All posts tagged allegory

Catastrophe by Samuel Beckett (1982)

Catastrophe is a very short play by Samuel Beckett, written in French in 1982 at the invitation of the Association Internationale de Défense des Artistes and first produced in the Avignon Festival on 21 July 1982.

Unlike most of Beckett’s plays or works, which are notably apolitical and even asocial in their studiedly abstract, experimental and often very solipsistic focus, Catastrophe is something like a political play, an impression Beckett fostered by dedicating it to the Czech playwright and political reformer, Václav Havel who was, at the time, imprisoned by the Czech communist regime.

That said, the play is still very late-Beckettian in at least three respects:

  1. It is really very short – the Beckett Project production clocks in at just five and a half minutes
  2. It is very claustrophobic, small and confined and, as so often, only has two speaking parts, in this instance a bossy theatre director and his assistant
  3. As mention of the characters suggests, it isn’t set in a prison or concentration camp or dictator’s courtroom or party meeting or hideout of rebels and freedom fighters or any other overtly political setting that the word ‘political’ implies –instead it is set in a theatre

Mise-en-scène

As so often, Beckett’s stage directions convey half the information or impact of the piece. As so often there are only 2 speaking roles. As so often they and the two non-speaking roles don’t even have names but are assigned only initials.

Director (D).
His female assistant (A).
Protagonist (P).
Luke, in charge of the lighting, offstage (L).

Rehearsal. Final touches to the last scene. Bare stage. A and L have just set the lighting. D has just arrived.
D in an armchair downstairs audience left. Fur coat. Fur toque to match. Age and physique unimportant.
A standing beside him. White overall. Bare head. Pencil on ear. Age and physique unimportant.
P midstage standing on a black block 18 inches high. Black wide-brimmed hat. Black dressing-gown to ankles. Barefoot. Head bowed. Hands in pockets. Age and physique unimportant.
D and A contemplate P.
Long pause.

It is, in its telegraphese, prosey way, a kind of poem.

The plot

We are in a theatre. A haughty director snaps and bosses around a female assistant as they put the finishing touches to some kind of ‘last scene’ of some kind of dramatic presentation. This appears to consist entirely of one man, called The Protagonist, standing stock still on a plinth on the stage while the director and assistant circle him considering his dress, posture and so on.

In this respect – two characters animatedly discussing a third who does not move or speak – it is identical to Rough For Theatre II where two characters, A and B, discuss the character and case of a third figure, C, who stands in the open window, unmoving and unspeaking.

The Assistant has arranged the Protagonist atop the 18-inch-high black block and draped him in a ‘black dressing gown’ down to his ankles and wearing a ‘black wide-brimmed hat’. The action of the play consists of the irritable, domineering Director over-riding her presentation and fussing about innumerable details of the Protagonist’s posture, his hands, the hat, his face, telling the assistant to take off the Protagonist’s coat and roll up the trousers of his old grey pyjamas.

His irritability is symbolised by the way his big Director’s cigar keeps going out and he keeps snapping at the Assistant to provide him a light.

When he has got the Assistant to largely strip the Protagonist, she points out that he is now shivering. The Director doesn’t care. Or worse, he pretends (to himself) to care, saying ‘Bless his heart,’ but not changing his behaviour at all. He’s only interested in achieving his great creative effect, and also mentions that he’s late for a meeting (which he refers to by the unusual term of a ‘caucus’).

Throughout, whenever the Director makes a more general suggestion, the Assistant replies with the unusual phrase ‘I make a note’, rather than ‘I will make a note’ or ‘I’ll take a note’ or make sure it’s done’ or any of a  number of possible phrases. No. ‘I make a note’ has a surprisingly large impact in making the dialogue, and consequently the entire setup, appear strangely brittle and unnatural.

When the Director withdraws to the stalls to get a proper view of his handiwork, the Assistant flops down in an empty theatre seat, but only for a moment. She springs right back up and wipes the seat vigorously, as if to avoid contamination, before reseating herself.

In the last minute they call on Luke, the lighting technician, who has two lines, though he doesn’t appear, and who obeys the Director’s imperious instructions about changing the light on the Protagonist in order to create the most dramatic possible tableau. It is at this point that the title of the piece appears. When Luke adjusts the lighting so it falls solely on the Protagonist’s face, the Director goes into raptures.

D: [Pause.] Good. There’s our catastrophe. In the bag. Once more and I’m off… Terrific! He’ll have them on their feet. I can hear it from here…

‘In the bag’. Good. And with that the Director is ready to whisk off to his ‘caucus’. But it’s in the last 30 seconds that the piece acquires its bite. For in these last seconds, the Protagonist, who has been standing stock still, with his head down, submitting to all these indignities, finally raises his head and looks the audience directly in the eye, and the audience, which has been acquiescing in this bullying and humiliation, is slowly shamed into silence.

P raises his bead, fixes the audience. The applause falters, dies. Long pause

Beckett, whose every utterance was, by this late stage of his life, taken down and recorded for the use of future scholars, apparently told American theatre critic Mel Gussow that:

‘it was not his intention to have the character make an appeal… He is a triumphant martyr rather than a sacrificial victim… and it is meant to cow onlookers into submission through the intensity of his gaze and stoicism.’

Interpretations

Aristotle

In Aristotle’s seminal work of literary criticism, the Poetics, the Greek philosopher defines the catastrophe of a play as the moment when the tragic hero pulls down ruin and pain on himself and his society, when Oedipus blinds himself, when Pentheus is torn to pieces by the Maenads. More broadly, it is:

the final resolution in a poem or narrative plot, which unravels the intrigue and brings the piece to a close. (Wikipedia)

Catastrophe is obviously nothing like Aeschylus or Sophocles. It is muted and boring, the only real interest being the character of the thuggish, bullying male director, a character who could have walked directly from the accusations of the #metoo movement.

And yet the word ‘catastrophe’ is deliberately uttered by the key character, and he appears to be using it in its correct technical sense.

D: [Pause.] Good. There’s our catastrophe. In the bag.

The Director is satisfied that this tableau, of the protagonist stripped down to his undergarments and lit just so will provide just the right climax to whatever drama has preceded it.

There is, then, a tremendous irony in the way the play then proceeds, in the final 30 seconds, to enact Beckett’s ‘catastrophe’, the one whereby the Protagonist lifts his face to confront the audience and cow them into silence and shame.

This catastrophe doesn’t bring tragic recognition and ruin in the classic sense, but it does transform the figure from utterly passive object, rudely talked about, to a man who is fighting back, defying his owners and manipulators.

Thus the concept of the ‘catastrophe’ is correctly used twice at the end of the play, but to highlight the fact that it contains two narratives – the play-within-a-play whereby the Director achieves his effect – and the wider play, the Beckett play which the audience is watching, which achieves its catastrophe in an entirely different way. Or is working to a completely different aesthetic. Or to a completely different set of moral values.

For such a short piece, it’s quite a dense and complex effect.

Politics

If it hadn’t been dedicated to Havel, a world-famous dissident and political reformer, it might not have been easy to see Catastrophe as a ‘political’ play at all. But in the event, Beckett was involved in several of the productions around the West and left some pretty explicit comments about his intentions in this regard. Most notably, in answer to a reviewer who claimed that the ending was ambiguous, Beckett replied angrily:

‘There’s no ambiguity there at all. He’s saying, you bastards, you haven’t finished me yet.’

So quite obviously Catastrophe is about a figure who is poked and prodded and reified or objectified and reduced to a wordless mannequin to suit the whims of the Director. But who at the last minute asserts his freedom and agency.

Whether you think this rather slender ‘plot’, and the fairly tame and super-familiar setting (a rehearsal for a play, or part thereof) is sturdy enough to bear the heavy freight of political symbolism which the play has been loaded with, is a judgement call. In the febrile world of the theatre and the glib world of literary criticism it can easily be made to pass for one.

The Beckett on Film production

The Beckett on Film project set out, at the turn of the century, to produce high quality, filmed productions of all 19 of Beckett’s plays. The producers approached leading directors and actors, but not always with happy results.

To direct Catastrophe they chose acclaimed American playwright and director David Mamet, cast playwright and Beckett enthusiast Harold Pinter to play the Director and, in a great coup, secured acclaimed Shakespearian actor Sir John Gielgud as the Protagonist. It was Gielgud’s last role and he died only a few weeks after filming it.

Which makes it all the more of a shame that Mamet seems to have made quite a balls-up of the piece. Mamet made his name as the author of a series of plays about hairy, testosterone-fuelled toxic American men such as Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974), and American Buffalo (1975), Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and Speed-the-Plow (1988).

If you’re familiar with Mamet’s attraction to strong, unpleasant male characters, often depicted in exploitative relationships with younger women, it comes as no surprise that his production devotes all its attention to the domineering figure of the Director, played by a characteristically offensive, barkingly pukka, alpha male Harold Pinter, and his bullying relationship with the (very attractive) Assistant.

Re, this Assistant, it is notable that, whereas, in the stage directions the Assistant wears shapeless ‘White overall. Bare head. Pencil on ear. Age and physique unimportant.’ in Mamet’s production, she is a) very attractive b) wearing the smart and shapely outfit of a briskly willing secretary, as per the Hollywood BDSM movie, The Secretary.

All subtlety whatsoever is scorched away from the piece. It has been turned into Sexual Perversity in Theatreland.

It doesn’t help your sense that Beckett’s original intentions have been left far behind when you learn that the actress playing A, Rebecca Pidgeon, is a) American – which helps to explain what is subtly wrong about her posh English accent – and b) is, um, married to David Mamet. Aha. People talk, these days, about crony capitalism. Maybe there’s such a thing as crony thespianism.

All of which is getting on for tragic because of the criminal under-use of one of the greatest English actors of all time, Sir John Gielgud, who stands out of vision for almost the entire piece.

Now, you can understand why they keep his figure peripheral for the scripted part of the play – it is in order to raise the tension and expectation so that when the Big Reveal comes it will be all the more dramatic. Reasonable idea.

And yet, when the Big Reveal does come, the moment which the entire interpretation of the piece as a political play hangs on, the notion that his final facial expression conveys the Protagonist’s revolt and defiance and cows and shames the audience which has acquiesced in his humiliation into embarrassed silence – well, Mamet muffs it big time and makes Gielgud look exactly like Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movies.

Instead of a look of defiance designed to shame the audience which has tamely acquiesced in his torment, Gielgud is made to look like a grinning goblin. It’s a travesty. A travesty of a mockery of a sham.

Mamet’s mangling of this subtle play is a good piece of evidence for the broader argument that Americans simply can’t understand European culture because they have never been invaded, overrun, defeated, cowed and crushing into submission, as almost the entire continent of Europe was from 1939 to 1945.

And then that, while half of Europe groaned under communist tyranny for decades after the Second World War, and their intellectuals agonised about communism and decolonisation, Americans were enjoying a bubblegum postwar boom, driving bigger and bigger cars, building bigger and bigger houses equipped with swimming pools and ever-more convenient domestic appliances, and ogling pneumatic pinup girls. Brainless consumerism.

So, in my opinion, Mamet completely misses what so many critics take to be the play’s central importance, namely the way the dominating Director functions as a symbol of the thoughtless, bullying authority which forms the basis of most repressive regimes.

But not only this, Mamet also completely omits the artistic subtlety of the piece – the Beckettian overtones, the weird, abstracted, formalised armature to be found in so many of Beckett’s plays, the oddities of language and phrasing (the way the Assistant says ‘I take a note’ and the Director keeps saying, ‘Come on. Say it’) the language oddly off kilter, which alert the viewer or reader that we are in a strange and unusual place, in Beckettland.

No, Mamet and Pinter conspire to make this piece all about cocky, swaggering masculinity, about a big swinging theatrical dick, so that the subtlety of language, the oddity of the action, and the ghosts of Europe’s history of oppression and struggle, are all utterly erased.

In the theatre

In several other reviews I’ve pointed out a basic fact of much of Beckett’s prose, which is that it can be seen as consisting of narrators who pose, position and direct other characters.

Take Ill Seen Ill Said which I’ve just reviewed. There is very little plot in the ordinary sense; what there is, is a narrator who is trying to arrange the disparate elements of the situation into some kind of order and, in doing so, he frequently stops to comment on his own efforts, wonders whether he should pose the old lady protagonist in this, that or the other position even, at one point, stops arranging the action altogether in order to wonder whether his approach is correct or valid.

In other words, in a lot of Beckett prose pieces the narrator behaves like a theatrical director, getting his characters to do things or say things over and over again, with multiple variations, as he struggles to achieve the desired effect (the desired effect often explicitly being described as ‘finishing’, completing the task, achieving the closure which, however, the texts forever hold out of reach of all concerned, both characters and author).

In this respect Catastrophe brings this situation up out of the shadows of the (often hard to read) prose pieces and makes it explicit.

1. It is one thing to read the play as a political allegory, with the Director as a heartless and ruthless brute treating people like objects to achieve a satisfying result, whether fascist, communist or any other way tyrannical…

2. But Catastrophe is obviously also a simple and straightforward account of what bastards theatrical directors can be, treating people like meat, forcing them to undergo humiliating actions, costumes and poses in order to achieve the desired effect.

3. And not very far behind that, is the even simpler interpretation, of what utter bastards writers can be – on the one hand, playing havoc with people in real life, exploiting their names and characters and lives and stories and mannerisms regardless of the consequences, in order to create the all-important ‘work of art’; and then subjecting their fictional characters to a vast array of humiliations, fiascos, tortures and death, in order to entertain and amuse their readers.

Writers of fiction like to tell themselves they are educating the nation and firing the imagination and liberating people’s minds and striking blows for freedom and justice and all the rest of the standard boilerplate. But when you compare this rhetoric with most of the works of fiction that are actually published in a year – the slushy romances, the thrillers and cop novels, and the vast number of fantasy, sword and sorcery novels in which endless legions are hacked, stabbed, burned and eviscerated to death, you realise what a weak and self-serving argument that is.

Being a writer of fiction is a profoundly morally compromised activity, and it is the way this realisation is one of the three or four layers of meaning packed into Catastrophe – much more than the supposed ‘political’ interpretation – which is what I take away from this incredibly short but amazingly dense and multi-levelled piece of drama.

Related link

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

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The Lost Ones by Samuel Beckett (1970)

So true it is that when in the cylinder what little is possible is not so it is merely no longer so and in the least less the all of nothing if this notion is maintained.

The last half dozen Beckett prose pieces I’ve read take their lead from his 1953 novel The Unnameable in being extreme close-up descriptions of individuals, either the figure crawling through the mud in How It Is or highly self-centred, solipsistic descriptions of trapped consciousnesses, in which sentences come apart at the seams and cluster or blocks of words are endlessly recirculated, in the case of Lessness using chance processes to order prefabricated sentences.

The Lost Ones is significantly different from its predecessors. For a start almost all the sentences make sense, albeit many are long-winded and with sometimes demanding word order. But they are not like the conglomerations of phrases joined together without any punctuation which you find in its half dozen predecessors, which demand a lot of interpretation or which you can relax for the effort of parsing and let create a kind of dynamic alternative to traditional prose, a kind of poetry of repetition in your mind.

The Lost Ones is more like a report, an anthropological study, of a particular environment and its inhabitants. It’s almost like a piece of science fiction, the kind of sci fi story which gives a detailed account of a new and bizarre alien society. It is definitely not a story: there are no characters, no events and no dialogue. But it is laid out in a logical structure and the sentences make sense.

The abode

The cylinder Beckett describes a cylinder fifty metres round and sixteen high, populated by about 200 human beings. The cylinder is all they have ever known. It is their life. He refers to the cylinder throughout as ‘the abode’. If you do the math you discover that each of these individuals is allotted ‘a little under one square metre’ of space.

One body per square metre of available surface.

This explains why ‘lying down is unheard of in the cylinder’.

The light The text (about 20 pages of a normal Word document, 8,240 words)  moves on to give precise description of the interior of the cylinder. One of the main features is that the permanent yellow light which suffuses it (from no identifiable source) grows dimmer and then brighter on a regular cycle. Long term exposure to these oscillations of light leads to blindness.

The temperature The oscillations of light are accompanied by changes in temperature from 25°C down to 5°C, occasionally as low as 1°C, the changes happening within four seconds! These drastic alterations have the effect of destroying the skin and drying up the mucus membranes, rendering sex (sex appears in most of Beckett’s texts, no matter how degraded) very uncomfortable, although some lost souls still fling themselves at it.

The walls are made of a rubber-like substance:

Floor and wall are of solid rubber or suchlike. Dash against them foot or fist or head and the sound is scarcely heard. Imagine then the silence of the steps.

The niches The next thing to note is the existence of 20 niches set in the walls:

cavities sunk in that part of the wall which lies above an imaginary line running midway between floor and ceiling.

The tunnels They are arranged in a cunning pattern of quincunxes (‘a geometric pattern consisting of five points arranged in a cross, with four of them forming a square or rectangle and a fifth at its center’, like the number 5 on a dice) but are undetectable from floor level. Some of the niches are connected by tunnels. There is one long unfinished tunnel which many have set off crawling along only to reach the blockage and have to shuffle backwards all the way back to the opening.

The ladders For those who want to find the niches, who are called searchers, there are fifteen ladders ranged along the cylinder walls. They vary in length but are all broken and missing some of their rungs. Some of the inhabitants not interested in ‘searching’ use them to hit each other or defend themselves.

The queues Those who want to mount the ladders have to queue because there are only fifteen ladders. Beckett goes into the rules of queueing for the ladders in great detail, but then he goes into great, obsessive detail about every aspect of the cylinder and its inhabitants.

This tendency to not be at all interested in character, psychology, plot or dialogue but to give obsessively precise descriptions of the physical aspect of a location and, above all, to give long and complete enumerations of every possible permutation of a particular physical activity (the classic example is the two pages devoted to describing all the different ways Molloy could transfer 16 stones from one pocket of his jacket to the other, giving each a good sucking on the way) is a core and central characteristic of Beckett’s prose. It’s odd that it is so overlooked, critics and commentators much preferring to focus on his schoolboy nihilism.

Categories of inhabitant This compulsion to categorise and enumerate comes into play when Beckett turns to describing the inhabitants of the cylinder, which include:

  • the searchers, keen to find a way out
  • the carriers (of ladders)
  • the climbers
  • the sedentary (‘if they never stir from the coign they have won it is because they have calculated their best chance is there and if they seldom or never ascend to the niches and tunnels it is because they have done so too often in vain or come there too often to grief.’)
  • the vanquished who, as the name suggests, have given up, who believe that ‘For in the cylinder alone are certitudes to be found and without nothing but mystery’ — the narrator estimates there are about 185 searchers which means about 15 vanquished
  • the watchers, who only sit and watch
  • the blind, their eyes worn out by the fluctuations in light

Wall space Because the ceaseless motion of the milling crowd would seriously interfere with the activity of the searchers moving ladders from one position to another up against the walls of the cylinder a convention has arisen to leave the yard or so closest to the walls free, creating a space for the searchers. In fact, Beckett quickly categorises the types of floor space available within ‘the abode’:

  1. First an outer belt roughly one metre wide reserved for the climbers and strange to say favoured by most of the sedentary and vanquished.
  2. Next a slightly narrower inner belt where those weary of searching in mid-cylinder slowly revolve in Indian file intent on the periphery.
  3. Finally the arena proper representing an area of one hundred and fifty square metres round numbers and chosen hunting ground of the majority.

Escape And why this endless effort to climb ladders, find niches and crawl along the tunnels? Because some of the inhabitants believe the tunnels are a way out, and will lead to a wider world:

From time immemorial rumour has it or better still the notion is abroad that there exists a way out.

Although here, as in everything else, things fall into sets or series although, in this case, only two:

  1. One school swears by a secret passage branching from one of the tunnels and leading in the words of the poet to nature’s sanctuaries.
  2. The other dreams of a trapdoor hidden in the hub of the ceiling giving access to a flue at the end of which the sun and other stars would still be shining.

These can be taken as allegories of religions, in the way you encounter strange religious sects in all manner of science fiction stories – one sect is seeking Nature, the other Heaven,

Law of ladders There’s quite a bit more detail about the laws and conventions governing the moving of the ladders, and the climbing of the ladders (only one at a time; if someone is coming down any ascender has to go back down to the floor to let them), the timing of the fluctuation of the lights and the temperatures, the behaviour and beliefs of the different types of inhabitant, but that’s the main gist.

True north A bizarre aspect of the abode is the way the first woman to give up all hope, and squat down, head down, naked, not caring any more about anything, has come to be taken by the others as a kind of lodestar, the only fixed point in the endless shuffling round the arena of all the other inhabitants.

There does none the less exist a north in the guise of one of the vanquished or better one of the women vanquished or better still the woman vanquished. She squats against the wall with her head between her knees and her legs in her arms. The left hand clasps the right shinbone and the right the left forearm. The red hair tarnished by the light hangs to the ground. It hides the face and whole front of the body down to the crutch. The left foot is crossed on the right. She is the north.

Hell

The abode is, of course, a version of hell, and Beckett brings out one or two hellish aspects, for example the way the inhabitants are filled with the horror of contact and yet are compelled all their lives by lack of space ‘to brush together without ceasing’.

Beckett also makes no bones about namechecking the chief imaginer of hell in the Western tradition, Dante. Dante also had a very mathematical, geometric, categorising kind of mind, clearly imagining the geography of the nine descending circles of hell and carefully categorising all the different types of sin, before imagining all manner of colourful punishments for them. You could say he co-ordinated the confused host of punishments his Christian predecessors had imagined for various sins into one huge and coherent system whose comprehensive structure combined with vivid poetic touches and a sympathetic insight into human nature in all its many manifestations has impressed everyone who’s read his great work, The Divine Comedy, for the past 700 years.

Maybe Beckett imagined himself doing something similar, he was certainly a lifelong devotee of Dante – except that the wonderful cohesiveness of medieval philosophy, medieval theology, medieval society and medieval culture had long since been lost and fragmented by the mid-20th century.

Maybe a modern approach to the same problem – a deeper analysis of the human condition which seeks to probe beneath the superficial details of character, plot and dialogue – can only be achieved via fragments, offcuts, shards and that explains Beckett’s approach.

Hence the shortness of Beckett’s later prose pieces, along with the sense that they are approaching the same thing over and over again, but each time from a slightly different angle. ‘Fail again fail better,’ as one of his t-shirt mottos has it.

So the cylinder of The Lost Ones may well be a vision of hell but there are no flames or demons and it is a weirdly modern, almost absurdist, hell – a hell of rubber walls, damaged ladders and tunnels which don’t lead anywhere.

Sentiment

Beckett clearly set out, in both his prose and plays, to reject bourgeois conventions of plot, psychology or character. Difficult to achieve in plays where the human actors generally require at least some kind of identification, even if they’re three mannekins in jars, as in Play, or three old ladies on a bench, as in Come and Go. Much easier to achieve in prose, which is one of the things which makes his run of prose works during the 1960s so interesting:

  • All Strange Away (1964)
  • Imagination Dead Imagine (1965)
  • How it Is (1964)
  • Enough (1965)
  • Ping (1966)
  • Lessness (1970)

But something that’s often overlooked by critics who focus on his fifth-form nihilism, is the way many of these texts include unexpectedly sentimental passages, especially at the end. He fights it, he resists it, but endings are difficult, just ending, point blank, somehow feels crude.

Thus it is that, rather than concluding The Lost Ones after he has exhaustively described the inside of the cylinder, Beckett provides a kind of coda, in which he imagines the behaviour of the very last survivor. Some time in the remote future all the other inhabitants will not exactly have died, but been worn down to immobility. Leaving just one (male) survivor) to totter over to the sitting woman who represents ‘north’.

There is nothing at first sight to distinguish him from the others dead still where they stand or sit in abandonment beyond recall… And sure enough there he stirs this last of all if a man and slowly draws himself up and some time later opens his burnt eyes. At the foot of the ladders propped against the wall with scant regard to harmony no climber waits his turn. The aged vanquished of the third zone has none about him now but others in his image motionless and bowed…

There he opens then his eyes this last of all if a man and some time later threads his way to that first among the vanquished so often taken for a guide. On his knees he parts the heavy hair and raises the unresisting head. Once devoured the face thus laid bare the eyes at a touch of the thumbs open without demur. In those calm wastes he lets his wander till they are the first to close and the head relinquished falls back into its place. He himself after a pause impossible to time finds at last his place and pose whereupon dark descends and at the same instant the temperature comes to rest not far from freezing point.

Hushed in the same breath the faint stridulence mentioned above whence suddenly such silence as to drown all the faint breathings put together. So much roughly speaking for the last state of the cylinder and of this little people of searchers one first of whom if a man in some unthinkable past for the first time bowed his head if this notion is maintained.

This final sentimental scene wasn’t at all necessary. It reminds me of the scene at the end of The Time Traveller where the protagonist stings our imaginations by describing the final, expiring days of the dead earth; or any other science fiction story which portrays the last survivor of some tribe or group (‘this little people of searchers’) that the reader has become attached to, and so tugs a bit at our heartstrings. This sentimental coda is strangely at odds with the clinical reportage of so much else of the text.

Notes from The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett

  • Beckett wrote the original work in French with the title Le Dépeupleur then translated it himself.
  • The Lost Ones is Beckett’s longest later prose work.
  • He began it in 1965 and worked on it intermittently till publication in 1970.
  • The final paragraph which, as I point out, brings out a plangent, sentimental mood, was written separately from most of the text, just before publication.
  • This ‘softening’ is also detectable in the change from the French to the English title. The French title means ‘The Depopulator’ which suggests Death and that the entire work is a sort of allegory of being dead. Whereas the English title, ‘The Lost Ones’, is much softer, more romantic, echoes the sentimental name of ‘the lost boys’ in Peter Pan. I doubt if Beckett consciously intended this, but I think it is there in the finished work.
  • The cylinder has 205 inhabitants: 120 climbers, 60 remaining on the floor looking for their loved ones; 20 sedentary searchers; five vanquished, chief among them the woman known as The North.

What are we to make of The Lost Ones?

I don’t think you need to think about it too much. I’ve read hundreds of science fiction and other types of tales which give you the exact dimensions of a spaceship or room, give a detailed description of its contents, which is all preparation for moving onto the human action. Phrasing it like that makes you realise that a lot of these Beckett prose works amount to an obsessively detailed description of the mise en scène and then… a kind of walking away before what you could call the human or humanistic element begins.

That said, The Lost Ones differs significantly from his other prose works of the period because it is so readable. The sentences work, and contain the familiar elements of subject, verb and object. The following passage is typical of many and extraordinarily accessible for Beckett:

The ladders. These are the only objects. They are single without exception and vary greatly in size. The shortest measure not less than six metres. Some are fitted with a sliding extension.

What does it all mean? Well, the reference to Dante is an unmistakable nod to the notion of hell and the afterlife, but pretty much all the other details militate anything like a conventional idea of hell. And I don’t think there are any (and the Beckett Companion doesn’t mention any) riffs or references to any other traditional aspects of hell or Christian theology.

No, it feels more like a standalone imagining which we, the readers, can situate anywhere we want to. It reminds me a bit of Arthur C. Clarke’s brilliant science fiction novel, Rendezvous With Rama, which is about a mysterious hollow cylinder full of strange artefacts. And the constantly circulating crowd jostling against each other remind me of two of J.G. Ballard’s short stories about an overpopulated world, Billennium (1962) and The Concentration City (1957). And the last man standing who staggers over to the barely alive last woman remind me of countless ‘last survivor’ stories.

For these reasons, although The Lost Ones is weird, it is at least readable, and that alone makes it quite a bit less weird than most of the other prose works Beckett was writing at the time.

Related link

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

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Selected Poems by John Dryden edited by Donald Thomas (1993)

John Dryden was the most successful poet, playwright, critic, translator and man of letters of his time, that time being roughly the late-1660s through to his death in 1700.

Early life

Dryden was born into a Puritan family in Northamptonshire in 1631. He was sent to the prestigious Westminster private school in 1645, the year Charles I’s army was defeated at the Battle of Naseby. In 1649 Charles I was executed in front of the Banqueting House in Whitehall, just a few hundred yards from Dryden’s classroom. Dryden went up to Cambridge in 1650 and four years later returned to London to work as clerk to his cousin, Sir Gilbert Pickering, who was Cromwell’s Lord Chamberlain. When Lord Protector Cromwell died in 1658, Dryden wrote a set of Heroic Stanzas in praise of him, but when Charles II was restored to the throne eighteen months later, Dryden wrote a poem celebrating this event too – Astraea Redux.

To modern eyes this abrupt switching of allegiances might look like hypocrisy, but the editor of this selection of Dryden’s poetry makes two points:

  1. Dryden was merely following the mood of the entire nation which switched, with surprising speed and conviction, in favour of the restoration of Charles II.
  2. Stepping back from the politics, what these two early examples of his work show is Dryden’s natural predilection to be a poet of politics and political power.

Marriage and public poetry

In the mid-1660s Dryden made a fashionable marriage to Lady Elizabeth Howard but he was not making money. He decided to make a conscious career decision to commit himself to ‘the poetry of public life and political argument’, to writing poems on public occasions and poems about political life. The first great example was Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders 1666, 1,200 lines of verse divided into 304 quatrains.

Three points.

1. The obvious one is that the poem deals with major public events – in the first half some of the sea battles which were part of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665 – 1667), in the second half the Great Fire of London. It isn’t love poetry or elegiacs or pastoral poetry.

2. Second, Dryden rewrote history to cast Charles as the hero of the age. The poem emphasises Charles’s wisdom and strategic prowess during the war, and his heroism during the fire, and how his prayer to God for help was answered. Dryden was a conservative: he believed in hierarchy and the monarch and law and order. All his poetry supports the existing order against the constant threat of factions and politicking which, he feared, would lead to anarchy and civil war. Annus Mirabilis earned Dryden his reward. In 1668 he was made Poet Laureate with an annual salary of £200 and a barrel of sack, and two years later was appointed Historiographer Royal (although he continued to be for many years, relatively hard up). Here’s Dryden sucking up to Charles:

This saw our King; and long within his breast
His pensive counsels ballanc’d too and fro;
He griev’d the Land he freed should be oppress’d,
And he less for it than Usurpers do.

His gen’rous mind the fair Ideas drew
Of Fame and Honor, which in dangers lay;
Where wealth, like Fruit on precipices, grew,
Not to be gather’d but by Birds of prey…

He, first, survey’d the Charge with careful eyes,
Which none but mighty Monarchs could maintain…

His pensive counsels, his grieving for his country (abused by the Dutch), his generous mind, ready to pluck fame and honour from their dangerous precipice, his ‘careful’ eyes (careful in the modern sense but also full of care and responsibility), trademark of a mighty monarch… and so on. Top brown-nosing, Dryden deserved his £200 a year.

3. Thirdly, Annus Mirabilis wasn’t an original work – it was a polemical riposte or reply to an earlier work by someone else. It was part of a literary dialogue. In 1661 a seditious pamphlet titled Mirabilis Annus: The Year of Prodigies had predicted God’s vengeance on a nation which tolerated a sinful king and a wicked government, and was followed by other pamphlets using the same title. Dryden’s poem is a deliberate and polemical response. It isn’t a Wordsworthian inspiration from within the poet’s mind. It is arguing a case about the nature of Charles’s rule and society in the 1660s.

This is what becoming a ‘poet of political argument’ meant – that his works more often than not actively engaged in public debates and controversies, often as direct replies to previous publications by other writers with contrary views.

Drama

But public poetry wasn’t the only string to Dryden’s bow. In 1663 he published his first play, The Wild Gallant, and for the next 20 years produced a stream of comedies (Marriage-a-la-Mode) and heroic tragedies (All For Love, The Conquest of Granada). Some of these were original works but, rather as with the political poems, it’s notable how many weren’t. All For Love is based on Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and The State of Innocence is a dramatised version of Paradise Lost. These are pretty obvious large-scale copyings, but Dryden was also to be criticised throughout his career for plagiarising lines and entire passages from other poets.

This volume includes some of the many prologues and epilogues he wrote to his plays, as well as poems addressed to specific actors and fellow playwrights such as George Etherege and William Congreve.

Satire: Absalom and Achitophel

Writing plays under the Restoration required a thick skin since new works were savaged by scores of wits and self-appointed critics. The plays themselves often contained scabrous satire about the values of the times and sometimes lampooned specific individuals. To write and publish almost anything involved exposing yourself to extremes of ridicule and abuse.

So that by the time the Popish Plot (1678) had evolved into the Exclusion Crisis (in which leading Whig politicians three times tried to pass an Act of Parliament excluding Charles II’s Catholic brother, the future James II, from the succession) Dryden had developed a thick skin and a razor-sharp pen. And he used it, as the king’s Poet Laureate, to savage and ridicule the king’s Whig enemies. The result was his masterpiece, Absalom and Achitophel.

In the Bible (the second book of Samuel, chapters xiv to xviii) handsome young Absalom is encouraged by the sinister old politician Achitophel to rebel against his father, King David. In Dryden’s work scheming old Achitophel is a portrait of the Earl of Shaftesbury, who had emerged as leader of the radical Whigs and led the three attempts to exclude James II from the succession. Absalom stands for King Charles’s illegitimate son, James Duke of Monmouthshire, charming but gullible, who was egged on by the canny Shaftesbury to position himself as the rightful, Protestant heir to the throne. Various other key political figures appear under Biblical names and the poem leads up to a grand speech by King David from the throne which echoes Charles’s final speech to his recalcitrant Parliament before he dissolved it for good in 1681.

Horace versus Juvenal

When it came to satire, Thomas makes the point that Dryden, like many others, drew a distinction between the satires of Horace – which were designed to laugh men out of their follies – and those of Juvenal, which expressed what he called his saeva indignatio, his fierce contempt for the vices of his time.

Horace is often amiable and funny; Juvenal is rarely funny, instead his satire is full of wit and attack. Absalom and Achitophel is a Juvenalian satire. It is grounded in the grim and bitter reality of the political struggles of the Exclusion Crisis and aims to give insightful, psychologically perceptive and devastating criticisms of its key characters. It is not intended to be funny. But Dryden was just as capable of a completely different style of satire, the laughable and ludicrous.

The mock heroic: Mac Flecknoe

As 17th century literary critics discovered and popularised classical ideas about poetry, so the notion spread that the highest achievement a poet could aspire to was to write a great Epic Poem, in the lineage of Homer and Virgil. Dryden was no exception:

A Heroic Poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest Work which the Soul of Man is capable to perform.

He nurtured ambitions to write some kind of national epic tracing the history of Britain and dedicated to his hero Charles II as Virgil had dedicated the Aeneid to the Emperor Augustus. But it was not to be. His long-meditated epic was never written. Instead Dryden ended up helping to develop the anti-epic, written in the so-called mock heroic style. This consisted in applying all the trappings of the epic poem – lofty diction, elaborate similes, mythological trappings, men mighty as gods – to subjects which were low and pathetic, in order to create a comic disjuntion, to create burlesque and travesty.

Dryden’s early poem, Annus Mirabilis, had already used many of the exaggerated trappings of heroic poetry, notably the extended epic simile and the direct involvement of heavenly powers (or gods or angels).

Heavenly powers

To see this Fleet upon the Ocean move,
Angels drew wide the Curtains of the Skies:
And Heav’n, as if there wanted Lights above,
For Tapers made two glaring Comets rise.

Extended epic simile

So Lybian Huntsmen on some Sandy plain,
From shady coverts rouz’d, the Lion chace:
The Kingly beast roars out with loud disdain,
And slowly moves, unknowing to give place.

But if some one approach to dare his Force,
He swings his Tail, and swiftly turns him round:
With one Paw seizes on his trembling Horse,
And with the other tears him to the ground.

So far, so epic but, as Thomas explains, the mock epic, like the epic itself, needs to address one central theme – and Annus Mirabilis is more bitty, more of a series of episodes or incidents strung together, impressively so, but it is a scattered work.

It’s this idea of uniting everything in one central theme which is what makes MacFlecknoe Dryden’s masterpiece of the mock-heroic. Basically, it is a hilarious 217-line demolition of one of Dryden’s rivals in the theatre, the poet Thomas Shadwell, renowned for being dull and unimaginative, who is transmuted via Dryden’s mock-heroic style into a monstrous burlesque figure.

The aim of the mock-heroic is to attribute to a trivial person or subject such ludicrously over-inflated actions and qualities as to make them appear ridiculous. Thus the poem describes the not-very-successful poet Thomas Shadwell in superhuman terms and attributes to him a royal progress and coronation, garlanded with biblical and imperial comparisons. But his ‘throne’ is set up among the brothels of Barbican and instead of the royal orb he holds a Mighty Mug of Ale in his hand, and every other ‘epic’ detail of the poem is carefully undermined and burlesqued.

The name Mac Flecknoe derives from the comic notion that Shadwell is the son (‘mac’ in Gaelic) of Richard Flecknoe, an even more obscure poet, who appears in the poem declaiming a grand abdication speech before comically disappearing down through a trapdoor, leaving Shadwell the undisputed ruler of the land of Nonsense. It is all blown up to enormous proportions in order to be mocked and ridiculed.

Dryden was extremely proud of Mac Flecknoe because it was, at that point, the most complete and finished example of its kind in English. Relatively brief though it is, it was to form a template or inspiration for the mock epics of a later generation, most notably Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1712) and then his enormous satire on the literary world, The Dunciad (1728).

Poetry of religion 1. Religio Laici

Dryden published two major poems about religion.

Religio Laici or a Layman’s Faith (1682) consists of 456 lines of rhymed couplets arguing against the fashionable Deism of the time and defending the Church of England against Roman Catholicism. It is characteristic of Dryden, as we’ve seen, that many of his works are responses to previous publications and Religio Laici is a good example. An English translation had recently appeared of a theological book by a Frenchman, Father Richard Simon, A Critical History of the Old Testament which laid out the many ways in which the text of the Old Testament is compromised and imperfect. In the Catholic Father’s view, Protestantism relied too heavily on the (highly imperfect) text of the Bible; it was wiser for Christians to base their faith on the unbroken traditions of the (Catholic) church as an institution.

Dryden’s poem directly addresses Father Simon’s ideas and points out that, if the Biblical text can err, so can tradition. Both need to be supplemented or informed by God’s revelation. In this, Dryden was defending the Anglican media via between the extreme reliance on the Bible of the Puritans and deference to a tradition cluttered with saints and absurd legends which characterised Catholicism.

Several things strike me about Religio Laici. For a start it is preceded by an enormous preface which is longer (4,317 words) then the poem itself (3,573 words). And this brings out just how disputatious a poet Dryden was. Even after he has cast his elaborate series of arguments into verse, he cannot stop, but has to repeat or anticipate them in a long prose preface.

Having just struggled through the poem twice, with the help of notes, I think I’ve understood most of its meaning. But when I studied English at university it was a standard strategy to read any text on at least two levels – on one level for the overt sense or meaning; but at the same time, alert for key words, themes or ideas which recur and work on the reader at a less logical level, by virtue of their repetition.

So the third or fourth time I read the word ‘safe’, I began to realise that although Religio Laici consists of a series of theological points, at a deeper level it works on a polarity between the twin extremes of safety and danger. To put it more clearly, Religio Laici doesn’t come from an era when a person could speculate about religion and God and the Bible in calm and comfort. On the contrary, Puritan views had, in living memory, contributed to a catastrophic civil war which had led to the execution of the king, the overthrow of traditional institutions and a military-religious dictatorship. And, more recently, scare rumours about a Catholic plot to murder the king and seize control of the state had led to a mood of hysterical witch-hunting. So speculation about religious belief in Dryden’s time was fraught with danger.

Seen against this background, Dryden’s use of the word ‘safe’ points to the fundamental message of the poem which is that all speculations on this subject should remain private, personal and moderate, in order to preserve the peace of the realm. He espouses moderation in belief and behaviour because he and his generation are acutely aware what lack of moderation leads to.

And after hearing what our Church can say,
If still our Reason runs another way,
That private Reason ’tis more Just to curb,
Than by Disputes the publick Peace disturb.
For points obscure are of small use to learn:
But Common quiet is Mankind’s concern.

Poetry of religion 2. The Hind and The Panther

However, just five years later Dryden published The Hind and the Panther, A Poem in Three Parts (1687) a much longer and more complex poem. At 2,600 lines it is much the longest of Dryden’s original poems (i.e. excluding the long translations he made at the end of his life) and it comes as quite a surprise because he now rejects the theological position of the earlier poem and wholeheartedly embraces Roman Catholicism.

Dryden converted to Roman Catholicism in 1687, a couple of years into the reign of the openly Roman Catholic king James II in 1685, much to the disgust and mockery of his many enemies. The Hind and the Panther is divided into three distinct parts and derives its title from part one, which presents an extended allegory or animal fable in which the different religious denominations in the England of the day appear as animals, namely Roman Catholic as ‘A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged’, the Church of England as a panther, the Independents as a bear, the Presbyterians as a wolf, the Quakers as a hare, the Socinians as a fox, the Freethinkers as an ape, and the Anabaptists as a boar.

Critics from Dryden’s day to our own praise the skilful use of verse, vocabulary and imagery, but lament the fact that the animal fable was a poor way to convey complex theological arguments and positions, which would have been much more effective if plainly stated. Dr Johnson commented that it was a good poem despite its subject matter.

Translator

Unfortunately for Dryden, his new patron, the Roman Catholic King James II, only lasted three years on the throne before being booted out by the so-called Glorious Revolution. He was replaced by William III who was not just a Protestant but a Calvinist, a humourless man ruthlessly focused on the essentials of international power politics, and completely indifferent to art, culture, plays or poems. All officials in William’s new court were required to take oaths of allegiance including clauses pledging allegiance to the Church of England. As a newly devout Catholic Dryden couldn’t do this and so he was sacked as Poet Laureate and, in one of the supreme ironies of literary history, replaced by the man he had expended such labour ridiculing in Mac Flecknoe, Thomas Shadwell.

Deprived of all public offices Dryden now had to live by his pen and – after the public poems of the 1660s and 70s, his many plays, the satires of the Exclusion Crisis and the poetry of religious debate, in his final decade Dryden turned to a new area of activity – literary translation.

In 1693 he published translations of the satires of Juvenal and Persius which he prefaced with a Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire. In 1697 his translation of the works of Virgil, including a complete translation of the Aeneid, was published by subscription and brought him the notable sum of £1,400. And in 1700 he published Fables Ancient and Modern which included translations into contemporary English of tales from Chaucer, Ovid and Boccaccio.

Heroic couplets

In Thomas’s account, the 1610s and 20s produced poets who liked far-fetched comparisons and irregular verse forms, such as John Donne (died in 1631) or George Herbert (d.1633). Later generations dubbed them the ‘metaphysical poets’ (the expression was first used by Dr Johnson in 1780 but in fact Dryden himself had already referred, in an essay, to Donne’s ‘metaphysicals’). The Caroline poets of Charles I’s court similarly wrote lyrics and other forms in sometimes complex metres and forms, although with markedly less convoluted similes and metaphors.

But the future lay with neither of these groups but with the much more open, smooth and regular form of the rhyming couplet. The medium of two rhyming iambic pentameters had long ago been used by Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales.

Bifel that, in that seson on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At night was come in-to that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a companye,
Of sondry folk, by aventure y-falle
In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde;
(Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, lines 19 to 26)

and couplets were a familiar device in Elizabethan theatre to bring a speech in unrhymed verse up to a kind of boom-boom conclusion.

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
(Claudius in Hamlet, Act 3, scene 3)

Many of Robert Herrick’s short poems from the 1630s are in rhyming couplets, and so on. But the use of nothing but rhyming couplets over extended texts was revived in the mid-17th century by poets like Edmund Waller (1606 to 1687) and Sir John Denham (1615 to 1669). Denham is remembered for his bucolic poem, Cooper’s Hill with its lulling melliflousness. These are its best-known lines, two out of a long series of smoothly rhyming couplets:

O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without o’er-flowing, full.

Relaxing, isn’t it? Dryden’s achievement was to take the rhyming couplet, use it for extended poems, and hugely expand its potential, turning it into a versatile medium for panegyric, satire, political argument, theological debate or straightforward narrative. In the right hands these couplets have all sorts of potential. Individual lines can be used to make sharp distinctions or antitheses:

They got a Villain, and we lost a Fool.

Or in this description of the Duke of Buckingham, who would do anything for amusement.

Beggar’d by fools, whom still he found too late:
He had his jest, and they had his estate.

The couplet lends itself to expressing maxims or pearls of wisdom, the end-rhyme of the second line giving it a kind of proverbial or didactic power:

What cannot praise effect in mighty minds,
When flattery soothes, and when ambition blinds!

But the obvious risk with the rhyming couplet is that each set of paired lines becomes a unit in itself, the temptation being to provide a boom-boom payoff at the end of every second line, so that each couplet ends up standing alone, and reading them becomes like having hiccups – every ten seconds another clever rhyme, so that an extended poem comes to feel like a sequence of same-shaped bricks, and that this becomes wearing and tedious over the long haul.

But Thomas demonstrates how Dryden expanded the form’s potential by breaking through this barrier, to create units of meaning across multiple lines, letting the logic of his thought overflow the potential boundaries of the couplet to create what are, in effect, fluid verse paragraphs. These are particularly suitable to argufying and putting a point of view:

What shall we think! Can people give away
Both for themselves and sons, their native sway?
Then they are left defenceless to the sword
Of each unbounded arbitrary lord:
And laws are vain, by which we right enjoy,
If kings unquestion’d can those laws destroy.

They’re still rhyming couplets but the thought, the argument flows through them, so that it no longer feels like a series of stops and starts. Moreover, the way the logic of the argument flows over the cat’s eyes or bumps of each couplet’s end-rhyme creates a complex mental pleasure – the reader processes the cleverness of the rhyme but doesn’t stop at it because the flow of the argument carries you forward. There’s a kind of counterpointing, or two rhythms going on at the same time, which is not unlike musical counterpoint.

Related reviews

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History

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Restoration drama

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Posted by Simon on September 9, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/09/09/john-dryden-selected-poems-donald-thomas/

The Aerodrome by Rex Warner (1941)

What a record of confusion, deception, rankling hatred, low aims, indecision!
(The Air Vice-Marshall nicely summing up this absurd novel, page 200)

There’s a genre of books about English village life, set in the 1920s and 30s, which are so normal, so provincial, so banal, and yet so utterly removed from the world we live in now, 80 years later, that an air of surrealism hovers over them, a gentle sense of unreality.

American tourists fresh from the excitement of Pamplona, the glory that was Greece or the grandeur that was Rome etc, were often nonplussed to arrive in 1930s England and find themselves invited to village fetes and vicarage tea parties, all emotions so repressed, everything so hemmed in by good taste, the scones and cream arranged just so, that foreign visitors felt something weird and lurid must be hidden just below the surface.

This feeling, that everyone’s frightfully good manners are too good to be true, is one appeal of the very English detective novels of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, where the primmest of country house parties all turn out to conceal vipers’ nests of infidelity and jealousy.

Rex Warner’s third novel, The Aerodrome, takes this kind of vicarage tea party mode, a fussy English concern for napkins and cucumber sandwiches (the central figure is in fact a village Rector’s son) and then transmutes it into an increasingly weird and clunky allegory.

Rex Warner

Warner was a typical product of the Auden generation. Born in 1905 to a clergyman father, he went to a jolly good boarding school where he was jolly good at games, and then onto Oxford, where he associated with W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis and Stephen Spender, and published in the chummy university magazine, Oxford Poetry.

He was also typical of that generation in that:

  1. he picked up at post-war Oxford a radical attachment to revolutionary communism (this was the generation of the Cambridge spies e.g. Anthony Blunt, expensively educated at Marlborough, Cambridge then became a spy for Stalin)
  2. he went on to become a teacher and writer

The Aerodrome was Warner’s third novel. The first, The Wild Goose Chase (1937) is a fantasy in which three brothers, representing different personality types, are on holiday when they come across a wild goose and chase it into a fantasy land ruled by a right-wing dictator. The second, The Professor (1938), is the story of a liberal academic whose struggles against a repressive government eventually lead to his arrest, imprisonment and murder.

The Aerodrome continues this combination of fantasy and strong political message. It’s the story of a fairly innocent and naive young man, Roy, brought up in a village vicarage by the dear old Rector and his lovely wife, all of them friendly with the kindly old Squire and his lovely sister.

Roy is partial to a few beers and games of darts with the lads at the village pub, and is having a heady first-love affair with the publican’s willing daughter, Bess. But he also finds himself drawn to the slick, drawling, manly air force officers from the nearby Aerodrome.

For just outside the village, with its sweet old Manor house and characterful old pub and dawdling river, is a big new Aerodrome, staffed by brisk, efficient, no-nonsense men of action, the dynamic hi-tech forces of the 20th century looming over the almost feudal life of ye olde village.

Should Roy choose the earthy life of the village i.e. getting drunk with Mac and Fred, and (literally) rolling in the hay with bosomy Bess? Or acquiesce in the growing power of the Aerodrome and its brisk no-nonsense leader, the Air Vice-Marshal, and a love affair with the highly-sexed wife of one of its top officials?

However, what this quick summary fails to capture is the weirdness of the actual plot and the difficulty of penetrating Warner’s clunky, thunking prose style.

It’s not exactly rubbish, but I can see why The Aerodrome is long forgotten (it has no Wikipedia page, you can’t find the text anywhere online). And difficult to understand how the noted short story writer V. S. Pritchett called Warner ‘the only outstanding novelist of ideas whom the decade of ideas produced’, let alone why Anthony Burgess considered it as much of a modern classic as Nineteen Eighty-Four!

The plot

1. The Dinner Party

The story opens in media res with our hero drunk lying face down in a wet mire in Gurney’s Field, enjoying the sensation of the watery black mud seeping in at the collar and between the buttons of his formal dinner shirt. We learn his name is Roy. He is the son of the village Rector. It is his twenty-first birthday.

2. The Confession

Earlier that evening Roy’s parents had held a little birthday dinner party for him, the guests consisting of the Rector and his kindly wife, the elderly Squire and his lovely sister, and a Flight-Lieutenant from the nearby Aerodrome.

To Roy’s horror his ‘father’, the Rector, makes a speech in which he reveals that he and his wife are not Roy’s parents, but that baby Roy was brought to them by someone from the local village and they arranged to take him as their own. Now they’re revealing the truth. In front of a table of strangers.

Disgusted, the Flight-Lieutenant gets up and leaves, Roy follows him, and ends up going to local village pub where he proceeds to get hog-whimpering drunk, staggers out the pub and across country with two drinking buddies – which is when he trips over a wire fence and finds himself face down in the mud – which is where the book opened.

On reflection I can see how this episode is meant to convey, as literally as can be, the earthiness of village life, its drunken peasant quality.

Anyway, Roy sobers up a bit and staggers back to the vicarage. He slips through the only unlocked window into the house, and finds himself in the study and is still in the curtained window alcove when he realises the Rector is kneeling in prayer and (like Hamlet’s father) confessing his sins. Astonishingly, he reveals that his wife was once in love with his best friend, Antony – he caught them in embraces a couple of times – and so the vicar-father conceived a wicked plan to go mountain climbing with Antony, to get to a particularly tricky cliff and there to yank Antony off the ledge and, as he dangled helplessly from the safety rope, to slowly cut through the rope so that Antony plunged to his death.

This whole scene would be pretty unrealistic in itself, but as Roy peeps through the curtains drawn across ‘his’ window he sees the Rector’s wife peeping from the curtains of the neighbouring window alcove. She spots him and winks. On her usually placid face is a shocking expression of malice and contempt.

As the Rector-father concludes his long piece of exposition, she slips over to the door and makes a fuss of opening it as if coming into the room, the Rector snaps out of his prayerful trance and welcomes her presence, she puts on a simpering vicar’s wife expression and Roy, watching all this from the crack in the curtains, is left absolutely flummoxed.

Within the space of one short evening he has discovered that his ‘parents’ are not his parents, that his supposedly saintly ‘father’ is in fact a cold-hearted murderer and his lovely ‘mother’ had a passionate affair!

But not half so flummoxed as the reader. Is this clever allegory, deliberately absurd Joe Orton-style satire, or tripe?

3. The Agricultural Show

Events follow each other in quick succession, with a sense of mounting hysteria, or plain weirdness. Roy, his ‘parents’ and the Squire’s sister meet up next morning to motor out to the annual Agricultural Show. So far, so Archers. They bump into the Flight-Lieutenant who is breezily apologetic for leaving the little birthday party the night before, then, on a whim, jumps onto the back of the show’s prize bull (Slazenger), cutting through the nearby fabric of the marquee tent they’re in, and riding the mooing protesting massive bull through the gap in the tent and out into the astonished and screaming crowds. What?

4. The Accident

They come to the Beer Tent where Roy discovers his drinking buddies from the night before, Mac and Fred. Strange scenes: a retired grocer with a red face and white hair staggers to his feet and makes a long speech to his dead mother to forgive him his wicked life. In another corner is a rat-catcher who, for a pint, takes live rats out of his teeming pockets and bites their heads off. A quarrel turns into a fight and the village bell-ringer, George Birkett, is smashed in the face with a broken beer glass by a short man who then darts out the tent, allegedly some member of staff from the Aerodrome (p.44).

This isn’t a normal Agricultural Show. It is more like something out of Breughel, or maybe Hieronymus Bosch.

It’s time for Roy’s date with Bess, they agreed to meet at noon, he finds her, they swagger arm in arm through the show, to her adulation he has a go at the coconut shy and being a big touch chap knocks all the coconuts off their shies.

They come across the Flight-Lieutenant now ensconced in a display area of his own, demonstrating the working of various machine guns to entranced little boys, and onlookers. He sees them and shouts over that the bull was recaptured and is perfectly fine, then gets on with his demonstration.

Roy and Bess wander beyond the bounds of the show itself across farmland to a remote barn and here have what was presumably as much sex as the censors of a 1940s novel would allow i.e. it’s written obscurely and elliptically, but clothes are unbuttoned and some kind of sexual experience is had (though nothing is ‘satisfactorily achieved’) which leaves Roy dazed (p.47).

They are just adjusting their clothes when the Flight-Lieutenant comes running over the field towards them and announces in his foppish, bantering style, that there’s been an accident. ‘I’m afraid I’ve potted your old man’. The F-L thought he’d loaded one of his machine guns with blanks, but they were real bullets, the Rector was among the crowd, and when he fired, the gun fired a ream of real bullets into the Rector who fell over like a nine-pin. It is specifically pointed out that the bullets didn’t just hit him, they ripped off his face. The corpse is unidentifiable. The Flight-Lieutenant is absurdly formal about his apologies. Frightfully sorry, old boy. ‘It was a really bad show.’ (p.48).

5. The Squire

Everyone takes this tragedy in their stride. The narrator isn’t that upset. The body lies in a coffin at the Rectory for a few days. Roy goes to the Manor to visit the Squire. He finds the old man at the end of a visit from an airman from the Aerodrome. The smartly dressed man salutes and leaves. The old Squire tells Roy the devastating news that the Aerodrome is going to take over the village, all its land, lock stock and barrel, converting the pub, all the houses, even the church, to air force purposes (p.55).

This prompts him to a soliloquy in which he reflects that his whole life has been for nothing, all the little kindnesses, running the boys club, helping expectant mothers, it’s all come to this. To be kicked out of his own home in his 70s. And his sister, Florence, has devoted her life to him, but he knows she’s never been happy. At least not except for one short period and he, the Squire, did what he could to crush even that (p.56). Roy listens politely and embarrassed.

6. The Funeral

The Rector’s funeral is held at the local church. First the Air Vice-Marshall appears at the Rectory. He is immensely blunt and to the point, polite as a robot, unbending. Roy can feel himself attracted to the man’s steely efficiency (the ‘power and confidence of the man’, p.62) and we get the impression both the womenfolk – the Rector’s wife and the Squire’s sister, Florence – moisten at the lips.

To people’s surprise, the ceremony is led by the Air Vice-Marshall. The address he gives is blunt to the point of rudeness. In fact he hardly lauds the dead man, instead using the opportunity to announce to the startled villagers that the entire village is going to be taken over by the Air Force, who will instal a new padre, take over as employees of all the adults, maintaining their pay, as long as the work is done conscientiously. An old boy rises to his feet to protest but the Air Vice-Marshall asks for him to be removed and two smartly-dressed airmen are immediately at the man’s sides, taking his arms and hustling him out of the church (p.67). After this stunning announcement the Air Vice-Marshall steps down from the pulpit and the rest of the service follows in the traditional style.

7. New Plans

Afterwards in the pub, what I suppose Warner intends us to think of as the common people, the chavs, the villagers, swig their ale and complain about the news: ‘The old Rector was a good man, he wouldn’t have allowed no takeover of the village’ etc.

When the pub closes, Roy has another date with Bess, she comes out the pub to join him, link arms and go for a country walk. She, like the Rector’s wife and the Squire’s sister, is impressed by the Air Vice-Marshall (just twenty years later Sylvia Plath would write: ‘Every woman adores a fascist.’). Bess begs and insists that Roy join the air force, and they get married and he will be an airman and she will be an airmans wife, oh won’t it be marvellous.

As so often happens, the Flight-Lieutenant strolls along at just that moment, the opportune moment, like an angel or allegorical figure, like Hermes or Puck.

He sits down by them in the shade of a hedgerow and Bess enthusiastically tells him that Roy is going to join the air force and they’re going to be married. At which the Flight-Lieutenant rather surreally explains that, when the air force take over the village, he is going to be made padre and so he sort of has the legal right to marry them right now if they want. ‘Tomorrow’, says the excited Bess. And Roy walks her back to the pub and hands her over to her publican father, both of them dizzied by the prospect of getting married.

8. The Impulse

En route back to the Rectory, Roy bumps into the Squire’s butler, flustered and without his customary bowler hat, who tells him the Squire has taken to bed and is very sick. Returning to the Rectory, Roy finds the Air Vice-Marshall has arranged to stay overnight and overhears a conversation in which he tells the Rector’s wife:

‘I was merely observing that those who have been my enemies tend to die out, usually as a result of their own weakness or incompetence, while I survive them.’ (page 81)

Roy formally enters, the adults suspend their conversation, the Rector’s wife also tells him about the Squire who’s been calling for Roy. Cut to a few hours later and Roy is in the Squire’s bedroom, curtains drawn, night-time, fire burning, the old man is in bed, unconscious, barely breathing. Suddenly he stirs and utters the words: ‘Your father’ before relapsing exhausted. A few moments later, with great effort, he says: ‘Florence’.

Now, having been alerted to the unlikely sexual shenanigans concerning the Rector and his wife right at the start of the novel, I immediately began to suspect there was more to Roy’s parentage than meets the eye. The precise story, as told by the Rector at the opening birthday party, was that the baby was found in a basket by the road at the top of the village, and the wife of the village publican brought the babe in a basket to the Rector who adopted it (p.19).

Well, the abandoned baby with a fateful parentage is as old as writing, appearing in Jewish (Moses) and Greek (Oedipus) mythology, and hundreds of novels as a cheap plot (Tom Jones, Oliver Twist). What if Roy is the Squire’s sister’s son? What if she had an affair with the wicked Rector? Alternatively, who was it ‘discovered’ and brought the babe in a basket to the Rector’s? The landlord’s wife. What if Roy is her child? In which case his affair with Betty would be incest.

Anyway, Roy has taken the old man’s hand as he tries to say something dreadfully important, but at that moment the Squire’s sister, Florence comes in and starts to gently stroke the old man’s face when, to everyone’s astonishment, the old man’s legs shoot out, his grip tightens on Roy’s hand, and he bites deep into his sister’s hand!. She shrieks and the old man only bites harder at which the sister’s face completely transforms and she starts beating him round the face, smack smack smack. Too astonished to move, Roy watches the old man’s jaws slacken, the sister whip away her bleeding hand, and they both hear his death rattle. The old Squire is dead (p.85).

Roy sees it is his duty to comfort the Squire’s sister, although at the same time repelled by her actions. Then out into the hall where the Squire’s servants are all gathered, muttering about the news, and so home to the Rectory where he finds the Air Vice-Marshall, brisk and businesslike, fastening his gloves before getting into his chauffeur-driven car and motoring away.

9. The Honeymoon

Cut to a few weeks later. The Flight-Lieutenant, true to his word, has ‘married’ Roy and Bess. Not only that but he and a couple of air force buddies have fitted them up a sort of quarters in a corrugated iron shed at the bottom of airfield property. Over the days they and the happy couple bring pillows and fabric and turn it into a cosy love nest. Neither of their families know they’re married. They meet at the edge of the village and spend afternoons and evenings there together. They finally have proper sex, and Roy is astonished by the world of splendour which opens up for him.

On the day of the Squire’s funeral, the air force begins its formal takeover of the village. The village divides into two parties, the older inhabitants who’ve been used to traditions and dislike the new regime, and the younger men who admire the airmen and their machines and, now that agricultural work has come to an end, hope to get jobs as labourers or technicians up at the aerodrome – with the landlord acting as a sort of referee between them.

The Squire’s sister becomes openly contemptuous of the airmen, spitting on the ground after the Flight-Lieutenant’s walked by. He now takes Sunday service in the church but doesn’t bother changing out of his airforce uniform and reads dully and uninspiredly. The Rector’s asks Roy if he might consider working for the air force. She doesn’t know that, at the same time as he got married to Bessy, Roy signed up to join the air force.

10. A Disclosure

Roy is bowled over by the intimacy and power of sexual love, and a bit irked that Bessy is far more excited by the prospect of him joining the air force, learning to fly, them getting married quarters and a little car, of travelling abroad! The weeks go by. One day she is a bit distant. She explains that her mother is always trying to put her off him. Roy vows to go and see her, walks down the sloping field, stops at the bottom and waves. He feels a tremendous closeness and intimacy with her, as with no-one else.

He walks to the pub and presents himself to the landlord’s wife in the garden, among the lupins, delphiniums and buzzing bees. After preliminary chat she takes him up to her bedroom (her husband, the landlord, being fast asleep in the bar) and tells him blank: Bess is his sister. The Rector had an affair with her, the landlady. She got pregnant, Bess is the result. At first Roy denies it, explaining that the Rector explained at his birthday that he was not Roy’s biological father. Oh but he was, the landlady explains. Just that he got the Rector’s wife pregnant quite a bit before they were married. They married in a hurry, then the Rector’s wife was packed off abroad with her, the landlady, Eve, to accompany her. The Rector’s wife returned, the story of the finding of the baby in a basket was cooked up and arranged between all three of them. And during this period the Rector had started an affair with the landlady, getting her pregnant too. ‘Oh he was a fine man.’

So the beautiful young woman Roy is having an affair with, who he has married and who has opened up for him the world of sexual delight… is his half-sister!

Chapter 11 Change of Plan

Roy walks back through the village, across the fields and up towards the tin shed in the field, when he hears voices. Laughter. He jerks open the door of the shed to reveal Bess on the bed naked and the Flight-Lieutenant naked above her. As she scoops bedclothes up around her nekkid body, the Flight-Lieutenant is up and getting swiftly dressed, so swiftly that within moments he is moving towards Roy holding his call-up papers for the air force. As Roy looks down, the Flight-Lieutenant, obviously quite scared, skips past him, into the open and is off with a typically unfeeling quip: ‘Sorry about this, but all’s fair, you know’ (p.112).

It’s the old story: the more totally in love you are, the deeper the knife twists in your guts. Roy reels. Bess’s uneducated simplicity comes out. She thought she was being ‘nice’ to both of them. She tells him she started her ‘affair’ with the Flight-Lieutenant the day before she and Roy were married. And she goes on to tell him, as if it will help, that the Flight-Lieutenant is much better, physically, than him: much more confident, much more exciting, makes her feel much more at ease. Thanks, Bess.

This chapter well conveys the flood of contradictory feelings you experience in such a situation, including the impression that it’s all a bad dream and all you have to do is reach out your hand to restore the wonderful, paradisal intimacy you once shared with another human being. But the more they talk the worse it gets, and then Roy decides to prick her smug self-satisfaction and tells her they are brother and sister.

This prompts a moment of horror, Bess struggles to process this momentous new fact, but then she manages to smile and say, ‘Well at least that makes it easier.’ She reaches out her hand and smiles at him, ‘What shall we do now, Roy?’ but he too has processed the situation to a conclusion and says, ‘Do what you want’, turns on his heel, walks down the field then breaks into a run over fields and fences, till he gets to the river, strips off and dives into its refreshing cleansing cold waters.

12. The Air Vice-Marshall

Cut to a few weeks later. Roy has been inducted into the air force along with fifty or so other recruits. Life isn’t as cushy as he’d anticipated, the accommodation is basic, the food is poor, up early, to bed late, lots of exercise and none of them have been anywhere near a plane.

The Air Vice-Marshall assembles them in an underground lecture theatre (a lot of the Aerodrome’s facilities, it turns out, are underground, linked by an underground railway – maybe on the model of the French Army’s Maginot Line defences.)

The Air Vice-Marshall delivers an extended lecture about what is expected of the new recruits (pp.121-128). They are seeking not only to protect but to transform society. He anatomises the feudal rules of the village, labouring under a worn-out religion nobody believes any more, losing themselves in drunkenness and humiliating ‘love affairs’.

The airmen must rise above all that. First be rejecting their parents and all aspects of their former lives. Then the Air Vice-Marshall embarks on a lengthy description of how, although love and sex are inevitable for any young man, they must not let themselves be trapped by women, time-bound creatures made by biology to be bound to the past (parents) and future (children) more than men. All love affairs end in tears. A true airman makes sure the tears are not his. All love affairs are between unequals. The airman must make sure he is not the giver who ends up feeling exploited. He must always be the exploiter, the taker.

This way the airman can fulfil his destiny which is to escape the constraints of time and achieve the complete self-mastery, which is Freedom.

I can imagine many a feminists head exploding in outrage as she reads this extended and forensic explanation of how to exploit women and their supposedly ‘better’ nature. For me, though, the disappointment is in Warner’s fictional character’s target. We know from the book about European fascism which I’ve just finished reading (To Hell and Back by Ian Kershaw) that, in the ideology of true Fascism, a key tenets alongside transforming the state and devoting yourself to The Leader, is fighting communism. Communism was the great bogeyman which helped unify all kinds of forces on the right of politics and helped them bury their differences to create authoritarian dictatorships across Europe.

You can see why mentioning specific political movements or parties is too specific or narrow for the kind of broad allegory Warner i writing. But it seemed to me that he was playing to the gallery instead of addressing the issue. What I mean is: these passages address an issue dear to the hearts of humanist and liberal readers of literature (love and relationships and feelings and emotions etc) and completely irrelevant to the actual historical circumstances of Fascism, which has its origins in the collapse of parliamentary democracy and the spread of street violence which only The Strong Man says he can quell.

13. Alterations

They watch a synchronised flying display. The man behind the radio-controlled co-ordination of the planes is an elderly mathematical genius. The Air Vice-Marshall congratulates him. The implication is that someday soon actual pilots will be redundant.

Roy is now a talented pilot. He’s surprised to discover he is already regarded as more promising that the Flight-Lieutenant who he used to so admire. When he goes down into the village he finds it transformed. The sleepy high street is full of air force vehicles or squads of cadets marching up and down. The Manor has been gutted and turned into an officers club with a new rooftop restaurant, the elaborate garden torn up to make way for a swimming club and tennis courts. When he drops into the pub, Roy’s old mates avoid him. He’s one of them now.

The airmen hear that the Flight-Lieutenant is going native. It’s as he and Roy have switched identities. Roy finds the villagers harder and harder to take, beginning to think these simple muddy souls are fit only for hard labour, while the Flight-Lieutenant is reported to be taking his duties as padre more and more seriously, delivering extended sermons, asking for Aerodrome funds to help repair the church tower. He has long ago lost interest in Bess. On his rare visits to the pub Bess tries to be friendly with Roy, but he’s having none of it.

In a striking scene Roy makes a rare visit to the Rectory only to discover the Flight-Lieutenant leaning against an armchair, having his hair idly stroked by the Squire’s sister. He has become their darling – whereas Roy has become an airman – coldly he asks for his clothes, shakes hands and departs. He has become the brisk, rude personality he admired at the start of the book.

14. Eustasia

Their positions become even more reversed when we learn that the Flight-Lieutenant is in love with a lady on the airbase called Eustasia, but that she upsets him by often asking after Roy — rather as Bes, although ‘married’ Roy, secretly lusted after the Flight-Lieutenant.

Now, just to spite the Flight-Lieutenant, Roy determines to have an affair with her. (Eustasia is, by the way, the wife of the genius mathematician-engineer who’s designing the radio-controlled airplanes. She’s bored. She has lots of affairs with the fit young pilots.)

The Flight-Lieutenant takes Roy to her rooms, introduces them. She has just got out of the shower and is wearing a dressing gown. Clearly this is her seduction outfit. She tells the Flight-Lieutenant to run along and buy some cigarettes and, once he’s gone, there is a moment of stasis super-charged with meaning and lust. Then she puts her hand on Roy’s knee, he grasps her thigh, she pout towards him and they are kissing lustfully.

In the midst of their grappling they realise the Flight-Lieutenant has reappeared in the room, sinks to the floor beside the sofa, puts his head against it and start crying. Roy looks down at him with contempt. The Flight-Lieutenant lets rip with a lot of stuff about how she’s the only woman who understands him, he feels so out of place at the aerodrome, and other emotional claptrap. With a jolt Roy realises this is how he must have appeared when he made his declarations of undying love to Bess. Eustasia treats him like a puppy. Everything he says, his entire outpouring of heartfelt emotion, means nothing to her.

Now this, this thread of meditations about love, which run from Roy’s puppy love for Bess, through devastation at her betrayal, to his newfound cynical confidence with a worldly woman like Eustasia, and their cynical almost sadistic treatment of the Flight-Lieutenant, this strikes me as having an imaginative force and experience unlike anything else in the book. The intense focus on analysing the relations between men and women reminds me a little of Kingsley Amis.

They become lovers. They meet and have sex every day in her stylishly decorated apartment. Roy is a confident man of the world and takes her to the officers club and to balls. He thinks back with a shudder to the time he wasted in the shabby tin hut on the edge of a field with the landlord’s stupid daughter in her home-made dresses. God, how far he has come!

15. Discipline

To his surprise Roy is appointed personal assistant to the Air Vice-Marshall. Slowly he discovers the scope of the Aerodrome, not just to defend the country but to transform it. Thus it has departments devoted to banking, agriculture, fisheries and so on.

From this point on (page 149), rather suddenly, Roy – and therefore the entire text – is transported to high up in the secret paramilitary organisation which actually runs the Aerodrome, and we now hear all about it from two sources: 1. verbatim speeches which the Air Vice-Marshall gives explaining the movement’s philosophy and 2. Roy’s description of his own discoveries about the movement’s aims (to take over and transform society).

Alongside his discoveries, Roy hears of incidents of insubordination in the village, leading up to the murder of an Air Force officer. In vague militaristic terms we learn that an example is made, anyone caught criticising the Air Force is dealt with severely.

Then we learn that the Flight-Lieutenant has been taking his job as padre too seriously and making anti-Air Force comments. The Air Vice-Marshall takes Roy along with him to the next Sunday service at the village church and they are both surprised to see the Flight-Lieutenant appear in full vicar outfit, to which he has no right, ascend to the pulpit and start talking about the good old days before the Air Force took over.

At which point the Air Vice-Marshall steps into the aisle and orders the Flight-Lieutenant to come down. As he hesitates some parishioners start muttering and there are shouts of ‘throw him out’ at which the Vice-Marshall draws his revolver and points it at the Flight-Lieutenant.

While he hesitates the Squire’s sister rises and starts shouting at the Vice-Marshall, pushing her way past sitting parishioners into the aisle, points at the Vice-Marshall and other airmen, starts saying, ‘Listen, listen all of you,’ and the Vice-Marshall shoots her point blank.

The Squire’s sister falls to the floor dead. The parishioners cower, the women start weeping, the Flight-Lieutenant comes down along the aisle and kneels beside the bleeding body, the Vice-Marshall orders his men to arrest him (p.159). The Vice-Marshall and Roy leave the church together, Roy is astonished at how little he feels for the murdered woman.

16. The secret

Roy goes to the club. Fellow officers are laughing and joking about the shooting. Roy reveals an extremely strange attitude to the killing of one of his oldest friends, which is that he finds it unaccountable that he seems to be somewhat moved. This is not an ordinary novel, in which we might expect the protagonist to be badly shaken up. He realises it is nearly his birthday, nearly a year since the events which kicked off the narrative. He realises he isn’t interested in the date or the occasion. He has now been lifted onto the Air Force’s level of abstract living, detached from human values.

He walks past the pub and toys with going in but the locals, the ones he used to be mates with, give him dirty looks. But the landlady comes out, takes him aside, and tells him how miserable Bess is, in fact she’s so broken-hearted she’s ill. This gets through Roy’s zombie-carapace a little and he promises to get Dr Faulkner the chief medical officer at the Aerodrome to visit her.

As he walks into the Aerodrome grounds he sees Eustasia outside her apartment building. She waves him over and insists on taking her upstairs to his flat. There she announces that she’s pregnant, staring at the floor. Roy is horrified – airmen are forbidden from having children, it ties them down – but pretends to be pleased.

But when Eustasia starts telling him how excited she’ll be to leave the Aerodrome and go live in another part of the country, Roy can’t hide the dismay at the ruin of all his plans and ambitions, and suddenly Eustasia gets really angry, ‘You never loved me’ etc. And then Roy feels sees in her the recriminations he brought against Bess and feels sorry for her. And they have sensitive tearful sex, both of them knowing their happy-go-lucky fun days are over.

17. Bess

Roy accompanies Dr Faulkner, the Aerodome chief medical officer, to see Bess. She is in her bedroom, hunched up in the windowseat, staring into space, catatonic, the lap of her homespun dress full of primroses she’s picked. Immediately we think of Ophelia, who went mad and picked flowers.

In a surprising development Roy gets down on his knees and puts his head in her lap. She strokes it absent-mindedly like Ophelia and Hamlet. He realises that Eustasia and the entire Aerodrome and its plan to take over and transform the nation mean nothing to him next to Bess’s love.

I remembered suddenly and vividly the moment in the past when we had been together in the field listening to the larks singing, the time when I had decided easily and gladly to abandon myself to her love. The promises and ambitions of that time may have been stupid and ill-considered. I had believed them to have become null and void; but I saw now that the feeling that had prompted them could never be recalled. It was not that I had any more a desire to possess her. Such an idea would in any case have been absurd; but I knew in a moment and with certainty that compared with her health and happiness the aerodrome and all that it contained meant nothing to me at all… (p.175)

I was astonished at how soppy this was, and how quick and complete the change in Roy’s attitude. He has little or no plausibility as a character, as a depiction of a real human being. He is more a robot witness of the ‘allegorical’ and often bizarre events Warner puts him through.

18. New friends

Roy bumps into the Rector’s wife waiting outside the Aerodrome. It is eerie how neither of them seem particularly upset by the events they’ve witnessed – the Rector and the Squire’s wife being shot dead.

She amazes the reader by explaining that the Flight-Lieutenant is the dead Squire’s sister’s son. The Squire had refused to have the boy in the house, had insisted on him being sent away, nobody knew about it, and nobody realised it was the Flight-Lieutenant until a chance remark of his confirmed it. (But this is the man who shot dead the Rector, her husband – how can anyone… oh, whatever).

Roy accompanies Dr Faulkner to see Bess and then walk back to the Aerodrome on numerous occasions. She had been in a deep depression, incapable of speaking. Slowly she is coming out of it and the doctor assures Roy her recovery will be complete, but he’s not telling something, Roy catches him and the Rector’s wife conferring, there’s some secret.

Somehow Roy manages to reconcile his realisation that he loves Bess, that he sympathises with the villagers and realises the values of the Aerodrome are worthless with… working closely with the Air Vice-Marshall on the plan to take over the country. You can see how he’s not really a person, but more a puppet in a pantomime.

And it tells you everything about Warner’s priorities that he devotes just one paragraph to this subject – the plan to take over the entire country: whereas he has given us pages and pages about a) Bess & her health b) about the Flight-Lieutenant being the Squire’s sister’s son and now c) goes into an extended analysis of the new flavour of his love affair with Eustasia i.e. they stop having sex but enter a deeper kind of relationship. All his about love and relationships, but barely a paragraph about the plans to take over the country. Those are his priorities.

Now you might remember that the Flight-Lieutenant had been imprisoned at the Air Vice-Marshall’s order after the scene at the village church. Now he’s released, has been reduced to the ranks and is working as ground staff. Roy meets him again at Eustasia’s apartment and they discover they’re back to being friends again. Roy tells him how disillusioned he is with the Air Force, the Flight-Lieutenant urges caution.

But at their next meeting Roy tells the Air Vice-Marshall that he has got Eustasia pregnant.

  1. The Air Vice-Marshall reveals that he, too, once had a liaison with her (confirming the sense that more or less all the men on the Aerodrome have slept with Eustasia)
  2. The Air Vice-Marshall angrily reminds Roy that a key tenet of the Air Force is it is absolutely forbidden to have children. Children are a tie to the future and an airman must have no past or future, he must elude time in order to become a New Man.

The Air Vice-Marshall gives Roy three days to sort it out i.e. to force Eustasia to have an abortion. (This is a pretty obvious symbol of the Air Force’s literal denial of life in all its messy glory, and crystallises Roy’s sense that:

the code under which I had been living for the past year was, in spite of its symmetry and its perfection, a denial of life, its difficulty, its perplexity and its suffering, rather than an affirmation of its nobility and its grandeur. (p.193)

19. The Decision

One day Roy is out at the Aerodrome watching the Flight-Lieutenant and other mechanics making last-minute adjustments to the twenty-seater plane which is to fly the Air Vice-Marshall to some important meeting. The Flight-Lieutenant steps briskly away, in the direction of Eustasia’s block of flats and Roy goes to follow him, but is intercepted and delayed by a chat with Dr Faulkner.

Walking on to Eustasia’s flat he is almost knocked over by a squad of six motorcyclists heading out of the base at top speed. Arriving at Eustasia’s flat Roy finds all the doors open and a message. She and the Flight-Lieutenant have done a bunk, running away together. He realises the motor bikes were sent out to catch them. Stepping out into the Aerodrome road, Roy sees one of the bikers returning. He salutes and the biker tells them they caught up with the escapees at a narrow stone bridge. The cars crashed, both the people inside were crushed, killed.

He is describing it to the doctor, stunned, when an orderly tells him the Air Vice-Marshall wants to see him. Roy reports. The Air Vice-Marshall is in an excellent mood. He jovially tells Roy how this means he is off the hook – no more pregnant Eustasia, no more difficult decision for Roy. He can refocus on his work.

Roy tells him he can stuff his work. He is disgusted and repelled by the organisation, The Air Vice-Marshall controls his fury and tells Roy he has no option but to have him killed. (All this passes as in a dream. I had no sense of threat, and couldn’t care less about Roy, unlike, for example the real terror you feel on Winston Smith’s behalf.)

The Air Vice-Marshall is just offering Roy a last opportunity to change his mind and save his life when there is a swift knock at the door and the doctor and the Rector’s wife walk in. This is more like a Whitehall farce than a dystopia. The doctor apologises and call the Air Vice-Marshall Antony.

Antony!? The name of the man the Rector confessed to sending plummeting to his doom up some mountain, the supposed lover of  his wife, the Rector’s wife before they got married!?

Yes: now it all comes tumbling out, as on the last page of a whodunnit or the last few minutes of a bedroom farce. Yes: as a young man the Air Vice-Marshall (Antony) had been in love with the Rector’s wife (we never get to learn her name), and had had a fling with her while the Rector was pursuing a more formal wooing. Spotting them, the Rector had suggested their trip to the mountains where he cut Antony’s rope sending him plunging down the mountainside. But he had survived and returned (somehow the Rector never noticed this), returned to discover that his lover, pregnant with his son, had now married the Rector (thinking Antony dead) and born the child who is… none other than Roy!

So…. so when the landlady told Roy she was his mother, after the Rector had an affair with her…. that was a lie? So Roy is not a blood relative of Bess? So their ‘marriage’ was not incest?

But not only this – the Rector’s wife now tells us and the audience that Antony not only returned from the dead and berated her for marrying his would-be murderer and making him his son’s father… Antony then went and had an affair with her best friend, the Squire’s sister, got her pregnant, and spirited away the baby, a boy, a son, who was to return years later as…. the Flight-Lieutenant!!!

So…. the Air Vice-Marshall… let me get this straight… when the Air Vice-Marshall shot dead the Squire’s sister in the church he was killing the woman he had an affair with and the mother of his son, the Flight-Lieutenant, who he then had thrown into prison and… and has just now despatched a squad of motorcycle riders to have killed.

Yes, because the Rector’s wife now accuses Tthe Air Vice-Marshall of having had one of his sons murdered, and being on the verge of murdering the other, too (Roy).

(So the Flight-Lieutenant and Roy were brothers… which explains why he was invited to Roy’s 21st birthday party right at the start… doesn’t it?)

After the Rector’s wife makes her big speech explaining all this, the Air Vice-Marshall turns to Roy and says I told you so. What an absurd, messy, sordid business life is. Come with me, cast off the shackles of the past and be free.

Can you not see, and I am asking you for the last time, to escape from time and its bondage, to construct around you something that is guided by your own will, not forced upon you by past accident, something of clarity, independence and beauty? (p.200)

The doctor now reveals that it was he who saved Antony/the Air Vice-Marshall’s life after his fall and nursed him back to life. He pleads for Roy’s life. Furious, the Air Vice-Marshall says he’ll be lucky to survive for his treason.

He asks Roy if he’s coming with him to the climactic meeting of the organisation, to finalise plans for the coup. Roy says No. The Air Vice-Marshall tells him he’s going to lock the doors, if anyone tries to escape he’s giving orders for them to be shot down, He goes out and they hear the lock turn.

Through the window of the office where he’s locked up, Roy idly watches him walk across the runway, meet up with the Chief Mathematician and all the other important men from the organisation. They get in the plane. The Air Vice-Marshall himself is flying it. It taxis down the runway, turns and takes off. But it doesn’t climb as it should. Then climbs too steeply. Then the wing Roy had seen the Flight-Lieutenant fiddling with falls off! The plane plummets back to earth, smashing and exploding on impact, killing everyone inside it.

20. Conclusion

Three last pages tie up loose ends. The doctor tells Roy how he was friends with both the Rector and Antony and a) nursed the latter back to health b) decided with him to keep his survival a secret and stage a fake funeral c) never told the Rector the truth (thus letting him live a life plagued by guilt).

And watched the recovered Antony vow never to let himself be influenced by women or love or the past, but to remake and remodel himself. Out of this burning ambition grew the ambition to remodel the entire country and human nature. So: that’s the origin of the Air Vice-Marshall’s steely determination and ‘fascist’ beliefs.

But now that he’s dead, the organisation he had built up over years collapses. The threat of a coup evaporates.

Bess is now healed. Reconciled with her, Roy now marries her in a formal ceremony. They sit in the fields by the ancient elms. He is at one not only with her, and with Nature but with… past time, the way the messiness of time, our pasts and everyone else’s pasts prevents anything human from being pure, or being made new. The author’s final message is:

It was not for me, I knew now, to attempt either to reshape or to avoid what was too vast even to be imagined as enfolding me, nor could I reject as negligible the least event in the whole current of past time. (p.205)

Cast

  • Roy – the 21-year-old first person narrator
  • The Rector – his supposed father, murdered his friend Antony, shot dead by the Flight-Lieutenant at the Agricultural Show
  • The Rector’s wife – Roy’s supposed mother
  • Antony – the Rector’s friend and his wife’s lover, who the Rector confesses to murdering in chapter two
  • the Squire – a 70-year-old, white haired old worthy, lives in the Manor, dies after the Aerodrome requisition the entire village and specifically after his siter has beaten him round the face
  • the Squire’s sister – Florence, who has devoted her life to her brother, but falls into a huge rage at his death-bed and then is shot dead by the Air Vice-Marshall of the church
  • Mac – one of Roy’s drinking buddies from the (unnamed) pub in the (unnamed) village
  • Fred – another of Roy’s drinking buddies
  • the landlord – of the unnamed pub
  • the landlady – of the unnamed pub, who claims to be Roy’s mother, by the Rector
  • Bess – the landlord’s sexy but simple daughter who Roy has a passionate affair with, and even gets unofficially ‘married’ to, until the landlady tells Roy she is actually the illegitimate daughter of the Rector and so Roy’s step-sister
  • the Flight-Lieutenant – a drawling, lackadaisical smart young representative of the Aerodrome and its complete lack of conventional manners or pieties, who accidentally shoots the Rector dead, has a fling with Bess behind Roy’s back, is tasked with being the village padre after the Aerodrome takes it over, but slowly adopts village values, takes his duties seriously, begins speaking out against the Air Force
  • the Air Vice-Marshall – ‘a slight tense figure’ (p.158) the logical, no-nonsense head of the Air Force and indeed of the wider ‘movement’ which is planning to take over the country and transform it
  • the mathematician – a tall, elderly man with a small straggling beard (p.131) mastermind of a new technology of remote controlled airplanes; married to the pneumatic Eustasia
  • Eustasia – sexy wife of the mathematician who has had affairs with a string of airmen and now takes up with Roy
  • Dr Faulkner – medical co-ordinater at the Aerodrome, tends to Bess during her melancholia

Time

Several times the Air Vice-Marshall goes well beyond a conventional view of fascism as the takeover of the state and the expulsion of all the time-servers and money-lenders and parasites who infest it, far beyond that, to expound a vision of a new type of Man who will have a new type of relationship with Time! (p.128)

He explains that the airman must reject his parents, siblings, family and background i.e. all the ties of the past – and cease to worry about his own life, how it will turn out etc, in other words, cease to fear about the future. In other words, the New Men, by abandoning the ties of past and future, by entire devotion to the mission of the Air Force, can escape Time itself:

‘What is the whole purpose of our life… To be freed from time, Roy. From the past and from the future.’ (p.150)

Only then will we become ‘a new and more adequate race of men’ (p.128).

But in the last few chapters, as Roy passes the apogee of his attachment to the Aerodrome ideals, he comes to see that men are stuck in time for better or for worse, and that it is this embedded-in-time-ness which creates the potential, the adventure and excitement which are quintessentially human, as against the rigid, utterly predictable logic of the Air Force. ‘We in the Air Force had escaped but not solved the mystery’ (p.177).

It is only human to make mistakes, and get caught up in the confusing messiness of life, whereas it is an error:

to deny wholly the relevance of the world of time and feeling where such mistakes were only too easy to make, and to erect in contrast with it our own barren edifice of perfection, our efficient and mystical mastery over time. (p.181)

This interest in Time is an unusual and thought-provoking spin on the central polarity the novel describes. It reminds me of the contemporaneous obsession with time in T.S. Eliot’s poem Burnt Norton (1936).

Style

My plot summary gives you the events but doesn’t give any sense of how hard The Aerodrome is to actually read, chiefly because of its clotted, clunky style.

Warner writes in long sentences, often with three or four subordinate clauses, with non-standard word order, and using idioms or phrases which have long ago been dropped from ordinary English. Take the opening of chapter five:

In our house, as I should say in many others, death had not been in the past a frequent topic of conversation; but now, with a dead body in an upper room lying beneath a sheet, both the presence and the certainty of death were never, during the days that preceded the funeral, far from our minds. (page 50)

The prose is sufficiently different in layout and phrasing from modern English that, at moments, it prompts your mind (expecting clarity and logic) to set off in the wrong direction and you have to call it back in order to reread what the text actually says. Take this passage describing the layout of the Aerodrome, much of which is built beneath ground so that staff move around it using an underground railway.

By this railway we had come immediately after breakfast, accompanied by the three or four officers who were responsible for our training, and since the early days after we had been called up had been rigorous enough, we had been surprised to find this place so luxuriously furnished and so unlike the severity of the quarters in which we had so far lived. (p.119)

A modern writer would perhaps say the training had been ‘very rigorous’ – saying rigorous ‘enough’ sets a modern reader up to expect that it was vigorous enough for something to follow logically. Similarly, when I read the first ‘so’ I expected the sentence to continue ‘so luxuriously furnished that…‘ – I mean that the ‘so’ would lead into a conclusion rather than remain an adverb.

Maybe it’s just me, but I found Warner’s prose as stiff and restraining as Roy’s dinner party white shirt. Towards the end of the book the landlord’s wife approaches Roy:

She appeared to me at once as both older and less self-possessed than she had been at our last interview, and though for some weeks after that time I had avoided conversation with her, now I was by no means displeased to see that she evidently wished to talk to me; for I still retained for her the affection of my childhood, and did not fancy that she could reveal anything else to me that could disturb the serenity in which I lived. (page 163)

Warner’s clunky, peculiar prose style has at least two consequences:

1. You as the reader have to work quite hard to penetrate the prose and make out what’s happening, or to rethink the crabbed sentences into more flowing English so you can grasp their meaning. Quite often I felt Warner was struggling, didn’t have the basic expressive skill, to describe his own story.

I saw that Eustasia was watching me closely. Her large eyes were fixed on my face and there was an expression of eagerness in them, as though she were attempting to drag to her my thoughts from behind my forehead. (p.169)

2. The style is so peculiar and stilted that it keeps you on the outside of the narrative.

Apparently Warner intended his book to be an ‘allegory’ and it’s just as well because it doesn’t work as a psychological novel i.e. a novel where we’re meant to care in the slightest about the characters.

Roy barely reacts to the bizarre and shocking things he sees – his father’s confession, the Squire’s sister slapping the Squire to death, the Vice-Marshall shooting her dead – Roy moves through the story like a zombie.

The only places his account comes to life are in the scattered descriptions of being really head-over-heels in love with Bess, the persuasive account of his distress when he discovers her with another man, and then the new set of emotions he discovers during his affair with the worldly-wise Eustasia.

But almost all the other passages – about the Rector, his wife, the Squire, his sister and much of the description of the Aerodrome – are processed logically, in his stiff, starchy sometimes clumsy prose, and leave the reader utterly outside the experience. I kind of read at The Aerodrome but never felt I got inside it. Certainly none of its characters or events made much impression on me. For Anthony Burgess to compare it with Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the most effectively nightmareish novels ever written, is grotesque.

Critique

By the end of the book, it has become, almost in spite of itself and its odd prose style, an impressive text. I’ve given a detailed summary so you can judge for yourself what you think of the story as a story; I’ll mention a few other aspects.

Many critics claim Warner is a kind of English Kafka. This is maybe true in two respects:

  1. the overall allegorical feel of the story in which incidents and details are crafted to fit into the totality of the allegory, as they are in The Trial and The Castle
  2. the bizarre and inexplicable elements – having recently reread all of Kafka I was reminded how plain weird many of the episodes in Kafka’s novels are, and also that he left the novels in fragments precisely because he was good at weird and intense scenes but less good at figuring out how to stitch them together

Kafka and Warner are even similar in their attitude to sex, in the sense that Kafka’s two main protagonists, Joseph K and K, seem to be very attractive to women but end up having sudden sex in incongruous places with little or no courting or foreplay – a little like Roy finds himself fornicating in a hay barn or a rickety tin shed with Bess.

For me, though, the central criticism of the Aerodrome is in its vision of a totalitarian movement. It’s too simple and too clean. Having just read Ian Kershaw’s exhaustive survey of Europe in the 1930s and 40s, a key element in the rise of right-wing dictatorships was the violence – the violence of thugs on the street, the violence of left and right wing paramilitaries, and then the violence of seizing and holding power. Enemies were rounded up, gaoled and murdered.

The Aerodrome contains some thrilling speeches by the Air Vice-Marshall about how the movement is not going to take over the country, it is going to transform it, how the old world of muddle and confusion will be swept away, how a new breed of men who have rejected the past and have no fear of the future – who have, in other words, escaped the bonds of Time – will for the first time live properly human lives.

But, like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, it is a very shiny, technology-driven vision. Clean, antiseptic. It doesn’t take into account the actual conditions which gave rise to right-wing government across Europe which were, above all, poverty, unemployment, complete loss of faith in elected governments, and real fear of a communist revolution. These were the elements which so destabilised European nations that right-wing, often military figures could step in and promise to restore order, give people jobs, and prevent the advent of the communism which huge portions of the population were so terrified of.

None of this is in The Aerodrome. None of the political complexity, the collapse of government, and the street violence. It is a strangely antiseptic and theoretical vision of what a fascist regime would look like. And this theoretical or ‘allegorical’ treatment extends to the way the opposite of the fascist movement is not a communist or social democrat regime, it is rural tradition. But this wasn’t the alternative most people in urban industrialised Europe faced, let alone in Britain, the most urbanised country in the world.

Instead the central antithesis in the book between hi-tech airmen and drunks from the pub feels like a warmed-up version of the age-old dichotomy between city and countryside which stretches back through all civilisations, to the ancient Roman and Greeks and probably beyond, in which the businesslike city-dweller is glamorous but somehow shallow, while the country-dweller is humble and thick but somehow more authentic.

And in the simplicity of its age-old dichotomy The Aerodrome also fails to investigate the much more tangled imagery of contemporary Fascism which somehow managed to combine both elements, so that the Nazis managed to create posters and propaganda films which showed blonde Hitler youths both helping with the harvest, exercising in the country and flying brand new Messerschmitt fighter planes.

German Fascism, like Italian and Spanish cousins, combined veneration of Blood and Soil with veneration of shiny new technologies, to present the propaganda image of the totality of a nation united in one purpose.

By adopting his gleaming airmen versus doddery old village types, Warner misses all the complexities and contradictions of actual Fascist regimes, and instead paints a kind of children’s cartoon version of it.

The Aerodrome is, at the end of the day, despite its terrible prose and lack of any attempt to create credible characters, an interesting and occasionally enjoyable book. But as any kind of guide or insight into the actual fascist mind it strikes me as useless.

Also it tells you bugger-all about the air force, any air force, or what it was like to fly a plane in the late 1930s. For a book which describes the joy of flying, try Sagittarius Rising by Cecil Lewis (1936).

Credit

The Aerodrome by Rex Warner was published in 1941. All references are to the 1968 Sphere Books paperback edition (cover price 7/6).

Related links

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by Simon on June 8, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 8, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/06/08/the-aerodrome-rex-warner/

Milan Kundera on Franz Kafka (1979)

In 1979 the Czech novelist Milan Kundera published a short essay about the works of fellow Czech and Prague inhabitant, Franz Kafka. The essay was titled Somewhere behind.

Throughout it Kundera uses the adjective ‘Kafkan’, which seems perverse of either him or the translator, because everyone else in the English-speaking world talks about the ‘Kafkaesque’.

Four elements of the Kafkaesque

Anyway, Kundera sets out to define what the ‘Kafkaesque’ consists of, and comes up with:

1. It describes a world which is an endless labyrinth which nobody can escape or understand, run according to laws nobody remembers being made, which no longer seem to apply to humans.

2. K.’s fate depends on a file about him which has been mislaid in the Castle’s vast and inept bureaucracy. Kafka’s world is one in which a man’s life becomes a shadow of a truth held elsewhere (in the boundless bureaucracy). Kundera says this notion of a supra-human realm begins to invoke the theological.

In his opinion this dualism led early commentators to interpret Kafka’s stories as religious allegories, not least Kafka’s friend and executor Max Broad, who saw his friend as a deeply religious writer. Kundera disagrees because this view ‘sees allegory where Kafka grasped concrete situations of human life’. I certainly agree that many of the scenes, especially in The Trial, are imagined and described in great and lucid detail.

He also makes the interesting point that when Power deifies itself it automatically produces its own theology. Thought-provoking…

3. The punished seek the offence, want to find out what it is they have done. Worse, the punished become so oppressed by the sense of their own guilt, that they set about finding what it is they have done wrong, so that Joseph K. sets out to review every word, thought and deed from his entire life. The punished beg for recognition of their guilt.

4. When Kafka read the first chapter of The Trial to his friends everyone laughed including the author. Kafka takes us inside a joke which looks funny from the outside, but in its core, in its gut, is horrific.

Against a sociological or Marxist interpretation

Just recently I read an essay by the Marxist literary critic György Lukács, who claimed that Kafka’s fiction was, at its heart, or root, a response to contemporary capitalism:

The diabolical character of the world of modern capitalism, and man’s impotence in the face of it, is the real subject matter of Kafka’s writing. (The Meaning of Contemporary Realism by György Lukács, p.77)

Kundera rejects this and it’s worth quoting his reasons:

Attempts have been made to explain Kafka’s novels as a critique of industrial society, of exploitation, alienation, bourgeois morality – of capitalism, in a word. But there is almost nothing of the constituents of capitalism in Kafka’s universe: not money or its power, not commerce, not property or owners or the class struggle.

Neither does the Kafkaesque correspond to a definition of totalitarianism. In Kafka’s novels, there is neither the party nor ideology and its jargon nor politics, the police, or the army.

So we should rather say that the Kafkaesque represents one fundamental possibility of man and his world, a possibility that is not historically determined and that accompanies man more or less eternally. (p.106)

Kundera’s rejection doesn’t have the conceptual depth of Lukács who, after all, doesn’t describe Kafka’s works as a critique of capitalism on the basis that they describe or analyse any specific aspect of a capitalist society. Lukács bases his claim on the notion that Kafka’s works, taken as a whole, convey the worldview of bourgeois alienation, which modern capitalism produces. Even if it doesn’t describe any of the details of a capitalist society (factories, banks, modern technology etc), it still conveys the mood.

Kundera’s quick paragraphs are a useful reminder of just how uncapitalist the settings and events of some ofKafka’s stories are: The Castle in particular is set in a sort of 18th century, pre-industrial Ruritania, completely remote from the modern world.

But Kundera is, in fact, wrong to say:

There is almost nothing of the constituents of capitalism in Kafka’s universe: not money or its power, not commerce, not property or owners or the class struggle.

In The Trial Joseph K works in a bank. He is a senior figure in a bank, in competition with the Deputy Director, lording it over innumerable clerks, and holds meetings with a number of businessmen clients. ‘Nothing of the constituents of capitalism’? Arguably, The Bank is the central institution in capitalism.

Similarly, in The Metamorphosis Gregor Samsa is not only a travelling salesman, but his father’s business went bankrupt owing large debts to the company which Gregor works for, and Gregor’s job there is based on a deal that part of his salary is deducted to pay off his father’s debts. He is a sort of debt slave, and this accounts for the tragi-comic way that, after he awakens as a giant beetle, Gregor’s first response is not horror at what’s happened to him but anxiety at the fact that he’s going to be late for work, and indeed the first incident after the transformation, is the arrival of the company’s Chief Clerk wanting to find out why Gregor is late.

So, no, Kundera is wrong. Of Kafka’s three great masterpieces, two of them are set in very capitalist institutions – a bank, and in the sales and marketing of a clothing company – and the second also features as key plot components the ideas of business, bankruptcy, debt, salary and commission.

On reflection many of the constituents of capitalism feature in Kafka’s universe: money and its power to shape individual lives, commerce, the ownership of property, business owners (Gregor’s Chief Clerk or the bank’s Deputy Director). Kundera seems oddly blind to these basic facts.

The nature of totalitarian society

Fundamentally, Kafka’s stories are about the dehumanisation of the individual by faceless powers, and Kundera compares them with his own first-hand experience of totalitarian society in communist Czechoslovakia. He pauses to focus in on a particular aspect of the totalitarian society:

Totalitarian society, especially in its more extreme versions, tends to abolish the boundary between the public and the private; power, as it grows ever more opaque, requires the lives of citizens to become entirely transparent. The ideal of life without secrets corresponds to the ideal of the exemplary family: a citizen does not have the right to hide anything at all from the Party or the State… (p.110)

(This, incidentally, is what terrifies me about political correctness; the way it holds everyone accountable to impossibly high standards of perfect, immaculate, blameless behaviour, while expanding its surveillance and judgement into every aspect of everyone’s private lives, stretching back decades, and raining down hecatombs of career-ending criticism on anyone who is caught out saying, thinking or doing the wrong thing. They think they are creating a utopian society; I think they are creating a total surveillance state.)

Kundera’s novels often address the theme of the abolition of privacy by the intrusive state, and it is interesting to have this element of the Kunderesque identified as being part of the Kafkaesque, too. Thus, as  Kundera points out, Joseph K. is in his bed when the two officers come to arrest him – what more personal place is there? And in The Castle, K. can never get away from his two ‘assistants’ who watch over him even when he’s making love to Frieda.

Death of privacy.

The phantasmal office

Kundera quotes a sentence from a letter by Kafka which contains, Kundera thinks, one of his greatest secrets:

‘The office is not a stupid institution; it belongs more to the realm of the fantastic than of the stupid.’

Kundera points out that Kafka saw what millions of other office workers failed to even though it was in front of their noses, which is the surreal and fantastic quality of office life: how individuals are converted into data which can be stored, lost, misquoted, fought over and generally come to distort every aspect of their lives. Our credit ratings, our passport and tax and National Insurance details, our criminal records, all of it is held on files which can be hacked or stolen. What we like to think of as the reassuring ‘reality’ of our lives can be twisted out of all recognition with the click of a mouse.

This situation is, when you reflect on it, bizarre, and Kafka perceived it to an unusually intense degree, and so:

transformed the profoundly anti-poetic material of a highly bureaucratised society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job (which is actually the story of The Castle) into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never seen before. (p.114)

The novel as discovery of aspects of the human condition

Lastly, Kundera is struck by the way that Kafka accurately predicted an entire aspect of man’s experience in the 20th century without trying to.

Many of his friends were deeply political, avant-garde, became Zionists or communists etc, and generally devoted an enormous part of their lives and thought and writings to commentary and speculation about contemporary and future society. And yet all of their works and most of their names have vanished into oblivion.

Kafka, by complete contrast, was a very private man who cared little or nothing about contemporary politics and barely mentioned it in his works or letters or diaries, a hypochondriac obsessed with his own personal life, oppressed by the domineering figure of his father, enmeshed in a complicated series of love affairs, and yet —

It turned out to be this shy, socially awkward and intensely solipsistic individual who, giving little or no thought to ‘the future’ or society at large, created works which turned out to be staggeringly prophetic of the experience of all humanity in the 20th century and beyond.

Thus, for Kundera, Kafka is a prime example of his central belief in the radical autonomy of the novel, his conviction that the really serious novelists are capable of finding and naming aspects of the existential potential of humanity in a way that no other science or discipline can.

— Obviously Kundera excludes most authors and fictions from this faculty; he is talking, in a rather old-fashioned way, about the Great Novelists. But I think he makes a good case that the serious novel is an exploration of human potential and that Kafka is a striking example of it, a man who failed to complete any of his three novels, who only wrote about twenty short stories, and yet who is universally regarded as a kind of prophet or discoverer of an entire realm of human existence.

Somewhere Behind

And the title of the essay, Somewhere Behind? It’s a quote from a poet Kundera quotes elsewhere in his works, Jan Skacel, which runs:

Poets don’t invent poems
The poem is somewhere behind
It’s been there for a long long time
The poet merely discovers it

Kundera goes on to suggest that History itself is like the poet in the sense that it brings to light, through new combinations of circumstances, aspects which were always latent and potential in human nature.

History does not invent, it discovers. Through new situations, History reveals what man is, what has been in him ‘for a long long time’, what his possibilities are. (p.116)

Thus Kafka experienced certain aspects of human nature to such an extent, so powerfully, that he described and portrayed them with an intensity no-one else ever had.

He shed light on the mechanisms he knew from private and microsocial practice, not suspecting that later developments would put these mechanisms into action on the great stage of History. (p.116)

The real poet, author, novelist discovers something new about human nature and human potential in the world, something

no social or political thought could ever tell us.

Kundera or Camus

I’ve just read a similar-length essay on Kafka by Albert Camus who, by contrast with Kundera’s cool, concise and cerebral analysis, comes over as much the worse writer. There is more food for thought in a page of Kundera than in all fourteen pages of Camus’s overblown, superficial and pretentiously name-dropping text.

Coda

Still, stepping back a bit, reading Kunder, Camus and Lukács  makes me wonder whether there are maybe two types of critic of Kafka: the ones which base their analysis solely on the novels and The Metamorphosis, and the ones who take into account the full range of Kafka’s weird and diverse short stories.

For although Lukács and Kundera fundamentally disagree about the possibility of a political interpretation of Kafka, they both refer solely to the novels and The Metamorphosis because this trio of texts are very much of a piece and convey a homogeneous message about paranoia, bureaucracy and totalitarianism.

Such interpretations are harder to sustain if you start to consider The Great Wall of China, the stories in A Country Doctor, or the final works with their weird focus on animals, such as The Burrow or Josephine the Singer or Investigations of a Dog.

Do critics like Lukács and Kundera completely ignore the stories because their greater variety and weirdness complicate and/or undermine the simplicity of the axes they want to grind and the points they want to make? For these works neither Lukács’ nor Kundera’s master ideas really fit.

There is, in other words, a kind of inexplicable surplus in Kafka’s oeuvre (relatively small though it is), an excess of meaning, or of vision, which goes – in my opinion – way beyond the scope of any rational theory to explain or analyse.

Related links

Related Kafka reviews

Dates are dates of composition.

Reviews of Milan Kundera’s books

1967 The Joke
1969 Life Is Elsewhere
1969 Laughable Loves (short stories)
1972 The Farewell Party
1978 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
1984 The Unbearable Lightness of Being
1986 The Art of the Novel (essays)
1990 Immortality
1995 Slowness
1998 Identity
2002 Ignorance
2014 The Festival of Insignificance

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by Simon on October 5, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 5, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/10/05/milan-kundera-franz-kafka/

A Hunger Artist and other stories by Franz Kafka

A Hunger Artist is a collection of four short stories by Franz Kafka published in Germany in 1924, the last collection that Kafka himself prepared for publication. Kafka corrected the proofs during his final illness but the book was only published several months after his death. The first English translations of the stories, by Willa and Edwin Muir, were published in 1948, in the larger collection titled The Penal Colony.

They are all relatively short stories (compared to the 60 or so pages of The Metamorphosis). They are all odd, peculiar, non-naturalistic stories, having the feel of dreams or fables. They all seem to point to a truth or meaning beyond themselves, just out of reach. And it’s noticeable that three of the four have a circus setting, or involve animals, as did some of the stories in A Country Doctor.

First Sorrow (3 pages)

An account of a trapeze artist, married to and obsessed by his trade. It is typical of Kafka that the man lives in his trapeze, that food has to be hoisted up to him in special containers, merely retiring to one side when other performers perform, that he loves the height, the sense of freedom, specially when the windows round the top are opened.

But he hates travelling of any kind, in the city will only submit to being taken anywhere if it’s in the manager’s sports car, and from city to city, when travelling by train, has such sensitive nerves that he and the manager take a whole compartment to themselves and the trapeze artist sleeps in the luggage rack.

On one train journey the trapeze artist surprises the manager by asking for two trapezes to be set up for him to use. The manager, who clearly pampers the trapeze artist, immediately agrees. Nevertheless the trapeze artist is sad, and for the first time the manager sees worry lines and tears trickling down his face as he sleeps.

So that’s what the title, First Sorrow, turns out to mean. It is an elusive, elliptical story.

A Little Woman (8 pages)

This is very reminiscent of the fabric and feel of Kafka’s longer fiction, The Castle in particular, in the way it consists of a long, convoluted and tortuous meditation on a relationship between the narrator and one other character.

It simply starts off by describing a thin woman known to the narrator, and then explains that, for some unknown reason, she is permanently vexed and irritated by him, and from there passes into ever-more complex over-thinking of why that might be, and what it might mean, and the many possible reasons for her vexation, and whether it’s a performance solely for public consumption, and so on and so on and so on.

It is all done in Kafka’s characteristic block paragraphs which I find challenging to read.

Perhaps she hopes that once public attention is fixed on me a general public rancour against me will rise up and use all its great powers to condemn me definitively much more effectively and quickly than her relatively feeble private rancour could do; she would then retire into the background, draw a breath of relief, and turn her back on me. Well, if that is what her hopes are really set on, she is deluding herself. Public opinion will not take over her role; public opinion would never find me so infinitely objectionable, even under its most powerful magnifying glass. I am not so altogether useless a creature as she thinks; I don’t want to boast and especially not in this connection; but if I am not conspicuous for specially useful qualities, I am certainly not conspicuous for the lack of them; only to her, only to her almost bleached eyes, do I appear so, she won’t be able to convince anyone else. So in this respect I can feel quite reassured, can I? No, not at all; for if it becomes generally known that my behavior is making her positively ill, which some observers, those who most industriously bring me information about her, for instance, are not far from perceiving, or at least look as if they perceived it, and the world should put questions to me, why am I tormenting the poor little woman with my incorrigibility, and do I mean to drive her to her death, and when am I going to show some sense and have enough decent human feeling to stop such goings-on — if the world were to ask me that, it would be difficult to find an answer. Should I admit frankly that I don’t much believe in these symptoms of illness, and thus produce the unfavourable impression of being a man who blames others to avoid being blamed himself, and in such an ungallant manner? And how could I say quite openly that even if I did believe that she were really ill, I should not feel the slightest sympathy for her, since she is a complete stranger to me and any connection between us is her own invention and entirely one-sided. I don’t say that people wouldn’t believe me; they wouldn’t be interested enough to get so far as belief; they would simply note the answer I gave concerning such a frail, sick woman, and that would be little in my favour. Any answer I made would inevitably come up against the world’s incapacity to keep down the suspicion that there must be a love affair behind such a case as this, although it is as clear as daylight that such a relationship does not exist, and that if it did it would come from my side rather than hers, since I should be really capable of admiring the little woman for the decisive quickness of her judgment and her persistent vitality in leaping to conclusions, if these very qualities were not always turned as weapons against me.

It amounts to a brief specimen of the kind of endlessly self-questioning, over-ratiocination which makes the novels so very long and, often, such hard going, a fine example of the way Kafka can spin an inordinate amount of verbiage out of the simplest relationship.

In a sense this short excerpt demonstrates the technique by which Kafka assembles the longer texts to create the structure of the novels: the technique being to line up a series of encounters with officials from the Court, and then subject each one to a mind-bogglingly over-elaborated, hyper-sensitive, and rather menacing over-thinking of every possible nuance and conceivable double, triple and quadruple interpretation of all possible permutations of thinking and worrying about it.

Until you end up with entire paragraphs which appear to be saying something but which are, on closer examination, almost empty, as the narrator himself at one point acknowledges.

And on closer reflection it appears that the developments which the affair seems to have undergone in the course of time are not developments in the affair itself, but only in my attitude to it, insofar as that has become more composed on the one hand, more manly, penetrating nearer the heart of the matter, while on the other hand, under the influence of the continued nervous strain which I cannot overcome, however slight, it has increased in irritability.

A Hunger Artist (11 pages)

As I’ve noted in my reviews of the novels, a key element of the Kafka style is entropy, meaning that everything, large and small, literal or symbolic, falls away, declines, decays and dies.

The protagonists of The Trial and The Castle and The Metamorphosis die in the end, the Officer of In The Penal Colony dies, the man waiting at the door of the Law dies. And thus it is that, following the general pattern, the Hunger Artist as well wastes away and dies.

And, just like in The Trial or the Penal Colony or the Door of the Law, his last words contain a message pregnant with meaning and poignancy.

The text is told by a narrator looking back wistfully at an earlier time, a tone which immediately reminds us of The Great Wall of China. Back in those days, back in the good old days, fasting was an art which was widely appreciated and the Hunger Artist was the leader in his field. He was paraded around in a barred cage, wearing a black swimsuit, his ribs sticking out, setting up in a new town or city every forty days, and charging admission to admiring crowds who came to point and ooh and mock or admire his heroic efforts to survive on no food for forty days.

Why forty days? Well, on an interpretative level this is obviously a number fraught with religious meaning, since Jesus went into the wilderness to fast for forty days and nights, and this story itself was possibly invented to mirror the forty days and nights of the Biblical flood told in the book of Genesis.

But in the story it is simply because the artist’s commercially minded manager has discovered that forty days is about as long as you can milk an audience in any given own or city before they start to get bored and he has to move on.

The middle part of the text describes the Hunger Artist’s unhappiness and disgust at the way people don’t believe he’s really fasting, the way the guards set to watch over him don’t really believe him, and so on.

But then the narrator describes how a great change comes over society, fashions change, pastimes change, and people lost interest in fasting as a spectator sport. The manager tries a last whistle-stop tour of cities to rouse audiences, but people just weren’t interested any more. Should the Hunger Artist take up a new profession? He’s too old to learn new tricks. And anyway, it is his life’s work.

So he signs up to join a circus, although he finds his cage being set up in the narrow walkways the crowds walk along to get to the far more exciting animal cages. He has become a back number. People hurry past his cage or stop to mock.

Strictly speaking, he was only an impediment on the way to the menagerie.

Children ask their parents what it means and what he does. But the parents struggle to explain:

You try explaining fasting to someone! Unless a person feels it he can never be made to understand it.

His keeper initially marks a record of the days fasted on a wooden plaque stuck on the bars of his cage, but eventually forgets to do this, then forgets about the artist altogether. See what I mean by entropy.

One day a new supervisor demands to know the purpose of this empty cage and no-one can remember what it’s for. Mixed in with the straw is a stick. When they poke it the stick it talks. It is the Hunger Artist. The rough proley nature of the workers is well conveyed in the J.A. Underwood translation, as the workers listen to the Hunger Artist’s last confession. He only fasted, he explains in a weak whisper, because he never found anything he wanted to eat.

And with this poignant confession he expires, the circus labourers clear out his cage and instal a virile young panther in it which draws the crowds with its awesome power.

The Hunger Artist feels like a fable or parable or allegory of awesome importance, with Biblical resonances and some deep meaning for all of us. But what is that meaning exactly, is it historical or psychological or political or sociological… Kafka has left a century of critics and commentators to discuss.

Coming with a deep interest in history I note that the final years of the Great War saw widespread starvation in Germany and Austro-Hungary due to the Allied blockade on all shipping which prevented the importation of foodstuffs. And one of the Axis powers’ grievances was that the blockade continued for seven months after the armistice of November 1918, up until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919.

Thus real hunger, the actual starvation of men women and children was a spectacle Kafka and all Germans would have been bitterly familiar with.

Then again, those who prefer biographical explanations will point to the fact Kafka himself throughout his adult life subjected himself to an increasingly strict diet, which began with vegetarianism and became progressively more strict and self denying until he in fact died of untreatable laryngeal tuberculosis, which closed up his throat until he could neither eat nor drink and literally starved to death.

But you don’t need to know either of these background facts to respond to the power of the story. It is the way the subject has been turned into not just fiction, but into a story with the roundedness and finish and fairy tale perfection of a fable or allegory or parable, which counts.

Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk (19 pages)

The narrator writes like a person drafting a long critical essay examining a contemporary artist from a variety of sociological angles, except that, as the story progresses, the reader realises that the narrator is a mouse and that he is talking about the ‘famous’ mouse singer Josephine.

I’ve repeatedly mentioned the way things in Kafka’s stories decline and fall away, and the way this even happens within individual sentences, in the way a sentence sets off to make a statement and finds itself contradicting its opening, qualifying and balancing and introducing doubts and numerous clauses which successively weaken the opening until it is often abolished and erased.

Even Kafka’s sentences display a death wish.

That pattern is very visible in this, Kafka’s final story. The narrator opens by telling us that Josephine is the mouse people’s greatest and most popular singer and makes a few supporting statements about how important she is to her people.

But this breezy opening is then subjected to eighteen pages of criticism and undermining. It comes out that her ‘singing’ might in fact not be strictly speaking ‘singing’ after all. In fact it might very much be like the sound every other mouse makes, which is a common or garden squeak. In fact Josephine’s squeaking might, in fact, even be weaker and less impressive than the average mouse’s. If this is so, what on earth gives her the extraordinary power and influence she holds over mousekind?

And it is to the investigation of this apparent mystery, with long, multi-claused sentences, hedging his own conclusions, balancing interpretations and weighing possible theories, that the narrator turns to ponder with all the weighty orotundity of a learned German professor.

How to explain that at some public concerts, other mice have gotten excited and let out squeaks, and those squeaks were every bit as good as Josephine’s if not better? Is her popularity something to do with the history and struggle of her people, his people?

A thought which gives rise to a long series of reflections on the life of mice, how they are born into struggle, into a life of anxiety, small and weak and surrounded by enemies, by ‘the enemy’.

It was impossible, for me at any rate, not to think about Kafka’s Jewishness and wonder to what extent these repeated and heartfelt descriptions of a scattered, weak race oppressed by stronger neighbours, is a not very coded reference to his Jewish peers.

Our life is very uneasy, every day brings surprises, apprehensions, hopes, and terrors, so that it would be impossible for a single individual to bear it all did he not always have by day and night the support of his fellows; but even so it often becomes very difficult…

This mass of our people who are almost always on the run and scurrying hither and thither for reasons that are often not very clear…

Laughter for its own sake is never far away from us; in spite of all the misery of our lives quiet laughter is always, so to speak, at our elbows…

One might think that our people are not fitted to exercise such paternal duties, but in reality they discharge them, at least in this case, admirably; no single individual could do what in this respect the people as a whole are capable of doing. To be sure, the difference in strength between the people and the individual is so enormous that it is enough for the nursling to be drawn into the warmth of their nearness and he is sufficiently protected.

But for all the occasions that the reader can impose onto sentences like these a meaning to do with the Jewish community of Prague or Berlin or Central Europe, there are plenty of other sections which are patently just descriptions of mice, with their impatience, tendency to gossip and to squeak at the slightest provocation.

In other words, the narrative sometimes approaches what you could call a real-world interpretation but then veers away, into fiction, subsumed into the vividness of the allegory or fable.

Whenever we get bad news – and on many days bad news comes thick and fast at once, lies and half-truths included – she rises up at once, whereas usually she sits listlessly on the ground, she rises up and stretches her neck and tries to see over the heads of her flock like a shepherd before a thunderstorm…

The more you read on, the more you realise the text is as much or more an analysis of The Mouse Folk as of Josephine herself, and hence its sub-title. And, while you read on, the figure of Josephine becomes less and less of a singer and more and more of a unifying symbol of hope for an embattled people.

Josephine’s thin piping amidst grave decisions is almost like our people’s precarious existence amidst the tumult of a hostile world.

But by half-way through you have come to realise that the story is more like a parable about art and the artist and the artist or storyteller’s ability to give comfort and solace to his ‘people’ no matter how inadequate and ordinary his voice.

It is more the symbolism and the staging of the artist’s performances and what they mean for his or her listeners or readers which matters, it is the psychological unifying and healing it offers, than the actual ‘quality’.

Squeaking is our people’s daily speech, only many a one squeaks his whole life long and does not know it, where here [in Josephine’s performances] squeaking is set free from the fetters of daily life and it sets us free too for a little while…

And where he writes squeaking, he means speaking, and in fact means writing.

Related links

These are links to modern translations of the stories available online.

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by Simon on September 26, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Germany, Great War, Literary criticism, Literature, Short stories
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Posted by Simon on September 26, 2019

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The Great Wall of China by Franz Kafka (1917)

my investigation is purely historical

I remember this story giving me a funny feeling when I read it as a teenager because of the heady, sweeping vision of history it gives you. I was too young to realise that any ‘history’ it contains is used for purely aesthetic reasons, to feed the purposes of the parable and of Kafka’s distinctive take on human existence.

The Great Wall of China imagines what it was like to be one of the builders of the Great Wall. It is told from the point of view of an articulate member of the generation who were raised to build it, trained to build it, and indoctrinated to build it, a man from a southeast Chinese province ‘almost on the borders of the Tibetan Highlands’.

The first half of the text describes the excited and patriotic ‘spirit of the times’, the narrator being lucky enough to have turned twenty and graduated from school just as the mammoth project was commencing.

And goes on to describe the wall less as a engineering and logistical challenge but more, as you might imagine from a creative writer, as a psychological challenge. Thus, according to the narrator, the main challenge to be overcome was exhaustion and despair. It would take a gang of workers and supervisors about five years to build five miles of wall by which time

the supervisors were as a rule too exhausted and had lost all faith in themselves, in the wall, and in the world.

And so after five years they were moved to a new region hundreds of miles away, the sole purpose being to show them other sections of the completed wall and parade them past cheering fellow citizens to bolster their morale.

The wistful tone

But rereading it now I think what appealed to me was the tone of the narrator. Most of Kafka’s other stories are told in real time – this happens then this happens then this. But the narrator of the Great Wall is looking back, wistfully and nostalgically to the early days of the wall which coincided with his flush of youth. He wants to ‘convey the ideas and experiences of that time and make them intelligible’ and the story is littered with phrases which hark back to that hopeful and optimistic era:

  • In those days the book was in everyone’s hands…
  • At that time for many people, even the best, there was a secret principle…

The whole text is bathed in an unusually warm and humane tone of voice.

The mysterious high command

The legendary vastness of China gives Kafka a new location to situate what you could call the core essence of the Kafkaesque, the notion of an endlessly ramifying hierarchy of unknowable authorities:

It is possible that even these considerations, which argued against building the wall in the first place, were not ignored by the leadership when they decided on piecemeal construction. We—and here I’m really speaking on behalf of many – actually first found out about it by spelling out the orders from the highest levels of management and learned for ourselves that without the leadership neither our school learning nor our human understanding would have been adequate for the small position we had within the enormous totality.

In the office of the leadership—where it was and who sat there no one I asked knows or knew—in this office I imagine that all human thoughts and wishes revolve in a circle, and all human aims and fulfilments in a circle going in the opposite direction.

Note the litotes in the first line – ‘It is possible that even these considerations… were not ignored by the leadership – which he uses to create a characteristic sense of uncertainty and speculation…

Slowly we realise that the story is in fact cast as an essay, a historical enquiry, into one odd fact, the fact that the wall was built in standalone sections which were often not linked up for decades or ever. Pondering the wisdom of the high command, the author talks himself into believing that the wall was in fact never a practical defence against invaders from the north: it was more a categorical imperative to unite Chinese society. More than that, it had an almost supernatural source.

I imagine that the high command has existed from all eternity, and the decision to construct the wall likewise. Unwitting northern people believed they were the cause; unwitting emperor who imagined he had given orders for it. We who were builders of the wall know otherwise and are silent.

This I found a breath-taking and vast and mysterious vision.

The remoteness of the emperor

In the second half of the short text the author goes on to expand it by subjecting the figure of the Emperor to a thorough Kafka-isation i.e. turning him into a figure so remote and mysterious, that no one knows or can know about him. The same idea he’s applied to the notional ‘Court’ in The Trial. 

We would think about the present emperor if we knew who he was or anything definite about him. We were naturally always trying… to find out something or other about him, but, no matter how strange this sounds, it was almost impossible to learn anything, either from pilgrims, even though they wandered through much of our land, or from near or remote villages, or from boatmen, although they have travelled not merely on our little waterways but also on the sacred rivers. One hears a great many things, true, but can gather nothing definite.

The idea is developed to visionary or phantasmagorical lengths, with the author stating that the empire is so vast that it is impossible ever to hear anything about the emperor, malicious court conspiracies may overthrow him, but the author’s people, far in the distant south, will never hear about this. Nobody knows the name of the current emperor resulting in ‘universal uncertainty’.

In fact the text contains a one-page-long parable of haunting beauty.

The parable of the emperor’s message

The Emperor has sent a message to you, his humble subject, a tiny shadow cowering in the furthest distance from the imperial sun; the emperor on his deathbed has sent a message to you alone. He ordered the messenger to kneel down beside his bed and whispered the message into his ear. He thought it so important that he had the messenger repeat it back to him. He confirmed the accuracy of the verbal message by nodding his head. And in front of the entire crowd of those who’ve come to witness his death – for all the obstructing walls have been broken down and all the great ones of his empire are standing in a circle on the broad and high soaring flights of stairs – in front of all of them he dispatches his messenger.

The messenger sets off at once, a powerful, tireless man. Sticking one arm out and then another, he makes his way through the crowd. If he encounters resistance, he points to his breast where there is a sign of the sun. So he moves forward easily, unlike anyone else.

But the crowd is so huge; its dwelling places are infinite. If there were an open field, how he would fly along, and soon you would hear the marvellous pounding of his fist on your door. But instead of that, how futile are all his efforts. He is still forcing his way through the private rooms of the innermost palace. He will never he win his way through. And if he did manage that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to fight his way down the steps, and, if he managed to do that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to stride through the courtyards, and after the courtyards the second palace encircling the first, and, then again, stairs and courtyards, and then, once again, a palace, and so on for thousands of years.

And if he finally did burst through the outermost door – but that can never, never happen – the royal capital city, the centre of the world, is still there in front of him, crammed to bursting with its own refuse. Nobody could pushes his way through here, even with a message from a dead man.

It is Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, redone in a mystical fictional form. If this had been in The Trial both teller and auditor of the fable would have reflected (at length) on how impossible it is to ever establish any truth or knowledge, to ever receive the message, to ever find out what is going on.

But The Great Wall of China is different. It has, as I mentioned, an unusually warm and mellow tone about it. And thus this page-long parable ends not on a note of hopelessness, but with an image of acceptance.

But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream that message to yourself.

Kafka is rarely this forgiving to himself or his readers. It is this twilight, nostalgic and forgiving tone which makes The Great Wall of China stand out among all his other works.

And it also makes you realise that his fundamental tropes of distant rulers and unknowable hierarchies and universal uncertainty need not necessarily be negative. Precisely the metaphors and tropes which make Kafka a patron saint of existentialist angst can give just as much support to a mellow, almost Zen-like air of detachment and mellowness.

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by Simon on September 23, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 23, 2019

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The Renaissance Nude @ the Royal Academy

In this review I intend to make three points:

  1. This exhibition is without doubt a spectacular collection of outstanding Renaissance treasures, gathered into fascinating groups or ‘themes’ which shed light on the role of the body in Renaissance iconography.
  2. It confirms my by-now firm conviction/view/prejudice that I don’t really like Italian Renaissance art but adore North European late-medieval and Renaissance art.
  3. Despite being spectacular and full of treasures, the exhibition left me with a few questions about the underlying premise of the show.

1. Spectacular Renaissance treasures

The exhibition brings together works by many of the great masters of the Renaissance, including Titian, Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Donatello, Dürer and Cranach. The small sketch by Raphael of the three graces is seraphic, the two pages of anatomical drawings by Leonardo da Vinci are awe-inspiring and the Venus Rising by Titian is wonderful full scale and in the flesh.

Venus Rising from the Sea (‘Venus Anadyomene’) by Titian (1520) National Galleries of Scotland

However, it isn’t just a parade of greatest hits. The exhibition includes works by lots of less-famous figures such as Perugino, Pollaiuolo and Gossaert, and lots of minor works or works which aren’t striving for greatness at all.

Indeed, there are quite a few rather puzzling or perplexing prints and images, like Dürer’s woodcut of naked men in a bath-house, or a battle scene from the ancient world where all the axe-wielding men are naked. The exhibition is more notable for its diversity and range than its concentration on well-known names.

And it is far from all being paintings. There are also large numbers of prints and engravings, alongside drawings and sketches, statuettes in metal and wood, some bronze reliefs, and fifteen or so invaluable books of the time, propped open to display beautiful medieval-style, hand-painted illustrations.

There’s even a case of four or five large circular plaques from the period, showing the patron’s face on one side and nude allegorical figures on the other. There are some 90 works in total.

In other words, this exhibition brings together pieces from across the widest possible range of media, and by a very wide range of artists, famous and not so famous, in order to ponder the role of the naked human body in Renaissance art, showing how the depiction of the nude in art and sculpture and book illustration changed over the period from 1400 to 1530.

A Faun and His Family with a Slain Lion (c. 1526) by Lucas Cranach the Elder. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

It does this by dividing the works into five themes.

1. The nude and Christian art

Medieval art had been concerned almost exclusively with depicting either secular powers (kings and emperors) or religious themes. For the most part the human figure had been covered up. So a central theme in the exhibition is documenting the increasing ‘boldness’ or confidence with which artists from the period handled subjects involving nudity, and the increasing technical knowledge of the human body which gave their images ever-greater anatomical accuracy.

You can trace this growing confidence in successive depictions of key Christian stories such as the countless depictions of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, probably the locus classicus of nudity in the whole Christian canon.

This version by Dürer seems more motivated by the artist showing off his anatomical knowledge and skill at engraving (and learnèd symbolism) than religious piety.

Adam and Eve by Albrecht Dürer (1504) Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Of course the Christian Church still ruled the hearts and imaginations of all Europeans and the Pope’s blessing or anathema was still something to be hoped for or feared. From top to bottom, society was dominated by Christian ideology and iconography. And so alongside Adam and Eve there are quite a few versions of of other subjects which provided an opportunity for nudity, such as Christ being scourged or crucified, or the large number of Last Judgements with naked souls being cast down into Hell.

In fact for me, arguably the two most powerful pictures in the entire show were the images of damned souls being stuffed down into Hell by evil demons, by the two Northern painters Hans Memling and Dirk Bouts.

The Fall of The Damned by Dirk Bouts (1450)

In these images the fact that the men and women have been stripped naked is an important part of their message. It symbolises the way they have been stripped of their dignity and identity. They have become so much human meat, prey for demons to torture and even eat. Paintings like this always remind me of descriptions of the Holocaust where the Jews were ordered to strip naked, men and women and children, in front of each other, and the pitiful descriptions I’ve read of women, in particular, trying to hang on to their last shreds of dignity before being murdered like animals. The stripping was an important part of the psychological degradation which reduced humans to cowed animals which were then easier to shepherd into the gas chambers.

2. Humanism and the expansion of secular themes

Humanism refers to the growth of interest in the legacy of the classical world which began to develop during the 1400s and was a well-established intellectual practice by the early 1500s.

Initially, humanism focused on the rediscovered writings of the Greeks and especially the Romans, promoting a better understanding of the Latin language and appreciation of its best authors, notably the lawyer and philosopher Cicero.

But study of these ancient texts went hand in hand with a better understanding of the classical mythology which informed them. In the 1500s advanced thinkers tried to infuse the ancient myths with deeper levels of allegory, or to reconcile them with Christian themes.

Whatever the literary motivation, the movement meant that, in visual terms, the ancient gods and goddesses and their numerous myths and adventures became increasingly respectable, even fashionable, subjects for the evermore skilful artists of the Renaissance.

In addition, classical figures also became a kind of gateway for previously unexpressed human moods and feelings. For some painters a classical subject allowed the expression of pure sensual pleasure, as in the Titian Venus above.

In this wonderful drawing by Raphael something more is going on – there is certainly a wonderful anatomical accuracy, but the drawing is also expressing something beyond words about grace and gracefulness, about eloquence of gesture and poise and posture, something quite wonderful. It’s relatively small, but this little drawing is among the most ravishing works in the exhibition.

The Three Graces by Raphael (1517 to 1518) Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019

The replacement of sex by desire in artspeak

About half way round the exhibition, I began to notice that the words ‘sex’ or ‘sexy’ do not appear anywhere in the wall labels or on the audioguide. This began to seem increasingly odd because some of the paintings are deliberately sexy and sensual, blatant pretexts for the artists to show off their skill at conveying the contours and light and shade of naked human bodies, often deliberately designed to arouse and titillate.

The word ‘sex’ was completely absent from both the wall labels and the audioguide. You get the strong impression that in curatorland it is banned, swept under the carpet. Art scholars prefer to use the vague and willowy term ‘desire’. Not only that, but you also get the strong impression that ‘same-sex desire’ is the optimum form of this, especially when it comes to men. After a good couple of hours you begin to realise that ‘same sex desire’ is preferred to ‘desire’ and wonder if it’s because (predominantly women) art curators and scholars are more comfortable dealing with women’s desire and same-sex desire, than with heterosexual male ‘desire’.

Not just in this exhibition, but in any other you attend nowadays, any way in which a straight man can look at a woman is, certainly in modern art scholarship, immediately brought under the concept of the wicked, controlling, shaping, exploitative, objectifying, judgmental and misogynistic Male Gaze.

The English language possesses many other words to describe these feelings and activities surrounding sex but I was struck how they are all banned from the chaste world of artspeak. Here’s an example:

Within humanist culture, much art created around the nudes was erotic, exploring themes of seduction, the world of dreams, the power of women and same-sex desire.

‘The power of women and same-sex desire.’ These are very much the values promoted by art institutions and art scholars in most of the art exhibitions I go to, and the values which the narrow world of contemporary art scholarship projects back onto all of history.

The sexy or horny male has been quietly and subtly elided from the picture.

I don’t even really disagree with this view, as such; up with empowering women, bully for same-sex male desire. It’s more the narrowness of perception I’m complaining about: the sense that the world of legitimised responses has narrowed down to the same constricted interpretations and carefully limited vocabulary.

For me art is about opening up – perceptions, possibilities; it’s about expanding my sense of visual and conceptual possibility, new ideas, strange feelings. Whereas the repetitive, stock, predictable use of a handful of approved ideas and buzzwords limits and closes down analysis and discussion and enjoyment. It’s not the vocabulary itself, it’s its limitedness and endless repetition which I find depressing.

Saint Sebastian

A good example of the unashamed sensuality of Renaissance art is the image the Academy has chosen for the posters for the exhibition, Saint Sebastian by Agnolo Bronzino.

Saint Sebastian by Agnolo Bronzino (1533) Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Saint Sebastian was an early Christian convert who was killed by Roman soldiers by being shot to death with arrows (around the year 288 AD, according to legend). There are four or five depictions of the arrow-peppered saint in the exhibition and what comes over powerfully in all of them is the way that the supposedly tortured saint is obviously experiencing absolutely no pain whatsoever. In fact, in the hands of Renaissance painters, the subject has become an excuse to display their prowess at painting (or sculpting) beautiful, lean, muscular, handsome young men, often seeming to undergo a sexual rather than religious experience.

Bronzino’s painting takes this tendency – the conversion of brutal medieval legend into Renaissance sensuality – to an extreme. The audioguide points out that the unusually large ears and distinctive big nose of this young man suggest it is a portrait from life, maybe the gay lover of Bronzino’s patron?

Whatever the truth behind this speculation, this painting is quite clearly nothing at all to do with undergoing physical agony, torture and dying in excruciating pain in order to be closer to the suffering of our saviour. Does this young man look in agony? Or more as if he’s waiting for a kiss from his rich sugar daddy? It is easy to overlook the arrow embedded deep in his midriff in favour of his hairless sexy chest, his big doe eyes, and Bronzino’s show-off depiction of the red cloak mantled around him.

It is a stunningly big, impactful, wonderfully executed image – but it also epitomises a kind of slick superficiality which, in my opinion, is typical of Italian Renaissance art – a point I’ll come back to later.

3. Artistic theory and practice

This is a scholarly room which explains how Renaissance artists began to submit the human body to unprecedented levels of systematic study and also to copy the best of classical precedents. We see examples of the sketches and sculptures made by Renaissance artists copying newly discovered classical statues, such as the Laocoön and the Boy with a Thorn in his Foot.

At the start of the period covered (1400) life drawing was unheard of, which is why so much medieval art is stylised and distorted and sometimes dismissed as rather ‘childish’. By the end of the period (1530) drawing from life models was standard practice in all reputable artists’ workshops.

It is in this section of the exhibition that we see the enormous guide to anatomy, the Vier Bucher von menschlicher Proportion created by Albrecht Dürer, in a display case, and two examples of Leonardo da Vinci’s extraordinarily detailed drawings of human anatomy (in the example below, of a man’s shoulder).

The Anatomy of the Shoulder and Neck by Leonardo da Vinci (1510 to 1511) Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

It was a fleeting idea, but it crossed my mind that there is something rather steampunk about Leonardo’s drawings, in which intimately depicted human figures are almost turning into machines.

4. Beyond the ideal nude

This small section examines images of the human body being tortured and humiliated. The founding motif in this subject in the Western tradition is of Christ being stripped, whipped, scourged, stoned, crucified and stabbed with a spear as per the Gospel accounts of his interrogation, torture and execution.

There is an exquisite little book illustration in the Gothic style of a Christ naked except for a loincloth tied to the pillar and being scourged. If you can ignore the half naked man being scourged within an inch of his life at the centre, the detail on the faces and clothes and the pillar and architecture are all enchanting.

The Flagellation by Simon Bening (1525–1530)

This room is dominated by a vast depiction of the legend of the ten thousand martyrs who were (according to Christian legend) executed on the orders of the Emperor Hadrian by being spitted and transfixed on thorn bushes. The odd thing about images like this is the apparent indifference of those being skewered and tortured, but there is no denying the sadism of the torturers and, by implication, the dark urges being invoked in the viewer.

Here again, I felt that modern art scholarship, fixated as it is on ‘desire’ and, in particular, determined to focus on women’s desire or the ‘safe’ subject of ‘same-sex desire’, struggles to find the words to describe human sadism, brutality and cruelty.

I had, by this stage, read quite a few wall labels referring to the subtle sensuality and transgressive eroticism and same-sex desire of this or that painting or print. But none of them dwelt on what, for me, is just as important a subject, and one much in evidence in these paintings – the human wish to control, conquer, subjugate, dominate, punish, and hurt.

Reflecting the civilised lives lived by art scholars, wafting from gallery to library, immersed in images of erotic allure and same-sex desire, art criticism tends to underestimate the darker emotions, feelings and drives which exist out here in the real world. The universal use of the bluestocking word ‘desire’ instead of the cruder words which the rest of the English-speaking word uses for the same kind of thing, is a small token of this sheltered worldview.

These thoughts were prompted by the scenes of hell, the numerous battle scenes and the images of martyrdoms and whippings on display in this room. They were crystallised by this image, which was the first one to make me really disagree with the curators’ interpretations.

This is Hans Baldung Grien’s etching of a Witches’ Sabbath. The curators claim the image represents ‘male anxiety’ at the thought of ‘powerful women’ and ‘presents women as demonic nudes, rather than as beauties to be desired’. (Note the buzz word ‘desire’ being shoehorned into the unlikely context of even this dark image.)

Witches’ Sabbath by Hans Baldung Grien (1510)

Anyway, the curators’ interpretation is so bedazzled by feminist ideology as to misread this image in at least two ways.

Number one

Is it really the women’s nudity which is so scary? No. It is the thought that these are humans who have wilfully given themselves to the power of the devil, to Satan, and become his agents on earth to wreak havoc, blighting harvests, infecting the healthy, creating chaos and suffering. That was a terrifying thought to folk living in a pre-scientific age where everyone was utterly dependent on a good harvest to survive. The nudity is simply a symbol of the witches’ rejection of conventional notions of being respectably clothed. The fact that the curators completely miss the religious threat and complexities of the picture in order to focus on the ‘power’ of naked women typifies everything about the shallowness , body obsession and unimaginativeness of their worldview.

Number two

The nudity is surely the least interesting thing in the entire image. Surely the print is packed full of arcane and fascinating symbolism: what are the two great streams issuing up the left-hand side, and ending in what looks like surf? Are they some kind of wind, or actual waves of water? And why does the lower one contain objects in it? Are they both issuing from the pot between the woman’s legs and does the pot bear writing of some sort around it, and if so, in what language and what does it say? Why is the woman riding the flying ram backwards and what is in the pot held in the tines of her long wooden fork? What is lying on the plate held up in the long scraggy arm of the hag in the middle? Is it just a cooked animal or something worse (i.e. a human body part)? Are those animal bones and remains at the witches’ feet? What is the pot at the left doing and what are hanging over another wooden hoe or fork, are they sausages or something more sinister?

Feminist art criticism, by always and immediately reaching for a handful of tried-and-trusted clichés about ‘male anxiety’ or ‘the male gaze’ or ‘the patriarchy’ or ‘toxic masculinity’, all-too-often fails to observe the actual detail, the inexplicable, puzzling and marvellous and weird which is right in front of their eyes. Sometimes it has very interesting things to say, but often it is a way of smothering investigation and analysis under a blanket of tired clichés and corporate buzz words.

5. Personalising the nude

During the Renaissance individual patrons of the arts became more rich and more powerful. Whereas once it had only been Charlemagne and the Pope who could commission big buildings or works of art, by 1500 Italy was littered with princes and dukes and cardinals all of whom wanted a whole range of works to show off how fabulous, rich, sophisticated and pious they were, from palaces and churches, to altarpieces and mausoleums, from frescos and murals to coins and plaques, from looming statues to imposing busts and big allegorical paintings and small, family portraits.

Thus it is that this final room includes a selection of works showing the relationship between patrons and artists, especially when it came to commissioning works featuring nudity.

The most unexpected pieces were a set of commemorative medals featuring the patron’s face on one side and an allegorical nude on the other.

Next to them was a big ugly picture by Pietro Perugino titled The Combat Between Love and Chastity. Apparently, Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua, was one of the few female patrons of her time and commissioned a series of allegorical paintings for her studiolo, a room designated for study and contemplation.

Isabella gave the artist detailed instructions about what must be included in the work, including portraits of herself as the goddesses Pallas Athena (left, with spear) and Diana (centre, with bow and arrow), as well as various scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses which have been chucked into the background (for example, in the background at centre-left you can see what appears to be Apollo clutching the knees of the nymph Daphne who is turning into a laurel tree.)

The Combat Of Love And Chastity Painting by Pietro Perugino (1503)

Maybe the curators included this painting an example of the way nudity had become fully normalised in Western painting by about 1500, but it is also an example of how misguided devotion to ‘the classics’ can result in a pig’s ear of a painting. And this brings me to my second broad point.

I prefer northern, late-medieval art to Italian Renaissance art

Why? Because of its attention to sweet and touching details. Consider The Way To Paradise by Dirk Bouts, painted about 1450. This reproduction in no way does justice to the original which is much more brightly coloured and dainty and gay.

In particular, in the original painting, you can see all the plants and flowers in the lawn which the saved souls are walking across. You can see brightly coloured birds perching amid the rocks on the left. You can even see some intriguingly coloured stones strewn across the path at the bottom left. There is a loving attention to detail throughout, which extends to the sumptuous working of the angel’s red cloak or the lovely rippled tresses of the women.

The Way to Paradise by Dirk Bouts (1450)

So I think one way of expressing my preference is that paintings from the Northern Renaissance place their human figures within a complete ecosystem – within a holistic, natural environment of which the humans are merely a part.

The people in these northern paintings are certainly important – but so are the flowers and the butterflies and the rabbits scampering into their holes. Paintings of the Northern Renaissance have a delicacy and considerateness towards the natural world which is generally lacking in Italian painting, and which I find endlessly charming.

Take another example. In the centre of the second room is a two-sided display case. Along one side of it is a series of Christian allegorical paintings by the Netherlandish painter, Hans Memling. I thought all of them were wonderful, in fact they come close to being the best things in the exhibition for me. They included this image of Vanity, the age-old trope of a woman looking in a mirror.

Vanity by Hans Memling (1485)

I love the sweet innocence of the central figure, untroubled by Leonardo da Vinci’s scientific enquiries into human anatomy, undisfigured by flexed tendons or bulging musculature.

And I like the little doggy at her feet and the two whippets lounging further back. And I really like the plants at her feet painted with such loving detail that you can identify a dandelion and a broad-leaved plantain and buttercups. And I love the watermill in the background and the figure of the miller (?) coaxing a donkey with a load on its back towards the little bridge.

The other side of this display case shows a series of allegorical paintings by the famous Italian artist Giovanni Bellini, titled Allegories of Fortune (below).

In the image on the left, of a semi-naked figure in a chariot being pulled by putti, you can see the direct influence of ancient Roman art and iconography which infused all Bellini’s work. It is learnèd and clever and well-executed.

But my God, isn’t it dull! The figures are placed in generic settings on generic green grass with generic mountains in the distance. All the enjoyment of the life, the loving depiction of natural detail, has – in my opinion – been eliminated as if by DDT or Agent Orange. Unless, maybe, you find the little putti sweet and charming, but I don’t. Compared to the delicacy of medieval art, I find Renaissance putti revolting.

Thinking about these pesky little toddlers gives me another idea. They are sentimental. Northern gargoyles and kids and peasants and farmers and figures are never sentimental in the same way these Italian bambini are. There is something a bit rotten about the Italian paintings, they have the official dullness of those packs of Medici Christmas cards you get in charity shops. Sterile. Dead.

Four Allegories by Giovanni Bellini (1490)

In my opinion, by embracing the pursuit of a kind of revived classicism, many Renaissance paintings lost forever the feel for the decorative elements of the natural world and a feel for the integration of human beings into the larger theatre of nature, which medieval and Northern Renaissance art still possesses.

Reservations about the basic theme of the exhibition

This is without doubt a wonderful opportunity to see a whole range of masterpieces across all forms of media and addressing or raising or touching on a very wide range of topics related to the iconography of nudity.

The curators make lots of valid and interesting points about nudity: they invoke the revival of classical learning, the example of classical sculpture, they describe the importance of nudity in Christian iconography, the way the almost-nudity of Christ on the cross was deliberately echoed in depictions of the almost-nudity of countless saints who are shown being tortured to death.

The curators discuss nudity as symbolic, nudity as allegorical, nudes which appear to be portraits of real people (often the belovèd of the patrons paying the painter), nudes which warn against the evils of sin, nudes which revel in the beauty of the naked male or female body, nude old women acting as allegorical reminders of the passage of Time, nude witches exemplifying ‘male anxiety’ at the uncontrolled nakedness of women – all these points and more are made by one or other of the numerous exhibits, and all are worth absorbing, pondering and reflecting on.

And yet the more varied the interpretations of the nude and naked human form became, the more I began to feel that it was all about everything. Do you know the tired old motto you hear in meetings in big corporations and bureaucracies – ‘If everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority’? Well, I began to feel that if the nude can be made to mean just about anything you want to, maybe it ends up meaning nothing at all.

According to the exhibition, nude bodies can represent:

  • the revival of classical learning – and yet also the portrayal of Christian heroes
  • the scientific study of anatomy – and yet also unscientific, medieval terrors
  • clarity and reason and harmony – and yet also the irrational fears of witches and devils
  • key moments in the Christian story – but also key moments in pagan myth
  • warnings against lust and promiscuity – but also incitements to lust and promiscuity
  • warnings against the effects of Time and old age – and celebrations of beautiful young men and women in their prime

Nakedness can be associated with Christ or… with witches. With the celebration of sexy, lithe young men… or with stern images of torture and sacrifice. With suffering martyrs… or with smirking satyrs tastefully hiding their erections.

In other words, by the end of the exhibition, I felt that nudity in fact has no special or particular meaning in Western art, even in the limited art of this period 1400 to 1530.

The opposite: by the end the exhibition has suggested that nudity had an explosion of meanings, a tremendous diversity of symbols and significances which artists could explore in multiple ways to the delight of their many-minded patrons, and which we are left to puzzle and ponder at our leisure. Nudity, in other words, could be made to mean almost anything an artist wanted it to.

When is a nude not a nude?

There is another, glaringly obvious point to be made, which is that a lot of the figures in the exhibition are not nudes.

  • The Bronzino Saint Sebastian is not nude, he is wearing a cloak which obscures his loins.
  • Christ is always shown wearing a loincloth, never naked.
  • Adam and Eve are held up as examples of the nude but they are, of course, almost never depicted nude but, as in the Dürer woodcut, wearing strategically placed loincloths. 
  • None of the figures in Dirk Bouts’s Way to Paradise is actually nude.
  • In fact one of the several medieval illustrations of Bathsheba shows her fully dressed except that she’s pulled up her dress a bit to reveal some of her thighs. That’s not nude.

So I became, as I worked my way round, a little puzzled as to how you can have an exhibition titled The Renaissance Nude in which quite a few of the figures are not, in fact… nude.

The more you look, the more you realise that something much more subtle is going on in the interplay between fully dressed, partially dressed and completely naked figures, and I felt the full complexities of the interrelationships between total nudity and the various forms of dress and bodily covering to be found in the pictures wasn’t really touched on or investigated as much as it could have been.

Take the Perugino painting, The Combat Of Love And Chastity. I count sixteen figures in the foreground (not counting the irritating cupids). Of these sixteen no fewer than eight are fully dressed, two are partially dressed and only six are nude. So this is not a study in the naked human body. It is a far more subtle study of the interplay between dressed, partially dressed, and fully nude figures, each of these statuses drenched in complex meanings and symbolism.

Again, I wondered whether the curators’ modish obsession with sensuality and desire and ‘the erotic’, and their requirement to assert that this period saw The Rise of the Daring Naughty Nude as a genre, has blinded them to other, far more subtle and interesting interplays between nudity and clothing, which are going on in many of these works.

Summary

This is a fascinating dance around the multiple meanings of nakedness and (near) nudity in Renaissance iconography, and a deeply rewarding immersion in the proliferation of new techniques and new belief systems which characterised the period 1400 to 1530.

But, in the end, as always, the visitor and viewer is left to dwell on with what they like and what they don’t like.

For me, the Renaissance marked a tragic break with the gloriously detailed and eco-friendly world-view of the high Middle Ages, a world (in its iconography) which often achieved a lovely delicacy and innocence.

This late-medieval world is represented in the exhibition by the works by Memling and Bouts which I’ve mentioned, but also by a clutch of exquisite, tiny, illuminated illustrations from a number of medieval books of hours which, we learn, continued to be made and illuminated well into the period of the High Renaissance (around 1500).

So I marvelled, as I am supposed to, at the skill of Bronzino and his sexy Saint Sebastian, at the subtle use of shadow to model the face and torso, at the way the artist shows off his ability to paint the complex folds of the red cloak which sets off the young man’s sexy, hairless chest, and so on.

But I got more genuine pleasure from studying the tiny illuminations in these books of hours, including this wonderful image by Jean Bourdichon, showing the Biblical figure of Bathsheba having her famous bath (in the Bible story she is ‘accidentally’ seen by King David who proceeds to take her to bed).

Yes but note the details – the apples on the tree in the centre and the cherries (?) on the tree on the right. And the flowers on the hedge of bushes across the middle, and the careful detailing of the lattice-work fence. The filigree work of the cloth hanging out the window where King David appears. And the shimmering gold of Bathsheba’s long, finely-detailed tresses as they fall down her back.

‘Bathsheba Bathing’ from the Hours of Louis XII by Jean Bourdichon (1498) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Compare and contrast the modesty and sweetness of Bourdichon’s image with the big, grandiose, heavy, dark and foreboding symbolism of a classic Italianate Renaissance painting like this one.

Allegory of Fortune by Dosso Dossi (c. 1530) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

The final room is dominated by this enormous painting by Dosso Dossi, the kind of sombre, portentous allegory you could, by the mid-1500s, order by the yard from any number of artists’ workshops, the kind of thing you can nowadays find cluttering up the walls of countless stately homes all across England, helping to make dark, wood-panelled rooms seem ever darker. I find this kind of thing heavy, stuffy, pretentious, dark and dull. The triumph of soulless perfectionism.

But that’s just my personal taste. You may well disagree. Go and see this fabulous exhibition – it is packed with wonders – and decide for yourself.

Curators

The exhibition is curated by Thomas Kren, Senior Curator Emeritus at the J. Paul Getty Museum, in collaboration with Per Rumberg, Curator at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Related links

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Posted by Simon on April 25, 2019

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Elizabethan Treasures @ the National Portrait Gallery

This exhibition transports us back into the Elizabethan Age, the age of Shakespeare and Spenser, of pointy beards and intricate ruffs, to the soundtrack of exquisite lute music.

Lute music was one of the art forms Elizabethan England was recognised for across the Continent, its chief exponent, John Dowland, being poached by the king of Denmark to entertain his court in 1598.

The other art form which flourished in Elizabethan England was the very distinctive one of portrait miniatures, brought to a peak of perfection by two specialists, Nicholas Hilliard (1547? – 1619) and French-born Isaac Oliver (c.1565 – 1617).

This exhibition – Elizabethan Treasures: Miniatures by Hilliard and Oliver – brings together some 85 masterpieces by both men, making it the first major exhibition of Tudor and Jacobean portrait miniatures to be held in the UK for over 35 years. And what a delight it is!

Sir Walter Ralegh (Raleigh) by Nicholas Hilliard c. 1585 © National Portrait Gallery, London

Sir Walter Ralegh (Raleigh) by Nicholas Hilliard c. 1585 © National Portrait Gallery

These miniature portraits were termed ‘limnings’ at the time, the intricate detailing of their style deriving, ultimately, from medieval manuscript illumination, but the shape and format clearly owing something to the artwork for coins and medals.

Miniatures were prized by monarchs, courtiers and the rising middle classes as a way of demonstrating favour, showing loyalty and expressing close relationships. They could be set into ornate jewelled cases or worn around the neck, could be pinned to clothing or secretly concealed as part of elaborate processes of friendship, love, patronage and diplomacy.

Variety

Having studied the literature of the Elizabethan period, and being a fan of lute music, I thought I knew what to expect – 60 or 70 exquisitely painted miniature portraits – but the most surprising thing about the exhibition is the variety of works it includes (miniatures, oil paintings, sketches, coins, manuscripts) and the presentation and context surrounding the portraits, which make it feel much more like an immersion in the broader culture and history of the time.

How to limn

For example, early on in the exhibition there is a display case showing the dozen or more implements which were required to create and paint miniatures, including a mortar and pestle to grind the colour, sea shells to mix the pigment with water or gum, the vellum surfaces the miniatures were painted onto, which were themselves worked flat using a paintbrush-style stick with a smooth tooth (!) at the end to create a super-smooth and even surface.

Above the case is a video showing every stage in the preparation and painting. Very informative.

Manuscript illumination

I was fascinated to be told that the tradition of these miniatures stems directly from manuscript illumination, and from the very finely drawn illustrations often found in later medieval manuscripts. To demonstrate how close the link was the exhibition includes a surviving manuscript, the charter marking the establishment of Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1583, illustrated by Nicholas Hilliard himself.

Queen Elizabeth

You expect the patrons of these fine artists to have been the richest people in the land, the Queen and her courtiers and there is, indeed, a section devoted to the images of Queen Elizabeth I produced by Hilliard and Oliver. Hilliard, the older man by 18 years, established a monopoly of producing her portraits in miniature. He went on to design seals and illuminated legal documents and medals for the Crown, and became a salaried royal employee in 1599.

To be honest I found the miniatures of Elizabeth on display here less striking than the many full-length portraits of her which exist (and can be seen upstairs at the National Portrait Gallery, for example the stunning ‘Ditchley’ portrait by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger). But I was struck by one very unexpected picture, an image from 1580 of Queen Elizabeth playing the lute. Do you think she took requests?

Elizabeth I Playing the Lute c. 1580 by Nicholas Hilliard

Elizabeth I playing the Lute c. 1580 by Nicholas Hilliard

Symbols and secrets

Elizabethan culture was packed with signs and symbols. Images and words had multiple meanings, some public and openly acknowledged, others to do with families, family trees and mottos and coats of arms, others deeply personal and private. The miniatures on display reveal a complicated combination of all three.

So, for example, much of the symbolism surrounding he Queen was straightforward enough, beginning with the Tudor rose symbolising her family lineage and including flowers or jewels which symbolised constancy and virtue. No surprises there.

But what are we to make of an image like this, of a young man, not wearing a ruff, with his doublet casually open, set against a backdrop of roaring flames?

Unknown man against a background of flames by Nicholas Hilliard (c.1600) © Victoria & Albert Museum

Unknown man against a background of flames by Nicholas Hilliard (c.1600) © Victoria and Albert Museum

The commentary says we can be confident that this symbolises ‘burning love’. Fair enough, but what comes over in the section devoted to symbolism, allegory and secret meanings is just how much we don’t know – just how much of the carefully worked symbolism in these paintings has been lost forever. Even of this image, the commentary is forced to speculate:

The man, dressed only in his undone shirt, holds a jewel. This is perhaps a miniature case containing an image of his love, who was presumably the intended recipient of this portrait.

Perhaps. Presumably. Next to it is a weird image of a young man clasping a hand apparently emerging from a cloud in the sky above.

Young Man holding a Hand From a Cloud by Nicholas Hiliard. Courtesy of Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Young Man holding a Hand From a Cloud by Nicholas Hiliard. Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Because the Latin inscription written either side of his head translates as ‘Because of Athenian love’ the commentary says that the whole image may imply male homosexual love, which was associated with ancient Greece. May. Despite the fact that sodomy was punishable by death under Elizabethan law, so you’d have thought it was not something you’d leave incriminating evidence about, let alone commission the Queen’s own artist to publicise.

Next to it is a portrait of an unknown man, whose meaning, the commentary records, ‘is now obscure, as the identity of the man and the context of the miniature are lost’.

My point being that encountering a steady succession of images of unknown men or unknown women, with obscure or ambiguous mottos, clasping jewels or flowers which presumably had some meaning for them – but reading time and again how their identities and meanings are now long lost – creates a cumulative sense of mystery and uncertainty. Which is all rather wonderful and charming.

The images are so fantastically precise and perfect – and yet their meanings escape us. In some ways that’s frustrating. But in others it’s rather liberating.

Leicester and Essex

One section brings out the age gap between the two artists by comparing their patrons.

Hilliard b.1547, was patronised by Robert Dudley the Earl of Leicester (1532 to 1588), Elizabeth’s favourite in the early part of her reign. Hilliard’s portrait of Leicester from 1576 was one of my favourite three or four works from the show. What it lacks in strict anatomical accuracy, it more than makes up for in the tremendous sense of character and personality which it conveys. And, the closer you look, the more unbelievable the detailed painting of the great man’s fine white ruff becomes. This object is only about three inches in diameter. The fineness of the detailing is quite staggering.

Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, by Nicholas Hilliard, 1576

Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, by Nicholas Hilliard, 1576

By contrast, Oliver, born 18 years after Hilliard, in 1565, was taken up by the great court favourite of the second half of Elizabeth’s career, Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex. Oliver painted Essex, his friend the 3rd Earl of Southampton, and others in their circle including Southampton’s cousins, the Browne brothers, examples of which are here.

Full-length portraits

Expecting only to see face portraits, I was surprised to discover the exhibition included a whole section devoted to full-length portraits, mostly of a very particular type.

From the late 1580s, both Hilliard and Oliver, like other artists of their day, produced a number of portraits of men listlessly leaning, sitting or reclining in gardens, or in wilder landscapes. Common poses included the head resting on one hand or the arms crossed. These images would have been read by their contemporaries as depictions of the fashionable ‘complaint’ of Melancholy.

One of the most famous of these (possibly because I’ve seen it on the covers of half a dozen different book editions of Elizabethan sonnets and so forth) is Hilliard’s depiction of a noble youth, posed full length and leaning moodily against a tree.

Young Man Among Roses' by Nicholas Hilliard

Young Man Among Roses’ by Nicholas Hilliard (c.1588)

Obviously enough, the figure is surrounded by elaborately painted rose bushes alive with thorns. Presumably these represent the thorns and snares of earthly love and so – presumably – would have had a significant personal meaning for the subject and, presumably, commissioner of the work. But then the commentary points out:

The symbolism of the roses, combining beautiful flowers and sharp thorns, and the Latin motto, suggest that its subject is the pain associated with loyalty to someone who has fallen from favour. It has been suggested that the miniature depicts the young Earl of Essex pining for the loss of the queen’s favour, but the context of the poem from which the motto is taken suggests a political affiliation gone wrong.

As so often, we don’t know and so the entire image becomes a prompt for all kinds of pleasantly romantic speculation.

Oliver branches out

If I was slightly surprised by the full-length portraits, I was astonished when the exhibition went on into a section describing the artistic diversity of the younger man, Oliver, who was far more experimental than Hilliard.

For a start, Oliver tackled overtly religious subjects, something Hilliard doesn’t seem to have done, and we are shown a portrait of Christ he did.

Even more surprisingly, the painting is done using stippling i.e. there are no direct lines defining the image, the whole thing is built up solely through the application of brief impressions of paint. The result is that it looks completely unlike anything else in the show, and resembles more the large paintings of contemporary Italian Renaissance artists such as Correggio and Federico Barocci. Soft and blurry, unlike any other of the images here.

Jesus Christ by Isaac Oliver (1610)

Jesus Christ by Isaac Oliver (1610)

Also distinctive to Oliver was sketching and drawing. The exhibition shows two A4-size pencil drawings, one of the Lamentation over the Dead Christ. Maybe Oliver’s French origins connected him culturally to the European Catholic tradition. There are no religious paintings by Hilliard.

Most surprising of all is this large-scale work, sometimes titled An Allegory, sometimes A Party in the Open Air: An Allegory on Conjugal Love, by Oliver.

A Party in the Open Air: An Allegory on Conjugal Love by Isaac Oliver (1590-95) © National Gallery of Denmark

A Party in the Open Air: An Allegory on Conjugal Love by Isaac Oliver (1590 to 1595) © National Gallery of Denmark

As so often we are not completely sure, but experts think that this picture shows an allegory of virtuous and immoral love.

On the left, a soberly dressed group of middle-class women, accompanied by a man, walk through woodland. To the right, richly and colourfully dressed women, probably prostitutes, are gathered around a reclining man. Behind these figures a number of other couples embrace in the woodland, and three different types of hunting are taking place: hawking, boar-hunting and shooting ducks. The miniature displays Oliver’s extraordinary skill, at a relatively early stage in his career, in creating a complex, crowded scene, convincing spatial recession and a sense of movement.

Maybe. Perhaps.

James I

The Stuart royal family

A separate room explores aspects of the change which came over the arts when Elizabeth died in 1603 and was succeeded by James VI of Scotland, who was crowned James I of Britain. Unlike Elizabeth, James was married with children and thus the need for accurate portraits was greatly multiplied, and they were of a different type. While Elizabeth had to appear stern and aloof, many of the Stuart portraits feel softer and more intimate, as if to be shared among an extended family circle.

While James continued to patronise ‘our well-beloved servant Nicholas Hillyard’, in 1605 the more artistically adventurous queen consort Anne of Denmark appointed Isaac Oliver her ‘Painter for the art of limning’ for the same salary as Hilliard, £40 a year.

The result is a series of miniatures of king, queen and their three children, Henry, Prince of Wales, Princess Elizabeth and Charles, Duke of York. The exhibition shows us portraits by Hilliard and Oliver of the same royals, allowing us to compare their styles.

Anne of Denmark by Isaac Oliver, c. 1612 © National Portrait Gallery, London

Anne of Denmark by Isaac Oliver, c. 1612 © National Portrait Gallery

Maybe I was subliminally influenced by the extraordinary ‘softness’ of the Jesus portrait, but I thought I detected a general softening of outlines in these Stuart portraits, especially by Oliver.

The level of detail – the hair styling, ruffs and jewels – is the same as the Elizabethan portraits but – maybe it was just me, but – I thought somehow the overall effect of the images was less sharp and precise and, somehow, more gentle.

One thing which definitely changes is the use of red velvet curtains as a background. The Elizabethan images tended to be set against an abstract colour wash, often blue. Now the royals are standing in front of a luxurious red backdrop implying wealth and grandeur of a more baroque and continental style.

Masques

James’s court saw the rise in popularity of masques, elaborate entertainments expensively staged with generally allegorical or classical subjects, words provided by the poet laureate Ben Jonson and sets and costumes by Inigo Jones. Masques were:

hugely expensive and elaborate court entertainments involving music, dance, poetry and sometimes prose. They were performed by courtiers and members of the royal family. Some took place in the Inns of Court and at courtiers’ homes, but the most spectacular were staged at royal palaces, and involved magnificent costumes and sets.

Some historians I’ve read detect in the popularity of masques among the royal court, a movement away from the sunlit, open-air progressions, tournaments and hunts favoured by Queen Elizabeth. The old queen spent a lot of time travelling round the country, imposing on her aristocratic hosts and asking for large entertainments to be staged, in order to make herself known to her subjects and celebrated as the nexus of national power.

In sharp contrast the masque was a form of entertainment which was held indoors, often at night amid candlelight, and was highly exclusive, restricted to close courtly circles.

Puritans, the more radically Protestant wing of the Church of England, saw in these masques and in their pagan, classical subject matter, a form of blasphemy. The way they were held in private gave rise to dark rumours of immorality, an accusation supported by one of the miniatures here, a portrait of an aristocratic lady dressed as the Roman goddess Flora and wearing a surprisingly diaphanous blouse.

Portrait of a lady, masqued as Flora by Isaac Oliver

Portrait of a lady, masqued as Flora by Isaac Oliver

Take a magnifying glass

A contemporary wrote of these miniatures that ‘the art of the master and the imitation of nature are so great… that the largest magnifying glass only calls out new beauties’ and he raises an important point.

Almost all the works on display in this exhibition are very, very small.

Luckily (vitally), the National Portrait Gallery is handing out free magnifying glasses for visitors (you hand them back at the end) and I found I had to combine the magnifying glass and my own glasses to get a really clear, close-up, in-focus view of each picture.

Summary

This is an absorbing and fascinating exhibition. Being forced to look so very closely at the faces and the finely written mottos, and the astonishingly detailed ruffs and jewels and hairdos of so many of these figures, famous or anonymous, from royalty to dashing adventurers like Walter Raleigh, can’t help giving you the feeling you’re getting really close to these people, looking right into their eyes, rubbing right up against the mystery of their images and dress and symbols.

And when you guess at the meanings of the often unknown symbols, and wonder about the purposes of the pictures (as love tokens, gifts to spouses, favours from royalty or aristocratic patrons), you feel that you, too, are becoming part of the dance of meanings which wove in and out of late Elizabethan and early Stuart courtly culture. This is a wonderfully evocative and beautifully staged exhibition.

Sir Walter Ralegh (detail) by Nicholas Hilliard © National Portrait Gallery, London

Sir Walter Ralegh (detail) by Nicholas Hilliard © National Portrait Gallery

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by Simon on March 9, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, History
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Posted by Simon on March 9, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/03/09/elizabethan-treasures-national-portrait-gallery/

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