All posts tagged Brussels

King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild (1998) – part three

‘To gather rubber in the district… one must cut off hands, noses and ears.’
(Charles Lemaire, Belgian commissioner of the Equator District of the Congo Free State)

William Sheppard

Following his coverage of the black American Baptist minister George Washington Williams, who was appalled by what he witnessed in the Congo in 1890 and wrote an open letter of protest to the Belgian king, Leopold II, Hochschild goes on to describes the career of another black pioneer.

This is William Sheppard, a Baptist minister born in Virginia in 1865, who was sent by the Southern Baptists to the Free State, thus becoming the first black American missionary to the Congo. Hochschild emphasises that the church hierarchy ensured he was supervised every step of the way by a white superior, how it was the white man who actually met Leopold in Belgium while Shepherd was excluded, but how it was Shepherd who built up the mission on the river Kasai. Here he won the respect of the local BaKuba tribe whose language he was the only missionary to bother to learn, by his hard work and sympathetic understanding of their lives. They nicknamed him Mundéle Ndom, meaning ‘the black white man’.

Sheppard was the first Westerner to reach the Kuba capital, Ifuca, whose king usually ordered any outsider to be beheaded. But because he was black and spoke some BaKuba Sheppard was allowed to keep his head and stayed for four months, making detailed ethnographical records of their culture, art and religion (‘The Kuba are among Africa’s greatest artists,’ p.156). When he presented his findings to the Royal Geographic Society in London he was made a fellow, and back in the states presented the President with Kuba artefacts.

(Hochschild also mentions the spangling fact that Shepherd’s arrival at the mouth of the Congo coincided exactly with that of Joseph Conrad who was taking up the position of steamboat captain, and that Shepherd’s diary contains numerous references to the gentlemanly bearing of the exiled Pole who he spent some weeks with (p.154).)

Leopold’s grand plans

Leopold had impractically megalomaniac ambitions. He dreamed of linking his Congo possessions with the upper Nile and leasing Uganda from the British, both ideas gently rejected by Prime Minister Gladstone. He suggested raising a Congolese army to protect the Armenians who were being massacred by the Turks. When there was disturbance in Crete he offered Congolese troops as peacekeepers. His cousin, Queen Victoria’ thought Leopold was becoming delusional (p.168). But about one thing he was never deluded: maximising profit from his personal fiefdom in the Congo.

The rubber terror

‘Botofé bo le iwa!’, meaning ‘Rubber is Death!’ — Congo Proverb

Initially Leopold wanted to colonise the Congo because of ivory. As Frank McLynn makes clear in his chapter on the subject in Hearts of Darkness, ivory was the most valuable product of central Africa next to slaves, and the two trades were inextricably intertwined. Arab slavers destroyed native villages not only to enslave their women (killing most of the men) but also to loot the reserves of ivory many villages held, and use the newly acquired slaves to carry the plundered ivory the hundreds of miles to the coast.

It was the invention of the pneumatic tyre by John Dunlop, who set up the company of the same name in 1890, which made bicycling significantly more comfortable than before, which led to the outbreak of the ‘bicycling craze’ and which then led to a sudden spike in demand for rubber, that Leopold realised he was sitting on a goldmine, and that the farming of rubber from the huge rubber vines which twined up trees in the tropical rainforest almost overnight became a very profitable business (p.158). The West’s appetite for rubber grew for use not only in pneumatic tyres for bicycles and then cars, but for a myriad other uses, for example as insulation on electrical cabling which was undergoing an explosion of use around the world.

It is about this point, exactly half way through the book, and after a fair amount of relatively ‘ordinary’ historical and biographical stuff about Leopold and Stanley and so on, that the text takes a very dark turn and the reader is now plunged into the world of disgusting terror, massacre and mutilation created by the authorities who ran Leopold’s Congo Free State.

Force Publique officials were ordered to fulfil rubber quotas. They did this by kidnapping wives or children of villagers and threatening to mutilate or kill their hostages unless villagers handed in the correct and very onerous quotas of rubber. Natives who resisted were beaten, tortured, mutilated and murdered, had their families held hostage, their wives and daughters raped, or their houses and villages burned. If villages failed to fulfil the quota or showed any resistance, they were burned to the ground. The British traveller Ewart S. Grogan, crossing northeastern Congo, wrote: ‘Every village has been burned to the ground, and as I fled from the country I saw skeletons, skeletons everywhere’ (p.230). The Belgians turned Congo into a charnel house.

Most of the food the locals grew was confiscated by European officials leading to poor diet or starvation in many areas. State official Léon Féviez explained to a visiting official that when the local village didn’t supply enough fish and manioc to feed his troops he had a hundred of them beheaded. After that the villagers supplied sufficient food alright, even at the cost of themselves starving (p.166).

The incursions of black troops from one area into another spread diseases many had never previously been exposed to. Smallpox was carried from the coast where it was endemic, inland to populations who had no resistance to it. Worse was sleeping sickness, which is estimated to have killed half a million Congolese in 1901 alone (p.231).

The net effect of all these factors was a collapse in population. Missionaries and travellers through the Congo spoke again and again of entire regions laid waste and depopulated.

Hochschild singles out four factors and then gives copious evidence for each of them, being:

  • Murder
  • Starvation, exhaustion and exposure
  • Disease
  • Plummeting birth rate

The Reverend A.E. Scrivener was just one of many eye witnesses:

Lying about in the grass within a few yards of the house I was occupying were a number of human bones, in some cases complete skeletons. I counted 36 skulls, and saw many sets of bones from which the skull was missing. I called some of the men and asked the meaning of it. ‘When the rubber palaver began,’ said one, ‘the soldiers shot so many we grew tired of burying, and very often we were not allowed to bury and so just dragged the bodies out into the grass and left them.’

There was no census before Leopold’s murderous regime began but the best estimate is that 10 million Congolese lost their lives. This is based on the fact that in areas where population was known, it fell by a half between 1890 and 1910. Since the first detailed population estimate, in 1924, estimated the current population at around ten million, and most experts estimated that it was half the original number, that gives you some 10 million victims of Leopold’s regime, directly murdered or killed by overwork, famine or disease. (In fact at the end of the book, Hochschild devotes a passage to the estimates of modern demographers, who also agree with the 10 million figure.) More, in other words, than the Nazi Holocaust.

Chopping off Africans’ hands

Hands were used as proof that villages had been punished for failing to fulfil their quotas or rebelling. Force Publique soldiers had to prove that every bullet they were issued with was used to kill a villager (and not going off on hunting expeditions) by bringing in a hand for every bullet fired. Hands became a form of proof of discipline. Many soldiers couldn’t be bothered to wait for all the rubber to be counted and just hacked off a few hands at random to impress their superiors with how zealous they were.

But cutting off hands was also a form of punishment and incentive. Hostages – women and children –had their hands cut off unless their menfolk brought in the required quota of rubber. Some villagers, in desperation, instead of slicing a rubber vine and patiently waiting for the drops of sap to ooze out of it, were so panic-stricken that they cut down the entire vine and squeezed every drop of rubber out of it. This killed the vine rendering it unavailable for future use and so in turn was punished by the authorities, in the form which was now becoming universal – the men or their womenfolk or children having their hands cut off. Hochschild quotes scores of officials and soldiers who boasted about how many hands they collected per day.

‘Many fled and some were mutilated. I myself saw a man at Likange who had had both his hands cut off. Sometimes they cut them at the wrist, sometimes farther up . . . with a machete.’

In some military units there was a job, ‘keeper of the hands’ (p.165). Some units smoked severed hands over fires in order to keep them as decorations to hang on poles or over doors as a constant reminder to the locals of what even the slightest infringement would trigger.

Bestand:MutilatedChildrenFromCongo.jpg - Wikipedia

Mutilated Congolese children and adults. Photos taken between 1900 and 1905 by the English missionary Alice Seeley Harris

Hochschild brings out how atrocity acquires a momentum of its own. As in the Nazi genocide or the Soviet labour camps, cruelty and sadism, once permitted, become endemic. Thus René de Permentier, a Force Publique officer in the Equator district, had all the trees and bushes around his house cut down so he could use passing Africans as target practice for his rifle. If he found so much as a stray leaf in the courtyard swept by women prisoners he had one of them beheaded. If he found a forest path poorly maintained, he ordered a child in a local village executed. That kind of megalomaniac momentum.

Two Force Publique officers ordered a man hung by his feet and a fire lit underneath so he was cooked to death. Morel quoted a message from district commissioner Jules Jacques telling his underlings to warn the locals that if they cut down another vine he will exterminate them to the last man (quoted page 229). As the Reverend Scrivener testified:

A man bringing rather under the proper amount [of rubber to a collecting post], the white-man flies into a rage and seizing a rifle from one of the guards shoots him dead on the spot. Very rarely did rubber come but one or more were shot in that way at the door of the store.

There are hundreds of examples of this kind of psychopathic behaviour. Late in the book Hochschild says speakers of the Mongo language refer to the period as lokeli, the overwhelming (p.300).

Edmund Dene Morel

We know so much about the evil practices of Leopold’s state because of the obsessive work of one man, Edmund Dene Morel, who became a one-man international human rights dynamo.

In the late 1890s Morel was a relatively lowly clerk working for the Liverpool-based trading company Elder Dempster (p.177). He began travelling back and forth across the Channel as his company’s liaison with officials of the Congo Free State. Slowly he began to realise something was wrong. Hochschild attributes his revelation to three elements which he saw or, as a clerk handling the official paperwork for the cargoes, was able to calculate for himself while spending time at the State’s docks in Antwerp:

  1. He learned that huge amounts of arms and ammunition were being shipped to the Congo along with surprising amounts of chains and shackles. Why?
  2. The amount of ivory and rubber brought back by the ships greatly exceeded the amount stated on the manifests and paperwork. Someone was creaming off millions in profit. Who?
  3. Over 80% of the goods being shipped to the Congo were remote from trade purposes. In other words, a huge amount of goods were being brought out but very little was going in to pay for them. So how was this wealth of ivory and rubber being generated. Dene realised there could be only one explanation: slave labour.

‘These figures told their own story…Forced labour of a terrible and continuous kind could alone explain such unheard-of profits…forced labour in which the Congo government was the immediate beneficiary; forced labour directed by the closest associates of the king.’ (Morel, quoted page 180)

He called it: ‘the most gigantic fraud and wickedness that our generation has known’ (p.206).

Morel made his fears known to his superiors who told him to keep quiet. The Free State was a major client of Elder Dempster’s. They tried to coerce him into keeping silent. The company offered him a pay rise, then the role of highly paid consultant. Free State officials in Brussels stopped talking to him. He refused all bribes and insisted on speaking out.

Eventually, in 1901, Morel quit Elder Dempster and, after pondering what to do, set up a newspaper, the West Africa Mail in 1903, backed by philanthropic sponsors. It consisted of Morel’s articles, letters from missionaries, maps, cartoons, and pictures. Morel didn’t hold back:

‘Blood is smeared all over the Congo State, its history is blood-stained, its deeds are bloody, the edifice it has reared is cemented in blood—the blood of unfortunate negroes, spilled freely with the most sordid of all motives, monetary gain.’

Morel intended the West Africa Mail to publish everything he knew about the Congo and encouraged all-comers to send him their reports about ‘the shootings, shackles, beheadings, mutilations and kidnappings of a slave labour system’ they witnessed – and they did, in increasing numbers (p.270).

Morel tapped into the resources of existing anti-slavery organisations, namely the Anti-Slavery Society and the Aborigenes Protection Society, as well as roping in influential figures such as the politician Sir Charles Dilke and the author Mary Kingsley. He became a writing phenomenon, working 16 or even 18 hours a day to produce books, speeches, articles and pamphlets about the Congo (p.209). In the first six months of 1906 alone, he wrote 3,700 letters (p.214).

Morel requested information from all and any sources, and developed a remarkable knack for getting inside information from all kinds of people, not only missionaries and travellers in the region, but dissident military officers such as Raymond de Grez, who secretly fed him reports and statistics for many years, as well as people involved in the various shipping companies and testimony from their agents in-country, such as the American business agent Edgar Canisius (p.192).

The more Morel’s reputation grew as the doughty opponent of the evil being perpetrated in the Congo, the more people knew he was the man to slip confidential information (p.188).

It snowballed into a vast publicity campaign, featuring hundreds of public meetings, thousands of letters, he received thousands of letters full of facts and figures which Morel was then able to use in his articles or feed to sympathetic journalists and politicians.

With the aid of the charities and sympathetic politicians Morel secured a debate in the House of Commons which was held on 20 May 1903. At its conclusion the British Parliament passed a resolution to allow the British government to negotiate with the other Great Powers over the matter, avowing that the native Congolese ‘should be governed with humanity’ and, incidentally, noting that ‘great gratitude was due’ to Morel for creating public awareness (p.194). It was a truly impressive achievement. As Hochschild summarises:

Almost never has one man, possessed of no wealth, title of government post, caused so much trouble for the governments of several major countries. (p.209)

Pamphlets were followed by excoriating books, namely:

  • Affairs of West Africa (1902)
  • The British Case in French Congo (1903)
  • King Leopold’s Rule in Africa (1904)
  • Red Rubber – The story of the rubber slave trade that flourished in Congo in the year of grace 1906 (1906)
  • Great Britain and the Congo: the Pillage of the Congo Basin

When I read the title of Red Rubber I immediately saw the link with the campaign against ‘blood diamonds’ originating in Africa under war-torn or oppressive conditions from much the same region of Africa, in our own time.

Roger Casement

The Parliamentary debate directly affected another major figure. Parliament set up a commission to investigate the accusations and ordered the British consul to the Congo, Roger Casement, to go in-country to find out more.

Casement evaded the beady eye of Leopold’s officials, paid his own way and independently interviewed missionaries, natives, riverboat captains, and railroad workers. He then wrote up and submitted to Parliament a report containing 39 pages of testimony and a 23-page index of facts, what has been called ‘the most damning exposure ever of exploitation in Africa’. Morel published the ‘Casement Report’ in full in the West Africa Mail and it was picked up and syndicated around the world.

Hochschild devotes a chapter to Casement who is a fascinating figure in his own right, not least because of his principled but ill-fated support for Irish independence a decade later. (Unfortunately, no modern biographer can abstain from prying into the sex lives of their subject, and so we learn quite a lot about the fact that Casement was gay and kept a detailed log of his sexual encounters wherever he went, with Europeans or Africans. Great – and utterly beside the point.)

When they met they instantly clicked. Both respected each other’s fierce integrity and utter devotion to exposing the evil of Leopold’s regime. Casement was a government employee and so had to go where his superiors sent him, but they kept in touch and he offered Morel important confirmation and moral support, becoming a vital colleague and sounding board for Morel’s campaigns. Morel nicknamed him the Tiger; Casement called Morel the Bulldog (p.207). Chaps.

Congo Reform Association (CRA)

Casement and Morel met again, in Dublin, and agreed that it needed more than a newspaper to bring about the change needed. Casement convinced Morel they needed to set up an organisation and so in November 1903 Dene announced the establishment of the Congo Reform Association (CRA) with a founding manifesto filled with names of the great and good and calling for ‘just and humane treatment of the inhabitants of the Congo State, and restoration of the rights to the land and of their individual freedom’.

An American branch was quickly set up which garnered support from such notables as Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. Twain was motivated to write a pamphlet, King Leopold’s Soliloquy: A defence of his Congo rule, in 1905, a satirical portrayal of Leopold as a self-pitying old man rambling on, making feeble excuses for the blood on his hands:

‘They burst out and call me “the king with ten million murders on his soul”.’

(It’s interesting that, even at this early point, the figure of 10 million dead was widely accepted. It’s a suspiciously round figure, isn’t it, but one Hochschild backs up with expert testimony at the end of his book)

Illustration from King Leopold’s Soliloquy by Mark Twain (1905)

Arthur Conan Doyle was inspired by his indignation to write The Crime of the Congo in 1908, while Joseph Conrad, in addition to the world famous novella about Leopold’s Congo, Heart of Darkness, co-wrote a novel with Ford Madox Ford, The Inheritors, which contains a devastating parody of Leopold’s greed and mendaciousness and personal oddities (p.257).

In 1904 Morel visited America, meeting with the President and members of Congress, before addressing large audiences around the nation. It took a while for the American campaign to gain traction, but in 1906 public pressure forced Congress to take a stand against Leopold and demand an end to the Congo Free State.

Alice Seeley Harris

Wife of the Reverend John Harris and a Baptist missionary in her own right, it was Alice Seeley Harris who took most of the photos of mutilated Africans which Morel distributed so widely and had such a devastating effect.

The couple had witnessed at first hand numerous atrocities, joined the Congo Reform Association and threw themselves into public activity. One or other of them made over 600 speeches in their first two years with the CRA, displaying implements like the shackles used to chain Congolese and the feared chicotte or whip made of hippopotamus hide, which was used to punish Africans who failed to meet their quotas and sometimes whip them to death (pages 120 and 216). Eventually John and Alice’s activism led to them running the newly combined Anti-Slavery and Aborigenes Protection Society (p.273).

Herbert Strang

The impact of the campaign spread far and wide. Hochschild mentions a British boys’ adventure writer, Herbert Strang, who wrote an adventure story set in the beastly Congo where a stout-hearted English teenager saves the day, titled Samba: A Story of the Rubber Slaves of the Congo. The preface he wrote to his novel is long but gives a fascinating insight into how the issue was seen at the time (1908).

Nearly a generation has passed since King Leopold was entrusted by the great Powers with the sovereignty of the Congo Free State. The conscience of Christendom had been shocked by the stories, brought back by Stanley and other travellers, of Arab slave raids on the Upper Congo; King Leopold, coming forward with the strongest assurances of philanthropic motive, was welcomed as the champion of the negro, who should bring peace and the highest blessings of civilization to the vast territory thus placed under his sway. For many succeeding years it was supposed that this work of deliverance, of regeneration, was being prosecuted with all diligence; the power of the slave traders was broken, towns were built, roads made, railways opened—none of the outward signs of material progress were wanting.

But of late the civilized world has been horrified to find that this imposing structure has been cemented with the life blood of the Congo races; that the material improvements to which the administrators of Congoland can point, have been purchased by an appalling amount of suffering inflicted upon the hapless negroes. The collection of rubber, on which the whole fabric of Congo finance rests, involves a disregard of liberty, an indifference to suffering, a destruction of human life, almost inconceivable. Those who best know the country estimate that the population is annually reduced, under King Leopold’s rule, by at least a hundred thousand. No great war, no famine, no pestilence in the world’s history has been so merciless a scourge as civilization in Congoland.

Yet owing to mutual jealousies, the Powers are slow to take action, and while they hesitate to intervene, the population of this great region, nearly as large as Europe, is fast disappearing.

It has been my aim in this book to show, within necessary limitations, what the effect of the white man’s rule has been.

If any reader should be tempted to imagine that the picture here drawn is overcoloured, I would commend him to the publications issued by Mr E. D. Morel and his co-workers of the Congo Reform Association, with every confidence that the cause of the Congo native will thereby gain a new adherent.

I must express my very great thanks to the Rev. J. H. Harris and Mrs. Harris, who have spent several years on the Upper Congo, for their kindness in reading the manuscript and revising the proofs of this book, and for many most helpful suggestions and criticisms.

By this point the atrocities were so widely known that Leopold had become associated with severed hands and blood in large parts of the press. Countless caricatures in European and American magazines satirised him as a mass murderer, his hands or beard dripping with blood while he hugged his sacks full of blood money (p.222).

Leopold II's Heart of Darkness, by David White | Open History Society

When Leopold’s second wife bore his second child, it was born with a withered hand and Punch magazine published a cartoon with the caption Vengeance from on high. Harsh but an indication of how universally he was despised.

What did Leopold spend his blood money on?

And how did Leopold spend the huge personal wealth he accrued from all this forced labour, slavery, murder and extortion? On grandiose building schemes and his teenage mistress.

1. Buildings

Leopold invested a huge amount of his blood money on buying, building or renovating grand properties. Wikipedia gives a handy summary of a subject which is spread across numerous passages in Hochschild’s book:

The public buildings were mainly in Brussels, Ostend and Antwerp, and include the Hippodrome Wellington racetrack, the Royal Galleries and Maria Hendrikapark in Ostend; the Royal Museum for Central Africa and its surrounding park in Tervuren; the Cinquantenaire park, triumphal arch and complex, and the Duden Park in Brussels, and the 1895–1905 Antwerpen-Centraal railway station.

In addition to his public works, Leopold acquired and built numerous private properties for himself inside and outside Belgium. He expanded the grounds of the Royal Castle of Laeken [one of Europe’s most luxurious royal homes] and built the Royal Greenhouses, the Japanese Tower and the Chinese Pavilion near the palace. In the Ardennes his domains consisted of 6,700 hectares (17,000 acres) of forests and agricultural lands and the châteaux of Ardenne, Ciergnon, Fenffe, Villers-sur-Lesse and Ferage. He also built important country estates on the French Riviera, including the Villa des Cèdres and its botanical garden and the Villa Leopolda.

(In a picquant footnote, Hochschild tells us that one of Leopold’s many villas on the Cote d’Azur was  subsequently bought by the English writer, Somerset Maugham, p.276.)

Hochschild contrasts these extravagant building projects with the many, many, many African homes and villages and entire regions which his officers laid waste and burned to the ground.

2. Caroline Lacroix

Leopold had married Marie Henriette of Austria, a cousin of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria and grand-daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II, on 22 August 1853 in Brussels. She was popular with the Belgians, was an artist and accomplished horsewoman, and the marriage produced four children. However, the couple became estranged and ended up living apart, Marie settling in the town of Spa where she lived till her death in 1902.

Meanwhile, Hochschild tells us, Leopold became a regular customer at high class brothels which specialised in young and very young girls, preferably virgins. Still, it comes as a bit of a surprise when Hochschild tells us that in 1899, in his 65th year, Leopold took as a mistress Caroline Lacroix, a 16-year-old French prostitute, and that they were to stay together for the next decade until his death.

It was on Caroline that a lot of the blood money from the Congo was lavished, in the form of cash, bonds raised against the Congo Free State government, castles and villas and dresses and makeup and holidays. Throughout this period they were unmarried, so Caroline was in effect his teenage mistress and became unpopular with the Belgian public and made Leopold even more of a figure of fun and contempt among international critics and cartoonists.

File:Your Majesty! at your age....jpg - Wikipedia

The priest is saying: ‘O sire! At your age!’ to which Leopold replies: ‘You should try it yourself!’

Leopold finally married Caroline in a Catholic ceremony just five days before his death, on 17 December 1909, aged 74. He left her a huge fortune but their failure to perform a civil ceremony rendered the marriage invalid under Belgian law and the Belgian government tried its best to seize all the king’s assets and fortune, giving rise to a jamboree for lawyers. Despite legal wrangles it is likely that she managed to spirit away $7 million, maybe more.

The Vatican recognised their wedding though, and Catholic priests were with him till the end. It is nauseating to read how the Catholic church stayed staunchly loyal to Leopold despite the most disgusting revelations, whereas a large number of the truth-tellers and reports were Protestant missionaries. A classic example of the stark contrast between the generally servile subservience of Catholic officials and the outspoken truth-telling of Protestant clerics, especially of non-conformists such as Baptists and the ever-principled Quakers. (You should read Hochschild’s wonderful account of the campaign to abolish slavery to be moved to tears by the hard work of the non-conformists and especially the Quakers in devoting their entire lives to ending slavery.)

When Leopold first heard about her, Caroline had been the mistress and sometime prostitute of Antoine-Emmanuel Durrieux, a former officer in the French army. It is somehow pleasing to learn that she tried to keep up a surreptitious relationship with Durrieux throughout her time with Leopold and that, seven months after the old monster died, she married Durrieux. Ah. True love.

In 1937 she published her memoirs, A Commoner Married a King: As Told by Baroness De Vaughan to Paul Faure. It is a classic example of the logocentrism of the West, in the sense that the doctored and sentimental memoirs of a royal prostitute are preserved for all time for scholars to pore over, analyse and re-analyse, while the lives and experiences of the ten million or so Congolese murdered, mutilated and starved to death – apart from a handful of testimonies recorded in the Casement Report and a few other public enquiries – are nowhere, nothing, vanished as if they had never been.

Leopold’s death and the end of the Congo Free State

The real question, reading all this horror, is why, despite widespread knowledge of the appalling atrocities, little or no steps were taken against him and nothing changed for so long. Leopold’s personal rule over his Congo Free State lasted 23 years, from 1885 to 1908.

The decisive step was getting the US government to switch its policy from indifference to Congo to active hostility, and this coincided with a massive newspaper revelation about the extent of Leopold’s behind-the-scenes bribery and manipulation of US government ministers, agencies and media.

The American change of heart crystallised with the hostility of the British government and, indeed, of a decisive majority in the Belgian government itself, and in Belgian popular opinion, to make Leopold realise the game was up and he agreed to hand over the running of the Congo Free State to the Belgian government so that it could become a ‘proper’ colony, subject to scrutiny in the press and by third parties.

Still, the canny old miser and manipulator insisted on selling the Congo to the Belgian government and drove a very hard bargain, emerging tens of millions of francs better off. In the end a compromise was reached whereby Leopold was paid $10 million and a further $9 million was assigned to his various grandiose vanity projects across Belgium as ‘compensation’ for losses which in reality he had never incurred.

And so, after months of wrangling, in November 1908 the Congo was handed over from Leopold’s personal control to the Belgian state (p.259). In August 1908 his closest officials spent a week non-stop burning all the official records of the Congo Free State, destroying all the evidence of malfeasance committed during his rule. Nonetheless, because of Morel and his many contributors, a sizeable amount of documentary evidence remained in the public domain.

As you might expect, conditions improved somewhat but most of the Belgian officials running the place stayed in post, the Force Publique didn’t even bother to change its name (p.271) and the basic economic imperatives – to maximise revenue from rubber – meant that, in practice, the living conditions of most Congolese continued to be wretched and brutalised. Thirteen months after handing over the Congo to the Belgian government, Leopold was dead, surely one of the most infamous brutes in recorded history.

Reluctantly, knowing that many abuses would continue to take place, Morel had to concede that, with the arch villain dead, many supporters of the CRA at home and abroad thought the job had been done and the fire had gone out of the campaign. In 1913 he held a last meeting of the Congo Reform Association then dissolved it. It had lasted from 1904 to 1913 and was, in Hochschild’s view, ‘the most important and sustained crusade of its sort between the Abolitionism of the early and middle nineteenth century and the worldwide boycott and embargo against apartheid-era South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s’ (p.277).

Arthur Conan Doyle, a late convert who became a very enthusiastic supporter of the cause, described the management of the Congo in his pamphlet The Crime of the Congo as ‘the greatest crime which has ever been committed in the history of the world’ (quoted on page 271).

The fact that there are statues and plaques in Belgium to this day commemorating Leopold for his humanitarian deeds and philanthropy is beyond grotesque.

The documentary

In 2006 a documentary was released, based on this book and with the same title, King Leopold’s Ghost, directed by Pippa Scott and narrated by Don Cheadle.

Credit

King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild was published by Mariner Books in 1998. All references are to the 2012 Pan paperback edition.

Africa-related reviews

History

Fictions set wholly or partly in Africa

Exhibitions about Africa

Leave a comment
by Simon on September 17, 2021  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, imperialism
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on September 17, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/09/17/king-leopolds-ghost-adam-hochschild-3/

Identity by Milan Kundera (1998)

This is a detailed summary of the plot of Identity by Milan Kundera. It aims to recreate the experience the reader has of only slowly discovering who it concerns and what it’s about and what happens, and also to recreate the continual sense of slight disorientation the book gives you – a feeling which snowballs in the second half, where the reader eventually realises that the book has actually crossed the line from ‘reality’ into ‘fantasy’, and is prompted to go back and try to figure out where it happened.

In other words, Identity is a clever, playful and deliberately teasing little book.

But it all starts very modestly with a middle-caged couple going to spend a weekend in a hotel in Normandy…

Chantal at the hotel

Jean-Marc and Chantal are going to spend the weekend at a small hotel on the Normandy coast. Chantal arrives first, freshens up and goes into the dining room. She overhears the waitresses discussing the disappearance of some rich person as described on a popular TV show Lost To Sight. She wonders how anyone can go missing in a world where every move is monitored by CCTV camera, where privacy is dying. She imagines losing Jean-Marc that way one day.

Jean-Marc visits an old friend

Meanwhile Jean-Marc has gone to Brussels to see an old school friend, F, because he is dying. They were close until he heard that F. refused to stand up for him in a meeting where he was universally attacked. At that point he completely cut F. out of his life. Looking down at F’s wasted body Jean-Marc realises how stupid that was. F. describes having an out-of-body experience.

F. describes some incident from their school days which Jean-Marc can’t remember. Suddenly it dawns on him that the purpose of friendship is to keep old memories alive.

Chantal and the daddies on the beach

After a bad night’s sleep troubled by a dream, Chantal walks down to the beach. On the way she observes fathers festooned with sacks and slings carrying babies and pushing prams. They have been daddified. On the beach she watches more dads flying enormous kites. She reflects that none of these absorbed men will turn and look at her, flirtatiously. Men don’t turn and stare at her any more 😦

Types of boredom

Jean-Marc has driven from Brussels to Normandy and parked at the hotel. He walks down to the beach, passing a girl wearing a Sony Walkman and half-heartedly jiggling her hips. Being a Kundera character he has to analyse and categorise everything, so he posits three kinds of boredom:

  1. passive boredom – the girl dancing and yawning
  2. active boredom – the men flying kites
  3. rebellious boredom – kids smashing up bus shelters

Down on the beach he comes across sand yachts being raced. Suddenly he sees one hurtling at high speed towards Chantal far out on the beach. He runs towards her trying to warn her. In the event, the sand yacht passes wide of her and, as he catches up with her, he realises it isn’t her at all.

Chantal is menaced in the café

This is because Chantal had got bored of the beach and gone up to a café complex perched on a cliff. It’s empty apart from a surly waiter and his mate, who deliberately intimidate her, turn up the rock music loud, block her way and threaten to prevent her from leaving. At the last minute they laughingly step aside so she can exit, her heart pounding with fear.

Men no longer turn to look at Chantal

Jean-Marc is appalled that he couldn’t tell his lover’s reality from a distance. He arrives back at the hotel and goes up to the room they’ve booked to find Chantal waiting. She is still in shock from the encounter in the café but she is also having a sustained hot flush. I surmise this is from the menopause, though Kundera doesn’t use the word; all we know is she is ashamed of feeling hot and perspiring. She tries to distract him by blaming her odd mood on the thought she had earlier – men no longer turn to stare at her.

Chantal’s work in advertising

A few hours later they’re at dinner, discussing her work in an advertising agency. She describes her two faces, the mocking one which thinks advertising is ridiculous, and the hard-faced professional one which has allowed her to succeed.

Now the company has got a brief to come up with adverts for a funeral parlour. This allows the characters to quote poems about Death, namely some lines from Baudelaire, as you do.

Chantal’s dead son

Talk of death makes her think of her son by her first husband, who died when he was just five. Her husband and his family told her to hurry up and have another one so that she would forget. This filled her with so much loathing that she vowed to divorce him and so a) she went back to work, not as a teacher as she had been but in advertising and b) as soon as she met Jean-Marc and was sure he was the one – she left her husband.

That night Jean-Marc has a dream in which Chantal appears to him vividly in every detail, except for her face. How do we know when someone is the person we love? If their face completely changed, would it still be the same person?

Existence and identity

By this stage (page 32) the reader has realised that the novel is a classic Kundera production, insofar as it is a prolonged meditation on a theme of existence, an aspect of the human condition. There’s no secret about it. The title broadcasts it. The theme is identity, what it is, and how fragile it is, how it can vanish and reappear from moment to moment in our quotidian lives.

Chantal in the bathroom, in the boardroom

The next morning Jean-Marc wakes up to find her already in the bathroom cleaning her teeth. For a moment he watches her unobserved being functional. Then she notices him and her whole body changes into the softness of love. They drive back to Paris and he drops her at work. Later, that evening, Jean-Marc arrives at Chantal’s advertising agency, and catches a glimpse of her being swift and professional with two colleagues and wonders at the change in her identity.

That morning, in the bathroom, he had recovered the being he’d lost during the night, and now, in the late afternoon, she was changing again before his eyes. (p.33)

By this stage, the reader realises the point of the book is just these fine distinctions, the way the two central characters, and the author, notice and analyse the myriad fine shifts in identity, from moment to moment, and across larger periods, during the change in their relationship.

Chantal’s fantasy about being a rose

When she was a girl Chantal had a fantasy about being as powerful and ubiquitous as a fragrance which would spread through the lives of men. But she was not by nature promiscuous and, as she’d grown older, had become more monogamous. So monogamous and devoted to Jean-Marc that she began to have feelings about her dead son where she was glad he was dead. Why? Because it meant her devotion to Jean-Marc, to her chosen one, was total.

The anonymous letter

One morning she receives an unsigned unmarked letter with the text: ‘I follow you around like a spy – you are beautiful, very beautiful’, which upsets her all day. Luckily, when she gets home, her letter is trumped by one from the hospital telling Jean-Marc that his old schoolfriend F. has died. This triggers a couple of pages on ‘the meaning of friendship’ i.e. to keep memories alive, memories being necessary for maintaining ‘the whole of the self’.

With typical morbid negativity, Kundera (well, his character) considers that friendship is dying and that modern friendship is merely ‘a contract of politeness (p.46).

Leroy, head of the advertising agency

CUT to a different type of scene and a new character, Leroy, who is supposed to be the whip-smart head of the advertising agency where Chantal works. Every week he does a presentation analysing a campaign which is in the media. Having worked in TV for 15 years I don’t recognise anything Kundera describes about TV, his version is far more casual and chaotic than the well-organised, budgeted and crewed TV productions I worked on. Similarly, I don’t believe this portrayal of an advertising agency. The character Leroy instead comes over as a sexed-up university lecturer, a type Kundera was familiar with since he was an academic for decades. The ‘analysis’ Leroy gives is about sex sex sex – the humanities lecturer’s favourite subject and not, as the advertising and marketing people I’ve met, about ratings, audience segments, personas channels and ratings. Leroy doesn’t sound anything like an advertising exec. He sounds like a film studies lecturer:

‘The issue is to find the images that keep up the erotic appeal without intensifying the frustrations. That’s what interests us in this sequence: the sensual imagination is titillated, but then it’s immediately deflected into the maternal realm.’ (p.50)

He goes on to tell his staff that new film footage shows the foetus in the womb sucking its own willy, fellating itself. Can you imagine a modern advertising executive playfully mentioning that in a presentation about a new campaign? No.

The self-fellating foetus

Amazingly, at the end of the day, when she climbs the stairs to the accompaniment of loud banging and drilling (because the lift is out of order), and in a menopausal flush, the self-fellating foetus is what she chooses to tell Jean-Marc about. Which prompts his clever-clever thought that the foetus feels a sexual impulse before it can even think of pleasure.

So our sexuality precedes our self-awareness. (p.53)

Modern society spies on everyone

But she has a different take on it. Chantal is appalled that even in the womb, ‘they’ can spy on you, that nowhere is safe nowadays from the prying eyes of the media, and she tells macabre stories of how they cut off Haydn’s head after his death to analyse his brain and various other famous clever people whose brains were experimented on after their deaths. Influenced by her hot flushes, she blurts out that only the crematorium, only being burned to ashes, means you will be finally, completely safe from them.

At the grave of her son

Next day she visits her son’s grave and talks to him. She realises that, if he still lived, she would have to have engaged herself with the horrible world and accepted all its stupidities. His death freed her to revolt against a world she hates, to be truly herself. She silently thanks her dead son for this gift.

The second anonymous letter

Chantal receives a second, longer anonymous letter, the author has been following her movements. It’s signed C.D.B. The reader reflects that this is another aspect of identity, where identity is withheld, the letter is from someone but a person with no name.

Jean-Marc remembers giving up medicine

Jean-Marc recalls his dead friend F. telling him about a boyhood memory he (F.) has of Jean-Marc, namely that at age 16 or so Jean-Marc was disgusted by the eye, by the eyelid sliding over the cornea. Jean-Marc went on to choose to study medicine aged 19, but after three years realised he couldn’t face blood and guts, the body, its decay and death.

The letter suggests she wears cardinal red

Chantal receives more letters, which are becoming more passionate, in a French way. The writer dreams of wrapping her in a red cardinal’s costume and laying her gently down on a red bed. So she buys a red nightdress, as you would do if an unknown man was writing you anonymous letters, and is wearing it when Jean-Marc comes home one day, and she sashays round him, seducing him, and so he ravishes her and, thinking of the letter, she climaxes. She shares the fantasy of wearing cardinal red in a crowd and, aroused a second time, he makes love to her again. I admire the rapid recovery time of his penis. Or is he just an empty cipher for the author’s psychological-erotic fantasies?

The obsession of all Kundera’s books with love-sex is wearing me down. There is so much more to life than love-sex.

Is the letter writer the young man in the café?

At first Chantal thinks the author of the letters is a moony young man who’s often in the local café. But one day she walks boldly almost up to him as he sits outside nursing a glass of wine, giving him ample time to at least smile, but he doesn’t register her existence at all.

Is the letter writer the beggar in the square?

Then she suspects it’s the incongruously well-dressed beggar who hangs about in their square, near the big lime tree. To test her theory she goes up to him and offers money into his outstretched hand, only at the last minute realising she doesn’t have any coins then, worse, that the only paper she has is the ludicrously large sum of 200 Francs. The beggar is flabbergasted and she realises it isn’t him.

Or is the letter writer Jean-Marc?

Then she begins to suspect it is Jean-Marc, specially when she realises that the pile of bras she’s been hiding the letters under has been riffled through, then carefully restored.

And indeed, on page 88 this suspicion is concerned as we flip over to Jean-Marc’s point of view, and are told why he wrote her an anonymous letter. It was to cheer her up when he saw she was depressed, after she had said that men no longer turn to look at her in the street i.e. she has become middle-aged and unattractive. That’s why he playfully signed the second one C.B.D. short for Cyrano de Bergerac, the lover who hid behind the mask of another. Soon he wrote another one, and soon he became hooked.

How writing the letters changes Jean-Marc’s view of himself and of Chantal

And as he did so, it created a different idea of Chantal in his mind. The fact that she has kept and hidden the letters from him, suggests she might countenance an affair with an anonymous letter writer. She is ready to be unfaithful.

For her part, Chantal has a whole fleet of complicated reactions (the point of a Kundera novel is to place the characters in a situation and then analyse their motives and reactions to the nth degree), the main one being the disturbing suspicion that Jean-Marc is trying to trap her. But why? Because he is going to dump her for a younger model.

The flush

Worth pausing to consider The Flush. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being a key incident was that, after turning up on his doorstep from her remote provincial town, Tereza a) made love with Tomas but then b) came down with a heavy flu fever. He was forced to nurse her back to health and during that nursing discovered all kinds of emotions within himself he didn’t know he had. That fever recurs again and again through the story, as the characters reassess its importance and consequences.

Kundera uses the same technique here with respect to Chantal’s hot flushes. The first time the couple met was at a conference at an Alpine hotel, where he was a ski instructor and invited along to mingle with the guests after a session. They were briefly introduced and made a little small-talk then went their ways. But the next evening he went back determined to find her again, and the moment she spotted him, she flushed crimson all across her chest and breasts. That flush decided their love, for both of them.

Now she is flushing again, although it is due to the menopause, her physiology confusing, or sending confusing signals, over the terrain and memory of that initial, primal flush. This is a key element of a Kundera narrative, repetition with variations, variations of interpretation.

Back to the narrative

Jean-Marc is sad because by creating a simulacrum of a lover, he has conjured into being a simulacrum of Chantal. And if Chantal is not real, but a simulacrum, then so is their relationship. And in fact so is his life, which he has committed to her. He decides to end the whole thing and writes a farewell letter.

He’s just about to post it in the apartment building mailbox when he is accosted by a woman with three children – it is Chantal’s sister-in-law, the (rather bossy) sister of Chantal’s first husband, the one who blithely said let’s have another child to help us forget the one that’s just died.

The fantasy

Quite abruptly the book changes tone and pace. Up till now this couple had been drifting peacefully from episode to episode, a morning here, arriving at work there, cleaning teeth, hiding letters – and Kundera has been cascading his own thoughts and their thoughts and analyses of each others’ feelings like confetti in the breeze.

All of a sudden the pace picks up and it turns into a farce, then a fantasy, then a kind of nightmare all happening in real time i.e. in one extended breathless fifty-page-long passage.

The sister-in-law’s unruly children

The sister-in-law’s kids run riot in Chantal’s room and Jean-Marc feebly tries to get them to leave. He is distracted by the sister-in-law flirting with him (in KunderaWorld a man and a woman cannot be in the same space without flirting and talking about sex), she even leans forward and whispers the bedroom secrets of Chantal and her first husband in Jean-Marc’s ear.

At which moment Chantal herself arrives in the door. She is livid. She bought this place to get away from her wretched sister-in-law and her brood. And then she sees that the kids have rifled through her pile of bras which are all over the floor, one of them on one of the kids’ heads, and the mystery letters are scattered all over the floor. She orders them to leave, all of them, orders her sister-in-law to leave.

Chantal and Jean-Marc argue

She and Jean-Marc have a blistering argument in which she asserts that she bought this flat so as not to be spied on, with the heavy implication that his letters say he is a Spy and, worse, she knows that he has been searching her room till he found her stash of his letters. And he realises she knows and is crushed. And in a few swift exchanges they reduce their relationship to ashes.

Chantal packs her bags and leaves for London

With steely self-control she goes into her bedroom, closes the door and doesn’t come out all night. Jean-Marc is forced to sleep on the spare bed. Early in the morning she has packed her bag and declares she is off to a conference in… in… London springs to mind, yes, London. In fact her office had been planning a trip to London, but not for three weeks. Several points:

  1. Earlier in the novel the seed of this was planted when Kundera invented an ageing English lecher who hit on Chantal on a visit to her office and left his card. They often joked about this figure who they blew up into a master of monstrous orgies, and gave him the nickname Britannicus.
  2. This had led Jean-Marc in the final letter, to suggest that he was ending the series because he had to leave to go to, to… on a whim he had written London.
  3. Incidentally, Chantal sleeps badly because, being trapped in a Milan Kundera novel she has all sorts of inappropriately intense erotic dreams. The narrator wonders whether all virtuous women have to combat erotic orgiastic fantasies all night long, before showering and facing the day with a straight face (p.115). Let me ask my female readers: Do you struggle every night with erotic fantasies of sexual promiscuity? In my opinion, this is more ageing male sex fantasy.

In fact Chantal has no plan but stumbles out the house and onto the first bus which comes along. As it happens it is going to the Gare du Nord from which trains head to London, she at first imagines she won’t get off at that stop, then she does, then she buys a ticket, then she bumbles down onto the platform where – in a coincidence which doesn’t make sense in any rational terms – she discovers her entire office waiting for her! What! How, why?

On the Eurostar

Onto the Eurostar they get and Chantal finds herself seated opposite the self-style super-clever boss of the advertising agency, himself sitting next to a middle aged female admirer. (Makes it sound more like a cult than a professional place of work.) Remember how Leroy regaled his staff with stories about the foetus that could self-fellate in the womb? Well, now he treats Chantal and the older woman to a prolonged analysis of the command in the Book of Genesis (‘Go forth and multiply’) which boils down to the categorical imperative that everyone must fuck. Chantal is wet and aroused. She admires Leroy for his ‘dry as a razor’ logic (while this author thinks he’s a dickhead).

Chantal fantasises about forcing the prim woman into an orgy

Down into the black hole of the Channel Tunnel the train hurtles as Leroy continues his prolonged sermon on the important of sex and coitus and coupling and fucking, while the middle-aged woman wails about ‘the grandeur of life’ etc, and Chantal sitting opposite her fantasising about leading this prim and properly dressed lady to Leroy’s bed, which is set on a grand stage amid smoke and devils.

Jean-Marc decides to head off Chantal at the Gare du Nord

Meanwhile, Jean-Marc had woken up to discover Chantal gone and himself packed his bags, he knows when he’s not wanted. He leaves his keys on the coffee table, slams the door and blunders out into the street. London? OK, London, he hails a cab and asks it to take him to the Gare du Nord. Here he blunders up to the ticket desk, buys a ticket to London, and is the last person to board the Eurostar, setting off through the carriages to find Chantal.

Jean-Marc sees Chantal behaving like a different person on the Eurostar

He does, spotting the back of her head as she engages in the long ‘razor sharp’ fantasy about fucking and deflowering the prim lady. Jean-Marc is appalled (yet again) at how unlike his Chantal she seems, animated and confident and professional. Though he doesn’t know that Chantal is now consumed with eroticism, imagining the middle aged lady stripped naked and forced to take part in an orgy while all around naked bodies couple and bump (p.134).

Jean-Marc tried and fails to reach Chantal in the London terminal

The train arrives in London and everyone disembarks. Chantal goes off to a phone booth to make a call (we are still before the era of mobile phones) and when Jean-Marc tries to get to her he is blocked by a film crew (film crews often play this role as frustraters, getting in the way, as in Slowness and the Farewell Party) filming a group of oddly dressed children, presumably for a commercial, and when he tries to push through he is firmly restrained by a policeman. By the time he’s let go, Chantal has disappeared.

Jean-Marc wanders the streets of London

Now Jean-Marc is lost, walking the streets of London, and he feels he has returned to his true self, a drifter, a loser – Chantal always made five times what he earned, he was always dependent on her charity. Now he’s homeless and looking for a bench to doss down on.

He finds one in a typical Georgian London square, opposite a big house with a grand portico and when the lights go on inside he knows this is the house where Chantal has come to attend the orgy, the orgy led by that lecherous Englishman who visited her in Paris, ‘Britannicus’.

Jean-Marc enters the house where the orgy is happening

Jean-Marc opens the door (unlocked) and goes up the stairs to a first floor where a huge clothes rack holds the clothes of all the people he knows are stripped off and fornicating like wizards in a room not far away. But at this point a tattooed bouncer in a t-shirt appears and manhandles him back down the stairs and into the street. I couldn’t help warming to this bouncer, one of the few characters in the book not overloaded with smart-alec psychological analysis.

Chantal at the (largely invisible) orgy

Chantal is in the middle of an orgy, or is dominated by the image of an orgy where, at the moment of climax, all the participants turn into animals. She opens her eyes to find she is naked and a blonde woman is trying to drag her somewhere for a sexual encounter but the spittle in her mouth makes Chantal want to gag (as in fact, we have seen her revolted reaction to the thought of the saliva in other people’s mouths throughout the novel; the Saliva theme is up there with the Flushing theme as a recurring image throughout the book).

Chantal and the septuagenarian orgy impresario

Then she is alone in a big cavernous room with the host, Britannicus, who is of course fully clothed and pulls up a chair and starts reassuring her that she is perfectly safe. He calls her Anne and she protests it is not her name, they are stripping her of her identity, but she can’t remember what her name is, she can’t remember anything about herself, she can’t she can’t…

And then she wakes up and it was all a dream.

Seriously. It was all a dream. ‘Wake up, wake up,’ Jean-Marc is shaking her awake and she wakens, hot and sweating and terrified from this long elaborate dream and everything is alright and she is safe in his arms.

Now, on the last page, Kundera invites the reader to decide at just what point his story ceased being ‘realistic’ and turned into this rather delirious dream, just where ‘reality’ crossed ‘the border’ into ‘fantasy’: was it when the train went into the Channel Tunnel? when Chantal announced she was leaving for London? maybe even when Jean-Marc began sending those letters?

Who knows 🙂 and it is difficult to care enough to try and decide. As if he himself can’t be bothered, Kundera only devotes a short paragraph to the questions and, unusually for him, doesn’t dwell on them.

Instead, in the last paragraphs, Chantal and Jean-Marc are in bed together. Once she has totally woken up, she vows she will henceforth sleep with the light on every night, so she can see him.

And that’s it. Finis.

Conclusions

This is a very strange book.

Having read his book of essays on the theory of the novel I understand how Kundera regards the novel as an investigation of aspects of human existence. That explains why, having chosen ‘identity’ as the theme of this one, he then crams every possible permutation on the theme into this little text. And yet, even on that basis – as a self-consciously contrived experiment – it seems oddly… limited. After years of thought, is this little story of two lovers who have an argument the most thorough investigation he can think up of the theme of identity in the modern world? Very limited…

Early on, the book contains some very sensitive moments, moments which genuinely capture the strange and evanescent feelings you might have for a lover or someone you’ve been married to for years, sudden distances and misapprehensions. These are delicately done. When Jean-Marc mistakes the woman on the beach for Chantal, or sees another side to his lover when she’s at work, these are novelistically interesting and on-point for his theme.

The trouble is that these early subtle moments are lost in a story a) whose scaffolding i.e. the plot, becomes more and more crude and stupid as it progresses, and b) are set next to examples of blundering crudity – for example, the extremely crude and horrible sex soliloquies of the monstrous head of her advertising agency, Leroy, yuk, what an idiot, and what crude bluster.

These are so bad and boorish and coarse that they tend to destroy the delicate filament of the earlier, subtler perceptions, blowing them away like a gossamer spider web in a hurricane.

The abiding memory of Identity is not so much of pornography – in a way straightforward pornography might be refreshingly honest, but the striking thing about the orgy scene is that there is, in fact, no description at all of an actual orgy – but of a sensibility which is obsessed with the erotic urge, which can’t conceive a human character without having him or her immediately thinking erotic thoughts, waking from steamy dreams, flushed by arousal, fantasising about whispering erotic provocations in the ears of the daddies on the beach (as Chantal does), imagining each other’s former sex lives, even the ghastly sister-in-law is within minutes flirting outrageously with Jean-Marc, leaning forward to whisper Chantal’s sexual practices with her first husband in his ear… not pornography so much as lust lust lust.

And this crude hectoring about sex and eroticism and fantasy and orgies, for me, eclipses and overshadows the more subtle insights Kundera has about identity in a relationship. Shame.

Is Kundera flirting with the reader?

Are Kundera’s books flirtations? Does Kundera flirt with his readers? I am not using the word in its ordinary sense, but as he himself defines it in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

What is flirtation? One might say that it is behaviour leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee. (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p.142)

‘A promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.’

Throughout the book there is a permanent erotic charge and expectation, from Chantal imagining trying to seduce the daddies on the beach on page three or four, onwards. The night after she has the big argument with Jean-Marc, she is plagued with all manner of erotic fantasies. Then, on the Eurostar, she can’t control her fantasies about stripping and serving up the prim middle-aged woman to her boss at the advertising agency to be raped on a stage amid smoke and devils. That’s quite steamy, wouldn’t you say?

And then the entire fantasy sequence which constitutes the final third of the novel climaxes in her attendance at an orgy which is paralleled by Jean-Marc’s feverish jealous fantasies about what she is doing in the big smart house, and what is being done to her, at the orgy.

Except that… there is no orgy. She awakes (strangely, with no explanation of how she got there or why she’s naked) in a remote room in the big house in London, where no sex is going on at all, and she is alone. She (and we) actually sees no sex taking place, she has no sex with anyone, no contact with any man at all. Her only contact is with a blonde woman whose only role is to remind Chantal of her long-running aversion to saliva and French kissing, yuk.

So both of the key characters fear and fantasise about a gross, mass orgy and yet… we never see a single breast or penis, and no sex of any kind is described.

In this sense, then, the entire book can be seen as a prolonged promise of sex, ‘without a guarantee’. In other words, the entire novel can be seen as Kundera engaging in a prolonged ‘flirtation’ with the reader.

Credit

Identity by Milan Kundera was first published in Linda Asher’s English translation by Faber and Faber in 1998. All references are to the 1999 Faber paperback edition.

Related links

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

2000 Ignorance
2014 The Festival of Insignificance

Leave a comment
by Simon on September 5, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Comedy, Novel
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on September 5, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/09/05/identity-milan-kundera/

Charles I: King and Collector @ the Royal Academy

King Charles I is most famous for getting his head chopped off in 1649, at the climax of the civil war he had triggered against his Puritan, ’roundhead’ opponents in Parliament.

(I am aware that there’s controversy about all aspects of the wars, from their very name [should it be called the Great Rebellion, the British Civil Wars, the Wars of Three Kingdoms, etc] through to the dates, because the civil wars across all four of his realms actually started with the rebellion of the Scots at having an English prayer book imposed on them in 1637 – which triggered Charles’s hapless manoeuvrings with his Parliament to get them to fund an army to repel the Scots invasion of 1638 – although it wasn’t until rebellion broke out in Ireland in 1641 that the final breach between Charles and his Puritan opponents in Parliament became irreconcilable. It’s a much more complicated story than usually depicted.)

Anyway, before he mismanaged his kingdoms so badly that he triggered war in all three of them (Wales was not a kingdom but a principality) Charles had been one of the most sophisticated royal patrons and collectors of art anywhere in Europe. This big exhibition at the Royal Academy brings together an impressive number of the sculptures, paintings, tapestries and so on that Charles either directly commissioned or purchased through his roving agents from the leading artists of the day. it is a magnificent display of some 150 works of art, ranging from classical sculptures to Baroque paintings, and from exquisite miniatures to monumental tapestries.

Equestrian painting of Charles I with M. de St Antoine by Anthony van Dyck (1633)

Scattered and reunited

A simple but important point about the exhibition – and a demonstration of the vanity of human wishes – is that, having spent a lifetime collecting all these riches, soon after Charles’s execution the new Puritan regime sold them off to pay their soldiers and all these masterpieces were scattered across Europe.

Some were tracked down and rebought by his son, Charles II after his restoration to the throne in 1660, especially the ones which had gone to British purchasers who were no keen to ingratiate themselves with the new king. Most remained abroad and, indeed, made very nice additions to the royal collections of the Louvre and the Prado. But what was returned, along with the works which Charles’s queen, Henrietta Maria, had taken to France and brought back in 1660, went on to form the core of the future Royal Collection.

Charles the collector

In 1623, two years before he became king, Prince Charles visited Madrid. The purpose of the visit was to sound out the possibility of marriage to Maria Anna of Spain, daughter of King Philip III of Spain. Negotiations broke down when the new king, Philip IV, demanded that Charles convert to the Catholic Church and live in Spain for a year as pre-conditions.

But although the diplomatic aim of the visit failed, one thing made a deep impact on the future king of England, namely the huge and dazzling art collection of the Philip IV. This, thought Charles, was the magnificence and grandeur befitting a divinely appointed monarch! Charles went shopping and returned to England with a number of works, including paintings by Titian and Veronese, while agents were sent to France and Italy to snap up anything which came on the market. Thus Charles was able to snap up the famous Gonzaga collection which had been accumulated by successive dukes of Mantua, through the work of Nicolas Lanier, his Master of Music and agent.

It was this collection which included Andrea Mantegna’s monumental series, The Triumph of Caesar, (1484 to 1492) which is given a whole room to itself in the exhibition.

Triumph of Caesar: The Vase Bearers by Andrea Mantegna (1484 to 1492)

But it wasn’t just a matter of liking fine art. A king’s collection bespoke his power, both to the few subjects who saw it, but, more importantly, to visiting ambassadors and princes. According to historian Jenny Uglow, ‘ceremonies were delayed and dinners cooled as he showed visiting dignitaries proudly round’ his collection, including the so-called Bear Gallery containing works like Titian’s portrait of Charles V with a Dog (1533) and Rubens’s Daniel in the Lions’ Den (1616), to the Privy Lodging Rooms which housed works by Titian, Correggio, Giorgione and others; and then, the core of the collection, the Cabinet Room, which held 80 paintings, 36 statues and statuettes, as well as bas-reliefs, miniatures, books, engravings, drawings, medals and precious objects.

Charles V with a Dog by Titian (1533) Museo Nacional del Prado

Moreover portraits, such as those by van Dyck, then had multiple copies made of them which could be sent to foreign monarchs as testaments to Charles’s majesty and glory.

By 1649, Charles’s collection comprised around 1,500 paintings and 500 sculptures. An inventory compiled by Abraham van der Doort (c.1580 to 1640), first Surveyor of The King’s Pictures, recorded the contents of the collection, providing a detailed account of the artistic tastes and high level of connoisseurship within the king’s circle.

Changing British taste

One of the aims of the exhibition is to demonstrate how Charles was the first British monarch to really grasp the artistic culture of the Continent. The Protestant Tudor monarchs (Henry VIII, Edward VI, Elizabeth I), with the brief exception of the Catholic Queen Mary (1553 to 1558), had been wary of Catholic Europe and its culture.

But Charles’s father, James I, changed this policy. During the long reign of Queen Elizabeth Catholic Spain had been the enemy, justifiably so since its king, Philip II, had launched an armed invasion of England, which, if it had succeeded, would have resulted in the forced conversion of the church and people back to strict Roman Catholicism, with untold numbers of arrests, tortures and public burners of recusants.

James came from a different family and tradition and so was able to break with Elizabeth’s policy and seek a rapprochement with Catholic Spain. During his reign the treaties with Spain were moderate but still sparked murmurs of dissent from the Protestant aristocracy. (Anti-Spanish murmurings became louder when the Protestant hero, Sir Walter Raleigh, was beheaded in 1618, largely at the behest of the Spanish ambassador, and as a result of a last, ill-fated expedition to South America in 1617.)

The apotheosis of James I, commissioned by Charles I from Peter Paul Rubens to form the centrepiece of the newly refurbished Banqueting House, completed in 1636

James’s eldest son, Henry, surrounded himself with scholars, artists and musicians and acquired ‘Catholic’ paintings from Holland and from Florence. On Henry’s death in 1612 his collection passed to his mother, Anne of Denmark, who herself became a keen patron of painters, dramatists and architects as well as court masques, and filled her rooms at Somerset House and Oatlands Palace with religious pictures, still-lifes, landscapes and allegorical scenes.

So this was the family atmosphere Charles grew up in, far more relaxed about Catholic culture than his Protestant forebears of the previous century. The Puritans in Parliament disliked this cultural shift, as they had disliked Charles’s trip to Spain (still Europe’s most Catholic power) and then really disliked Charles’s marriage to the Catholic Henrietta Maria, youngest daughter of Henry IV of France, who – to the Puritans’ outrage – was allowed to attend Catholic masses in the Royal Palaces.

But Charles wasn’t alone in his taste for Continental art. Other super-rich aristocrats vied with him to create superb collections, including Thomas Howard (1586 to 1646), Earl of Arundel, and George Villiers (1592 to 1628), Duke of Buckingham. At the height of his success, Buckingham’s palace in the Strand contained over 300 paintings by artists including Rubens, Titian, Tintoretto and Bassano. It became a fashion and a competition.

Titian was the main man. Titian (1490 to 1576) had loyally served Habsburg monarchs, sending them paintings on a wide range of subject from his base in Venice. Titian’s portraits, especially those of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, proved him the supreme painter of kingly, military and diplomatic power, and Charles wanted some.

The Allocution of Alfonso d’Avalos to His Troops by Titian (1540 to 1541) Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Charles and Van Dyck

The artist most associated with Charles is Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599 to 1641). Charles persuaded the great Flemish painter to come to London in 1632, where he was appointed ‘principalle Paynter in Ordenarie to their Majesties’.

Triple Portrait of Charles I by Sir Anthony van Dyck (1636)

Van Dyck’s achievement was immense. His fluency and sense of composition, his extraordinary ability to capture not just the likeness but the mood and character of his sitters, was unparalleled. The exhibition includes some of his most spectacular works, including:

  • Charles I and Henrietta Maria with Prince Charles and Princess Mary (1632)
  • his two magnificent equestrian portraits, Charles I on Horseback with M. de St. Antoine (1633) and Charles I on Horseback (1638)
  • ‘Le Roi à la chasse’ (1635)

Many portraits were done in several versions, to be sent as diplomatic gifts or given to supporters of the increasingly embattled king. Altogether van Dyck has been estimated to have painted forty portraits of Charles himself, as well as about thirty of the Queen.

Such was the impact and range of his works that van Dyck became the dominant influence on English portrait-painting for the next 150 years. Charles awarded him a knighthood and a £200 annual pension. When van Dyck died young, in 1641, he was buried in (the old) St Paul’s Cathedral.

The Mortlake tapestries

But it wasn’t just van Dyck. Charles I commissioned some of the most important artists of his day. Beside the ceiling of the Banqueting House (above) Charles commissioned from Peter Paul Rubens paintings such as ‘Minerva Protects Pax from Mars’ (1630) and his ‘Landscape with Saint George and the Dragon’ (1630 to 1635).

Another major highlight of the exhibition is the Mortlake tapestries of Raphael’s Acts of the Apostles. These have a complicated history. In 1513 Pope Leo X commissioned Raphael to design a set of tapestries of the Acts of the Apostles to be hung in the Sistine Chapel. Detailed versions of the works were painted in gouache on sheets of paper which were glued together to achieve the scale required, and these preparatory studies are referred to as ‘cartoons’. These cartoons were the send to Brussels, at that time the premiere centre of tapestry making in Europe. The final tapestries took some time to create but were complete and delivered to Rome by the time of the Pope Leo’s death in 1521.

The cartoons were kept on at the workshops in Brussels for some years, and more versions of the tapestries created from them. But a hundred years later many had found their way back to Italy, to the city of Genoa to be precise. And it was here that one of Charles’s agents ascertained that they were available for sale and so young Prince Charles hurriedly bought them.

His aim was to bring the cartoons to England, where they could be used as models for the tapestry factory established in 1619 by his father, James I, at Mortlake in south-west London, and several partial sets of the Acts of the Apostles were indeed woven here over the next two decades. After passing through the hands of various monarchs, the reassembled cartoons were eventually gifted to the Victoria and Albert Museum. And it’s these huge and awesome works that the visitor can see in a room devoted to them.

The Miraculous Draft of Fishes by Raphael (1515 to 1516)

Summary

To visit the exhibition is to bask, for a while, in the reflected glory and magnificence of royalty, strolling past the masterpieces mentioned above as well as stunning works by other Renaissance artists such as Correggio, Agnolo Bronzino, Jacopo Bassano, Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese as well as Albrecht Dürer, Jan Gossaert, Hans Holbein the Younger and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. What a banquet of Baroque art, a visual feast fit for a king.

The promotional video

Related links

History reviews

More Royal Academy reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on February 17, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, History
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on February 17, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/02/17/charles-the-first-king-and-collector-royal-academy/

%d bloggers like this: