All posts tagged plot

Jorge Luis Borges on Franz Kafka (1981)

In 1981 Cardinal published a collection of all the short stories which Kafka published during his lifetime, from the first story in 1904, to the last ones published just after his death in 1924 – a working life of precisely 20 years. They are all here in new translations by J.A. Underwood. The edition is interesting because it gives a brief textual explanation before the major stories, explaining when they were written, and when published.

It also contains a brief three-page essay on Kafka by the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, which can be summarised as follows:

Why Kafka wanted his works destroyed

Borges starts with Kafka’s injunction to Max Brod to burn his works. He compares this to Virgil’s request to his friends to destroy the manuscript of the Aeneid. As a practising author Borges gives a nice interpretation of both men’s wishes to destroy their masterworks, namely they didn’t want them actually to be destroyed, but

longed to disburden themselves of the responsibility that a literary work imposes on its creator.

Anyone familiar with The Trial or The Castle can immediately see how this applies to Kafka; they’re great works but they’re nowhere near finished and the effort to review, reorder and restructure them, and then to write all the linking passages and the final chapters required to bring them to a successful conclusion would daunt a lesser man and was clearly beyond Kafka. All he felt was the guilt and shame of failure.

Kafka’s works are like:

a parable or series of parables on the theme of the moral relationship of the individual with his God and with  his God’s incomprehensible universe.

They are less like what we call literature and closer to an ancient religious work like the Book of Job. Borges emphasises Kafka’s religious, and specifically Jewish, motivation. He thinks Kafka saw his work as an act of faith, and he did not want his writings to demotivate others (as they surely must have).

Borges goes further and suspects Kafka could a) only dream nightmares and b) was interested or hypnotised by delay and failure, which is why he produced a body of work solely about nightmares, and about nightmares which never reach a conclusion but are endlessly delayed… Borges thinks Kafka’s own imaginative vision wore him out.

And knowing how it wore him down, is why Kafka wanted the works burned, so as not to discourage others from seeking for happiness. (This is the same sort of terminology Brod uses in his defence of not burning the works in his afterword to The Trial).

When Borges first read Kafka

Borges slips in a memory of his own youth when he first came across Kafka; He was reading an avant-garde magazine full of modish experiments with text and font and layout but which also included a story by Kafka which, to his eternal shame, he thought insipid and so ignored.

Kafka’s Jewishness

Borges thinks Kafka’s Judaism is central. He thinks Kafka was as much in awe of his father as Israel is of its punishing God. He thinks Kafka’s Jewishness ‘set him apart from humanity’ and was ‘a torment to him’. So far so fairly basic.

Hierarchy and infinity

More interestingly, Borges goes on to speculate that Kafka’s work is underpinned by two big ideas, subordination and infinity. In almost all his stories we find hierarchies and those hierarchies tend to be infinite. Thus:

  • the hero of America roams across the land of the free until he is admitted to the great Nature-Theatre of Oklahoma which is an infinite stage, no less populous than the world
  • the hero of The Trial tries to understand the nature of the hierarchy of the Court and the authorities who have arrested him and are managing his case, but every step of the investigation only reveals how impenetrably vast and never-ending the hierarchy is
  • the hero of The Castle is summoned to work for authorities at a castle who never acknowledge him or his task

Infinity and incompletion

Borges says some critics complain about the fact that all three novels are unfinished and lament the absence of the chapters which would complete them. Borges says this is to misunderstand Kafka, to misunderstand that his subject was precisely the infinity of obstacles his heroes had to overcome. The novels are incomplete because it is ‘essential’ to their artistic purpose that they remain incomplete.

Borges compares the impossibility of completing a Kafka novel to Zeno’s paradox about the impossibility of movement.

Suppose Zeno wishes to walk to the end of a path. Before he can get there, he must get halfway there. Before he can get halfway there, he must get a quarter of the way there. Before traveling a quarter, he must travel one-eighth; before an eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on. Describing the task in this way requires Zeno to perform an infinite number of tasks which is, of course, impossible. (Wikipedia)

Intolerable situations

Moving swiftly on, Borges suggests that Kafka’s greatest gift was for inventing intolerable situations. Anyone thinking of The Metamorphosis or In the Penal Colony would agree.

But Borges instances something a little different, which is the way the tremendous imaginative power of some of Kafka’s engrave themselves on our minds.

Leop­ards break in­to the tem­ple and drink all the sac­ri­fi­cial ves­sels dry; this happens over and over and, in the end, it can be predicted in ad­vance and so becomes in­cor­po­rat­ed in­to the rit­ual.
(The Zürau Aphorisms)

These short parables from early in Kafka’s career describe something different from the longer works: it is something to do with infinity and paradox, but harder to define, and less amenable to the kind of sociological interpretations which the novels are routinely subjected to.

Invention over craft

Borges makes a few controversial claims right at the end of this short essay:

Kafka’s craft is perhaps less admirable than in his invention, certainly in the way that all the stories feature basically the same character, Homo domesticus, ‘so Jewish and so German’, so desperate to keep his place in his bank or office or profession or employment.

He says ‘plot and atmosphere are the essential characteristics of Kafka’s work and not the convolutions of the story or the psychology of the hero.

We can quickly agree that few of the novels or stories have a ‘plot’ in the conventional sense of a beginning, middle and an end. His most famous stories tend to record a steady decline in circumstances and psychology until the protagonist dies.

When Borges writes that Kafka’s work doesn’t bother much with the psychology of the hero, I suppose what he means is that none of his protagonists are changed by events in the way that a classical novel is all about the change and growth in thinking and opinions of its main characters. The protagonists psychologise at very great length indeed, but, in a sense, it is always the same problem they are worrying over, and they are permanently caught in the same predicament or trap which shows no real psychological development or change.

Which is why Borges concludes that the short stories are superior to the novels, because they capture this atmosphere and this plight with greater purity and force.

Personally, I disagree. I think everyone should read The Trial because it gives you the essence of the Kafkaesque – and that the stories, being far more diverse, strange, varied and complex than the novels, tend to confuse and perplex your view of who Kafka is: the more you read of him, the less confident you become about being able to make useful generalisations.

Borges reviews

Kafka reviews

Dates are dates of composition.

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by Simon on May 14, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 14, 2021

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The Relapse by John Vanbrugh (1696)

Sir John Vanbrugh wrote a handful of plays before going on to a complete change of career, and becoming one of England’s finest country house architects, whose masterpieces include palatial private homes such as Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace.

The Relapse, or, Virtue in Danger, the first of his plays, was in fact a sequel to someone else’s.

The original play was Love’s Last Shift, or, The Fool in Fashion written in 1695 by a young actor-dramatist, Colley Cibber. In Cibber’s play a free-living Restoration rake named Loveless is brought to repentance and reform by the ruses of his wife-to-be, Amanda. Supposedly, Vanbrugh saw the play and realised the ending didn’t really conclude the story. So he conceived The Relapse, in which the ‘reformed’ rake comes back up to London from his happy rural love nest, and succumbs all over again to the bright lights and pretty women.

The cast

THE MEN
Sir Novelty Fashion, newly created Lord Foppington
Young Fashion, his Brother
Loveless, Husband to Amanda
Worthy, a Gentleman of the Town
Sir Tunbelly Clumsey, a Country Gentleman
Sir John Friendly, his Neighbour
Coupler, a Matchmaker
Bull, Chaplain to Sir Tunbelly
Syringe, a Surgeon
Lory, Servant to Young Fashion
Shoemaker, Taylor, Perriwig-maker, &c.

THE WOMEN
Amanda, Wife to Loveless
Berinthia, her Cousin, a young Widow
Miss Hoyden, a great Fortune, Daughter to Sir Tunbelly
Nurse, her Governant,

The plot

Loveless is the reformed rake who has retired to the country with his pure and noble wife, Amanda.

Most of their dialogue consists of high-minded sentiments of fidelity and marital honesty cast in unrhymed verse or poetry. Being used to the oppressively consistent rhyming couplets of Alexander Pope and 18th century poets, and even the solidly iambic pentameters of Shakespeare’s plays, I was pleasantly surprised to find this verse more irregular and varied, with some lines having six beats, some only three.

Can you then doubt my Constancy, Amanda?
You’ll find ’tis built upon a steady Basis——
The Rock of Reason now supports my Love,
On which it stands so fix’d,
The rudest Hurricane of wild Desire
Wou’d, like the Breath of a soft slumbering Babe,
Pass by, and never shake it.

Fortunately, however, these insipid lovers are not the prominent figures. They decide – rashly – to come up to London on business, both swearing they won’t be tempted back to their wicked old ways – with inevitable results.

The play only really gets going with the introduction of Young Fashion and his servant Lory. Fashion is the second son and so has inherited a measly £200-a-year allowance and has managed to blow all of that so that, as the play opens, he is skint. His enterprising servant, Lory, makes the obvious suggestion that he apply to his elder brother, Sir Novelty Fashion, who inherited most of the family fortune.

Sir Novelty Fashion has only recently (within 48 hours) paid for and received the title of Lord i.e. he is now Lord Foppington. He is the most spectacularly grand and affectedly foppish fop I’ve encountered in any of these plays and he is a marvel, a cynosure of extravagant pretension, and he really lights up the play every time he appears.

Why the Ladies were ready to puke at me, whilst I had nothing but Sir Novelty to recommend me to ’em——Sure whilst I was but a Knight, I was a very nauseous Fellow… [but now I am a Lord] Well, ’tis an unspeakable Pleasure to be a Man of Quality —— Strike me dumb —— ‘My Lord’ —— ‘Your Lordship’ —— ‘My Lord Foppington’ — Ah! c’est quelque chose de beau, que le Diable m’emporte ——

The only catch is that the honour cost him £10,000! leaving him short of ready cash. Thus, when his starveling kid brother turns up begging for his debts to be paid off, Lord Foppington dismisses him with an airy wave and says he has to go dine with important people. Young Fashion is mortified and aggrieved.

Just after he’s been humiliatingly dismissed, Young Fashion bumps into Old Coupler, a marriage arranger who’s known him since he was a boy. Coupler also dislikes Lord Foppington and so the two quickly cobble together A Plan.

Coupler had been hired to find a rich widow who Lord Foppington can marry in a hurry to pay off his debts, and has contracted with a nice plump partridge of a widow woman living fifty miles away in the country. Lord Fashion had promised to pay Coupler £1,000 once the marriage was secured. Coupler now says that for £5,000 (!) he will secure the rich widow for Young Fashion.

The Plan is simple: Lord Foppington wrote the widow’s family to expect him in two weeks’ time; Young Fashion should go straightaway and pretend to be his brother, sign the contract, bed the widow, and bob’s your uncle. Or as Coupler puts it:

Now you shall go away immediately; pretend you writ that letter only to have the romantick Pleasure of surprizing your Mistress; fall desperately in Love, as soon as you see her; make that your Plea for marrying her immediately; and when the fatigue of the Wedding-night’s over, you shall send me a swinging Purse of Gold, you Dog you.

‘A swinging purse of gold’. This is by far the most vividly and clearly written of the Restoration plays I’ve read recently – Vanbrugh has a lovely swinging style.

They shake on the deal. When Coupler has gone, Young Fashion has a sudden pang of conscience, and vows he will give his brother a second chance to take pity.

If you take a ‘moral’ or psychological view of literature or plays, this shows that Young Fashion has a conscience and ‘develops the play’s themes of responsibility’.

But I don’t take that kind of view. I tend to think of works of literature as language machines built to deliver a wide range of often complex and sophisticated pleasures, and I’m interested in analysing the mechanisms and linguistic tools they use to do so.

So on my reading – divested of its ‘moral’ content – this decision to give Lord Foppington a second chance is really just a pretext for another comic scene with the monstrous Lord Fashion.

Act 2 Amanda and Loveless arrive at their London lodgings and have a long poetic exchange in which both reveal, to each other and themselves, that they have been a little distracted by the pleasures of the Town i.e. the opposite sex. Loveless in particular reveals that he went to the play the night before and was struck by a stunning beauty. Amanda is understandably upset but Loveless insists he admired but didn’t speak.

At that moment the servant announces the visit of Amanda’s cousin, Berinthia, and damn me if she isn’t exactly the woman Loveless was struck with the night before! Barely has Loveless recovered from this surprise, when Lord Foppington pays a visit.

Foppington gives a comic account of a Day in The Life of a Fop, note the affected pronunciation whereby ‘o’ is pronounced ‘a’ in ‘nat’ and ‘bax’:

I rise, Madam, about ten o’clock. I don’t rise sooner, because ’tis the worst thing in the World for the Complection; nat that I pretend to be a Beau; but a Man must endeavour to look wholesome, lest he make to nauseous a Figure in the Side-bax, the Ladies shou’d be compell’d to turn their eyes upon the Play.

Foppington goes on to explain in the most cynical way possible one attends church solely for the Society one meets there and has nothing to do with religion. Having regarded Amanda for some time, he thinks he is in love with her and, with absurd miscalculation takes her hand, kisses it and declares his passion for her.

Foppington has heroically misjudged, for Amanda snatches back her hand and boxes him round the ears, then Loveless draws his sword, engages him in a duel and appears to run him through. In fact it is the barest of scratches but the women run screaming and return with a doctor, Syringe, an excellent comic turn who declares it is a wound large enough to drive a coach and horses through and extorts a fee of £500 from Foppington before he gets servants to carry the Lord to the doctor’s house.

Consistent with his pretentious style, Foppington grandly forgives Loveless as he is carried away, as if from his death bed, but once he’s gone, Loveless tells Amanda it was just a scratch.

Enter a citizen named Worthy, who performs a structural function, namely while Loveless returns to lusting after Berinthia, Worthy can start to have designs on Amanda, creating a neat parallelism.

The menfolk leave the stage to Amanda and Berinthia who have a long dialogue about Modern Man and love affairs.

Over the course of this long scene Berinthia creates a kind of atmosphere of urban naughtiness in which Amanda is encouraged to slowly reveal her secrets. Berinthia explains that Worthy is a kind of anti-fop or anti-beau; an outwardly sensible sober man – but in fact he is quietly having affairs with half the women of quality in the Town.

By encouraging Amanda to speculate what she would do if Loveless were to die (God forbid!), Berinthia encourages her to think about a successor and replacement for her husband, and thus slyly encourages her to start to harbour thoughts about ‘other men’. Corrupts her, in other words.

Act 3 Scene 1 Lord Foppington is recovered (from his scratch) and preparing to go out when he is visited for the second time by his brother, Young Fashion, who proceeds from politely asking his brother to help him out, to pleading consanguinity, to becoming more and more infuriated by his unprovocable nonchalance.

Young Fashion: Now, by all that’s great and powerful, thou art the Prince of Coxcombs.
Lord Foppington: Sir — I am praud of being at the Head of so prevailing a Party.

Fashion vows to tame maximum revenge on his brother.

Scene 2 Loveless, in heroic poetry, ponders his mixed feelings. He knows he owes his wife everything, and yet.. and while he’s hesitating, the beautiful Berinthia enters and, after some flirting, they catch hold of each other in a big snog! They have barely begun kissing before a servant enters to say Amanda has arrived home, Loveless exists, Berinthia has a paragraph sighing about him — which is overheard by Worthy who has just entered.

Worthy now tells Berinthia he saw everything and so has her in his power. He wants to use her to persuade Amanda to have an affair with him, Worthy. Worthy proposes a precise Scheme: Berinthia should persuade Amanda that Loveless is having an affair with someone else; then Berinthia can a) pose as her friend b) carry on her affair with Loveless unsuspected. Berinthia can confirm that, during her earlier conversation, Amanda had admitted that – her husband gone – she could be tempted to another man, and even that Worthy might be a candidate.

Exit Worthy. Berinthia now finds herself in the position of carrying Worthy’s cause forward for him, not quite pimping for him, but… Vanbrugh disappoints me a little by having her express some stock anti-women sentiments:

I begin to fancy there may be as much pleasure in carrying on another body’s Intrigue, as one’s own. This at least is certain, it exercises almost all the entertaining Faculties of a Woman: For there’s employment for Hypocrisy, Invention, Deceit, Flattery, Mischief, and Lying.

Mind you, this is immediately followed by the entrance of Amanda who is in a foul mood with her husband, suspecting him of infidelity, with many insults and aspersions. Berinthia follows Worthy’s Plan and encourages her doubts, indeed says she knows exactly who her husband is in love with, without naming names (and of course she does – it is herself!).

Scene 3 The country house Hilarious scene where Young Fashion and Lory arrive at the country house of the plump partridge widow who Coupler has recommended. It starts with the house being semi derelict and the door only reluctantly opened by suspicious yokels armed with a blunderbuss and scythes, led by the crude country squire, Mr Tunbelly Clumsy.

Cut to the country widow in question, Miss Hoyden who, in a bit of comic business, Sir Tunbelly orders to be locked up anytime anybody pays a visit. She appears to be quite a rude, rustic yokel of a young woman. Meanwhile Young Fashion impresses himself on Sir Tunbelly as a confident London fop and tries to hurry along the deal – can’t they get married that very night?

Act 4 Still at the country house In a brief scene Miss Hoyden tells her Nurse she is keen to be married simply in order to escape the country, get up to London and start flaunting like a Grand Lady. Enter Young Fashion and he and Miss Hoyden quickly reach agreement that they should be married immediately. They call in the Nurse so Young Fashion can flatter her, give her half a crown, and get her on their side. And then ask her to use her influence with the local chaplain to get them married in a hurry. Luckily, it turns out the Nurse has been flirting with the chaplain for these past seven years, so it should be a doddle.

Scene 2 Cut to Amanda and Berinthia praising Worthy as a most excellent lover, dwelling on how he spent a couple of hours praising every one of Amanda’s features. Then Worthy himself walks in, apologises for the lateness of the hour, says he’s been sent by Loveless to say that Loveless is out very late with friends and so the women invite Worthy to make up a hand of ombre (a card game).

Scene 3 Berinthia’s chamber Enter Loveless. He has completely ceased to be the ideal husband of act one and has reverted to being a scheming rake. He has gotten access to Berinthia’s bed chamber and now ponders where to hide. He has barely hidden in the closet before Berinthia enters, explaining that she left Worthy and Amanda to play cards, begging the excuse of having to write some letters. Loveless springs out of her closet and they embrace. After some flirting he carries her into the ‘closet’ (which is obviously more like an actual room) to ravish her!

Scene 4 Sir Tunbelly’s House Young Fashion and Miss Hoyden have just been married by the vicar, Bull, and are congratulating each other when Lory rushes in to tell them that his brother – the real Lord Foppington – has arrived at the gates with a coach and horses and 20 pages and the full panoply. Sir Tunbelly arrives to ask what the devil is gong on, and Fashion braves it out, telling him the man claiming to be Lord Foppington is an imposter and they’ll deal with him by inviting him in, raising the drawbridge, then firing a few shots which will make his people scatter.

Scene 5 At the gate They carry out this plan. Tunbelly admits Lord Foppington, and as soon as he’s inside the gates swings them shut, his servants fire a few shots in the air and all Lord Foppington’s servants scarper. When Lord Foppington declares who he is, Sir Tunbelly (who may be a country bumpkin but is also justice of the peace in these parts) calls him as a rascally imposter come to ravish his daughter and orders him to be tied down. The rest of the family come in to abuse him, Miss Hoyden as was, declaring he deserves to be dragged through the horse pond. Lord Foppington takes this all with tremendously aristocratic sang-froid.

The comedy heightens when Young Fashion enters and Foppington’s familiarity with him (calling him Tom since he is, after all, his younger brother) offends the other characters (the lady, Tunbelly, even Bull the chaplain). They all clamour for more punishment. Foppington is intelligent enough to realise all the people regard Tom as Lord Foppington and decides his best course is to play along, so he switches to calling him that, asking him for a close-up quiet parley in private. Tom comes close and Lord Foppington offers his brother £5,000 to be set free (!). Too late, says Tom.

His offer rejected, Foppington suddenly remembers there is a local gentleman who will vouch that he is Lord Foppington and Young Fashion a mere rascal. Who? asks Tunbelly sarcastically. Why Sir John Friendly. ‘Tis true he lives not a mile away and has just returned from London, admits Tunbelly – and sends a servant to fetch him.

But as chance would have it the servant comes straight back to tell Tunbelly that good Sir John has just alighted at the main gate and is entering the house. Young Fashion realises the game is up. He tells Lory to run and secure the first two horse he finds in the stables, Tom will slip out in a few minutes and they’ll leg it. Lory and Young Fashion slip out one door as Sir John enters by another.

There is a big Revelation Scene when Sir John finally gets to see Lord Foppington and confirms he is who he claims to be – the result is mortification and humiliation on the part of Sir Tunbelly who immediately swears fire and vengeance on Young Fashion, the imposter. But he’s long gone.

In a final short scene the Nurse, Miss Hoyden and Bull are in a conclave in the next room wondering how on earth to get out of the dilemma of Miss H being just married to Young Fashion when Lord Foppington and, more importantly, her father think she is still a maid. The solution they all innocently / cynically / comically decide on is: She shall simply marry again.

Act 5 scene 1 Back in London. Young Fashion and Lory meet with Coupler, tell him the whole story and he caps it with what he’s heard, which is that Lord Foppington did swiftly marry Miss Hoyden – who is therefore now Lady Foppington – as told in a letter from Foppington himself in which he a) swears revenge on Young Fashion b) says that, although they are legally married, he has not yet fulfilled the divine part i.e. physically consummated the marriage.

Tom Fashion’s vexed rage prompts some good comic lines.

Coupler: Nothing’s to be done till the Bride and Bridegroom come to Town.
Young Fashion: Bride and Bridegroom! Death and Furies! I can’t bear that thou shouldst call them so.
Coupler: Why, what shall I call them, Dog and Cat?

They’re not the funniest lines ever, just expressed in a surprisingly modern, direct and understandable way which makes them feel funnier.

Anyway, Coupler suggests that they seek some kind of solution by suborning the priest, Bull who, like most modern priests, ‘eats three pounds of beef to reading one chapter’ of his Bible.

Scene 2 Worthy tells Berinthia he has all but seduced Amanda but she is still holding out with a last scruple about ‘Virtue’. Berinthia comes up with A Plan. Lord Foppington is having a Grand Supper tonight with dancing and music to celebrate his marriage. Berinthia will arrange for Amanda to see Loveless at a tryst with his lover; Amanda will be so furious, she’ll come home filled with thoughts of revenge and a little lewdness, and Worthy can pay a polite visit to escort her to Foppington’s supper and – whoops – take advantage of Amanda’s taste for revenge!

There is then another of the many comic touches which really lift this play. Worthy is so awed by Berinthia’s Machiavellianism, that he gets down on his knees before her:

Worthy [Kneeling] Thou Angel of Light, let me fall down and adore thee.
Berinthia: Thou Minister of Darkness, get up again, for I hate to see the Devil at his Devotions.

Scene 3 Tom Fashion’s lodgings Coupler has a Plan: Some vicar has died leaving a £500-a-year living empty, and Tom has it in his gift if he can prove himself the lawful wife of Miss Hoyden.

To this end they have summoned the Nurse and the Priest to Tom’s lodgings. Initially scared at finding themselves confronted by the ‘Rogue’, Coupler sends the priest into another room with Lory, while he and Tom work on the Nurse. Tom tells her he would and will make a much better husband for Miss Hoyden than the Lord.

They go on to say that if the couple will vouch Tom is the legal husband, he will immediately present the priest with the £500 living. The Nurse is convinced. When the priest is brought back in, the three of them convince him to vouch for Tom and to win both her and the living. Coupler has some comic lines about the Nurse, comparing her to a rather rundown house:

Coupler: [Rising up.] .. The Living’s worth it: Therefore no more Words, good Doctor: but with the [Giving Nurse to him.] Parish — here — take the Parsonage-house. ‘Tis true, ’tis a little out of Repair; some Dilapidations there are to be made good; the Windows are broke, the Wainscot is warp’d, the Ceilings are peel’d, and the Walls are crack’d; but a little Glasing, Painting, White-wash, and Plaster, will make it last thy time.

You can imagine the gestures confident Coupler would make at the bewildered Nurse during this speech. Vanbrugh’s dialogue is vivid and dramatic.

Scene 4 Amanda gets home furious at having seen her husband meet with his sweetheart. Worthy is lying in wait for her and indulges in an extended seduction in high-flown rhetoric which involves forcing her onto a couch and kissing her hand. But, although torn, Amanda remains true to herself.

Amanda: Then, save me, Virtue, and the Glory’s thine.
Worthy: Nay, never strive.
Amanda: I will; and conquer too. My Forces rally bravely to my Aid, [Breaking from him.] and thus I gain the Day.

Not only this, but she preaches a sermon at Worthy, telling him to repent his fleshly urges and succeeds. He is given a speech saying he has seen the error of his ways.

Scene 5 The Nurse explains the situation to Miss Hoyden-Lady Foppinton, who in any case doesn’t like her pretentious new husband half so much as the first one.

Scene 6 Foppington’s supper Enter Foppington, Miss Hoyden, Loveless, Amanda, Worthy and Berinthia. Foppington apologises for wooing Loveless’s wife (the pretext, if you remember, for the sword fight in act 2). Loveless forgives him.

Enter Sir Tunbelly and musicians and dancers, as at the end of every Restoration comedy. Tunbelly is the master of ceremonies and is drunk. A lengthy masque in which Cupid and Hymen present versified forms of their characters and cases.

Enter Tom Fashion with the Priest and Nurse who he lines up to testify in front of everyone that he – Tom – married Miss Hoyden first, to which Miss Hoyden herself testifies. Astonished, Lord Foppington asks the priest if it’s true.

It’s very funny that Sir Tunbelly is raving drunk and has to be held back from attacking Tom with a horsewhip. He is particularly upset when he discover the Nurse he has employed all these years lied to him. Why did she do it? The Nurse replies, because Miss Hoyden so wanted to be married.

Tom asks ‘the court’ of all the characters for their judgment and they declare him the honest husband. Sir Tunbelly says they can all go to hell and reels out drunk. Beautifully, Lord Foppington rises above it all with effortless superiority.

The epilogue is spoken by Foppington and is the only one of the half dozen I’ve read which I either understood or enjoyed because it is a further hymn to the wonderful superiority of noble beaux such as himself and how they have never lowered themselves to plots or violence or treason or criminality – Good Lord, no, such things are only done by the badly dressed – and so continues the comic conceit of his character right to the end of the play.

Vanbrugh’s prose

Vanbrugh’s prose is immeasurably more lucid and easier to read than the other Restoration figures I’ve been reading.

Lory. Why then, Sir, your Fool advises you to lay aside all Animosity, and apply to Sir Novelty, your elder Brother.
Young Fashion: Damn my elder Brother.
Lory: With all my heart; but get him to redeem your Annuity, however.
Young Fashion: My Annuity! ‘Sdeath, he’s such a Dog, he would not give his Powder-Puff to redeem my Soul.

It’s still 17th century prose, obvz, but it seems to me beautifully clear and easy to follow, and the clarity makes the vigour of the simile all the more vivid. I’m not sure it’s the best, exactly, but it strikes me as being the clearest of the comedies I’ve read:

Berinthia: Pray which Church does your Lordship most oblige with your Presence?
Lord Foppington: Oh, St. James‘s, Madam – There’s much the best Company.
Amanda: Is there good Preaching too?
Lord Foppington: Why, faith, Madam, I can’t tell. A Man must have very little to do there, that can give an Account of the Sermon.

See how brisk the dialogue is – question, answer, question, answer, leading up to a comic punchline – the joke being (in case it’s not obvious in this quote taken out of context) that Foppington is such a very model of a Restoration aristocrat that religion is quite literally the last thing he goes to church for; in fact the blasted sermonising etc gets in the way of the socialising!

There’s something intrinsically comic about a character asking a question and the the second character repeating the substance of the question but with a comic reversal or alternative at the end:

Servant: Will your Lordship venture so soon to expose yourself to the Weather?
Lord Foppington: Sir, I will venture as soon as I can, to expose myself to the Ladies.

And the relationships in the play have just the same clarity and precision. I liked young Fashion, the poor younger brother from the moment he started talking, and really warmed to his long-suffering, inventice and sarcastic servant, Lory, and enjoyed their relationship immensely.

After young Fashion gives his older brother an opportunity to help him out financially, and he refuses to, Fashion declares his moral reservations at an end. It’s not the decision itself, it’s the alacrity with which Lory responds which makes it bracing and funny.

Young Fashion: Here’s rare News, Lory; his Lordship has given me a Pill has purg’d off all my Scruples.
Lory: Then my Heart’s at ease again: For I have been in a lamentable Fright, Sir, ever since your Conscience had the Impudence to intrude into your Company.
Young Fashion: Be at peace, it will come there no more: My Brother has given it a wring by the Nose, and I have kick’d it down Stairs.

Vanbrugh’s sentences are short and punchy. In his robust good humour, Lory reminds me a bit of Sam Weller in the Pickwick Papers.

The accent of a fop

Vanbrugh goes to pains to spell out Lord Foppington’s pronunciation. By the look of it, the kind of rarefied courtier he is aspiring to be had a particular accent or idiom, a distinctive way of pronouncing English. In particular, ‘o’ becomes ‘a’, so that ‘constitution’ and ‘horse’ become ‘canstitution’ and ‘harse’:

  • what between the Air that comes in at the Door on one side, and the intolerable Warmth of the Masks on t’other, a Man gets so many Heats and Colds, ‘twou’d destroy the Canstitution of a Harse.
  • Fore. My Lord, I have done. If you please to have more Hair in your Wig, I’ll put it in.
    Lord Foppington: Passitively, yes

‘Or’ becomes ‘ar’:

  • Lord Foppington: I have arder’d my Coach to the Door:

‘Ot’ becomes ‘at’:

  • Lord Foppington: … when I heard my Father was shat thro’ the Head

‘U’ becomes ‘e’, e.g. ‘judge’ becomes ‘jedge’.

  • Lord Foppington: As Gad shall jedge me, I can’t tell; for ’tis passible I may dine with some of aur Hause at Lacket‘s.

He calls his brother Tam instead of Tom:

  • Lord Foppington: Don’t be in a Passion, Tam; far Passion is the most unbecoming thing in the Warld

Misogyny and misandry

I was very struck when I read some of the feminist introductions to these plays to discover that feminist critics dismiss all Restoration comedies – and indeed all Restoration society – as misogynist.

I take the point that there is a lot of anti-women propaganda in the plays, and that, on a deeper level, you could say the women are treated like chattel. Except that when you actually read the plays, you discover that a lot of the women characters are tough, independent, free to come and go as they please, take lovers, attend the theatre, and that many of them have independent means and live very well. I’m not suggesting 17th century London was like 21st century New York in terms of women’s liberation and legal equality, but having been warned about the utter oppression of women, it is a surprise to then read how much freedom and independence they did have.

And as to statements or sentiments, for every specifically anti-woman generalisation, there is one attacking men. Thus Amanda and Berinthia in Act 5:

Berinthia: Ay, but there you thought wrong again, Amanda. You shou’d consider, that in Matters of Love Men’s Eyes are always bigger than their Bellies. They have violent Appetites, ’tis true, but they have soon din’d.
Amanda: Well; there’s nothing upon Earth astonishes me more than Men’s Inconstancy.

If you are a feminist and want to be offended by what characters say in a play, it’s easy to find hundreds of anti-women beliefs and sentiments. But it is just as easy to find groups of women expressing anti-men sentiments.

For my part, I see statements like this as the kind of glue which binds together the plot. The dialogues are composed of sententious clichés which fill the down-time between the more urgent comic events. Often the sentiments are tendentious, and characters are using these cliches and stereotypes to bend someone to their will (generally women being persuaded that all men are faithless so-and-sos or all men being persuaded that all women are, well, the same).

They are a kind of rhetorical lubrication which keeps the engine of the play – its comic plotline – ticking over. And the women give just as good as they get. Maybe better.

Good Gods—What slippery Stuff are Men compos’d of!
Sure the Account of their Creation’s false,
And ’twas the Woman’s Rib that they were form’d of.

Related links

Reviews of other Restoration plays

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Posted by Simon on August 10, 2020

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The Old Bachelor by William Congreve (1693)

BELLMORE: Come, come, leave business to idlers and wisdom to fools; they have need of ’em.  Wit be my faculty, and pleasure my occupation; and let Father Time shake his glass.

In his lengthy reply to the stinging criticisms of the contemporary stage contained in the polemical pamphlet, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage written by the bishop and theologian Jeremy Collier, William Congreve tells us that he wrote his first play, The Old Bachelor, while recovering from ‘a fit of sickness’ aged just 19! It’s an astonishing achievement for one so young.

A few years later, in 1692, young William arrived in London and showed The Old Bachelor to the leading literary figure of the day, John Dryden who, with typical generosity, declared he had never seen such a good first play in his life, but that it needed a bit of work cutting down to length and re-ordering some of the scenes.

Once revised, The Old Bachelor was promptly accepted by the only theatre company then performing in London, the United Company, and opened in March 1693. It was a smash-hit and had an extraordinary run of fourteen nights, which was getting on for a record for a Restoration comedy; some new plays ran for the bare minimum of three nights!

If you think about it, these incredibly short runs tell you everything about the size of the audience for these plays. It was minuscule. Was it even in the thousands? And this puts in context the many prologues and epilogues to the plays. Often the playwright and the actors knew key members of the audience personally, and so were directly addressing known individuals in the prologues and epilogues.

The Old Bachelor‘s success was in part attributed to the skilful performances of veteran performers Thomas Betterton and Anne Bracegirdle in the roles of Heartwell and Araminta, respectively.

I was startled to learn in a footnote that the music for the play was composed by Henry Purcell.

Cast list

I find the cast lists of these plays not only useful, but sometimes amusing – the comic names and descriptions – in their own right:

MEN
Heartwell, a surly old bachelor, pretending to slight women, secretly in love with Silvia
Bellmour, in love with Belinda
Vainlove, capricious in his love; in love with Araminta
Sharper
Sir Joseph Wittol
Captain Bluffe
Fondlewife, a banker
Setter, a pimp
Tribulation Spintext, a Puritan preacher (who never actually appears in the play)
Mr Gavot, musician to Araminta
Servant to Fondlewife.

WOMEN.
Araminta, in love with Vainlove
Belinda, her cousin, an affected lady, in love with Bellmour
Lætitia, wife to Fondlewife
Sylvia, Vainlove’s forsaken mistress
Lucy, maid to Sylvia
Betty, maid to Belinda

It’s all set in London. As I’ve read more of the plays, I’ve realised that Aphra Behn’s setting her most successful play, The Rover, in Italy, is by far the exception not the rule of Restoration comedy. Almost all the comedies are set in the same city and the same time as the audience. They are completely contemporary.

Act 1

Bellmour and Vainlove are two weary rakes. Vainlove likes seducing women but is easily bored and actively dislikes it if they come on to him. He goes to show Bellmour but gives him the wrong one by mistake, it is a letter from Vainlove’s recently spurned lover, Sylvia, reproving him for abandoning her. It then comes out that Bellmour slept with her, apparently in disguise so she didn’t realise who he was! But she sincerely loves Vainlove and he has dumped her.

Next Vainlove gives Bellmour the letter he’d intended to show him, a love letter from Laetitia, the wife of the comic character Fondlewife – he paid her a few polite compliments and now she’s sent him a damn love letter telling him her husband will be out of town on business and to come and see her in disguise. He asks Bellmour to do him a favour and do it for him – but Laetitia’s lovely says Bellmour – yes, but I hate being forced into an affair, complains Vainlove. They discuss getting Vainlove’s tailor, Settler, to provide a disguise for Bellmour. They briefly discuss the feeble character of the husband, Fondlewife, then Vainlove leaves ‘on business’.

Bellmour complains that he is already in love with one woman, has a dozen or so mistresses, and now Vainlove is suggesting he take on his beloved, God it’s an exhausting business, being a libertine! He says this in the form of a soliloquy, alone onstage, at which point enter Sharper, whose role is to provide comic asides, and start with a good line:

SHARPER:  I’m sorry to see this, Ned.  Once a man comes to his soliloquies, I give him for gone.

Enter Heartwell who they both mock for being a grumpy old misanthropist who doesn’t believe in love. Heartwell in turn mocks Bellmour and Vainlove for expending so much energy in the pursuit of women, and has a particularly cynical speech about how, when you’ve finally gone through all this faradiddle in order to get married, your baby will end up looking like half the aristocracy of England because your wife will have been unfaithful with them all. Visitors coo and tickle the baby and say:

‘Ay, the boy takes after his mother’s relations,’ when the devil and she knows ’tis a little compound of the whole body of nobility.

Heartwell leaves ‘on business’ and Bellmour spots two stock comic characters, Sir Joseph Wittol, a foolish knight, and his companion, the cowardly bully, Captain Bluffe, who he points out to Sharper. Bellmour explains that the night before he came across Wittol being set upon by footpads and freed him, though Wittol ran off without identifying his rescuer.

Act 2 scene 1

Sharper follows Sir Joseph to the location where he was mugged the night before, then pretends to be his mysterious rescuer but says that, alas, he lost a hundred pounds in the affray, and starts trying to dun Sir Joseph for it. This blustering old fool is trying to find a way out, when his sidekick and defender turns up, the swaggering blustering bully Captain Bluffe, and there is a richly comic scene of Sharper egging both men on to silly heights of boasting and braggartry, Bluffe in particular being scandalised that his heroic escapades in the recent wars don’t seem to have been reported in the news gazettes!

Act 2 scene 2

Araminta, in love with Vainlove, squabbles with her cousin Belinda, who affects to despise men –

BELINDA: Oh, you have raved, talked idly, and all in commendation of that filthy, awkward, two-legged creature man.

But is secretly in love with Bellmour. Araminta says Belinda dreamed of Bellmour last night, called out his name and embraced her (Araminta) as if she was him. Stuff and nonsense, cries Belinda, and calls her servant to prepare her things to go out, but at that moment a servant announces that Bellmour and Vainlove are visiting. After some indecision, Belinda decides to stay after all, in order to protect her cousin’s reputation, of course – though her cousin teases her it’s solely to see Bellmour.

Prolonged repartee during which all sides wittily cap each other’s allusions and barbs, with generalised sententiae about love and devotion. Araminta emerges as the quickest-witted of them – all of these plays feature one strong, determined and clever woman. There is a passage of particularly barbed banter between Bellmour who extravagantly paints his devotion and Belinda who scorns him. In fact when he asks her what she can do for her, she says shut up, which leads to a comic sequence where Bellmour continues his conversation in sign language until Belinda is so exasperated she lets him speak again.

Their musician, Mr Gavot, performs a song Araminta has written. This happens in most of the plays. Did Restoration aristocrats write songs this glibly and easily for their lady loves or is it purely a theatrical convention?

Act 3 scene 1

Sylvia is the woman Vainlove has jilted, and Lucy is her maid who, as so often, impertinently tells her boss the true state of affairs, namely that Vainlove will never love her again. Sylvia is consumed with envy for her love rival, Araminta, but Lucy says she has a Plan to fix that – send Vainlove a cloying letter as if from Araminta – a woman’s enthusiasm always puts Vainlove off.

LUCY: Contrive a kind letter as from her, ’twould disgust his nicety, and take away his stomach.

Meanwhile, here comes Heartwell – Lucy encourages Sylvia to make the best of a bad job and hook him. Soon she’ll be old. She needs to get a husband before she can.

Vainlove and Bellmour have tailed Heartwell to Sylvia’s house. They watch as the ageing foo hesitates whether to in or not and commit himself to the snare of womanhood. He does, as Bellmour and Vainlove stifle their mirth. Then Vainlove’s tailor, Setter, arrives: he has prepared a full set of clothes which allow Bellmour to masquerade as the earnest Puritan preacher Spintext.

Bellmour tells Setter to meet him with the costume later and exits. Setter launches into a comically high-minded speech about the relative merits of a manservant and a pimp. Lucy comes upon him and, as so often, a lead male character’s manservant is in love with a lead woman’s maidservant, their working class love affair echoing their betters’ affair but more crudely.

Congreve gives this kind of set scene an extra spin by having Lucy put on a face mask before talking to Setter and, given that his soliloquy was already laughably pretentious, the couple then launch into a parody of highfalutin’ tragedy, complete with what were obviously obscure and archaic words to convey their eminence and lofty sentiments. Lucy extracts from Setter that his master will be in Covent Garden later, then manages to get away without being covered in slobbery kisses.

Wittoll and Bluffe enter. Bluffe is cross that Sir Joseph has given Sharper £100, and works himself up into a fury of vengeance, declaring that if only Sharper were here, he would take his revenge and… at that precise moment Sharper and Bellmour appear onstage and Bluffe performs a comic blustering retreat. Sharper quickly detects how angry they are with him but also what cowards they are – and so takes to kicking Wittoll and beating Bluffe who swears he will have vengeance, but not now, not here, it’s too public and various other excuses.

Sharper and Bellmour exeunt laughing.

Act 3 Scene 2 Silvia’s lodgings

Enter Heartwell, the ageing anti-love exponent, the old bachelor of the title, and Sylvia, Vainlove’s jilted lover. Heartwell has laid on a dance, music and the performance of a song to impress Silvia. He then jangles his purse full of gold coins at her. His wooing of her is done in the higher, more poetic style the play occasionally drops into. Heartwell combines high-flown rhetoric with emotional clumsiness, for example offering to buy Sylvia outright. But when she beings to talk about marriage, he is suddenly very reluctant to marry her – because he thinks marriage is a fool’s estate – suggesting instead that she become his licensed mistress. Which makes Sylvia cry that she doesn’t want to live as a whore and burst into tears.

But when he finally leaves, after grabbing a few kisses, Sylvia turns to the audience and says:

SILVIA:  Ha, ha, ha, an old fox trapped –

Suggesting that everything she said in their scene together, all the sighs and tears, were a ploy, a trap to get him to marry her, to get her hands on his money. (Money is never far from the surface of these plays; they reveal what a major role it plays in human relationships.)

Sylvia’s servant Lucy enters and says she’s contrived a letter to Vainlove as if from Amarinta which will wreck their love.

Act 4 scene 1

Bellmour dressed up as the Puritan Spintext:

BELLMOUR: I wonder why all our young fellows should glory in an opinion of atheism, when they may be so much more conveniently lewd under the coverlet of religion.

Exits. Enter Fondlewife who, in a soliloquy, reveals he is jealous of his beautiful young wife, Laetitia. Then a scene in which he suspects her of adultery and she, in comic asides, reveals she is frightened he knows her true intent i.e. to be unfaithful with Vainlove, whilst to Fondlewife’s face playing the aggrieved wife. They both use baby talk which makes the scene more funny. Finally, she manages, with umpteen kisses, to pack him off on the overnight journey he’s taking on ‘business’.

It is an important fact that Fondlewife has arranged for a chaplain or preacher to be with her and instruct her while he is away. This is the content of the letter she had sent to Vainlove and which he showed Bellmour right at the start of the play i.e. ‘my husband is going away for the night, come in the disguise of a preacher.’

Vainlove and Sharper. They read the letter they’ve been sent, as from Amarinta, but in fact by Lucy. She has done her work well, correctly predicting that by making Amarinta come on strong, puts Vainlove off her:

VAINLOVE: I hate to be crammed. By heaven, there’s not a woman will give a man the pleasure of a chase: my sport is always balked or cut short. I stumble over the game I would pursue. ’Tis dull and unnatural to have a hare run full in the hounds’ mouth, and would distaste the keenest hunter. I would have overtaken, not have met, my game.

So they plan to meet Amarinta at Covent Garden that evening, but Vainlove will now spurn her. (Sharper thinks he’s a fool.)

Act 4 Scene 2

Bellmour, in disguise as Spintext the preacher, is shown into Mrs Fondlewife i.e. Laetitia’s rooms. No sooner has the servant left before he throws off his disguise and reveals himself to Laetitia who feigns shock and surprise, mainly because she was expecting Vainlove. But the scene is devoted to showing Bellmour’s formidable seduction technique as he slowly wins her round and by the end, by pretending to have a fainting fit, he gets her to agree he can lie on her bed to recover, and they exeunt into her bedroom.

Act 4 scene 3 St James’s Park

Setting for the afternoon rambles of the layabout aristocracy. Enter Belinda and Amarinta. It is much more obvious that Belinda is meant to be pretentious and affected and tells Amarinta how she took it upon herself to correct the manners of a country family up in town for the first time.

They put on masks as Sir Joseph Wittoll and the boasting soldier Captain Bluffe approach and there is some comic banter before the ladies spy Vainlove approaching, and tell the two buffoons to bugger off, although Sir Joseph realises Amarinta is heiress to a vast fortune and tells us in an aside he’d like to marry her.

The point of the scene is for Amarinta and Vainlove to be left alone, so he can act cold and in a roundabout way berate her for the letter she sent him. But since she didn’t send him the letter, she has no idea what is going on and quickly becomes angry, storming off.

Act 4 scene 4 Fondlewife’s house

Bellmour and Laetitia have had sex and emerge from the bedroom to hear Fondlewife’s voice coming up the stairs. Bellmour gathers up the preacher costume and Laetitia bundles him into the bedroom before opening the door to Fondlewife and Sir Joseph.

In this farcical scene, Fondlewife announces that he needs to go into the bedroom to collect the papers he forgot to take for his ‘business’ and Laetitia desperately tries to think up pretexts to stop him, at one point bundling into Sir John when Fondlewife’s back is turned and claiming the old bodger tried to molest her; which Fondlewife believes and pushes Sir John out the door with vivid Biblical imprecations.

But Fondlewife is still determined to enter the bedroom (where Bellmour is hiding) and so Laetitia suddenly has a brainwave and tells her husband the preacher came round and was giving her lessons in piety but had an attack of stomach ache and is lying on the bed. Fondlewife buys this, tiptoes into the bedroom, sees the form of Bellmour on the bed, gets his papers and tiptoes out, telling Laetitia they must get the maid to look after the poor preacher when… he sees the book. A book on the floor. The book Bellmour brought with him. And is it a book of devotion and piety? No. Fondlewife picks it up and realises that it is a French novel, The Innocent Adultery! No priest would carry this. Bellmour is busted!

Angrily, Fondlewife calls for the unknown man to come out of the bedroom, while Laetitia pleads she has no idea who he is or what he was doing there, wretched please which Fondlewife now brusquely dismisses.

But this scene turns into a further demonstration of Bellmour’s mastery as he manages to outface the situation. He comes out of the bedroom and confronts Fondlewife, declaring he is a whoremaster who pinched Spintext’s costume, then pretended to have colic in order to lie on her bed and was about to call her in when Fondlewife appeared – so he never got as far as seducing Laetitia.

Bellmour exudes confidence. Laetitia talks babytalk to Fondlewife. The latter softens. She faints. He believes her. Thus gullible husbands.

Act 5 scene 1 The street

Bellmour meets up with Setter and tells him the disguise worked a treat. Then they both see Heartwell arriving at Silvia’s house. Setter exits and Bellmour chats up Lucy, Silvia’s maid, with a kiss (seems like she’s one his many conquests) and some money, and asks her to keep up the pretence that he is a preacher, so he can marry the silly couple.

Enter Vainlove, Sharper and Setter. Setter tells them that the letter which upset Vainlove, the letter pretending to come from Amarinta, was in fact concocted by vengeful Silvia. This clears the way for Vainlove to be back in love with Amarinta!

The final scenes get confusing. Bellmour in the guise of the preacher falsely marries Heartwell and Silvia, then takes her aside, reveals his true identity and promises he will find her a better husband. He pops back into the street and tells Setter and Sharper to keep their eyes peeled for a replacement husband then exits. At this point Sir John and Captain Bluffe come along.

Setter and Sharper then have a whole series of machinations, some of which happen in whispers, or offstage, in some of which they pretend information to dupe Sir John and the Captain, and also Heartwell who Sharper appears to torment by dragging him towards his own house, promising him a fine young wench who’s up for a shag… until Heartwell realises it’s the wife he’s just married that Sharper is talking about. I got lost in the maze. I read this passage a couple of times and still didn’t understand the ins and outs. Partly because they don’t clearly state what they’re planning to do, they disappear into corners to mutter with the people they’re gulling…the schemes they’re cooking up only become clear as they emerge in the final scene.

In the penultimate passage, Bellmour and Belinda, Vainlove and Amarinta, are invited to Heartwell’s house. Somehow Sharper has got Silvia out of the house and conspired to convince Heartwell that his wife of half an hour is already off whoring. The four leads tease Heartwell about his stupidity in marrying and his cuckolded state: Belinda in particular emerges as sharp tongued and witty.

As Eric Rump points out in his introduction to the Penguin edition, this tormenting of Heartwell amounts to bullying and triggers him to give a speech which echoes Shylock’s in The Merchant of Venice:

HEARTWELL: How have I deserved this of you? any of ye?  Sir, have I impaired the honour of your house, promised your sister marriage, and whored her?  Wherein have I injured you?  Did I bring a physician to your father when he lay expiring, and endeavour to prolong his life, and you one and twenty?  Madam, have I had an opportunity with you and baulked it?  Did you ever offer me the favour that I refused it?

At moments like this does the comedy topple into something much more serious, into something momentarily closer to tragedy? Is it that much more serious precisely because it emerges from comedy, rather than one of the era’s over-wrought tragedies?

Eric Rump points out that the role of Heartwell – the Old Bachelor of the title – was taken by Thomas Betterton, the ‘Laurence Olivier of his day’, who also played tragic leads and so would have given the role more depth and seriousness than a purely comic actor. However you judge the effect, it is extremely impressive of Congreve to have touched this deeper nerve when he was barely into his twenties.

Anyway, our boys and girls goad Heartwell into declaring he will do anything to be rid of his married state, which is what they’re conspiring for all along – and we, the audience, know that he is not in fact married at all, since the ceremony was carried out by Bellmour in disguise.

On the last three pages the elaborate scam is revealed. Sharper and Settle have married Sir John and Captain Bluffe to two women they thought were Amarinta and Belinda – except they aren’t. The real Amarinta and Belinda now take their masks off to reveal themselves – to the two braggart soldiers’ shock and surprise – and when they turn to the women they have married – they reveal themselves as Silvia and Lucy.

SIR JOHN: Pray, madam, who are you?  For I find you and I are like to be better acquainted.
SILVIA: The worst of me is, that I am your wife—

So Lucy is married to Captain Bluffe – who announces he will no more to the wars – Silvia is married to the insufferable Sir John, but does at least acquire a title. And Heartwell breathes a huge sigh of relief to realise he isn’t married after all.

And Bellmour – with the abrupt reversal in attitude for which these plays are notorious – declares he is happy to acquire the fetters of marriage with acid-tongued Belinda. It only remains for Vainlove to marry Amarinta and all the loose ends are tied up but Bellmour notices Vainlove, given his contrary psychology, showing signs of reluctance to marry her and so announces that he and Belinda will get married first the next morning, to set an example to Vainlove and Araminta.

Then there’s the traditional music and dancing.

Animal imagery

There’s a lot of animal imagery. Vainlove is referred to as an ass, Bellmour an ape and a wolf in sheep’s clothing, Heartwell an old fox, Sir John a lion, women as hares to be hunted or partridges to be covered, cuckolded men are like stags with horns. The references add colourful imagery to the endless truisms about love and marriage and adultery.

Maybe they link to Belinda’s comment about ‘filthy, awkward, two-legged creature man’, but I don’t see that there’s anything very deep going on here. All the Restoration comedies are based on a worldview which sees human beings as amoral animals devoted to quenching animal drives, lust being topmost, but also drunkenness and gluttony, and using their God-given minds not to seek a devout and spiritual life, but to concoct fantastically complicated schemes for their own debauchery.

SIR JOSEPH: Nay, Gad, I’ll pick up; I’m resolved to make a night on’t… Adslidikins, bully, we’ll wallow in wine and women. Why, this same Madeira wine has made me as light as a grasshopper.

Quite often, reading these plays, you can sympathise with Bishop Collier and his characterisation of the plays as deliberately encouraging lust, avarice, greed, gluttony, jealousy, anger and sometimes violence.

VAINLOVE: Why did you not find me out, to tell me this before, sot?
SETTER: Sir, I was pimping for Mr. Bellmour.
SHARP: You were well employed.

More noticeable is Congreve’s way with extended metaphors, or with a metaphor which allows him to bring in colourful imagery. Thus at the very opening Bellmour has a little speech which in four clauses contains four images from the game of bowls:

BELLMOUR: Business is the rub of life, perverts our aim, casts off the bias, and leaves us wide and short of the intended mark.

This is so contrived I wonder if the actor paused and waited for a ripple of applause from the audience at the author’s cleverness.

At the start of Act Five, Bellmour bumps into Setter who asks him how things went in the plot to have sex with Laetitia, and both of them jokily use an extended naval metaphor to describe the result:

SETTER: Joy of your return, sir. Have you made a good voyage? or have you brought your own lading back?
BELLMOUR: No, I have brought nothing but ballast back – made a delicious voyage, Setter; and might have rode at anchor in the port till this time, but the enemy surprised us – I would unrig.

So Bellmour has unloaded his cargo.

Misandry

Woke modern critics attack the Restoration comedies for their misogyny e.g. Sharper describing Araminta as:

a delicious melon, pure and consenting ripe, and only waits thy cutting up.

But it seems to me that all the characters, regardless of gender, age or class, manipulate and denigrate each other on the basis of an utterly heartless and cynical worldview. And for every dismissive generalisation the men make about women, the women make one about men, and the aristocrats make about their servants, and the servants make about their stupid masters.

  • BELINDA:  Oh, you have raved, talked idly, and all in commendation of that filthy, awkward, two-legged creature man.
  • LUCY: Man was by nature woman’s cully made:
  • HEARTWELL: Lying, child, is indeed the art of love, and men are generally masters in it
  • ARAMINTA to VAINLOVE: Thou hadst all the treachery and malice of thy sex

The plays may contain umpteen libels against women, but the biggest indictment is how the men talk and behave and Belinda has a vivid little speech about how, in the end, disappointing men are, after all the impressive wooing, once you actually marry them.

BELINDA:Thou art so troublesome a lover, there’s hopes thou’lt make a more than ordinary quiet husband.
BELLMOUR: Is that a maxim among ye?
BELINDA: Yes: you fluttering men of the mode have made marriage a mere French dish… You are so curious in the preparation, that is, your courtship, one would think you meant a noble entertainment – but when we come to feed, ’tis all froth, and poor, but in show.  Nay, often, only remains, which have been I know not how many times warmed for other company, and at last served up cold to the wife.

The exhausted libertine

I think it’s Dorimant in The Man of Mode that critics point out sounds tired – or is it Belvile in The Rover? The point is that many of the plays start with the leading male character sounding exhausted.

Now, the critics I read appear to take this at face value as an indictment of the libertine lifestyle as a whole, as if the plays are observational documentaries. But something in Bellmour’s final words in this play made me realise there’s a simpler and less moralising interpretation.

Structurally, all the plays end with the lead characters marrying and many critics have pointed out the complete lack of psychological verisimilitude involved in witty, cynical characters who’ve spent four acts slagging off marriage as an institution for stubborn fools – suddenly decide marriage is a wonderful state and enter into it with boundless enthusiasm.

Seen from this perspective, the trope of the tired libertine makes more sense. It stands to reason that, in preparation for this last act about-face, hints should be dropped right from the start that the lead libertine is actually quite tired of his life of endless seduction and is, in fact, teetering on the brink of abandoning it.

And therefore that the male lead’s expression of these thoughts and feelings have little or no moral or psychological content, but are a structural necessity of the form, as formulaic as most other aspects of the plays.

In fact, almost all these Restoration comedies can be reinterpreted as the final acts in the libertine’s long career. They’re all plays about Life Changes and Conversions.

Related links

Reviews of other Restoration plays

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by Simon on July 29, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Comedy, Play, Theatre
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on July 29, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/07/29/the-old-bachelor-william-congreve/

Tripwire by Lee Child (1999)

Novels of all types begin with a plot or fabula – a series of logically and chronologically related events, usually involving the same or a related set of characters. The author then creates from this a story, whereby different elements of the fabula are deployed in ways to create suspense, or irony, or mystery.

One of the main pleasures of reading a novel is working your way through the story back towards the fabula underlying it. In detective and thriller novels, this has become the main element of the text Whodunnit, and why?

The fabula

Thirty years ago in the Vietnam War, a U.S. helicopter pilot named Victor Hobie is sent on a mission, carrying a couple of military policemen to collect a notorious crooked American soldier, Carl Allen from a remote part of the jungle. The chopper is shot down and crashes, killing all on board except the criminal Allen who, however, has half his arm chopped off by a rotor blade and half his face burned by kerosene.

In a very bad way, Allen nonetheless swaps dog tags with the nearest body (as it happens, the tags of the pilot, Victor Hobie) and crawls off into the jungle.

Weeks later he is picked up by a U.S. patrol more dead than alive and taken to hospital. But as soon as he is half way mended, he breaks out of the hospital and makes his way, first of all to the secret location in the countryside where he had buried his stash of cash and other valuables; then uses this to buy his way through native villages across Vietnam, into Cambodia and then across the border into Thailand.

Thai doctors fix a prosthetic attachment to his stump of an arm, and he chooses a stainless steel hook. Not much can be done for his half-burned face. Eventually, Allen returns to the States and uses his assets to set himself up in business as a lender of last resort, using intimidation tactics to terrify his debtors.

Thirty years later he has established a respectable front organisation, Cayman Corporate Trust, with swish offices on the 88th floor of the World Trade Centre. He has adopted the name of the man whose dog tags he stole, Hobie, along with a grim nickname, ‘Hook’.

The trigger of the plot is that a man named Chester Stone has inherited the cinema film and projector company set up by his grandfather and expanded by his father, but which is now running into big trouble. Stone needs a loan of a million dollars to tide him over for six weeks until some new business comes in. Stone’s finance director points him towards Hobie, so Stone goes to meet him and takes out a loan, signing over some of the shares in the company as security.

What Stone doesn’t know is that Hobie plans to take over his entire company, by force and physical intimidation if necessary, and then demolish all the properties, factories and so on which it owns along the Long Island shore – and develop it as prime real estate land.

Hobie / Allen’s plan is complicated by the fact that he has been tipped off that someone has been snooping around the U.S. Army’s forensic facility in Hawaii, asking questions about Victor Hobie. And that, as part of the ongoing repatriation programme of U.S. military corpses, the army has just gotten round to crating up and shipping home the bodies from the site of the long-ago helicopter crash, delayed for so long partly because the Vietnamese authorities drove a hard bargain, demanding money for access, and partly because of its inaccessible location.

Hobie is tipped off about both of these situations, which threaten to unmask him and reveal his fake identity to the authorities. That is the meaning of the title, Tripwire. For thirty years Hobie has had in place a set of two ‘tripwires’ which would force him to bolt – the shipment of the bodies from Vietnam, and anybody snooping in Hawaii. Now both tripwires have been triggered at the same time.

His assistant, Tony, begs him to carry out the long-held plan, to liquidate his assets and flee the country, adopting a new identity. But Hobie is mesmerised by his project to fleece Stone, liquidate the Stone company, and sell of the Long Shore property at a vast profit. He wants to complete this last, grand plan.

And so he doesn’t hesitate to take Stone’s wife, Marilyn, hostage, along with the pretty woman estate agent who Marilyn had invited to come and value her and Chester’s house.

The story

This is the long, complicated back story which Jack Reacher (and the reader) has to unravel, starting with a trigger incident and then slowly working back through clues and investigations.

When we meet Reacher he is happily digging holes for swimming pools in Key West in Florida, hard exercise which has made his six foot five body even more formidable and fit. In the evenings he works as ‘muscle’ in a strip bar where the girls, unsurprisingly, are attracted by his size and strength and chivalrous nature. He looks, one of them says, ‘like a condom crammed with walnuts’ (p.23).

In the opening scene a private investigator, name of Costello, comes to the bar asking after a ‘Jack Reacher’. He’s been sent by a Mrs Jacob. Reacher tells him he’s never heard of Reacher or Jacobs. Later Reacher discovers Costello’s body, shot in the face with his fingertips cut off.

Intrigued, Reacher figures Costello must have been a retired cop, from New York by his accent, and with typical ‘Reacher luck’ rings around New York precincts till he is answered by a jaded old cop who says, ‘Sure, Costello, yeah he retired and set up as an investigator to pay off his alimony’ – and helpfully hands over the name and address of Costello’s office.

So Reacher’s Quest begins. He gets a plane to New York and goes to Costello’s office, only to find the door swinging open (as so many doors swing handily open in Reacher’s adventures) and the secretary’s computer handily left on. He uses it to get the address of the client ‘Mrs Jacob’ who Costello had mentioned, hires a car and motors out to her house.

To discover that ‘Mrs Jacob’ is none other than Jodie Garber, daughter of Reacher’s own mentor in the Military Police, Colonel Leon Garber. He knew her when she was an already-beautiful 15-year-old and he 24. Now she is a beautiful 29-year-old, in fact ‘achingly beautiful’ (p.81). Named Jacob because she married a man named Jacob, though she is now conveniently divorced and single again.

Reacher turns up as she is hosting a funeral party for her Dad who has just passed away from heart disease. Lots of Army top brass and officials who Reacher mixes with, embarrassed about his casual Key West clothes.

Once the guests leave Jodie and Reacher do some catching up. She explains that her dad had asked her to find Reacher, because he was involved in a case but, becoming increasingly poorly, needed his best M.P. to help him. Hence she commissioned Costello to find Reacher. Ah so.

But they have barely got chatting before two armed men try to shoot them. Reacher being Reacher handles the situation and he and Jodie roar off in her car. Now she is On The Quest, too. Now she is On The Team.

Reacher always assembles small teams, usually with one male sidekick, and always with a nubile and available woman who he ends up sleeping with. In Make Me it was investigator Chang, who he sleeps with. In Killing Floor it was Police Officer Roscoe, who he sleeps with. In this book it is attractive Wall Street lawyer Jodie Jacob, who… he sleeps with.

(‘Sleep with’ doesn’t really convey the sense of frenzied physical activity which the books tastefully hint at. In several of them there are fleeting references to the woman straddling Reacher. Given that he is six foot five of solid muscle trained to kill in 20 different ways, I can imagine that riding him is the only way to avoid serious physical injury.)

Jodie and Reacher go visit her father’s heart doctor whose receptionist tells them he was always chatting to old Mr Hobie, another patient with heart disease, in the waiting room. So, following this tip, off they go to interview Mr and Mrs Hobie, who tell them that, Yes, they asked the colonel to help them find the remains of their son. He was a model son, a medal-winning soldier and yet for all these years the Army has refused to confirm he is dead. So they are hoping against hope that he is still alive in Vietnam somewhere.

The Hobies had come across a researcher who they paid eighteen thousand dollars to track their son down and who came back with a photo of a gaunt fifty year old man in U.S. combat fatigues apparently in a Vietnam prisoner of war camp. The bounty hunter asked for more money to fund an expedition to liberate him.

Reacher takes Jodie to meet this guy, Rutter, who turns out to be a con artist, who had rigged up the photo in the New York botanical gardens amid tropical plants. Reacher beats the crap out of Rutter, takes his gun and his car and all the cash he has, half to repay the Hobies what he swindled them out of, half to fund what is now Reacher’s Quest.

Thrillers generally have information instead of psychology. Characters don’t develop much, but they often take you to interesting places, and explore interesting subjects. In fact, many thrillers contain at their core a sort of Wikipedia level of basic information on the chosen topic or subject area.

In this case the novel includes extensive information about what happened to the American Missing In Action in the Vietnam War. Using his wartime credentials, and the fact he’s with the daughter of the widely respected Colonel Leon Garber, Reacher blags his way into first the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, and then on to the military Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, a special facility that identifies the forensic remains of U.S. soldiers.

At the latter Reacher meets up with his old mentor, General Nash Newman, a forensic anthropologist (p.412). Threaded throughout the book we have had descriptions of the bodies of the American soldiers killed in that helicopter crash all those years earlier, being transported from the jungle to a military airport, being loaded aboard a U.S. Air Force plane with full military honours, and flown to Hawaii.

It is here that there is a memorable scene as Newman invites Reacher to study the seven bodies from the helicopter crash, reduced pretty much to charred skeletons, and figure out the puzzle.

The scene features the nearest thing to emotion in a Reacher novel, namely horror at the precise way each of the seven was dismembered, crushed or burned to death as the chopper crashed.

But it is also a Sherlock Holmes-level of close examination and deduction. We follow Reacher as he examines each of the bodies in turn before realising that the truth is staring him in the face — there are seven bodies but fifteen hands. The survivor had his hand chopped off in the disaster. They are looking for a one-armed man.

Meanwhile back in the World Trade Centre, the torture continues. Two policemen follow up a clue and go up to Hobie’s offices on the 88th floor, where they discover that Hobie is holding Chester, Marilyn and the state agent woman hostage. Hobie and Tony immediately get the drop on the cops, disarm and handcuff them.

Hook Hobie is a psychopath. He takes the woman cop into the bathroom of the swish offices, and tortures her to death to the terror of the other hostages. Chester and Marilyn have bought some time by telling Hobie that the remaining share certificates are held in trust, and can only be handed over with a lawyer as witness.

It’s hardly high feminism in action, but it’s worth pointing out that Marilyn, Chester’s wife, from the get-go is much more tough-minded, focused and practical than her lily-livered husband. While he goes into catatonic shock after being kidnapped, Marilyn becomes a classic Lee Child character, devising strategies to try and redeem the situation. It is she who persuades Hobie to let Sheryl, the estate agent whose nose Hobie had violently smashed, to be taken to hospital.

Grudgingly (and improbably) Hobie consents. Tony drives her to the nearest hospital, drumming into her that if she calls the cops Chester and Marilyn will be killed. She does this, putting off the cops, claiming her broken nose was an accident. But she also follows Marilyn’s instructions and alerts a law firm Marilyn knows, to expect a strange call.

Marilyn tells Hobie she is calling the law firm which must be witness to signing over all the share certificates to Stone’s company. Prepared for the call, the lawyer at the other end says they’re reluctant to do anything in this situation, she should really contact the police etc.

Hobie is standing right by Marilyn and can hear everything she says, so it’s like the scene you’ve seen in hundreds of TV shows and movies where the hostage has to say things which appear anodyne to the bad guy listening, but signal her real intent to the people at the other end of the line.

The climactic shootout

Jodie’s firm tell her she has been booked in for a big business meeting about the liquidation of a multi-million dollar company, and so she and Reacher hasten back from Hawaii mulling over what they’ve learned about the helicopter crash and the likely fate of Victor Hobie.

After having more sex at her Manhattan apartment, and freshening up, Reacher drops Jodie at the World Trade Centre. It is here, on the 88th floor, at Hobie’s offices, that the climax of the novel comes.

In the lift Jodie meets the private detective hired by the law firm Marilyn had contacted. The two of them walk into a trap in Hobie’s office, are disarmed, beaten up a little, and plonked on the sofa next to Chester and Marilyn.

All through the novel Hobie has been kept informed of the researches of Reacher. It was, after all, Hobie’s goons who killed Costello and then, following the same paper trail from Costello’s office that Reacher found, had tried to break in and kidnap Jodie – only to have Reacher save her life and scoot her away.

Hobie also has a paid snitch at the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, who tips him off about Reacher’s visit. So for some time Hobie has known that Reacher was on his scent. Now he holds his razor sharp hook against Jodie’s pretty face and tells her to phone Reacher and ask him to meet her there.

Knowing something is wrong, Reacher says he’s still in St Louis and it will take him some time to get there. OK, says Jodie. Hobie hears all this and settles down to wait. Unbeknown to him Reacher is still just outside the World Trade Centre. He bluffs his way past security in the standard Reacher style, and takes the lift to the 88th floor. Takes out the hall bulb so it’s dark in the hallway, and buzzes to say there’s a delivery.

Now throughout this final stage of the story, Hobie has been accompanied only by his fixer, Tony, and another tough guy. The tough guy opens the door and Reacher immediately attacks him, disarms him, pushes him over to the wall and breaks his neck. Using a fire axe he chops his lower arm off, then arranges the body, with severed hand next to it, carefully on the floor, and ducks down behind the reception desk to wait.

Noticing the tough guy’s absence, Hobie himself comes out to the reception area but still holding Jodie by his hook with a shotgun in the other hand. Hobie freezes when he sees the dismembered body, overcome with traumatic memories of the helicopter crash exactly as Reacher had hoped.

But Jodie is entirely blocking his face so Reacher can’t get in a shot. Tony the fixer follows carrying a shotgun and, walking clear of the other two, Reacher has a clear shot and shoots his head off with his handgun. This makes Hobie turn, scoop up the shotgun and before Reacher can re-aim, fire a huge, scattergun blast at the reception desk Reacher’s hiding behind, which blows into smithereens.

Reacher is aware of terrible pain in his head and blood pouring down his face. Jodie tells him he has a nail sticking out of his forehead. After a minute’s stand-off, Jodie ushes backwards against Hobie who trips over the corpse on the floor and shoots the other barrel of the shotgun accidentally into the corpse.

Blood flies everywhere. That’s the two barrels of the shotgun used up, so Hobie scoops out of his pocket one of the little handguns he had confiscated off the cop-turned-investigator who had accompanied Jodie to the meeting.

He holds this gun against Jodie’s side. It is a classic movie standoff with Hobie knowing that if he kills Jodie, Reacher will immediately shoot him, but if Reacher tries to shoot Hobie, Hobie will kill Jodie. Impasse.

The two protagonists weigh the situation and discuss it like pros, like all the characters in Reacher novels who spend their entire lives calculating odds and making plans.

‘I’ll shoot her,’ Allen said.
Reacher shook his head again. The pain was fearsome. It was building stronger and spreading  behind both his eyes.
‘You won’t shoot her,’ he said. ‘Think about it, Allen. You’re a selfish piece of shit. The way you are, you’re always number one. You shoot her, I’ll shoot you. You’re twelve feet away from me. I’m aiming at your head. You pull your trigger, I’ll pull mine. She dies, you die one-hundredth of a second later. You won’t shoot me either because, you line up on me you go down before you’re even half way there. Think about it. Impasse.’
He stared at him through the pain and the gloom. A classic standoff. (p.521)

The impasse is broken by Jodie who suddenly kicks back against Hobie, giving Reacher just time enough to pull up his gun. Hobie beats him to it by a fraction of a second, fires and hits Reacher full in the chest but Reacher still has the momentum to fire a shot which, with typical Reacher luck, blows Hobie’s head to smithereens.

Days later Reacher regains consciousness in hospital. The doctors have removed the nail and other debris from his head. And it turns out that all that pool building in Key West has built up his musculature to such a peak of toughness that the bullet’s momentum was slowed and it only bruised a rib.

Captain America. Superman. Jack Reacher.

Jack Reacher novels as ternary systems

A binary numeral system has two values, represented as 0 and 1. A binary system has two states, off and on. A ternary system has three states.

Calculating plans As in the other Jack Reacher novels, all the characters spend most of their time calculating what to do next, coming up with plans and schemes.

‘We were chased and attacked there, but nobody out here is paying any attention to us.’
‘You been checking?’ she asked, alarmed.
‘I’m always checking,’ he said. (p. 352)

The other guy was busy calculating the odds. (p.29)

Hobie moved his arm and tapped a little rhythm on the desktop with the point of his hook. Thought hard, and nodded again, decisively. (p.57)

Then he made his second great breakthrough. Similar to the first. It was a process of deep radical thought. A response to a problem. (p.130)

There was silence on the line again. Just the same faint hiss, and breathing. Like the old woman was thinking. Like she needed time to adjust to some new considerations. (p.136)

Hobie nodded, vaguely. He was thinking hard. (p.139)

It was a good plan, almost worked. (p.181)

Reacher changed his plan. (p.287)

Tony laughed. Jodie looked from him to Hobie. She saw that they were very nearly at the end of some long process. (p.495)

Lee Child characters view life as a sequence of problems, to be thought through and solved. Have a problem = unhappy. Have a plan = happy.

He could see Gerber’s problem. In the middle of something, health failing, unwilling to abandon an obligation, needing help. (p.93)

Jodie was the problem. (p.104)

‘Those two assholes playing at being my enforcers will be no problem.’ (p.141)

‘What about this Reacher guy? He’s still a loose end.’
Hobie shrugged in his chair. ‘I’ve got a separate plan for him.’ (p.141)

They paused in the hot Missouri sunshine after they paid off the cab and agreed on how to do it. (p.313)

Hobie has put in place a plan for what to do if the secret of his false identity ever comes out.

When he discovers Mrs Jacob is on his trail he dispatches men to kill her.

He devises a plan to take Chester Stone’s company off him.

Chester, meanwhile, is devising a plan to keep his company afloat.

For her part, Marilyn Stone, sensing the financial trouble her husband is in, devises a plan to sell their house – hence the presence of the estate agent.

And then reacts to the plight of being kidnapped not with panic, but with a series of strategems intended to wrest some control and agency back to her and her husband.

And so on, throughout the text. There is no end to the characters’ scheming and planning.

Binary Therefore, you could say that, for the purpose of these stories, all Lee Child characters operate in a binary system, having just two mental states: problem – where they are confronted with a situation, complexities, barriers – or plan – a solution, a way forward which manages the problem.

Child has Reacher reflect that this simple-minded vision of life as a sequence of problems requiring planning and solving stems from his upbringing in the Army, which gave him a very binary view of life.

His own career had been locked tight inside the service itself, where things were always simple, either happening or not happening, good or bad, legal or not legal. (p.474)

And, in a later passage, we are also shown how Reacher’s obsession with planning everything out, about thinking in terms of strategic advantage, combat and victory, is also the legacy of his army training.

Combat is about time and space and opposing forces. Like a huge four-dimensional diagram… Stay calm and plan. (p.508)

Stage 1: analyse threat. Stage 2: implement plan. OK. But I think there is another, third, element.

Shrugging I couldn’t help noticing that the characters are always shrugging. I began to underline the word ‘shrug’ and realised that it occurs on almost every page, sometimes twice a page.

DeWitt just shrugged. (p.374)
DeWitt shrugged. (p.376)
DeWitt just shrugged again. (p.378)
DeWitt shrugged. (p.379)

Why? In practice there’s a variety of reasons, but at its simplest it’s because a character doesn’t know what to do or say next.

She looked up at him, astonished. ‘But why?’
He shrugged. (p.91)

McBannerman shrugged and looked blank. (p.122)

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Where to first?’
Reacher shrugged. This was not his area of expertise. (p.149)

‘But when? How?’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe early one morning…’ (p.277)

‘I need to call somebody’s lawyer.’
The doctor looked at her and shrugged. (p.319)

‘Why list them as missing?’
Major Conrad shrugged. (p.327)

‘And what do we tell ourselves? That we were attacked by a ghost?’
He shrugged and made no reply. (p.359)

‘Why would she say she walked into a door if it was really a car wreck?’
O’Hallinen shrugged. ‘Don’t know.’ (p.361)

‘So what are you going to do?’ she asked.
‘About what?’
‘About the future?’
He shrugged again. ‘I don’t know.’ (p.449)

‘Are you going to look for Hobie?’
He shrugged again. ‘Maybe.’ (p.466)

Why do characters shrug on every page?

I realised it is often a third ‘state’ to add to the ‘Problem / Plan’ dyad. It denotes a moment when a character is presented with a question or challenge which they can’t, at that moment, process. Which doesn’t fit with any existing plan or strategem. Which needs to be processed in order to generate a new plan. Or, quite often, a question which the character hasn’t considered yet. Or a question the character is deliberately not answering.

Whatever the precise motivation, it represents a kind of third state, intermediate between 1. being faced with a threatening problem, and 2. coming up with a planned solution. Neither 1 nor 0, it is in between. Neither yes nor no, it is the ‘maybe’ state.

Thus Lee Child characters can be said to exist in one of three possible states.

  1. Problem – where they’re presented with a challenge or threat, long-term strategic or physical and immediate
  2. Plan – where they have devised a plan to solve the problem
  3. Shrug – the intermediate stage, where a character has a problem but hasn’t yet formulated a plan, or is simply batting the problem aside

(In fact, rereading the shrug moments, I realise there’s an alternative explanation to some of the shrugs. They are a response to elements which are outside of the current game. What is Reacher going to do after he’s solved the Hobie mystery, Jodie asks. Reacher shrugs, because that is a scenario beyond the current game, outside current concerns.  Not relevant. Ignore. This is particularly true of poor Chester Stone who is kidnapped and beaten up and stripped early in the story, held prisoner in Hobie’s office and does nothing but shrug whenever anyone talks to him or asks him a question. His persistent shrugging indicates that he is hors de combat.

‘You ready?’ she asked.
Chester shrugged. ‘For what?’ (p.481)

Also, there might be a lot of shrugging for the same reason that all the characters are described simply as ‘saying’ things – he said, she said. Because Child is deliberately reducing all verbs (and lots of human variety) down to a bare minimum.)

Pauses Quite often in the novels, characters pause.

She gazed at the photograph for a long moment, something in her face. (p.96)

They paused a beat… (p. 296)

She was quiet for a beat. Amazed. (p.357)

She was silent for a moment. (p.495)

Child uses a handful of distinctive phrases to describe this moment, a long pause, a long moment, occasionally stretching out to the verge of discomfort (i.e. making the other person in the conversation uncomfortable).

The long pauses struck me as another marker for when a character hasn’t yet formulated a plan. Remember the old icons you used to get on Microsoft computers where a timer or an hourglass icon jiggled for a few seconds while a programme opened or closed or saved.

That’s what the pauses indicate a character is doing in a Jack Reacher novel. Processing information. Preparing another plan.

Related links

Reviews of other Jack Reacher novels

Leave a comment
by Simon on August 5, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in America, Books, Thriller
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on August 5, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/08/05/tripwire-lee-child/

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