and confronting what I don’t know as often as possible is very affirming.

On the other hand, a sense of home is also important.  By that, I don’t mean a building, or even a particular location.  I can and have felt at home in several very different locations.  Nor is home necessarily about having family or friends around me.  Access to family and friends matters, and I like keeping in touch, following what’s happening, enjoy others’ lives, achievements, challenges.  However, for me home is about where I feel at rest.  I don’t need a ‘map to the end of time’. As long as I feel ‘at home’ in my own head, I can enjoy peace and continue to learn and grow, setting aside any need to think about ‘the end of time’.

DD35 – Monkey

What defines a children’s classic book?  One published more than fifty years ago and still regarded as ‘great’?  Or from more than a hundred years ago?  If we decide to focus on books written before 1900, there are several classics:  A Christmas Carol (1843), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Little Women (1868), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and Treasure Island (1883), just to mention a few.  Most of these, and others from the 19^th and early 20^thCenturies are adventure stories, where we follow one or more youngsters as they get involved in hair-raising and sometimes hilarious events, often with adults helping or getting in the way.  They were stories to which the young readers could relate, and even imagine themselves participating. Some might be about bears, rabbits or badgers, but those characters were almost human, too.  My list betrays my background, of course, since I think of English-language books (including Grimms Fairy Tales and Struwwelpeter in translation).

My perspective on this was radically changed when I started travelling to Asia and first confronted Sun Wukong, a monkey with supernatural powers.  Trying to write about Sun Wukong presents me with a number of issues.  At the practical level, I used to have two versions of the Chinese classic Journey to the West.  One was for children, thirty-four beautifully illustrated books telling in simplified fashion each of the adventures of Sun Wukong  as he travels with the Tang Priest, Pig and Friar Sand on their journey from China to India (the Western Heaven) to collect the sacred Mahayana Scriptures.  They were hilarious, with the adventures of Monkey (as Sun Wukong is titled in the series) and his friends involving increasingly improbable and often seemingly impossible challenges, only to be resolved by Money’s ingenuity and trickery, occasionally with help from the others.  No wonder the Chinese television series (there are several) are so popular:  Monkey is a cheeky, clever, naughty and magical character:  he makes my children’s books heroes seem pallid and prosaic.  Despite his ‘adventures’, even the Toad of Wind in the Willows can’t match up in any comparison, and Alice’s confrontations with the Red Queen and others in Wonderland are simple stuff compared to Monkey dealing with demons and dragons!

The other version I have is a dense book, small type covering almost 400 pages.  It’s an abridged version of the original 3 volume complete text.  Of course, that version is misleading, too.  It isn’t the ‘complete text’:  there’s no such thing.  I not referring to the book in Chinese, which of course the original must be.  No, the problem is rather more impossible to overcome.  Journey to the West was, and probably still is, a living story, told, retold, embellished, and elaborated over some 1,400 years.  For a long time it was an oral tradition, taking as its starting point the real journey undertaken by the Buddhist monk and translator Xuanzang who did travel to India in the early 600s.  Born in 602, Xuanzang was a student of Buddhist studies at Jingtu monastery. After travelling throughout China in search of sacred books of Buddhism, he wanted to collect a set of original untranslated Sanskrit texts to help resolve debates over various competing translations of key ideas.  He was 27 when he began his seventeen-year overland journey to India, eventually bringing many Sanskrit texts back on a caravan of twenty packhorses!

Xuanzang wrote an account of his journey, which was published in 646, as Great Tang Records on the Western Regions.  However, Journey to the West is a novel, an account which retains the broad outline of Xuanzang’s travels, but adds elements from folk tales, Chinese folk religion and mythology, and various other sources.  By the time it was written, the real journey had been elaborated and developed, and it was only in 1592 that a complete written version was prepared (it may have been offered in shorter versions some years before).  Wu Cheng’en sets the saga in a broader framework, with Gautama Buddha (often just referred to as Buddha) giving the Tang Priest, Tang Sanzang, the task of obtaining copies of the Mahayana scriptures to and providing him with assistance (some assistance, as it turns out!).  There’s Sun Wukong, (who I’ll call Monkey from now on), but he also gives the priest two other helpers – Strong-maned Pig, (Pig from now on), and Sha Wujing, (Friar Sand).  Pig seems devoted to trying to thwart Monkey’s plans.  One other key character is the Tang Priest’s white horse.  Much later his horse will be revealed to be a dragon prince, eventually to be ordained as the ‘Great Strength Bodhisattva of the Eight Heavenly Sections’.

Confused?  Don’t be.  Sufficient to say that the adventures of Monkey, Pig, Friar Sand and the Tang Priest has been recounted and elaborated for several hundred years before Wu Cheng’en produced his written version.  New versions and additions continue, with numerous television serials, manga and anime alternatives appearing in recent decades.  All of them appear to retain much of the core story, a comic adventure, a pointed and yet humorous satire of Chinese mandarins and bureaucracy, underlain with spiritual insights and allegories

The structure of the story is interesting.  Overall, the novel has 100 chapters that can be divided into four unequal parts.  The first part, which includes chapters 1–7, is a self-contained introduction to the main story, dealing with Sun Wukong before he joins the Tang Priest.  The second part (chapters 8–12) introduces us to the Tang Priest.  The last part, Chapter 100, the final chapter, quickly describes the return journey to the Tang Empire, and the aftermath.  These three parts top and tail the central 87 chapters, which are like a series of mini-stories:  you can read any one of these independently, and although there is a time element linking them, and some scenes are precursors to or successors from an earlier chapter, they are largely independent blocks.  These chapters are the core of most subsequent versions of the story, especially those adventures contained in children’s versions, or in the manga or anime alternatives mainly aimed at a young audience.

The first part of the story offers an evocative introduction to the style of the whole book.  We read Monkey King was born from a strong magic stone on the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit.  He joins a group of other wild monkeys, and, following his accomplishing a successful ‘dare’, he takes the throne and calls himself Handsome Monkey King.  However, he was upset when one of his older monkey friends dies and decides to find an immortal to teach him how to beat death.  His subsequent adventures include learning such skills as the Way of Immortality from Taoist martial artist Puti Zushi, and, later, going to the land of the Dragon Kings.  This is where Monkey acquires his golden-banded staff.  This extraordinary item can change its size, elongate, fly, and attack opponents according to Monkey’s will.  When he’s not using it, Monkey shrinks it down to the size of a sewing needle and stores it in his ear!

So much more takes place, but a critical stage is reached when the Jade Emperor Yu (the Heavenly Father) invites the Monkey King to visit him in Heaven.  The irrepressible visitor causes havoc when he gets there.  This culminates in one of the most memorable scenes in the book, when the Jade Emperor appeals to Buddha to deal with this badly behaved and boastful guest.   The Buddha makes a bet that the Monkey King cannot escape from his palm. The Monkey King smugly accepts the bet. He leaps and flies all the way to the edge of the universe. Seeing nothing there but five towering pillars, the Monkey King believes that he has reached the end of all existence and marks his arrival on one pillar declaring himself the ‘Great Sage Equal to Heaven’ as well as urinating on another. He  returns to Buddha’s palm to claim his victory by winning the bet, only to find that the five “pillars” he found are merely fingers of the Buddha’s hand!  Buddha turns his hand into a mountain of rocks, and seals him under a mountain for five hundred years, marked with the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum.

Five hundred years later, Bodhisattva Guanyin is looking for  a team to protect a pilgrim on a journey to the West to retrieve a collection of Buddhist sutras. Monkey offers to serve the pilgrim, the Tang Priest, but Guanyin realises Monkey will be difficult to control, and tricks him into  putting a gold circlet on his head.  Monkey discovers it cannot be removed, and when the Tang Priest uses a special sutra, the band tightens and cause an unbearable headache.  The priest is almost ready to begin the journey.

In the second section of Journey to the West, we learn the character of the priest is can be seen as an allegorical representation of the human heart.   Certainly, he proves helpless at defending himself and his first two escorts are killed during an encounter with demons soon after his departure from Chang’an. They are replaced by three powerful supernatural beings, and this is where Monkey, together with Pig and Friar join to aid and protect him on his travels. They become the Tang Priest’s disciples and once the pilgrimage is complete will receive enlightenment and redemption for their past sins.  However, some aspects of their characters are not to be denied, and so Monkey will remain cheeky and naughty, and Pig will continue to look for ways to stop Monkey’s plans.  These two characters will play key roles in the subsequent journey, during which the Tang Priest Tang is constantly terrorised by monsters and demons.  Unlike the real monk, Xuanzang,  the fictional Tang Priest appears a young rather naive monk, idealistically compassionate, often lacking mature wisdom, and frequently falling for the facades of demons who have disguised themselves as innocent humans.  Monkey identifies them, but this often leads to tension between him and the priest.

Each section consists of 1–4 chapters, often involving the Tang Priest being captured and his life threatened, while his disciples try to find some ingenious (and often violent) ways of liberating him.  At times the issues at stake are political, involving humans, but most of the time they comprise confrontations with various evil creatures, many of whom turn out to be earthly manifestations of heavenly beings.  This is the core story, still used as the basis for all the contemporary and visual versions of Journey to the West.  Is this enough of a summary to inspire you to go on to read a version of the book or watch a video version.  I hope so, as there’s no way I can give a brief overview of all the complex – and exciting – adventures.

However, the style is well shown in adventure which takes place when the White Bone Demon tries to capture the priest.  He attempts this three times, each time disguised as different family members.  The first time he appears as a beautiful young woman. After Monkey ‘kills’ the woman, the demon escapes, and Monkey gets punished by the priest for his endeavours.   Next the demon returns disguised as the young woman’s elderly mother, looking for her daughter.  Monkey fails to kill the demon but scares him off.  Then the demon returns a third time, now disguised as the young woman’s elderly father, searching for his wife and child.  This time Monkey manages to kill the demon, but the Tang Priest, convinced that he had actually killed three innocent people, sends Monkey away, despite his protests, rather than being satisfied with chanting the words of the gold circlet to punish him!

Of course, the priest gets into more trouble, and Monkey returns to save him.  The travellers continue to confront various magical monsters and evil magicians.  There are impassibly wide rivers, flaming mountains, a kingdom with a (dangerous) all-female population, a lair of seductive spider spirits, and more.  All this is wonderfully attractive for young readers, a suitable mixture of scary behaviour, ghouls and amazing rescues.  It is easy to understand why Journey to the West is such a widely loved book:  drama and adventure, overladen with mystical elements and all the creatures and gods of the Buddhist universe.

Much of Journey to the West relies on cultural knowledge and local history which an outsider misses.  It is partly a Chinese story and it is partly a Buddhist story.  Critics and researchers suggest that many of the events are explorations on the nature of fate as seen from a Buddhist perspective.  Perhaps this is the reason the story is packed out with all those monsters, demons and other frightening creatures.  However, despite what at times seem like overwhelming situations and attackers with extra-ordinarily malevolent abilities, the travellers always seem to emerge safe and largely undamaged by their battles.

In that sense, the story come across as a children’s tale:  frightening, but ultimately safe.  The same can be said of monkey, who is naughty, disrespectful and seemingly carefree, but at the end of every adventure he has done the right thing, saved the other travellers.  Yes, he might boast a bit, but let’s be honest, he has good reason!  One aspect of the story, which is opaque to an outsider, however, is the complex set of relationships between the various celestial beings, and the way in which Buddha is orchestrating much of what happens.  Would a modern Chinese child understand all that?  I doubt it.  They are more likely to be similar to a Western child in the Anglo-Catholic world, where there is some vague knowledge of saints and disciples, but detailed knowledge is some kind of arcane pursuit, only for the specialist.

One aspect of the book which I missed until I read an introduction many years was that the number and nature of the disasters follows a plan.  Often a monster turns out to be some kind of celestial being, sometimes being true to their nature, but sometimes needing to be helped out of a quandary.  Towards the end of the book, Buddha plays a direct role by determining the form and the challenge of the last disaster.  There’s a good reason for this.  The Tang Priest is one short of the 81 tribulations required before attaining Buddhahood, and so it is Buddha’s responsibility to ensure this final task is created and solved.

By the time you arrive at Chapter 100, the final chapter of Journey to the West, you discover it comprises only a brief description of the return journey to the Tang Empire, and its aftermath.  Each of the travellers is rewarded, given a position in the extremely bureaucratic Taoist heavens.  Monkey and the Tang Priest both achieve Buddhahood as awakened and enlightened beings.   Friar Sand becomes an arhat, having reached nirvana, and the priest’s White Dragon Horse is made a naga, a serpent-shaped deity.  As for poor Pig, whose attempts to do good deeds were always limited by his greed, he is promoted to an altar cleanser, i.e. he is allowed to eat any excess offerings at altars!

The comparison between Journey to the West and my English classics is interesting.  The books I read as a child often contained adventures in which children were naughty, often cheeky.  However, their behaviour was always tempered by good (religious?) values, and almost to a fault they would end up as upright exemplars of proper and diligent behaviour. They certainly don’t depend on a comprehensive understanding of a context like that of the Taoist deities and their complex relationships that sit above Monkey’s adventures.  There are moral learnings to be taken from Journey to the West, but the overwhelming theme is that Monkey is naturally naughty, enjoys making fun of others and has to be restrained (by that golden circlet on his head), rather than by some developing commitment to approved adult behaviour.  No, on reflection, I’m wrong.  Children’s classics in the East and the West are not that different.  In both cases, they are often funny, sometimes scary morality tales, offering a glimpse of an exciting ‘other’ world, that might be, even could be, just around the corner.

I, Claudius

A policy which I have tried to follow over the years is to read a book before I watch a film or television serial version. Books tend to be richer and more complex.  Seeing the simplified, and sometimes warped visual version is fine, but better if you know the ‘real story’.  I often see these film versions as offering a shorter, alternative, even a different approach to a great story.  However, sometimes I am tricked, and see the television version first, and only get to the book later.  Such was the case with I, Claudius [the correct title is I, Claudius, but the Word software editor keeps encouraging me to type I Claudius, so please excuse mistakes!].

Back in 1965, the poet Robert Graves was interviewed by the moderately controversial satirist and journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, in the BBC show Intimations.  Early in the interview, we learn Graves confessed he wrote I, Claudius“mainly because he needed the money to pay off a debt, having been let down in a land deal. He needed to raise £4000 [equivalent to more than a quarter million pounds in 2023], but with the success of the books he brought in £8000 in six months” and got himself out of trouble.  I, Claudius was written in the form of an autobiography, with Claudius commenting on events in Rome up to AD 41.  A second volume, Claudius the God, covered his time as emperor from AD 41 up to his assassination in AD 54.  Despite the fact it was written for money and rather dismissed by Graves in favour of his poetry in that Muggeridge interview, in 2005 the novel was chosen by Time as ‘one of the best English-language novels from 1923 to the present day’.

It was also the basis for a twelve-part television series produced by the BBC in 1976.  I, Claudius is frequently cited as one of the best British television shows and even one of the best television shows in history.  In 2007, it was listed as one of Time magazine’s ‘100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME’ (!)  and placed at #9 on BBC America’s poll of the 10 best British dramas of all time.   In 2016, it was ranked #8 out of 11 in a list of ground-breaking British TV moments.  The “lust for power, devious plotting and mesmerising machinations” displayed in the show foreshadowed such later series as The Sopranos, Game of Throne and House of Cards.  An outstanding series made all the more so by the extraordinary performance by Derek Jacobi, who presented Claudius as a stammering, twitching and very unlikely Emperor, always struggling under the machinations of his evil grandmother Livia (played to perfection by Siân Phillips).  It was brilliant television.

I, Claudius is an historical novel, apparently written by Claudius.  Robert Graves made as much use as he could of the historical information of the time, especially concerning, dates, events and places, but the dialogue and some of the characters are clearly the work of literary imagination.  What parts are true?  Claudius was the fourth Emperor of the Roman Empire, from AD 41 to 54, with a good pedigree:  a member of Rome’s first ‘imperial’ family, he was a grandson of Mark Anthony and  great-nephew of Augustus.  He did have a persistent stammer, a limp, and other nervous tics, which meant many saw him as mentally deficient, and certainly not as a threat to his ambitious relatives.

If that sounds like the ideal starting point for a story, it was.  Robert Graves uses Claudius’ peculiarities to create a sympathetic character whose survival in a family of ambitious murderers depends upon their incorrect assumption that he is a harmless idiot.  Graves translated Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars before writing the novels.  Later he went on to claim that Claudius came to him in a dream one night and demanded that his real story be told.  After all, the real Claudius was a trained historian and is known to have written an autobiography (now lost) in a series of eight books that covered the same period.  Just a little bit of artistic licence …

The set up for I, Claudius, and the second book, Claudius the God, is ingenious.  Graves came up with the idea that Claudius visited the Sybil, a prophetess, in the Temple of Apollo in Cumae.  He learns he will be one of the Caesars to rule Rome, and Claudius assumes that he can tell the identity of the last emperor described in the prophecy.  Graves establishes a fatalistic tone, Claudius correctly predicting his assassination and succession (by Nero).  The Sibyl tells Claudius that he will “speak clear”.  He believes this means his secret memoirs will be found one day and, having written the truth, will speak clearly, in contrast to his contemporaries, who had to distort their histories to appease the ruling family, and in retrospect they will seem like the stammerers.  Given he will keep a record of his life for later readers, Claudius explains that he wrote in Greek, which he saw as “the chief literary language of the world”.  It’s a device that allows Robert Graves to explore Latin wordplay.  It also gives him the freedom to allow Claudius to describe his grandmother Livia as a vicious schemer, controlling Rome from behind the scenes.  Altogether a great starting point.

There’s a lot going on in Rome.  Claudius’ account begins before his own story.  The beginning was when the Empire was being established, and  Augustus became Emperor, although in doing so claiming he would eventually restore the former Republic.  Augustus had a tough time, as no less than four of his favoured successors die in turn.  Claudius reveals this was the work of Livia, who was Augustus’ third wife (and is also Claudius’ paternal grandmother).  Livia, having cleared the way, plans make her son Tiberius (Claudius’ uncle) succeed Augustus as the next emperor.  When Claudius is born, he is sickly and weak, and promptly ignored:  he is advised by his idol, Asinus Pollio to play the fool to survive.

It gets increasingly complicated.  When Augustus dies, Tiberius is declared emperor, though it’s his mother Livia who retains her power and influence as empress.  Unfortunately, the Roman legions in Germany refuse to accept the unpopular Tiberius and decide to mutiny, while declaring Germanicus emperor. Shocked and confused, Germanicus refuses, announcing his loyalty to Tiberius.  Leaving on one side some twenty or more complications, eventually Germanicus comes under the threat of witchcraft , and dies from poison.  In the midst of her various manipulative exercises, Livia predicts that Caligula (and not his older brothers) will become emperor and that Claudius will succeed him, while privately admitting to Claudius that she ordered the various poisonings and assassinations of several key characters.  She begs Claudius to swear to deify her as a goddess, believing it will grant her a blissful afterlife.  Later invited to Livia’s deathbed Claudius swears that Livia will become the Queen of Heaven, which moves Livia to declare he is ‘no fool’ before she dies.

Tiberius, now free of Livia, executes hundreds of influential citizens on false charges of treason and  retreats from public life to the island of Capri (as we would all do, of course).  The old and feeble Tiberius is smothered to death and Caligula is declared emperor.  At first, he appears to be enlightened and kind. To his surprise, Claudius is recalled to Rome from his peaceful life in Capua, where he has been writing history, living with his prostitute companion Calpurnia.  Back in Rome he becomes the butt of many taunts and practical jokes by the Imperial Court. After recovering from a severe illness, Caligula descends into madness, and is assassinated, along with his wife and daughter.

Horrified, Claudius, who had been hiding behind a curtain, is discovered by one of the disgruntled Praetorian Guard killers.  Realising they need a new leader, the Guards suddenly and somewhat bemusedly declare Claudius emperor. Claudius explains he does not want to be emperor and only wants to see the Republic restored, but the Guards ignore him. Almost on a whim, he accepts for the sake of his wife and unborn child, and for the access the emperorship will give him to valuable historical documents.  As emperor he will finally be able to fulfil his hopeful expectation that people will read his books.  That skeletal outline ignores yet more dozens of sub-plots and complications:  Life was fun in Rome back then!

In the text, I, Claudius begins with some background as to why Claudius is writing this book, and then we quickly move on to his hilarious encounter with the Sybil (in fact he meets the previous and now dead Sybil, too) which sets the tone for two things:  this is going to be a complex story, but some images and issues are going to be painfully clear.  At the beginning of Chapter 3, Claudius is writing about his grandmother, Livia:

“The name Livia is connected with the Latin word which means Malignity.  My grandmother was a consummate actress, and the outward purity of her conduct, the sharpness of her wit, and the graciousness of her manners deceived nearly everybody.  But nobody really liked her:  malignity commands respect, not liking.  She had a faculty for making ordinary easy-going people feeling acutely conscious in her presence of their intellectual and moral shortcomings.  I must apologise for continuing to write about Livia, but it is unavoidable:  like all honest Roman histories, , this is written ‘from egg to apple’:  I prefer the thorough Roman method, which misses nothing, to that of Homer and the Greeks generally, who love to jump in the middle of things, and then work backwards or forwards as they feel inclined.”

How can you not want to read on.

Part of Robert Graves skill comes in not covering the details of everything, but leaving space for you to draw your own conclusions.  Early on, as we learn more and more about Livia’s manipulation of the Empire, she is faced with a challenge.  If the Empire is to continue, then Augustus needs an heir.  His sister’s son, Marcellus is the clear choice (even if there was a ‘myth’ than the role of emperor was not a matter of birth).  Augustus had adopted Marcellus as his own son.  As his wife, Livia makes a great deal of supporting this.  However, she clearly wants Agrippa to be the next choice (although we discover she has a more complex long-term plan in mind).  Agrippa was Augustus’ son-in-law!  What a conundrum

However, to quote “Augustus caught a slight chill which took an unexpected turn, with fevers and vomiting.  Livia prepared his food with her own hands during this illness, but his stomach was so delicate he could keep nothing down.  He was growing weaker and weaker, and felt at last he was on the point of death.”  What luck for Livia.  Unable to speak, and ‘guided’ by Livia, Augustus chose his heir – Agrippa!  “And from this moment Augustus began mysteriously to recover:  the fever abated and his stomach accepted food”.  Yup, and you won’t be surprised that Agrippa grew in importance, but, worried about his own future, decided to leave Rome to rule over the Eastern Provinces.

Does that give you a flavour of I, Claudius?  All that I’ve revealed took place in the first 23 pages of the first volume of Claudius’ life, which runs to 349 pages.  One of the benefits of the edition I read was that it contained a family tree replacing the traditional front-end papers.  Actually, it was so complicated, I had to recourse to Wikipedia to understand the complicated relationships, the evolving series of marriages and more!  Indeed, the various relationships are so complex that frequent recourse to the family tree was only partial help:  perhaps I should have made notes as I read along.

If I, Claudius was about events before he became emperor, Claudius The God deals with the short fourteen years of his reign.  One thing is clear.  After Caligula is assassinated, Claudius was quick to see his own safety would depend on clearing away a few challenges, and promptly bumps off the leader of the assassins and several of his supporters.  However, this could be considered an unfortunate short-term blip in his approach, and soon after he busily engaged in improving trade, building a harbour in Ostia, quelling a few military mutinies, and conquering Britain.  Well, you might have thought that, but there was more going on!

Much that happens during his reign is the consequence of manipulation and trickery by his wife Messalina, who manages to kill several of her enemies, enjoys adultery, and indulges in bribery.  Her master plan is to get her lover, Gaius Silius, to murder Claudius, but the plot fails, and Messalina and Silius are arrested and executed.  Drunk for some of the time on an ‘Olympian Mixture’,  he eventually recovers (dries out?),  decides that the Republic can be sustained only through being ruled by a mad monarch rather than a benevolent one.  He plays the role of a weak and easily manipulated fool, incestuously marries his niece, Agrippinilla, who he despises, while she is busily plotting to ensure her son Nero becomes emperor.  And so it goes on.  It was an action-packed fourteen years, all documented in this compelling, vivid and sometimes stunning novel.

What do we make of historical fiction like this?  It isn’t entirely fiction, and Graves did research and use a lot of what had been discovered about the life and times of Rome at the time.  However, what facts there are almost disappear in the colourful exaggerations that are added to the story.  Embellished, for sure, and yet in another sense, an introduction to the power politics of Rome that seems to bear a somewhat uncomfortable similarity to the bizarre things that go on in the US ‘republic’.  Dynasties and greed keep reappearing, and we can see much of current behaviour mirrored in the excesses of the past.

Of course, we can write off both Rome and Washington as excesses, and nothing to do with the rather more prosaic lives of politicians in Australia.  In comparison, we’re boring – aren’t we?  Perhaps we are waiting for an Australian equivalent to Primary Colors to be published.  Do you remember Joe Klein’s book?  It was a the thinly veiled account of the presidential campaign of a southern governor, described as a ‘roman à clef’, a work of fiction based on real people and events surrounding Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign in 1992.  Surely, we have an Australian writer who can did up enough scandal to make our otherwise boring processes of prime ministerial elections fun!

It’s more than that, of course.  We want these stories for more than entertainment.  It suits our fantasies, or fears, to believe that our leaders a weak and venal, not all that different from ourselves.  If we are fascinated by power, we are even more drawn to the flawed people seeking power.  I suspect we actually hope they will be much less than their public images suggest:  driven by money, lust and outright stupidity.  It’s reassuring, because, if you think about it, if that is what they are like, why, we could do a much better job than they did!  Claudius might be a step too far away from our lives today, while Primary Colors is much closer to the world we know.  Surely, we can learn from both:  sexual misbehaviour is fine, but add a bit of poisoning, dubious alliances, and promises made to be broken.  Hey, we can do that!  Reading books like these and seeing how many are like them, you can’t help but wonder if there is another truth here:  it’s possible we don’t want our leaders to be paragons of virtue but prefer them flawed and greedy. Characteristics like these make them ‘real’:  In Australia, for sure, we love to cut down ‘tall poppies’, and ‘too good’ leaders are certainly ripe for a little reduction in size.  Perhaps the ideal plan is to stammer your way to success!

1066 And All That

Before anyone feels compelled to point it out, ‘1066 And All That’ is not the full title of this book.  It is (get ready): 1066 And All That  A Memorable History of ENGLAND comprising all the parts you can remember including 103 GOOD Things, 5 Bad KINGS, and 2 GENUINE DATES.  The authors of this outstanding text are Walter Carruthers Sellar, Aegrot Oxon and Robert Julian Yeatman, Failed MA etc, Oxon, and the illustrations are by John Reynolds, Gent.  The facing page to the title page is an illustration, of a king looking at the partly exposed leg of a lady, wearing a Magna Garter (of course).  Finally, my edition is covered on the outside with ink splashes, and ink blots can be seen on the edges of the pages, as well as a huge ink blot on the back.  Incidentally, I read that ‘aegrotat’ meant passed without taking an examination as a result of illness, which was the case for Sellar, and while  Yeatman completed an Oxford BA, he couldn’t afford the fee to upgrade this to an MA!

Let’s proceed.  There are LXII chapters.  In case you haven’t got the point, there is an Introduction by Ned Sherrin.  Oh dear, don’t tell me you aren’t aware of Ned Sherrin.  Quoting from Wikipedia, Ned Sherrin CBE (18 February 1931 – 1 October 2007) “was an English broadcaster, author and stage director. He qualified as a barrister and then worked in independent television before joining the BBC.  He appeared in a variety of radio and television satirical shows and theatre shows, some of which he also directed.”  Come on, now, we’re talking about Ned Sherrin, who back in 1962, was responsible for the first satirical television series, The Was The Week That Was, with David Frost and Millicent Martin.  Ok?  What!  You never saw TWTWTW?  You’ve never heard of it!  This is getting depressing – or is it that I’m getting old?

Perhaps it will help if I quote the first paragraph of Ned Sherrin’s Introduction.  “A couple of brand-new schoolboy howlers surfaced during 1989 in the GCSE examinations.  ‘William I was crowned at the Abbey National.’  ‘Sir Anthony Eden was brought down by the Sewage crisis.’  Do you hear a faint echo?   The howler is not the device which Walter Sellar and Julian Yeatman employed in 1066 and All That, but the book exploits a similar frail and confused recall of the salient facts of history”

Two paragraphs in, and were told “Have you heard of the journalist who complained he couldn’t get his stuff in because of Reuter’s cramp?  Or “I’ve been looking over a paper on Othello, and one boy says Othello complained Desdemona played the trumpet in bed.”   You need more from the Introduction?  Two further pages along we read a comment from a Mrs Brownless about “an article I read in the Christ’s Hospital magazine called ‘The Blue’ about a man called James Whale.  He had gone on Captain Cook’s voyage as a botanist and, after many adventurers, ended up as a science master at Christ’s Hospital.  One of his pupils was one Coleridge.  If you cast your mind back to the way you spoke about your teachers, and the reread ‘The Ancient Mariner’ I’m sure you’ll agree that James Whale inspired it in the same way Sellars teacher inspired 1066 and all that:  he would make such memorable remarks as King John was a BAD THING.”

Now I am sure you realise this, but 1066 And All That was (and is) hilarious.  When I first read it, it saved me from continuing to believe that history was boring.  History had got off to a bad start in my life.  At school my only recollection of history was the timetable periods when our history teacher would come into the room, start writing on the blackboard (in small letters), and continued to do so for the rest of the session.  Our task was simple.  Copy and memorise what he wrote, as it would be the basis of the exam at the end of the year.

Incidentally, that same teacher had one uncanny skill.  If someone in the classroom began whispering, he could grab the blackboard duster (a piece of wood with a some felt on one side), turn and throw it at the offender:  he was always right and he never missed.  In fact, his performance with the duster is all that I remember from years of secondary level history!

My mother despaired at my attitude to a subject she thought important.  First, she gave me a copy of Marshall’s Kings and Things.  Described as a ‘lighthearted romp through British history, it was tolerable.  It was years later I discovered H E Marshall was Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall, a lifetime history writer whose income came from her books, and was best known as the author of Our Island Story, a history described as being ‘for girls and boys’.  Not yet discouraged by my continuing lack of interest in history, and determined to get me thinking, eventually my mother bought a copy of G M Trevelyan’s History of England and gave it to me.  That red covered volume sat on a shelf for a long time.  One day I picked it up and started reading – and really enjoyed it!  I was careful not to let my mother know she’d triumphed.

Ned Sherrin’s Introduction to 1066 And All That was written for the 1990 edition, published 60 years after the first edition.  Readers of the original version would have begun with the ‘Compulsory Preface’.  This turns out to be very helpful.  On the first page we learn “This is the only Memorable History of England, because all the history you can remember is in this book, which is the result of years of research in golf clubs, gun rooms, green rooms, etc.  For instance, 2 out of the 4 Dates originally included were eliminated at the last moment, a research done at the Eton and Harrow match having revealed that they are not memorable.”  

Those that survived this rigorous process were 55 BC “in which year Julius Caesar (the memorable Roman Emperor) landed, like all other successful invaders of these islands, at Thanet” and 1066, “this is also called the Battle of Hastingsand was when William I (1066) conquered England at the Battle of Senlac”.  I realise you might be a tad confused at this point, so let me explain (via Wikipedia) that ‘Senlac Hill (or Senlac Ridge) is the generally accepted location in which Harold Goodwinson deployed his army for the Battle of Hastings  on 14 October 1066.  It is located near what is now the town of Battle, East Sussex.’  Everything clear now?

Once this history gets going, it is quick and pointed.  There are ten chapters in the first part, which occupy a mere 15 pages.  They cover Caesar invading Britain; Britain conquered again; the Conversion of England (through the landing of St Augustine – at Thanet, of course); Britain Conquered Again (by the Danes – it was the Saxons the first time around); Alfred the Cake (I’m sure you know all about his careless behaviour); Exgalahad and the British Navy (who conquered the Danes – I hadn’t known that); Lady Windermere, the lady of the lake; and Ethelread the Unready.  After these preliminaries we meet Canute, who was initially a Bad King, until he recovered from getting wet sitting on the sea shore telling the tide to stop (which led him to utter the immortal phrase ‘paddle your own Canute’), and, in Chapter X, Edward the Confessor.

A first-time reader might be surprised to read that this history includes Test Papers.  Test Paper 1 was tough.  A sample question to convince you?  Question 5 was in two parts:

“How angry would you be if it was suggested

1. That the XIth Chap. Of the Consolations of Boethius was an interpolated palimpsest?
2. That an Eisteddfod was an agricultural implement?”

Or perhaps you might like to consider Question 11:

Why do you know nothing at all about

1. The Laws of Infangthief?
2. Saint Pancras?”

Tricky, huh.

In the unlikely but still possible situation that you haven’t read 1066 And All That, I shouldn’t give away too many quiz questions, or you might prepare beforehand – especially as there is no information in the book.  However, I think offering one more example is quite acceptable: this question comes from Quiz III:

“Do not draw a skotch-map [not a typo] of the Battle of Bannockburn, but write not more than three lines on the advantages and disadvantages of the inductive historical method with special relation to the ecclesiastical litigation in the earlier Lancastrian epochs.”

I’m tempted to add: ready, steady, go!

It would be easy to go on giving brief quotes, because they are all so good.  Did you know, for example, that Henry IV Part 1 exhibited the head of Richard II in St Pauls Cathedral, and then patriotically abdicated in favour of Henry IV Part 2?  Or, in case you aren’t aware of the way in which the US became independent, I should advise you:

“One day when George III was insane he heard the Americans never had afternoon tea.  This made him very obstinate and he invited them all to a compulsory tea-party at Boston; the Americans, however, started by pouring the tea into Boston Harbour and went on pouring things into Boston Harbour until they were quite independent, thus causing the United State.  These were also partly caused by Dick Washington who defeated the English at Bunker’s Hill (‘with his little mashie’ as he told his father afterwards).”

I wonder if he had his cat with him at the time?

Confession time.  Quite apart from the never-ending jokes, puns and crazy stories (like Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee being on account of the discovery of diamond mines at Camberley during the Borewore), 1066 And All That was also instrumental in teaching me some history.  The absence of dates was a nuisance (but I couldn’t bring myself to write dates on my copy of the book).  Despite this, in a mere 116 pages, I acquired a sufficient grasp of British history to keep me going all the way through my secondary education.  Yes, it was very funny, but each page also managed to refer to people and events in time order, and actually helped me understand the place of the Napoleonic Wars (and the Gorilla War in Spain – oops, sorry!), and why people kept on about Disraeli and Gladstone.

In case you are thinking I am joking, in sympathy with Sellar and Yeatman’s work, I am not.  It would be many years later I started reading more history and began to fill in the background to all the silly stories I had absorbed.  At one stage I became enamoured of massive historical novels written by Harrison Ainsworth.  I can’t imagine why they held my attention for a while, but I do admit 1066 And All That was an invaluable reference work, on such people as Bonnie Prince Charlie (although I’m not sure his many Scottish lovers did include Flora McNightingale, the fair maid of Perth), Amy Robsart, Lorna Doone, Annie Laurie, the Widow with Thumbs, etc.  I suppose there could have been more than one Annie Laurie, and both were famous?

Sellar and Yeatman are compelling examples of the English approach to humour.  They can take any story and by a combination of mis-spellings, exaggerations and confusions render the prosaic delightful.  They stand at the beginning of a long line of British comedians, to be followed by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, Terry Gilliam (and the other members of the Monty Python team), Spike Milligan (and the rest of the Goons), Kenneth Williams, Harry H Corbett, Frank Muir, Frankie Howerd, Michael Bentine, Bernard Cribbins, Sid James and Tony Hancock.  These, and many others, demonstrated that very British ability to make us laugh at ourselves, subtly confuse our language and its use, and turn everyday stories and events into bumbling sagas of ineptitude and misunderstanding.

What led to this profusion of English humorous talent?  I suspect one key contribution came from Punch (its full name was ‘Punch or The London Charivari’)  a British weekly magazine of satire and humour established in 1841.  From its heyday in the middle of the 19^th Century, during which time it established the ‘cartoon’ as a form of humour, it was to start the careers of many writers.  It was also the home, for fifty years, of John Tenniel, from 1850 – who was to become best known for his illustrations of the ‘Alice’ books.

A hundred years later, it was somewhat overtaken by Private Eye, a magazine well-known for its criticism and lampooning of public figures, and its investigative journalism into under-reported scandals and cover-ups.  The Eye’s alumni have included Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton, John Wells, Peter Cook, Claude Cockburn and Gerald Scarfe.

If writers like those in Punch offer one perspective on British humour, both Punch and Private Eye differ from 1066 And All That in one other important way.  Unlike those two, 1066 And All is essentially simple fun.  Punch and Private Eye have a sharper edge, focussed on puncturing the reputations of the boastful, dishonest and shallow.

Let’s give the final words to another history.  In this case it is Kings and Queens by Eleanor and Herbert Farjeon, published in 1932, just two years after 1066 And All That:

William I – 1066 – by Eleanor Farjeon

William the first was the first of our kings
Not counting the Ethelreds, Egberts and things.
He had himself crowned and anointed and blessed
In ten-sixty – I needn’t tell you the rest.

Now being a Norman, King William the first
By the Saxons he conquered was hated and cursed
And they planned and they plotted far into the night
Which William could tell by the candles alight.

So William decided these rebels to quell
By ringing a curfew – a sort of a bell
And if any Saxon was found out of bed
After eight o’clock sharp it was “Off with his head!”

I don’t know what was in their glasses in the 1930s – gin and tonic or champagne – but it was a great time for witty literature about history for the young.  Will the 2030s allow us to return to such innocent stuff?

If Lyra Belaqua is one of the great characters in fantasy fiction, for me her equal has to be Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit.  They couldn’t be more different.  Lyra is serious, thoughtful, and determined.  Bilbo is sometimes serious and determined, but at heart he is a trickster.  Tricksters have a special place in stories, especially in tribal myths and legends.  They break the rules, disrupt normal activities, they are cunning and often naughty, but their games and actions tip established rules and reasons on their head, and as a result create something new.  Bilbo is the archetypal trickster, a mischievous character telling lies and causing trouble.  He makes The Hobbit, a precursor to Lord of the Rings, a far more enjoyable book than the somewhat heavier-handed seriousness of the succeeding books which focus on Sauron and the destruction of the ring.  Years ago, travelling with my wife and three young children, we listened to The Hobbit as we drove from Melbourne to Adelaide – and, entranced, we even stopped just outside Adelaide to give ourselves time to finish the last tape before we arrived!

Today The Hobbit is seen as a precursor to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but when it was written, that wasn’t the plan, as it was later Tolkien began to develop the trilogy.  It has a different ‘feel’ to it, more clearly aimed at younger readers, with a character with whom they could identify.  In terms of the kind of fantasy, this wasn’t low fantasy, but with the creation of Middle Earth, it was if Tolkien wanted to keep the story close enough to our world to make it accessible to young readers.  As a creation, hobbits were perfect, enough like humans to relate to, and yet different in ways that made them appealing and ‘magical’.  They lived when there were elves, dragons, dwarves and all sorts of other fantastical creatures, but there were men, too, men who would play a key role in the trilogy.  This was an in-between world.

Tolkien had a great sense of fun when he was writing The Hobbit.  Here’s the opening:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.  Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it or to eat:  it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle.  The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs and lots of pegs for hats and coats – the hobbit was fond of visitors …

Except for Michael Hordern (I think) reading, our car was silent for our car trip.  We learnt before we’d left Camberwell that Bilbo Baggins, whose home it was, had an adventure and “found himself saying and doing things altogether unexpected”.  Hobbits, we were told are “little people, about half our height, and smaller than the bearded dwarves.  Hobbits have no beards.  There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary, everyday sort ….”

Rereading The Hobbit reminded me how wonderfully the story progresses.  Perhaps I am allowed one more, early quote, this one from page 3!  The wizard Gandalf has arrived in The Hill, forgotten since his last visit had been many, many years earlier.  On seeing an old man, Bilbo welcomes him (Bilbo was always polite – well, almost always):

“‘Good morning!’ said Bilbo, and he meant it.  The sun was shining, and the grass was very green.  But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat.

‘What do you mean?’ he said.  ‘Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?’

‘All of them at once,’ said Bilbo.”

There is a sense of fun in this book which, sadly but inevitably, seems to get somewhat suppressed under twenty years later, when Tolkien produces the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings.  Paunchy Bilbo will be set to one side, and replaced by the earnest Frodo, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli.

It would be foolish to suggest that The Hobbit is all fun and frolics.  Far from it.  But even in the worst moments of the story, we know that Bilbo will continue to be a little naughty and devious.  As Tolkien’s letters made clear, he saw The Hobbit as a children’s tale, but The Lord of the Rings was darker, more serious, and addressed to an older audience.  Less frivolity.

There are some wonderful scenes in The Hobbit.  When Bilbo first meets the dwarves, there’s a meal, and while Bilbo panics that food will be spilt, crockery damaged and glasses chipped, everything is done with great care.  All Bilbo’s belongings are cleaned and carefully put away.  After some songs, it is time for business, and Bilbo faints, almost runs away, and yet eventually sits in with the dwarves and Gandalf, only to hear himself described as a ‘burglar’.  This hobbit is a delightful creation, with the ability to talk himself into, and out of, all sorts of situations.  He talks himself into joining the band of dwarves, who are planning to go to the Mountain, near Dale, and take the gold that Smaug the Dragon is holding.

Part of the skill in this first book is the way Tolkien makes the potentially frightening moments enjoyable.  When the band is trapped in sacks by a trio of Trolls, with the intention of cooking and eating them, they are saved by Gandalf.  He uses his skills to sound like several people, answering each troll when they ask a question, and by this means whipping them up into a fury, to the point they don’t notice dawn has arrived, and, caught outside, are turned into stone.  What could be scary becomes a scene in a comedy, and the band escape while we laugh at Gandalf’s funny trickery.

Tolkien knew how to spice a story with clever observations.  A little way into the adventure, they meet the elves, and stay at the ‘Last Homely House’.  Unimportant to the story, and so this part of the journey is dealt with quickly:

“Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating and even gruesome may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway.  They stayed long in that good house, fourteen days at least, and they found it hard to leave. … Yet there is little to tell about their stay.”

About a quarter of the way through The Hobbit, we meet another of Tolkien’s inspired creations, Gollum, who calls himself ‘my precious’.  Gollum lives underground, his ‘home’ on an island in a large lake, and we are advised “I don’t know where he came from, nor who or what he was”.  However, we soon learn Gollum is on the lookout for ‘tasty morsels’, of which Bilbo, lost and parted from the rest of the band, looks an ideal example.  Gollum loves riddles and agrees to a game of riddles with Bilbo (if Bilbo loses, he’ll end up being eaten).  The five pages of the riddle game are delightful, extremely funny, with Bilbo surviving on his wits and luck.  This is where he will learn the ring he picked up (which he knew Gollum was seeking), made him invisible.  He wasn’t going to hand it back.  Nor, when he rejoins the dwarves and Gandalf will he tell them what he has found (or stolen?).

The sign of a master storyteller, slowly this adventure is becoming more serious, and there’s a shift taking place between challenges and adventures as opposed to stories and good humour.  The Hobbit is taking on a darker character.  Indeed, it is around the middle of the book we discover all the dwarves have been trapped by spiders, and Bilbo sees them cocooned and ready to be eaten.  It is one of the more frightening passages in the book, and I suspect many young readers might find this chapter lingers on, even well after Bilbo has freed his friends.  He uses the magic ring that makes him invisible once more, but still fails to tell his colleagues what he can do.  You begin to sense that Bilbo likes being able to disappear whenever he wants.  So far it has been for good reasons, but will that always be the case?

Fortunately for the young reader, despite whatever pickle the dwarves and Bilbo find themselves in, there is always a way out, even if it requires using such means as floating in barrels down a stream, methods that are as much funny as they are serious.  However, we know that Bilbo will have to meet Smaug, the mighty dragon, at some point, and we also know he must have been having second thoughts about this crazy expedition.  With a deft skill that reduces our anxiety, the first meeting between Bilbo and Smaug takes place inside the Mountain, Bilbo staying invisible as he is wearing the ring.  It is a masterpiece of repartee, with Bilbo unable to stop himself as he refers to who he is and where he came from.

Here is Bilbo still not answering the dragon, at the end of increasingly confusing comments about who he might be (Bilbo does get rather excited at times):

“I am the friend of bears and the guest of eagles.  I am Ringwinner and Luckbearer; I am Barrel-rider” he declaims, increasingly pleased with his riddling:

“That’s better!” said Smaug.  “But don’t let your imagination run away with you!”

This of course is the way to talk to dragons if you don’t want to reveal your proper name (which is wise), and don’t want to infuriate them by a flat refusal (which is also very wise).  No dragon can resist the fascination of riddling talk and of wasting time trying to understand it.  There was a lot here which Smaug did not understand at all (though I expect you do, since you know all about Bilbo’s adventures to which he was referring), but he thought he understood enough, and he chuckled in his wicked inside.

“I thought so last night,” he smiled to himself.  “Lake-men, some nasty scheme of those miserable tub-trading Lake-men, or I’m a lizard.  I haven’t been down that way for an age and an age, but I will soon alter that.”

“Very well, O Barrel-rider!” he said aloud.

If Bilbo was an inspired character, Smaug wasn’t far behind.  I love the passage where he muses out loud as to how Bilbo and his friends could take his gold away, assuming he didn’t stop them.  “But what about delivery?  What about cartage?  What about armed guards and tolls?”  It’s impossible not to laugh with him.  What’s more, the more Smaug comments, the more Bilbo begins to wonder about all these issues.  Had the dwarves though about cartage?  “This is the effect dragon-talk has on the inexperienced.  Bilbo of course should have been on his guard; but Smaug had rather an overwhelming personality”.  Even as we read about the fearsome nature of Smaug, you can’t help but like him.  Here’s a dragon with a sense of humour.

Fond as I am of fantasy, I have to admit some of the adventures I read are a combination of terrible and threatening situations, unbelievable stress and demands, leavened with a little romance.  Those writers who learn from Tolkien understand that humour has its place too.  It doesn’t get rid of the drama, but it gets over what can be unrelenting challenge and disaster.  Must fictional life always be grinding and grey?  The Tolkien of The Hobbit set a standard that more writers might aspire to copy.

I could continue to offer quotes from The Hobbit.  It’s 289 pages of compelling writing, every page with clever, funny and ingenious moments.  But it is also a series of portraits that make you stop and think.  Surely you have met a Smaug, a rich, clever, dominating individual, who makes you feel small and inadequate.  Surely you have met a Bilbo, anxious but slippery, someone about whom you have this series of tentative but unclear suspicions, that what’s being said isn’t really what happened.  Surely you’ve met a Gandalf, tall, striking, and yet curiously not quite with you, who seems to flit off every so often to attend to some complex issue of which you were unaware and will remain so.  Tolkien describes the lazy, the indulgent, the verbose and many more.  Part of the success of The Hobbit is that it simultaneously describes a ‘fantastic’ world, but also one full of people you could and even can and do meet in your own life.  Realistic fantasy?

The edition I borrowed from the local library has illustrations by Alan Lee.  I found them fascinating.  Lee is wise enough to offer only a few, and several are atmospheric rather than specific, although I did love the sight of the wrapped-up dwarves hanging from branches where the spiders had left them, hanging in their larder I suppose.  Those that work least well are those that deal with Bilbo, who looks rather like a plump adolescent, and, for me, not very hobbit-like.

Overall, I have real doubts about illustrations in fantasy because it works best when the story creates the images for you.  It is the same dilemma when a fantasy is made into a movie.  Quite apart from the variations from the story that are inevitable, there’s that gap between what you have conjured up in your imagination, and what a film director has developed for the screen.  This is one reason why I always read books before I watch movies based on them.  At least I can balance what I see on the screen with what I have already imagined.  The other way round, the image on the screen crushes any attempt to see the characters differently:  they are frozen into the people or images that were used.

In recent weeks I have been reading several books by Terry Brooks, in his monumental Shannara series.  It is a wonderful collection, people with characters at least as compelling as any Tolkien invented.  However, there is one striking difference.  In a Brooks story, we can expect that there will be a high ‘failure rate’ for the heroes.  Adventures, battles and events are nasty, characters are mortal, and many die, some in rather awful circumstances.  I’ve learnt never to come too close to a Shannara character because I know there’s a good chance they may not make it!  Is this offering a rather more realistic perspective on life in a fantasy, as compared to Tolkien’s approach, where most of his characters survive the journey?

Perhaps that is also part of a broader comment about fantasy.  Some fantasy writers are ‘story tellers’, and the characters are somewhat subsidiary to the events in the story.  We read along, wanting to know how a saga will be resolved, drawn in by set pieces like battles or the manipulation of the levers of power.  Others use fantasy to delve into the characters, and much of the story provides us with an insight into the ways individuals respond, love, fail, and achieve.  Rereading The Hobbit has surprised me.  Now I find the story, engaging and exciting as it is, as mostly providing a context for us to learn about Bilbo, who’s a superbly rich, complex character.  Tolkien shifted over the years, I suspect.  The Lord of the Rings is more about events and the dramatic context for those events.  The shift is slight.  Some characters shine.  Gandalf continues to be mysterious.  Gollum is still there!  However, for me the three well-meaning and adventurous hobbits in The Lord of the Rings lack something of the compelling complexity of boastful, tricky, scared and loveable Bilbo.