All posts tagged Albert Camus

At The Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell (2016)

A writer is a person who describes, and thus a person who is free – for a person who can exactly describe what he or she experiences can also exert some control over those events.
(At The Existentialist Café, page 104)

Brilliant

Suffice to say this is the only book I’ve ever read which not only explains what phenomenology was, but makes you understand how cool and revolutionary it felt in the 1920s.

It also provides, better than anything I’ve ever read, an intellectual biography of Martin Heidegger, explaining his initial devotion to the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, then their growing estrangement, in terms of their diverging philosophies and worldviews.

I thought the book would be mostly about Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir, and they certainly appear at the beginning and then feature in the second half – but the central achievement of At The Existentialist Café is to embed them among a) the broader strands of existentialist thought of the 1920s, 30s and 40s b) among a whole range of other thinkers who emerge as at least, if not more, interesting than the famous three, namely:

  • Husserl and Heidegger, who are worth reading about again and again
  • their disciples, like Karl Jaspers or Emmanuel Levinas
  • French colleagues, especially the fascinating figure of Maurice Merleau-Ponty
  • and related writers – there’s a section on Black American émigrés to post-war Paris such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, which is very enlightening

Bakewell has the priceless gift of being able to weave together biography, cultural context and summaries of (sometimes very difficult) philosophical writings, to dazzling effect. She doesn’t just summarise the philosophy but – in the classic existentialist style – makes you feel the force and excitement of the ideas of Husserl or Heidegger.

Thus the chapter on Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist classic, The Second Sex, makes it sound like not just another long old dusty tome languishing on your to-do list – but an intellectually thrilling, world-changing book which is still completely relevant to our contemporary situation.

Similarly, her description of Heidegger takes full account of his personal weirdness, his obsessions and narrowness, his impenetrable home-made jargon and, of course, his notorious Nazi sympathies – but nonetheless argues strongly for the sheer beauty of many passages in his strange disorientating philosophy, and actually manages to convey this.

Her description of Richard Wright immediately made me want to run out and grab a copy of his novel, Native Son. The same for the works of Merleau-Ponty – until this book just a name I’d come across in biographical sketches of Sartre, but who now emerges as a fascinating thinker in his own right – and for Emmanuel Levinas and Karl Jaspers, and so on.

Edmund Husserl (1859 to 1938)

At the turn of the twentieth century Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) thought that philosophy had become too technocratic, too dominated by bloodless, calculating scientific attitudes, by grand theories starting from over-familiar axioms or philosophical cruxes. But it is obvious that humans – even philosophers – are already in the world, engaged in all kinds of ways with eating, drinking, sleeping, and managing innumerable encounters with other people.

Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl

Husserl advocated stripping away, ‘bracketing out’, all the philosophical, rational, technical and scientific terminology from our thoughts (in a move known as the ‘phenomenological reduction’) and then trying to describe what it feels like to think, to see, to perceive, to encounter others – in other words, to be. Husserl’s war cry was ‘To the things themselves!’

The word ‘phenomenon’ is used because it’s an ancient Greek word meaning appearances; generations of philosophers have got hung up on the fundamental question of whether what we (seem to) perceive reflects an actual world ‘out there’. Who cares, says Husserl. If what all of us perceive of the world is the phenomena which fill our minds, so be it: Describe them! Describe the phenomena!

Successive generations of students came to study with him in Freiburg, nicknamed by Levinas ‘the city of phenomenology’, through the 1910s and ’20s. But, unfortunately, they all tended to then go off and develop their own versions of phenomenology. Some were atheist (Heidegger), some were Christian (Jaspers), or at least spiritual – all can be interpreted as part of the anti-rational reaction between the wars which included, in the broadest perspective, movements like Surrealism or Fascism.

Martin Heidegger (1889 to 1976)

Martin Heidegger grew up in a small German village, helped out with church chores, admired traditional local craftsmen, went for long walks in the huge Black Forest. As a student he went to study under Husserl in Freiburg and for three years was his assistant, many thought he was the chosen heir and successor.

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger

But Heidegger grew apart from the master, considering that phenomenology applied itself too promiscuously to all kinds of areas of mental perception and experience, while all the time missing the key, fundamental issue: the nature of existence itself.

For Heidegger all previous philosophy, since the time of Plato and Aristotle, concentrated on knowing, with two thousand years of thinkers elaborating vast superstructures and generating thousands of terms describing theories of sense perception and knowledge and so on.

Heidegger thought this was all a mistake. Every previous philosopher had been in a sense too complex, and had missed the most fundamental thing, the thing right in front of their noses – the fact that we exist at all. What is existence? What the hell is being?

Where Husserl had developed the ‘phenomenological reduction’ as a manoeuvre designed to focus the area of study, Heidegger spoke of the ontological difference. This is the distinction between beings of which there are, of course, an almost infinite number and a vast number of ways of studying – and Being itself, the fundamental bedrock of all lesser beings.

‘Forgetting’ the difference between Being and beings allows traditional philosophers to ‘fall’ into well-worn habits of doing psychology or sociology or any of scores of human sciences, i.e. studying the myriad individual entities in the world: but what of Being itself, the deep ocean which underpins all of existence? What do we know of that? How do we go about understanding the most fundamental aspect of the universe – the simple fact that it exists.

Heidegger wanted to single-handedly overthrow the existing tradition and replace it with a philosophy which systematically explores the nature and consequences of Being. Since no-one else had done this, he naturally had to make up his own terminology for the rapidly proliferating series of ideas and concepts this point of view generated.

Dasein is probably the single most important new term: rather than refer to mankind, or humanity, or people, Heidegger uses Dasein (literally ‘there-be’, more loosely ‘being-there’) to denote the presence of the human in the world. Dasein can then be examined from various perspectives, in relation to other Dasein, to the inanimate world, and to death.

The scale of Heidegger’s ambition – working through a completely new way of seeing and understanding human existence – explains why his work is so often seen as a momentous revolution in philosophy and he is often credited with being the most important 20th century philosopher.

Many readers then and now are put off by his tendency to generate long portmanteau words to try and describe the slippery concepts he’s noticing and explaining. Bakewell comes up with the characteristically useful suggestion that Heidegger (whose work she knows very well, having begun a PhD on him) can sometimes be thought of as a Modernist, experimental writer. His aim is to defamiliarise the world, to constantly make us aware of the strangeness of existence. This is a generally accepted technique in a wide range of literary writers; why not in a philosopher, too?

Existentialism

According to Sartre in Being and Nothingness, there are two types of being: being-in-itself (être-en-soi) describes all inanimate objects and animals; they just persist in their pre-ordained, unthinking selfhood. And this is contrasted with being-for-itself (être-pour-soi) i.e. human beings.

We can think and, above all, choose. We are thrown into the world, interacting with objects and other people, from earliest consciousness and, at countless moments, can choose what to do. We may well be constrained by biology, culture, history and so on, but – deep down and fundamentally – human beings are free as no other entities in the universe are. Free to choose and, when you reflect on it for a moment, this means that the accumulation of all our choices amounts to who we are.

Thus, human beings are unique in that we are continually inventing and creating ourselves through our choices, as no other entities in the world seem to.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre

This is the meaning of the catch-phrase, ‘Existence preceded essence’. We are born, thrown into the world, grow, exist and then we choose what we want to be. We exist first – and then we create our essence. There is (on this reading) no pre-existing human nature, or not enough to interfere with the radical uniqueness each of us possesses.

This explains existentialism’s thrilling sense of liberation and freedom for a whole generation of young people after the war.

For sure, Sartre also emphasises the weight of responsibility anyone who really acknowledges their freedom must consequently feel; he bandies around words like anguish and angst quite freely. But the reward for fully acknowledging your freedom and responsibility, is a sense that you are living an ‘authentic’ life, true to yourself, making conscious choices to be what you want to be.

This idea – whether the life you’re living is ‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic’ – in popular phraseology whether you’re being true to yourself or are a ‘phoney’ – became a dominant idea in pop culture for decades. ‘Phoniness’ is a central issue in the classic teen novel of angst and alienation, Catcher in the Rye (1951).

In fact all these key terms – existentialism, essence, freedom, anguish, authenticity – were widely popularised through newspapers, magazines, radio and so on to become key ideas, feelings, subjects of debate and rules for living among young people in the decades after the war.

Levinas, Merleau-Ponty et al

Bakewell explains how this radical new way of thinking about philosophy (and the drastic new ideas it threw up about human beings, life, society and ethics) opened up all sorts of new perspectives, which were followed up and worked out by slightly more peripheral figures such as Karl Jaspers, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and many others.

Thus Bakewell paints a really broad and deep and engaging picture of the philosophical tides surging around between-the-wars Western Europe into which keen young, clever young intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir arrived. Her accounts of their early works make sooooo much sense because she locates them as dialogues and divergences from the writings of these other, earlier, figures who she has spent the first half of the book so thoroughly explaining.

Weil, Arendt, de Beauvoir

Bakewell’s book embodies, for me, the best kind of feminism, which is that she doesn’t nag and complain about all the men being sexists or misogynists (as they probably were); instead she accentuates the positive and devotes a lot of space to showing how many women thinkers of the time more than held their own against the men, and made valuable contributions in their own right.

Simone de Beauvoir is mentioned throughout, as she reacted to the developments in phenomenology and developed her own brand of existentialist thought. She emerges as more nuanced, subtle and life-affirming than Sartre with his queasy hallucinations of being. Bakewell’s passage summarising The Second Sex not only places it among, but makes it sound just as exciting as, the masterworks of Darwin, Freud and Einstein.

Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir

But Bakewell also devotes a long, sympathetic section to the strange, passionate, mystical figure of Simone Weil who achieved a staggering amount in her short life (she died from self-induced starvation Emmanuel presumably some form of anorexia Emmanuel aged just 34).

And she spends some time explicating the biography and changing ideas of Hannah Arendt (1906-75) who, in the 1920s, studied with all three of Heidegger, Husserl and Jaspers, before pursuing her own, definitive, explorations of power and violence.

Her book made me realise how pitifully ignorant I am of the writing of all three of these women, but then it made me realise how ignorant I am of the entire Continental tradition she’s describing. Must try harder.

Summary

If you’re at all interested in the intellectual life of mid-twentieth-century Europe, this book is absolutely vital. It is one of the best, most thorough, capable, calm and lucid, but exciting and motivating books of intellectual history I’ve ever read.

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Posted by Simon on April 14, 2026

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Axël by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (1890)

Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (1838 to 1889) had a long disastrously unsuccessful career, living in poverty for much of the time, despite churning out numerous plays, novels, stories and articles. A hard core of friends and supporters relished his heavily Symbolist and Decadent stories but the general public never did, during his lifetime. Only in the last few years of his life did he enjoy some success, specifically on publication of his volume of 27 Cruel Tales in 1883 and its follow-up volumes.

Villiers began work on Axël around 1869 after a meeting with his hero, Richard Wagner, who advised him to create an ideal world rather than describe the real one. He continued to work on it for the next 20 years and, although excerpts were published in 1885, it was still unfinished when he died in 1889. After his death the play was edited by his friends, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé and the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, and published posthumously in 1890.

Axël is a long play, a philosophical drama designed to be read rather than staged. Villiers considered it his masterpiece although critical opinion places far higher value on his fiction. It was in 1885 and 1886 that the word ‘symbolism’ came to be used to describe the group of young writers led by Mallarme, Verlaine and Villiers and Axel came to be regarded by Villiers and his friends as a peak expression of their views, subject and methods. In the translator’s foreword, Marilyn Gaddis Rose says Axel is the Symbolist play par excellence and yet, by using every possible Symbolist theme and cranking them all up to maximum, she says Villiers defeated his object. It became so top heavy with symbols that it collapses under its own weight. Rose says it is more like an academic demonstration piece than a play.

The play is in four parts with several sub-divisions:

Part 1. The Religious World

  1. And compel them to come in
  2. The Renunciatrix

Part 2. The Tragic World

  1. Watchmen of the Sovereign Secret
  2. The Story of Herr Zacharias
  3. The Exterminator

Part 3. The Occult World

  1. At the Threshold
  2. The Renunciator

Part 4. The Passional World

  1. Trial by Gold and Love
  2. The Supreme Option

There are two central characters, representing the male and female principles, Axël and Sara.

Act 1. The Religious World (31 pages)

Act 1 (The Religious World) describes in minute detail the preparations in the darkened chapel of a Catholic convent in Flanders for the ordination of Sara, a 23-year-old foundling, her official initiation into the sorority of nuns. (Her full and highly symbolic name is Eve Sara Emmanuele, Princess of Maupers, p.27.)

Long speeches by the Abbess reveal various facts including that Sara is set to inherit much wealth which will come to the convent if she formally joins; but that she has proven difficult and obstinate. These doubts about her are fully justified when, after a vast amount of verbiage from the Abbess and ceremonial Latin from the Archdeacon, at the first point where she has to indicate her willingness to join, Sara utters the single word ‘No’ (p.31).

The entire convent is thrown into chaos, the Abbess wailing, her fellow nuns lamenting. When they’ve exited the Archdeacon unleashes long speeches about how she must renounce the flesh in order to become one with God etc and opens the vault of the founder where, he implies, she ought to be locked in to ponder her sins, but instead Sara seizes a huge axe, placed in the chapel as a votive offering and forces the old man down into the vault, then slams the stone lids shot in him. Opens the chapel windows so that wind and snow blow in, extinguishing the holy lamps. She tears a long pall into two strips, ties one end of it to a bar across the window, then climbs out, lowering herself down the pall out of sight, and so escapes the convent.

This is the rejection of religious commitment.

In Act 2. The Tragic World (77 pages)

I was expecting the ‘play’ to continue in the same overwrought, intense, religiose atmosphere of the first act, so Act 2 comes as a surprise. It opens to reveal that we are in the hall of a grand castle in Germany, somewhere in the Black Forest and introduces us to three of Axel’s loyal retainers (Gotthold, Miklaus, Hartwig who lost an arm in the wars), tall old men, some wearing old military uniforms bearing the Iron Cross. They are tidying up the grand hall, bickering, joking, reminiscing and giving us the backstory to their master, the central figure of the play.

This is that their master, the Count Axël of Auersperg, German prince, inherited the castle and estates when his father, Count Gherard of Auersperg, died just after the end of the Napoleonic wars i.e. 1815. The very day of Gherard’s death, a relative named Janus arrived and, when the will was read, it turned out that this Janus was given the baby Axel to raise (p.49). Now, 20 years have passed (so it’s about 1835) and the young Count, still supervised by the spookily unageing Janus, has recently been visited by a guest, Commander Kaspar.

At this precise moment, as Act 2 starts, Axël is out hunting, although the three retainers point out the sky clouding over and a storm blowing in. The three old men are interrupted by the arrival of Axël’s young servant, Ukko, who ought to be accompanying their lord. He says Axël is fine and has taken shelter from the storm in a cave. He’s mainly concerned to tell them that out in the woods he came across a pretty maiden, Luisa, who turns out to the daughter of Hans Glück the ranger, he wooed her, asked her father for her hand, and they are now engaged (p.53).

Barely has he finished his excitable account of all this before tall, lordly Commander Kaspar enters, very tall, very noble, about 43. The others pay their respects and exit leaving the Commander to survey the table laid for him and browse Axël’s bookshelves. He soliloquises and what emerges is that he believes his young cousin is falling into bad habits, locked up in this remote place he is taking an unhealthy interest in the occult, Hermeticism, Kabbalism and suchlike (p.56). He needs to be taken in hand, will prove malleable, will make a splash if presented at court where he’d be a hit with the ladies and ‘could win for me with the king certain influences’ (p.57).

Key fact: Kaspar has been staying at the caste for 8 days and this evening, after dinner, plans to leave, to ride 8 miles or so to a nearby village, overnight there, and catch a coach to Berlin the next morning.

The story of Herr Zacharias

He is musing how to manage Axël’s chamberlain, Herr Zacharias, when the latter enters and declares he has an important revelation to make. With a great deal of historical detail he tells the mystery of Axël’s father who, when the French invaded the German states during the Napoleonic War, was put in charge of a military convoy assigned to carry the nation’s wealth in gold ingots (‘eighty munitions wagons of the National Bank of Frankfurt, 400 casks of coin and gold bars, caissons of precious stones) to a safe place in the country. The conventional account has it that they were ambushed by the French and killed but Zacharias has a new, conspirator version, which is that the father decoyed the convoy deep into the Black Forest round this castle and buried it in a secret underground chamber. It was as he and his fellow officers were rejoining the convoy that they were ambushed and killed. But Zacharias himself was here, at the castle, when Count Gherard appeared suddenly, to visit his pregnant wife, Countess Lisvia of Auersperg, for a hurried kiss and farewell, before he rode off to his death. So somewhere near the castle is untold wealth which, due to complicated legal matters which he goes into, no longer belongs to anyone. I.e. finders keepers.

He revealed all this to his master, Lord Axël, but the latter made him and the others with him at that moment, all swear an oath of silence on the matter, and that was three years ago.

Enter Axël

Commander Kaspar is just about to enquire more when the protagonist of the play, Axël, finally makes his appearance. The servants reappear and serve Kaspar and Axël a sumptuous dinner. Over this meal (wild boar with red pepper and vanilla) Kaspar starts to make the pitch which is, as I understand it, the heart of this act, namely to persuade him to leave his self-imposed exile and return with Kaspar to the Court with its ‘merriment, luxury and love’. Kaspar goes on to describe the pleasure of having affairs at court, specifically how half the fun of ‘conquering’ a woman is knowing that her husband is driven mad with jealousy. Axël is visibly disgusted with all this.

(A notable aspect of the play is the use of asides. I’m used to this from Shakespearian and Restoration drama but it’s odd encountering it here, in a supposedly modern play. Thus the Commander is continually indicated as making asides [To himself]. I might be mistaken but I think that in one of these he implies that, as they ride together through the dark forest, he will shoot Axël and so inherit his estate and wealth. Another obvious aspect of these sometimes very long asides, is that the other characters have to hang around waiting while the character delivers their long aside, pretending they can neither near nor see them doing so. Bringing out what a very undramatic playwright Villiers was.]

So if Act 1 centred on the Archdeacon’s extended speeches using a variety of arguments to prove the value of the religious life, the servants now leave these two men alone and Kaspar embarks on a panoply of arguments to draw Axël from his reclusive life, studying esoteric knowledge under the mysterious Mater Janus, and instead:

‘Imitate me. Seize life…without illusions and without weakness,’ (p.82)

He gives a few more illustrations of how rewarding life at court is, before he decides to reveal what Herr Zacharias has revealed to him about the supposedly buried treasure. He calmly confesses that he himself is penniless but if they hire workers to dig in the castle grounds he will be happy to split the treasure when they find it 50/50.

Axël calls Herr Zacharias and very solemnly accuses him of breaking his oath and telling.

Next, to my astonishment, Axël calls his page, Ukko, and tells him to fetch the three old servants and bring two swords. Then, while Kaspar is still rambling on about h is dreams of sudden wealth and life of pleasure at court, Axël announces that Kaspar has mortally insulted him and he is challenging him to a duel. He ceases to be a guest in his home, this big hall will make a fair duelling ground, he indicates parchment and quill which he can use to write his will and that one of them will not leave the hall alive.

Kaspar is as amazed and surprised as the audience. Initially he thinks, like us, that it’s some kind of joke but it isn’t He sarcastically suggests that all guests to the castle be warned of the fatal consequences of staying there, but no jokes, pleas or expressions of outrage deter Axël and so they prepare to fight a duel. For full Gothic effect the storm has picked up again and the fight is illuminated by lightning and thunder.

BUT…some of the Commander’s words strike a chord with Axël’s servants. He sees them hesitate and so…in a move much criticised by all the play’s audiences and readers. Villiers has Axël put down his sword and launch a very long defence of his actions and the text turns into something more like a courtroom scene than an action movie.

For now Axël speaks at very great length, for well over 20 pages, to a series of accusations:

  • he refutes the Commander’s accusation that he wants to keep the gold for himself, claiming that a) he doesn’t know where it is b) he doesn’t want it or need it
  • the Commander accused him of keeping it from the State but Axël says it was the ‘State’ which sent his father to his doom and whose official histories accused his father of ineptness and dereliction of duty; he owes the Sate nothing

There is an interesting passage about language in which Axël says that the words they use are avatars or epitomes of their users and so the words Kaspar uses are gross and base like their speaker and so have nothing in common with the way Axël uses the same words. Can’t help thinking that would be fertile matter for poets like Mallarmé and Valéry.

The final 4 or 5 pages take a surprisingly martial turn for a character who is, I thought, intended to be so otherworldly and spiritual. He surprises the Commander by saying that if the State did send a force against him they would be massacred. He commands the loyalty of all the villages round and all the fit young men (20,000 foresters) who would fight for him. The rough terrain with its close-packed trees would block the advance of any army while his guerrillas picked it off. The crenellations of his castle are designed to host 48 cannon which would massacre any forces coming within two leagues. If a smaller force was sent they would be ripped to shred by his pack of psychotic Ulm hounds. He even declares the miners of the region are loyal to him and still very resentful of the forced conscription which sent them to war and so some of them would happily undertake a mission to assassinate the king. After a couple of such assassinations ‘the State’ would call off its attack on Axël.

So you can see why I was very surprised that the character I thought was going to be a mimsy aesthete and sensitive poet turns out to be a touchy, aggressive warlord who dreams of midnight attacks on the sleeping army which would result in ‘simple, thorough slaughter’ (p.114). He would set the forest on fire to roast an attacking army. In winter he would use landslides and the release of cunningly placed boulders. Survivors and deserters would be picked off one by one before they managed to escape the forest. At which point Axël’s forces would storm out of the forest and attack the nearest towns, thus triggering a civil war right across Germany. It’s an extraordinarily apocalyptic vision.

Or, they could leave this mild eccentric alone to his studies. But now he gestures to the Commander to pick up his sword. By this point, after this long rhodomontade, Kaspar, like the audience, knows that Axël isn’t kidding.

So they sword fight and Villiers describes it in some detail, the lights flashing off the blades etc, in a very cinematic style, Kaspar doing all the attacking, Axël impassively defending, till the latter sees an opening and with one quick thrust, runs Kaspar through the heart. He falls to the floor and dies without a word. Axël thanks his retainers for their faith, and orders them to take the body down to the vaults to bury.

At this moment, the mystery figure of Axël’s mentor, Master Janus, tall, 50, silver-haired, appears at the top of the steps at the back of the hall, a hieratic figure with a face like an Assyrian relief.

Comment

Axël’s very long speech which makes up the second half of this act and forms a long hiatus between the challenge to a duel and the duel itself, has led to much criticism. The translator, Marilyn Rose, describes it as possibly the most boring second act in all drama while even W.B. Yeats, a fan who tried to get the work staged in London, admitted in his preface to the 1924 translation that the second act ‘dragged greatly’.

I found this true of the first part which consists of a legalistic defence Axël’s right to the supposed treasure in which he gives various definitions of ‘the State’ and its obligations or lack thereof to him and his family – but I found his description of the castle’s defences against any form of attack, which escalates into the vision of launching a countrywide civil war, completely unexpected and surprisingly vivid. Much more practical and imaginable than the tedious religiosity of Act 1.

It’s taken quite a long time, but this act amounts to the rejection of the world, of fleshly pleasure, gold and power.

In Act 3. The Occult World (17 pages)

In line with the highly staged and schematic nature of the work, Act 3 consists entirely of a dialogue in which the Magus, Master Janus, lectures Axël on how to escape the world of Becoming into the world of Being. It follows immediately from the previous scene and starts with the voodoo idea that the vapour from Kaspar’s blood, which is still lying on a pool on the floor of the hall, has enveloped Axël, he has breathed it in along with the worldly instincts of its owner, and it has revived his worldly feelings and dragged him back to earth. He feels curious about the Gold which he hasn’t done for years.

In his ten page lecture Master Janus uses all manner of metaphors and occult language. Some of this made sense to me, some of it seemed like wordy gibberish, a few thoughts or phrases really struck home. Here’s an example of the boilerplate, stock, standard rhetoric of the mystic of all philosophies and religions, echoing the sentiments of the Stoics as summarised by Cicero or Marcus Aurelius:

‘The Law is the energy of beings! It is the living, free, substantial Notion in which the realms of the Seen and the Unseen moves, animates, immobilises or transforms the totality of all becoming…You originate in the Immemorial.’ (p.128)

Elsewhere he says something which resonated with me:

‘If what passes or changes worth remembering? What would you like to remember?’ (p.125)

I have plenty of regrets. I fantasise about the Buddhist ideal of achieving total release from all worldly ties and attachments. If only…. A little later Janus says:

‘He alone is free who has opted forever, that is, who can no longer be tempted and is no longer compelled to hesitate.’ (p.129)

At school we endlessly discussed existentialism, Catholicism, Kierkegaard, Hesse, Eastern philosophies, the leap of faith. The Sartrean idea that you are absolutely free to make your choices and your choices decide who you are, trumped by the notion of many faiths that once you have committed everything becomes clear and simple. No further agonising required. The Act is full of ideas like this.

As to the stagecraft, something pretty dramatic happens halfway through which is that the storm which has been rumbling along in the background, and intensified during the duel scene, suddenly leaps in intensity, as a bold of lightning crashes through a window and streaks across the hall as a sheet of flame, darting past the arms hanging on the old medieval wall until it strikes the fireplace and carves a furrow in it. Pretty impressive if this could be staged. As impossible as some of Wagner’s stage directions.

Anyway, this doesn’t have the shattering effect on the two protagonists as you might imagine, not least because Master Janus goes over to the shattered window, opens it and, as if by magic, the storm calms, the air clears, the night becomes serene as if ‘under a calm enchantment.’

Anyway Master Janus’s long mystical lecture reaches a climax when he asks Axël whether he accepts ‘Light, Hope and Life’ to which Axël, like Sara in the parallel moment in Act 1, replies quietly with one little word, No.

This is the rejection of the world of the occult.

Janus has half a page saying that Axël therefore commits to becoming more ensnared in earthly chains before being superseded because Gotthold enters to say that two of the other servants encountered a stagecoach on the road to the castle, found its occupant to be a young woman dressed in mourning, and that she is even now being taken to a spare bedroom.

Now, back at the start of Act 3 Janus had confided a prediction to the audience:

‘The Hour has come – she too is going to come, she who renounced ideal Divinity for the secret of the Gold…here then face to face the final duality of the two races I chose from the depths of the ages that simple and virginal humanity might conquer the twofold illusion of Gold and Love – that is, to found in a point of Becoming the virtue of a new Sign.’ (p.124)

Well, now she (Sara) has arrived and in fact is seen progressing along the back of the stage following a servant carrying a candle, while Janus closes the act with these portentous words:

‘The Veil and the Mantle, both renunciators, have intersected: the Work nears fulfilment.’ (p.139)

Ah. All is as foretold. Jolly good.

Act 4. The Passional World (32 pages)

Act four moves scene to be set in the vast castle vault, packed with statues of the family dead, with a hanging censer. The servants have buried Kaspar and are just preparing a cross for him. As at the start of Act 2, the atmosphere is lightened with some banter between the three old retainers (Gotthold, Hartwig, Miklaus) who have some respect for the dead Kaspar, and young Ukko who is so dismissive and disrespectful it makes the old men angry.

Enter Axël in travelling clothes. He tells the retainers he is leaving early the next morning and they react with incredulity and tears, especially young Ukko, who he astonishes by saying that, if he doesn’t return, the estate will be his. Tears and laments but then they slowly exit the vault leaving Axël alone and he forbids them to return. When you think about it, this is odd. Surely he should go to bed or some such. Leaving him down in the vault feels very staged to allow Axël not to leave but (in the event) to do away with himself.

What happens first is that while Axël is pondering he hears footsteps, hides, and sees Sara enter the vault. She goes over to the big escutcheon at one end and applies the point of the dagger she’s holding. As in hundreds of movies about secret treasure, at the touch of the dagger in the right spot the entire wall starts to sink and reveals a long ark vault and…a huge treasure of diamonds and other jewels, along with gold coins, comes flowing and tumbling over her and into the hall.

Axël emerges from hiding and makes to approach her, but quick as a flash she pulls two pistols from her belt, Lara Croft style, and shoots at him, twice, he dodges so her bullets only graze his chest.

Axël continues on towards her, grabs her hand with the dagger and is on the verge of stabbing her when he sees her face for the first time and hesitates. Huh. I thought the play was going to be a love story of sorts but it turns out nothing like it. 1) These two characters spend most of the play apart and only meet for these last 20 pages and 2) their first reaction is to try to shoot or stab each other.

In that voodoo Liebestod manner patented by Wagner, they don’t talk about love but about death, about trying to kill each other, how only one of them can survive etc in a quite psychopathic way.

‘From now on, my senses tell me, knowing you are alive would keep me from living! That is why I crave the sight of your lifeless body. And, whether or not you understand, I am going to become your executioner…’ (p.154)

However Sara deflects this by unleashing a torrent of erotic rhetoric at which Axël melts, sits her on the ebony sofa, kneels at her feet.

‘I know the secret of infinite pleasures and delectating cries, the secret of voluptuous sensations where every hope expires.’ (p.155)

‘Beneath your night-hued hair you are like an ideal lily, blooming in tenebrae. What quiverings rise at the right of you, my love?’

Sara tells Axël she grew up in a convent where she was mistreated and miserable and he immediately vows to raze it to the ground so she has to talk him out of that.

Sara tells Axël the story of plucking a rose from a rose bush in the winter snows, a story designed to evoke the Rosicrucians, very popular at the time.

Then Sara spends 3 or 4 pages giving exotic orientalising descriptions of exotic destinations around the Mediterranean and into the Far East which they could visit together.

The windows of the vault lighten as dawn comes, at the same time they hear Axël’s retainers singing a sad song about their master leaving.

But then Axël is stricken with an insight. He startles Sara by saying none of her visions will happen because they have just fulfilled them by imagining them. How could any reality live up to the ecstatic visions of this wonderful night?

‘If we accepted life now, we would commit a sacrilege against ourselves. As for living, our servants will do that for us.’ (p.170)

So this famous quote comes in the context of Axël realising that Reality can never live up to their ecstatic imaginings of it.

‘Satiated for all eternity, let us rise from the table and in all justice let us leave to ordinary mortals whose ill-fated nature can measure the value of realities only by sensation, the task of picking up the banquet crumbs. I have thought too much to stoop to act.’

From this he goes on to ask whether they want to experience all the maladies that ordinary mortals do, growing old and disappointment, old age and boredom. Sara realises he is justifying suicide, to cease now, at their moment of highest ecstasy and anticipation.

All the wonderful exotic places she listed? In reality they are piles of rubble and paupers.

‘You have thought them? That is enough, do not look at them. The earth…is swollen like a brilliant bubble with misery and deceit…Let us get away from her, completely! Violently!’ (p.171)

Sara hesitates and gives half a dozen reasons not to die which Axël (rather unconvincingly) refutes. So the tips the poison granules from the emerald ring she wears into a jewel-encrusted goblet Axël brings her, then he takes it up to a window and (rather impractically) captures the morning dew in it.

Then, as they hear the Chorus of the Woodsmen celebrating the arrival of dawn (as in an opera). Alongside it they hear the marriage song of young Ukko marrying the ranger’s daughter and Axël asks Sara to give the young couple their blessing. Then with a last few lyrical words, the pair drink from the goblet and die in each other’s arms, as the sun finally rises and we hear:

distant murmurs of the wind in the forest vastness, vibrations of the awakening of space, the surge of the plain, the hum of life. (p.175)

Thoughts

Obviously it’s a long, wordy, undramatic, wild farrago of ideas and images. Only at a few isolated moments does it become something like a believable depiction of human beings: in some of the early exchanges between the Abbess and Archdeacon, but most of all in the banter between the three old retainers at the start of acts 2 and 4. Kaspar’s disbelief when Axël abruptly challenges him to a duel suddenly has a human dimension. And Axël’s long description of the military precautions he’d taken to defend the castle, although over the top, is at least understandable.

For the rest it is very like the hieratic, static, stagey, work of symbolic drama of legend. Axël and Sara are both allegorical figures and symbols of something. This doesn’t trouble me. At university I studied allegories such as Gawayne and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman and the Pilgrim’s Progress. From that perspective, Axël is not allegorical enough. In acts 1 and 3, I felt the presentation of Christian theology and the mystical doctrines of the occult were not presented powerfully enough. The speeches of the Archdeacon and of Master Janus were just that, speeches made up of tissues of doctrine and rhetoric, rather than actions which fully dramatised the worldviews which Sara and Axël, respectively, reject.

Similarly, I was surprised that the section devoted to Commander Kaspar talking about life at court was so short, that Axël interrupted him fairly quickly by telling him how much he had insulted him (Axël) and challenging him to a duel. Surprised because I thought there would be more, in a Decadent play, about the life of the senses, about sensual pleasure, that it would be more fully worked out and detailed, than Kaspar simply saying it’s a lot of fun to seduce people’s wives at court.

I think what I’m saying is that, although all the acts are very wordy, they somehow fail to really bring out the essence of the three worldviews Villiers is schematically depicting. He accumulates arguments into great diatribes rather than selecting the key one or two, which would have been more focused, more dramatic.

In passing, I was expecting from summaries and references to the play, that the two protagonists, Axël and Sara, engage in an extended love affair, that the play is about their love but, as you can see from my summary, this is far from being the case. Sara only has one word to say in the first 31 pages and then disappears for 118 pages, only reappearing on page 149. It’s only in the last 20 or so pages that they are together on stage.

Obviously, the way they go from cheerfully wanting to murder each other to becoming besottedly in love with each other, unable to leave each other, so saturatedly in love that Axël comes to realise the rest of their lives can only be a pitiful anticlimax after this night of intense union, is so off-the-scale unreal as to be beyond comical and into the realm of high-pitched music-drama, Wagnerian opera which there’s no point applying common sense to, which is intended to sweep you up into a world of primal emotions beyond logic or sense, and I think it successfully does this.

Lastly, looking just at the end, it is thought provoking how this entire approach – rejecting religion, worldly pleasure, sex, wealth and success, and then the lures of occult mystical philosophy – leaves the characters, in the end, with only one option, to do away with themselves and leave the world altogether. In the darkened world of the auditorium, stunned by a succession of melodramatic scenes, special effects, weeping nuns, murdered soldiers and sheets of lightning, I can imagine this working, in dramatic context i.e. under the spell of everything which came before.

But at the same time, when the play ends, you emerge out into the light of day, blinking and dazed, and realise it has nothing to do with your life, with anyone’s life. That is both its strength, as a piece of achingly contrived artifice, a deliberate rejection of every aspect of tedious everyday existence, and its obvious weakness, because a suicide pact is not really a very practical philosophy of life.

As Axël deploys his case for suicide I couldn’t help thinking of Albert Camus’s famous book-length argument against suicide, The Myth of Sisyphus, written almost exactly fifty years later (1890/1942). I don’t really know enough about the full breadth of French literature, but I wonder if you could say that Camus, in part, answering the question de L’Isle-Adam put half a century earlier.

Finally, I’ve been reading the quotation, ‘As for living, our servants will do that for us’ for 40 years or more, and have finally got round to reading it in context. For all that time I imagined it expressed the splendid confidence of an Oscar Wilde-type character, drolly, ironically, aristocratically superior. Comic. Now I see it is something quite different. It is the almost contemptuous, disdainful comment of a character arguing the case for joint suicide. Not so comically droll after all. They are the words of someone who’s become fanatically convinced that the only way forward is to kill himself. Not at all what I’ve believed all these years…

The translation

If the work is a masterpiece of French Symbolist prose that doesn’t come over one little bit in this translation, which captures the overwrought vocabulary but without the slightest trace of magic. All too often the translation has only half removed from the original French, retaining the original syntax so as to appear thoroughly foreign in word order and rhythm.

However, by what so advantageous subjects of idle conversation do you so often replace the interest which these other subjects, perhaps, encompass…

Really, however insignificant the object of my favourite studies might be in your judgement, one can hardly see in what respect I have gained in exchange this evening by listening to you. (p.91)

Whether it’s Villiers, Rose or both to blame, a lot of the translation is clunky, clumsy and, because of this, unmemorable and sometimes hard to follow.

Credit

I read ‘Axël’ in the translation by Marilyn Gaddis Rose published by the Soho Book Company in 1986.

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Posted by Simon on July 3, 2024

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Cruel Tales by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (1883)

It is so amusing to play the dandy! I prefer that to playing cards.
(The narrator of ‘Maryelle’, page 216)

This book contains 27 short stories, vignettes, squibs and satires. Someone online commented that they are not cruel tales at all, and certainly anyone expecting the thrill or horror of Edgar Allen Poe will on the whole be disappointed (with a handful of possible exceptions). Much more accurate is the title of used by a 1920s translation of the same collection, ‘Sardonic Stories’. They are more about irony, satire and sarcasm than anything cruel and macabre – in particular, satire of the Paris literary and theatrical worlds which de l’Isle-Adam tried all his life to break into with impressively consistent lack of success.

Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838 to 1889) spent his entire life thinking his writings would make him famous and restore the fortunes of his aristocratic family, which he insisted was ancient and venerable. This didn’t happen. Instead he churned out novels and plays which nobody cared about while living in sometimes abject poverty, associating with a series of illiterate working class mistresses who bore him various children. Only in the last years of his life, with the publication of the ‘Cruel Tales’ in 1883, did he begin to garner some critical recognition.

Like so many French writers, de l’Isle-Adam despised his countrymen. As an aristocrat he was contemptuous of the bourgeoisie, as a monarchist he was contemptuous of democracy (in 1881 he stood unsuccessfully for parliament as a candidate for the Legitimist party), and as a Catholic he was contemptuous of science and materialism. He was, in other words, a reactionary berk.

A reactionary berk convinced of his own ineffable superiority to the rest of the human race, on account of his aristocratic family and his superb talent, even if the rest of the human race was too ignorant to recognise it. Outraged pride and lofty superiority run through the stories like a silver thread. I liked A.W. Raitt’s note pointing out that de L’Isle-Adam was well known for stopping in his walks around Paris to admire himself from all angles in shop windows and mirrors. He fancied himself a great actor, a championship boxer, as well as a writer and playwright and exquisite soul.

1. The Bienfilâtre sisters (10 pages)

De L’Isle-Adam drolly paints a dry picture of a famous café on a Paris boulevard, habituated by eligible young men and packed with courtesans. Two leading figures among the latter are the Bienfilâtre sisters, Olympe and Henriette. They have been working girls since young in order to support their parents, poor concierges, which allows de L’Isle-Adam to ironically describe them as dutiful daughters who honoured their engagements and could hold their heads high.

With further irony he then describes how one of the sisters, Olympe, fell from the straight and narrow of her profession when she (gasp!) fell in love! With a poor student called Maxime. Her work went to pot. Her sister had to pick up the slack. Other courtesans at the café talk behind her back. Henriette is ashamed. The family who have always eaten together, are now reduced to three in Olympe’s absence. There’s a funny scene where Henriette confronts her sister in the café, while all the other habitués pretend not to be listening, and delivers a rhodomontade made up entirely of Daily Mail-style bourgeois clichés and recriminations: ‘should be ashamed…owes a duty to her class…running off with a youngster like that…you’re not in this world to enjoy yourself but to work, young lady…what about her poor parents…’ etc etc.

Finally her guilty conscience (at ceasing to be a prostitute, at throwing away a good honest living in order to ‘fall in love’) strikes her down with illness and she takes to her bed. She calls for a priest and confesses her’ sin’ of falling in love and so straying from the straight and narrow, the path of purity (all ironic terms applied to her previous career as a prostitute).

At that moment the door is flung open by Maxime who bursts in chinking coins in his hand. His parents have sent him the fees for his exams. Olympe feebly stretches out her hand to him. The priest takes this as a moving sign of her true repentance. In fact it is joy that her lover has come true and has coughed up some cash. And with this beatific knowledge filling her soul, she expires.

This is a genuinely funny ‘story’, the sustained irony of the premise maintained right till the end. It was originally published in 1871, 20 years before Oscar Wilde used the same kind of satirical irony in a story like Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime (1891).

It establishes a major theme, in fact the fundamental worldview which underpins the stories, which is that de L’Isle-Adam assumes his readers to be as au fait with the cynical realities of Paris nightlife, with prostitutes and dissolute aristocrats and starving poets and so on as he is, so as not only not to show the conventional bourgeois horror at the subjects he tackles, but to take pleasure in his detached, ironic treatment of them.

In later stories he describes characters who are so blasé and over-familiar with every possible kind of ‘scandalous’ affair, with the plots of umpteen melodramatic novels, plays and operas that, when they actually find themselves in situations which could come from such productions, they not only feel they are acting a part, but observe themselves acting a part, and award themselves marks out of ten for their performances (most notable in ‘Sombre Tale, Sombre Teller’).

2. Véra (11 pages)

Powerful description of an aristocrat, the Comte d’Athol, whose wife passes away just six months after they were married, who leads the mourning and sees her body laid in the family tomb, returns to his grand apartments on the Faubourg Saint-Germain, tells his loyal retainer Raymond to dismiss the other servants, to refuse all invitations and visitors, and then immerses himself in a visionary state where he pretends his wife is still alive. It has the dreamlike intensity of Poe story but described in the sumptuous prose of late-Romanticism toppling over into the Decadence.

3. Vox populi (4 pages)

A prose poem designed to mock the fickleness and stupidity of the masses, the mob, ‘the people’. It zeroes in on three moments in recent French history – an 1868 review of Napoleon III’s birthday, the start of the Siege of Paris in 1870, the Commune of Paris March 1871 – on which the masses shouted the inane slogan of the times – Vive L’Empereur, Vive La Republique and Vive Le Marechal – all of which is counterpointed by the unchanging plea of an old blind beggar ‘Please take pity on a poor blind man’.

The moral being that the fickle face of politics and popular enthusiasms come and go, but the human condition remains the same. Or as Jesus said, the poor are always with you. Justifying de L’Isle-Adam’s lofty, aristocratic disdain for the people, the mob, the bourgeoisie, liberalism and all the other disgusting symptoms of the late-19th century world.

4. Two augurs (14 pages)

A satire on the press where a writer presents himself to the jaded philistine editor of a successful paper. The ironic twist is that the writer is proud of being a third-rate poetaster who’s produced a long-winded article bloated with complacency and bridles when the editor starts praising the quality of his work and then – horror of horrors – has the temerity to call him ‘a man of genius’, when all he’s aiming at is to churn out 5th rate bilge.

All this is a rather contrived satire on the world of the press, papers and magazines which, of course, de L’Isle-Adam himself occupied but which for so long refused to acknowledge what he considered his own genius. Sour grapes.

5. Celestial publicity (5 pages)

A satire which deadpan praises a magnificent new invention developed by M. Graves, which allows the projection of crude adverts onto the heavens. The satire is as much in the breathlessly enthusiastic tone, the tone of adverts and promotional bumf for the new technologies beginning to flood late-Victorian life, as in the (horrifying) plan to turn the heavens into advertising hoardings.

6. Antonie (2 pages)

Very short vignette describing a courtesan at a drinking party of men who, amid the drinking and banter, ask her who the locket she wears between her breasts is dedicated to. She opens it to show a lock of hair, teases the men for a minute who all want to know what heroic lover enjoys such devotion – before revealing that it is her own hair, which she wears as a gesture of fidelity (i.e. to herself). Very droll.

7. The glory machine (16 pages)

Similar to the machine which projects adverts into the sky, this satire takes the same excited tone about a new machine which produces glory. Unfortunately it then turns into a long tedious explanation of what ‘glory’ means in the world of poetry (alas) and explains the composition of ‘claques’ in Paris theatre. Laboured and boring.

A thing like this isn’t a story at all so much as a sustained expression of de L’Isle-Adam’s sour grapes and resentment.

8. The Duke of Portland (7 pages)

This is obviously intended to be one of the macabre stories. The Duke of Portland returns to his grand house by the sea, continues to host dinners and parties for all the best people but never attends them himself, sends a letter to Queen Victoria after reading which she gives him permission not to attend the House of Lords or carry out any official functions and a year later his fiancée arrives by boat on the beach at night to discover him dying and he dies as she is with him. His secret? On a trip to the Middle East he met a leper who gave him the disease, hence the letter to Victoria and his seclusion and the sadness of his fiancée.

It seemed obvious from this one that de L’Isle-Adam is much better at the wordy trappings of the Gothic tale and melodrama than he is at devising an actual plot.

9. Virginia and Paul (5 pages)

Many of de L’Isle-Adam’s pieces start with a sort of prologue describing the theme or subject of the story – Paris boulevards, the life of a courtesan, death and mourning – in general and poetic terms before finally arriving at t(often slender) plot.

Here there is over a page asking the reader to remember the emotions, the images and objects associated with their first love, before it finally arrives at the ‘story’ which concerns two young lovers, both aged just 15. They are cousins, he has slipped out of his parents’ house to climb over the wall into the grounds of her boarding school and they gushingly mix expressions of first love with clumsy talk of practicalities, like trying to conceal their love when they are with their families and how Paul can extract money from his father so they can run away.

Maybe the point isn’t the 3 or so pages devoted to their naive dialogue, but to the last paragraph which suddenly switches the perspective and reveals that the narrator (improbably enough) has been eavesdropping this little scene, which is not very likely in practical terms (how? if it’s happening on the other side of a high wall and, presumably, hidden in bushes) but is really just a pretext for him to deliver a little paean:

Oh youth, springtime of life! May God bless you, children, in your ecstasy – you whose souls are innocent as flowers, and whose words, evoking memories more or less similar to his first rendezvous, bring tears to the eyes of a passerby! (p.76)

10. The eleventh-hour guest (25 pages)

De L’Isle-Adam’s stories are 1) often barely stories at all, with very little narrative and 2) very contrived. He is proud of their contrivance. As far as I can make out, the show of contrivance is part of the aim. Their artificiality is to be prized.

The story is that one night he and his friend are in a box at the opera when, in the interval, three well-known ladies about town invite them out for dinner. At that moment the narrator spies a gentleman he recognises from somewhere, they get chatting and then, on a lordly aristocratic whim, they decide to invite him along. There follows an interesting description of what such an evening in a private room at a posh Parisian restaurant was like, with detailed descriptions of the meal, actions and banter of the six characters.

The last-minute guest is, as you might expect, mysterious, given to gnomic sayings, and insists on being referred to as Baron Saturn, which they playfully agree to. As the hour draws late he says he needs to leave as he has an urgent appointment in the morning. It’s only after he’s left, that another friend turns up and tells them who their mystery guest was. Turns out he is one of the most notorious unbalanced monomaniacs of the age and obsessed with public executions. Turns out h travelled widely in the East (Orientalism!) where he bribed his way to being allowed to carry out public executions and tortures. On his return to Europe he wrote to all the heads of state of the continent asking to be allowed to apply the exquisite tortures he had learned in the East to western criminals and condemned men.

In this he consistently failed but it is said that he quietly bribed executioners in some European countries in order to take their place. Still, he manages to get advance notice of executions across the Continent and then rushes to be present t the scene, at the foot of the scaffold soaking up the grisly thrill of the moment.

This puts a damper on the previously light-hearted party and as the hour of 6am approaches, when that morning’s execution is scheduled to be carried out, they all feel a ghost walking over their graves. Voodoo spooky.

The ‘story’, such as it is, is garnished with reflections about psychology, about perception and meaning, which feel pregnant with the Symbolist movement which was just about to be christened. (Symbolism was given its name when Jean Moréas published the Symbolist Manifesto in the Paris newspaper ‘Le Figaro’ on 18 September 1886). It contains paragraphs like this:

The sound waves of the nervous system have mysterious vibrations…They deaden, so to speak, with their multiple echoes, the analysis of the initial blow which produced them. The memory makes out the atmosphere surrounding the object, but the object itself is lost in this general sensation and remains stubbornly indistinguishable. (p.83)

As the Wikipedia article on Symbolism explains:

Moréas announced that symbolism was hostile to ‘plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description’ and that its goal instead was to ‘clothe the Ideal in a perceptible form’ whose ‘goal was not in itself, but whose sole purpose was to express the Ideal.’… As Mallarmé writes in a letter to his friend Henri Cazalis, ‘to depict not the thing but the effect it produces’.

Or, as de L’Isle-Adam puts it:

Objects are transfigured according to the magnetism of the human beings who approach them. Things have no significance for people other than that which the latter are able to give them. (p.84)

The Naturalism of Émile Zola and his followers strives to depict the world and everything in it exactly as they are, with full realistic descriptions. Symbolism has the diametrically opposite aim of trying to capture the feelings and moods (sometimes verging on hallucinations) which the world, and especially particularly powerful objects or experiences, evoke in us.

11. The very image (4 pages)

A very short text which is a premonition of Kafka.

A man is hurrying through Paris ‘on business’ when he finds himself next to a hospitable-looking building and pops inside to find the atrium has a glass ceiling, there are pillars on which are hung coats and mufflers, marble tables laid out bearing portfolios of official papers around which sit blank-faced people, and realises that the hostess of the place is none other than Death (!).

He hears the rumble of cab wheels outside, exits, gets into the cab and announces his destination. He arrives at another building, goes inside to find the atrium has a glass ceiling, there are pillars on which are hung coats and mufflers, marble tables laid out bearing portfolios of official papers and the same blank-faced people i.e. a complete repetition of the first experience.

At this point you expect some kind of cunning payoff as you might have in Kafka or, especially, Borges, but instead the narrator goes out, gets into his cab which he asks to take him home, and (rather limply) vows to stop rushing around ‘on business’.

Is it an allegory implying that the ordinary bourgeois running round Paris on business is living a kind of living death? That ‘business’ is the death of the soul and the antithesis of the sensitive refined thoughts which de L’Isle-Adam is at such pains to show off in these stories?

12. The impatient mob (8 pages)

The title reflects de L’Isle-Adam’s (comical) contempt for the mob, the masses, the people, in all their forms. This is another tale long on atmosphere and looming symbolism and short on actual story. It describes the population of Sparta crowding to the city walls because rumour has reached them that the vast army of the Persian Empire under Xerxes I has crushed the Greek army sent to stop it at the Battle of Thermopylae. The story describes a sole Spartan warrior who is spied descending from the hills and staggering across the plains towards the city. The entire city starts booing and shouting insults because a Spartan soldier was meant to come back holding his shield or dead on it, while this one doesn’t carry a shield and is taken to be a coward. They throw stones at him and the city cook spits a gob of phlegm at him. Utterly exhausted, ashamed and humiliated the soldier lies down in the dirt and lets himself be attacked by the ominous flock of black crows flying overhead. In the morning nothing is left of his body except the bones picked clean. And so the city never gets to learn that the Spartans won and that this man had been stripped of his spear and shield by his generals all the better to run faster back to the city and tell his countrymen of their victory. Never trust the masses, you see.

This is such a cheesy reversal, such a heavy moralising twist, that it reminds me of the cheesy payoffs of lots of cheap science fiction stories.

13. The secret of the old music (5 pages)

The Paris orchestra prepares to play the new piece by an unnamed ‘modern’ composer (strongly hinted to be Wagner) but discovers it has a part for the Chinese pavilion, an instrument it doesn’t possess and nobody can recall having been played in their lifetimes. But some of the musicians think they know an old guy who might have one so they visit him in his apartment (surrounded by versions of the instrument and sheet music) and persuade him to come along to rehearsals the next morning. But he finds the new music so difficult he protests against it, halting the rehearsal to declaim that Music is finished and promptly falling into the bass drum. Maybe this is meant to be funny.

14. Sentimentality (9 pages)

De L’Isle-Adam was a member of the Parnassian group of poets:

Parnassianism was a group of French poets that began during the positivist period of the 19th century (1860s to 1890s), occurring after romanticism and prior to symbolism … As a reaction to the less-disciplined types of romantic poetry and what they considered the excessive sentimentality and undue social and political activism of Romantic works, the Parnassians strove for exact and faultless workmanship, selecting exotic and (neo-)classical subjects that they treated with rigidity of form and emotional detachment.

This, then, explains the emotional detachment, the clinical approach, and the occasional classical subject matter of L’Isle-Adam’s ‘stories’.

This isn’t really a story but a dialogue designed to demonstrate and show off Parnassian values. The young poet, the Comte Maximilien de W– and the well-known beauty Lucienne Émery are sitting on the Champs Elysees. They are romantically involved. She asks him to explain why he, as a Parnassian poet, gives the impression of performing everything, of acting out feelings and emotions. Why can’t he be more like ordinary people? He explains that a poet and artist like himself feels things so deeply that he is lost for how to behave and so ‘acts’ feelings with the appropriate gestures which the ignorant masses would understand.

Very casually, she, also a devotee of this Parnassian way of living, informs him that this is their last hour together as she is leaving him for another man, who she’s meeting later the same night. True to his philosophy of deep feeling kept under clinical self-control, the Comte barely flickered an eyelid, possibly going just a shade paler before congratulating her on her choice. There’s a bit more explanation of art and feeling etc before he hails her a cab and she drives off. He walks home, files his nails, writes a few lines of verse, opens a new book, then calmly takes a small pistol from his cabinet and shoots himself through the heart. Émery has since that day worn mourning black.

15. The finest dinner in the world (9 pages)

I think de L’Isle-Adam’s obvious contempt for people would stop him being considered a major writer. In this little vignette two notables in an unnamed provincial town bet each other they can produce the finest dinner in the world. Maitre Percenoix goes first and produces a 13-course marvel which astonishes the 17 provincial worthies invited to enjoy it. At its climax his bitter rival, Maitre Lecastelier, stands up and says he will serve up one even better in exactly one year’s time.

The joke or gag or point of the story is that one year later Lecastelier serves the same bunch of (lampooned) provincial notables exactly the same dinner down to the last detail BUT…into each napkin he has slipped a 20 franc piece. These fall out as the guests open the napkins and each guest, in a provincial bourgeois way which de L’Isle-Adam mocks, hurriedly slips it into their pockets or purses, pretending they never saw it.

The joke is that, as they leave, and for days afterwards, all the guests for some reason feel that, although the menu was identical to the one laid on by Percenoix, the Lecastelier dinner really was better but, because of their bourgeois hypocrisy, none of them will admit why.

16. The desire to be a man (10 pages)

A variation on the Parnassian theme of ‘true’ feeling. The protagonist is Esprit Chaudval, the famous tragedian, getting on a bit now as he’s turning 50. Wandering the streets of Paris as the restaurants shut down he catches sight of himself in a mirror and poses and preens as he has done all his professional life. His hair is turning grey. It’s time to retire. In an incongruous and improbable development it turns out that he has applied to be a lighthouse keeper. He has just received a letter answering his application, now opens it and squeals with pleasure, then catches himself acting.

It dawns on him that he’s acted so many parts but, deep down, never really felt anything and he finds himself saying that he needs to be a man. Because of the histrionic way his (and de L’Isle-Adam’s) mind works, the old actor thinks the best way to really feel something is to commit a great crime and feel himself flooded with remorse, a genuine emotion which he can hold onto and feed off for the rest of his quiet life as a lighthouse keeper.

So he sets fire to an industrial estate on the outskirts of Paris full of warehouses of oil etc which goes up in a huge blaze, spreading to the nearby houses of the urban poor, some of whom are burned to death, many made homeless. He loiters long enough to enjoy the fruit of his labours – ‘At last I’m going to find out what it means to be “tortured with remorse”…I’m born again. I exist!‘ – then takes a cab with trunks of his belongings to the station whence he will travel to his lighthouse.

A small digression on outsider literary criminals

His grand arson puts Chaudval in the lineage linking Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s alienated student, Raskolnikov, in the novel ‘Crime and Punishment’ (1867); with Albert Camus’s blank-minded murderer, Mersault, in ‘The Outsider’ (1942); via André Gide who invented the concept of the ‘acte gratuite’ (an utterly unmotivated behaviour that defies routine, custom, and normal explanations) in his novel ‘Les Caves du Vatican’ in 1914.

17. Flowers of darkness (2 pages)

A baleful little 2-page meditation on the trade in Paris whereby flowers and wreaths left at funerals, come nightfall, are scavenged, thrown into carts and taken to ateliers where they are reworked as attractive bouquets and handed to the sweet little flower girls who come out at night and loiter in front of theatres, restaurants etc so that men can impress their dates by buying them bouquets.

De L’Isle-Adam gives it a characteristically morbid and moralising turn by saying that these flowers of the dead are an apt emblem for the pale-faced ladies of the night who all-too-often hand out love which is death, by which I take it he means sexually transmitted diseases.

18. The apparatus for the chemical analysis of the last breath (8 pages)

Like ‘Celestial publicity’ and ‘The Glory Machine’, this is a heavy-handed satire on the unrelenting pace of ‘progress’ and ‘enlightenment’ which de L’Isle-Adam associates with unbridled technical innovation, commercialism and advertising. It isn’t a ‘story’ at all but more a satirical article about a fictional invention.

The narrator hails the invention of a device which can capture and analyse the last breaths of the dying. He goes on to say that children are now practicing on their parents when they fall asleep in front of the fire, getting used to the experience and feelings of death so it’ll seem boring when it actually happens. An extended satire on how the young will learn to be heartless, respect for the dead will vanish and good thing too, art and literature will lose their mystery which is just as well in an age when time is money, and other sarcastic sallies.

19. The brigands (7 pages)

A broad farcical satire on the provincial bourgeoisie. A beggar, an old fiddler from the Gascon town of Nayrac, stops the churchwarden of the neighbouring town of Pibrac on the highway and asks for some alms. Within hours rumour passes round both towns that a huge gang of ferocious brigands is at large. So the bourgeois landowners of both places nerve each other to assemble a posse and, armed with ancient muskets (and cough drops from anxious wives) set off on a tour of their lands during which they’ll collect all the rents owed them.

They see no sight of any brigands because there aren’t any but as night falls they become distinctly nervous. Then in the darkness the two wagons, one of nervous burgers from Pibrac, one of the same from Nayrac, surprise each other on the dark road. The moon disappears behind a cloud and a nervous landowner fires his gun by mistake. What follows is a general massacre in which everyone, even the horse, is slaughtered.

Some distance away the blind fiddler and his loose group of beggar friends hear all the shooting and decide to investigate. They arrive just at the moment that the last burger accidentally blows his brains out and to find a scene of mayhem and massacre.

And, as you might have predicted, seeing all these dead bodies and bags of coins scattered everywhere, the fiddler suggests to his mates that they steal all the swag and hot tail it out of the province, which is what they do.

20. Queen Ysabeau (8 pages)

De L’Isle-Adam wrote a biography of Ysabeau de Bavaria (who was a real historical personage) which was itself meant to be only part of a vast history of his aristocratic family which he insisted stretched back at least as far as the 1400s. In the event this grand history was never completed and even the biography of Ysabeau de Baviere was never published during his lifetime. This ‘story’ is an episode from the larger biography.

It is a deliciously cruel story, a kind of historical Roald Dahl story. It is 1404. Queen Ysabeau de Bavaria is the wife of King Charles VI of France. He has gone mad and she has taken a lover, Vidame de Maulle. One day, carousing with his aristocratic friends who are discussing the nubile women at court and in particular the daughter of the Court silversmith, Bérénice Escabala, de Maulle is foolish enough to bet that he can take her virtue before anyone else.

Now, among the mob of jesting courtiers is Louis d’Orléans, the Queen’s brother-in-law, who has an unhealthily incestuous passion for her. He doesn’t hesitate to report de Maulle’s boast to the Queen, who is not amused. Thus, the next time they are in bed together, having had the usual passionate sex (‘the abandoned delights of the most wonderful pleasures’), the following scene transpires. De Maulle wakes the drowsy Queen to say he can hear bells ringing and the sky is red, there must be a big fire somewhere. Yes, Ysabeau, drowsily says, yes she had her people set fire to the home of the court silversmith. The next day he (de Maulle) will be arrested on the charge of starting the fire in order to abduct the silversmith’s daughter and win his bet. He has only one alibi, that he was here with the Queen on the night in question, which his honour as an aristocrat will forbid him from using – and also the fact that admitting to having sex with the Queen is Treason, also punishable by death. So it’s death either way. In any case he will be tortured until he confesses whatever he’s told to.

Now, they are in bed together, naked, having just had sex, as the Queen lazily and sleepily tells de Maulle all this and he laughs nervously and embraces her again. Ha ha, you’re joking, right? But next morning he is arrested, taken off to the Grand Chatelet prison, and thoroughly tortured, as the Queen predicted.

There’s a final twist. De Maulle’s lawyer believes the young nobleman and makes the noble gesture of swapping places with him in prison, lending de Maulle his cloak so the latter can leave pretending to be the lawyer after a prison cell conference. But when the Queen hears of this, she doesn’t display the nobility you might expect in a more bourgeois story and free the noble lawyer. Instead she has the lawyer ‘broken on the wheel’ in de Maulle’s name so that the latter’s title can be struck from the register.

And the moral of the story is: If you’re having an affair with a medieval queen do not make a public bet to take another woman to bed. A lesson we can all take to heart.

21. Sombre tale, sombre teller (10 pages)

It might be me adapting to de L’Isle-Adam’s style and worldview but, with this run of 5 or 6 good stories, the collection seemed to significantly improve. A bunch of writers go for dinner to celebrate a playwright’s success. Food and drink make them talkative and the subject turns to duels. One of them is asked to explain more about the duel he’s recently taken part in. This writer certainly does describe, in detail, the duel he assisted at which involved an old schoolfriend seeking satisfaction for a bounder who insulted his mother. But the point of the story is that he is so imbrued with writing and playwriting that he assesses every situation, every step of the unfolding story, as if it was a fiction, awarding marks to his friend as he retells the story of the original insult, then comparing him to famous actors of the day for his restraint, nobility and then, after he’s been mortally wounded in the actual duel, the dignity of his death speech. So much can he only see it as a drama that as his old friend expires in his arms he bursts out applauding.

This story had a little of the delirious effect, the effect of dizzying paradox, of one of Borges’s short stories (a little).

22. The sign (19 pages)

The narrator and some writer friends are drinking tea round a friend’s house when this friend, as always a titled gent, Baron Xavier de la V— offers to tell a story about an uncanny coincidence. To start off he makes all the fashionable claims about being doomed by hereditary spleen, a morose and taciturn creature prey to crippling depression. And that’s why he decided to take a rest cure in the country.

He decides to go and visit the Abbé Maucombe in the town of Saint-Maur in Brittany. His journey there, the farm and the good Abbé are all described in adequate detail. What stands out is the Baron’s hallucinations. Everything looks calm and bucolic around the old house where the priest lives but then a cloud passes over the sun and he sees it all in a different way, rundown and crumbling and sinister. (It reminded me a bit of the TV series ‘Stranger Things’ where you see an innocent small town by day and then are shown the grim, overgrown derelict place it will become if They take control.)

They have philosophical talks about God and stuff but that night the Baron has a sinister dream in which he a creepy figure whose face is masked hands him a cloak. Long story short, several days letter the Baron has to return to Paris on business and the Abbé insists on walking him to the village where the stagecoach stops and it starts to rain, and the kind-hearted Abbé lends him his cloak, handing it over in a gesture which exactly matches what the Baron saw in his dream. With a certain inevitability, a couple of days later, in Paris, the Baron gets a letter saying the Abbé has died of a cold picked up in the rainstorm.

But these ‘facts’ barely matter. What matters is the tremendous atmosphere of ominous premonition which de L’Isle-Adam whips up, and especially the couple of genuinely creepy moments when he suddenly sees an alternative reality, the rundown haunted landscape behind the bright sunny one we see most of the time.

23. The unknown woman (14 pages)

The scene is a grand night at the opera, the farewell performance of noted soprano Maria Felicia Malibran, singing in Bellini’s Norma. The narrative singles out a handsome young man in the stalls, displaying a notable excitement and enthusiasm, explaining that he is the Comte Félician de la Vierge, a provincial aristocrat who only comes to Paris occasionally. This young man catches sight of a beautiful woman in a box and is bowled over by her beauty. Her image speaks to something inside him and he realises that he is in love.

He follows her outside, ignoring the flashy opera crowd, and when she dismisses her cab, he does the same to his and follows her on foot. Seized by a sudden premonition that he might lose her and never see her again, he overtake he, turns and bows and declares his undying love for her. So far, so melodramatic and overwrought and improbable. But all this is to set up what follows, for the pale beautiful young woman waits till the man has finished his speech then declares that she is…deaf!

This staggers the young man for a moment but then his love is reinforced by compassion, and he renews his assault, declaring her disability will make him love her even more. Whereupon the ‘story’ takes a turn, for the unnamed deaf woman delivers a series of long speeches. The gist is that their love can never work because he will, sooner or later, no matter what he promises now, get used to her deafness. Married life requires a lot of practical discussion and agreement and she won’t be able to hear him and eventually he will just mouth ‘I love you’ and write her practical notes and she couldn’t bear that.

Having reduced him to stricken silence, she turns, steps into the cab which has been following her all that time, and is whisked away. Next day the tragical young man packs his bags, returns to his estates in Brittany and is never heard from again, living in heart-broken solitude.

That’s what happens, but in reality the last 6 or so pages are a peg or pretext for de L’Isle-Adam to get his unnamed woman to deliver a series of lectures or addresses on a variety of topical themes. In fact I detected (or think I detected) in the 14 pages of the story a variety of tropes and styles from the period, including Realism, Naturalism, Parnassianism, Romanticism, Decadence and Symbolism. If I have time, I’m thinking I might have a crack at analysing out all the different tones, registers and styles which thong this packed little text.

24. Maryelle (10 pages)

A well-known lady of easy virtue suddenly disappears from society and the narrator, from lordly aristocratic boredom, sets out to find out why. This isn’t very difficult since he bumps into her on the street, on the Avenue of the Opera, to be precise.

She is 25 and pale. He invites her to lunch at a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne ‘so that we might get bored together’, striking the note of exquisitely aristocratic world weariness. He tells her a story ‘to break the ice’ which captures the cynicism of de l’Isle-Adam and his circle perfectly. It concerns a vengeful squire who arrives home to find his wife ‘in a questionable position’ and swiftly inflicts a mortal wound on the lover. As he lays dying in the unfaithful wife’s arms, the husband has the bright idea of tickling her feet with a feather so that she bursts out laughing in the face of her beloved!

It now appears that they had some days of passion a year or so ago but Maryelle makes it quite clear that that is not going to happen again, at which, like so many de L’Isle-Adam characters, the narrator acts the part.

I considered it incumbent on me to assume a somewhat melancholy expression, as the tribute any well-bred man must always pay to a pretty woman. (p.217)

Then she tells him a story. Last winter at the theatre she became the object of a naive young man up from the provinces. Maryelle has the gift of becoming whatever other people want her to be. Here, as in so many of the other stories, it’s about a person who plays at living or acts a role, for at least two reasons: 1) they are such experts at life, they have lived so thoroughly, that most scenes are just repeats of things they’ve experiences, so they’re just going through the motions; 2) from another perspective, their acting turns their lives into art, gives them an artful completeness and aesthetic finish which ‘real life’, alas, usually lacks.

Anyway, when Maryelle becomes aware of the youth’s interest she adopts the role of a respectable widow of a respected army officer, deceased, on a rare trip up to Paris. (She is a courtesan. This is all an act.)

She receives one then several letters (which she shows the narrator who is cynically amused at their naive innocence) but then something strange happened. As she agreed to meet the poor innocent lad she found herself…falling in love with him!

She plays the part of the chaste widow so well that she comes to believe it herself conveniently forgetting her entire previous existence as a lady of the night. And the narrator, with typically droll irony, praises this sweet and innocent love based, as it is, on all-round lies and deceit. The only slight snag is that, while being faithful in her heart to the young innocent she is, apparently, continuing to see and sleep with an impressive roster of other gentleman to which her response is the admirably practical: ‘Is it my fault if a girl has to live?’

She then delivers a page-long speech about the artificiality of modern life, whose gist is:

Haven’t the appearances of love become, for nearly everybody, preferable to love itself? (p.223)

The implication that he (the narrator) has never had a meaningful relationship with Maryelle infuriates the narrator who shouts at her to go back to her penniless lover, Raoul. She, by contrast, keeps her cool, rises, adjusts her veil, and disappears into the evening.

There’s a funny payoff. From the balcony of the restaurant the narrator looks out over the grass bright with the evening dew. Vexed and irritated, to try and calm his mood, in a petty gesture, he insouciantly tosses his dead cigar onto it. Which explains why, one billion cigars later, the world is dying.

25. Doctor Tristan’s treatment (5 pages)

Hurrah!…Hosannah! Progress sweeps us along on its torrential course. (p.225)

Another right-wing satire on ‘progress’ and ‘liberalism’ and ‘humanitarianism’ like ‘The apparatus for the chemical analysis of the last breath’, ‘Celestial publicity’ and ‘The Glory Machine’. In many ways it’s the best because the satirical premise is kept simple and punchy.

A Dr T. Chavassus has invented a treatment for anyone suffering from those troublesome voices in their head, such as: the voice of God a la Joan of Arc, the voice of conscience, the voice of patriotism, the voice of outraged honour etc etc a sarcastic list of all the right-wing shibboleths.

The doctor’s technique is to clamp the patient to a chair, then yell in their ear for 20 minutes the magic word HUMANITY, after which he slips an electric wire in each ear and sends such a voltage through it that it bursts the eardrums, and makes the patient permanently deaf. But no more irritating inner voices which detract from the citizen’s efficiency in the modern economy.

This is carried along by de L’Isle-Adam’s anger but, as with all the other science satires, you only have to reflect for a few seconds to realise that deafening someone won’t interfere in the slightest with the voice of conscience or God or outrage patriotism or whatever which continua assailing those who hear them. It’s a bravura comic performance for the 7 or 8 minutes it takes to read, then instantly revealed to be impossible and not even internally consistent and so, like so many of his stories, discarded.

26. Occult memories (5 pages)

Originally a prose poem and only just about converted into something approaching a ‘story’, a 5-page monologue by a proudly Celtic son of Brittany who describes the career of his ancestor, some kind of soldier-adventurer in France’s Indian colonies, which opens with a deliberately Gothic description of the Dead Cities, overgrown with foliage, into whose tombs his ancestor crept, having massacred all the guards, to steal ancestral treasure, until he was eventually betrayed by a fellow adventurer, an Irishman with the splendid name of Captain Sombre.

It is another variation on one of de L’Isle-Adam’s idées fixes – the descent from grand, wealthy ancestors, the lament for present poverty, the refusal to truckle to the degraded ‘values’ of the present age.

27. Epilogue: The messenger (23 pages)

This is the longest story in the collection and de L’Isle-Adam was particularly proud of it. It’s based on a story told in the Old Testament which the book’s editor, A. W. Raitt, quotes in the notes in its entirety before going on to comment that de L’Isle-Adam’s main achievement was to ‘overlay it with a veneer of pretentious erudition’ (Notes, p.285). A bit later Raitt comments that de L’Isle-Adam ‘optimistically claimed to know Hebrew’ when he very obviously didn’t. Raitt’s notes are a joy to read in their own right, especially for the more absurd moments of de L’Isle-Adam’s biography which he pulls out.

It’s set in Jerusalem in the time of King Solomon and mostly consists of a long prose poem describing the layout and buildings and trees and canals and gilded decorations of the city as the narration, like a camera, pans over it and up to the great palace of Solomon himself. Here the text becomes clotted with descriptions of the exotic peoples who attend the court, in all their oriental variety, stuffed with Biblical placenames. It is striving for the same kind of gorgeous Biblical ornateness as Flaubert’s story, Hérodias‘, published just a few years before, in 1877, and anticipating Oscar Wilde’s play on the same subject, Salomé, published in 1891.

Almost the entire story is a gorgeous description of the celebrations of the Passover in the great palace of King Solomon at the height of which the sky goes ominously dark, heavy raindrops fall, a bolt of lighting demolishes a column and suddenly appears an angel of the Lord, Azrael. Initially Solomon thinks the angel of the Lord has come to take him away from this world of sorrow but he is disappointed because the Angel has, in fact, come to whisk away the King’s chief priest, Helcias.

This piece forms the deliberate climax of the collection, a spectacular cornucopia of Biblical names and descriptions rendered in a deliberately clotted, gorgeous poetic prose which you can imagine de L’Isle-Adam labouring over long and hard. It probably ought to be read aloud, recited or declaimed from a stage rather than silently read.

It prompted one simple thought, which is that, in a way I doubt de L’Isle-Adam intended, it shows how the entire edifice of Symbolism depends, ultimately, on the voodoo resonances of Judeo-Christianity. Symbolism piggybacks on Catholicism. It relies for its atmospheric effects on the most lurid and melodramatic aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition while ignoring the positive day-to-day practice of Judaism or the cheerful, ‘good news’ aspects of Christianity.

Conclusions

It took a while for me to adapt to de L’Isle-Adam’s tone and vibe and subject matter, but eventually, after an initial aversion due to their snobbery and melodrama, the sheer number of stories drew me in and I found myself enjoying them more and more, and rereading a number of them purely for pleasure of their arch, contrived, improbable, sometimes comic, but sometimes genuinely effective melodramatic appeal.

Purple prose

Here’s what de L’Isle-Adam regularly sounds like:

‘You, I thought to myself, who lack the refuge of your dreams, and for whom the land of Canaan, with its palm-trees and its living waters does not appear in the dawn after you have walked so far beneath the hard stars; traveller so joyful when you set off and now so gloomy; heart made for other exiles than those whose bitterness you now share with evil brethren – behold! Here you can sit on the stone of melancholy! Here dead dreams revive, anticipating the moment of the grave! If you wish to feel a real longing for death, approach: here the sight of the sky thrills to the point of forgetfulness.’ (Baron Xavier de la V— sounding off in ‘The Sign’)

Characteristic ingredients include:

  • exotic location from the Bible (land of Canaan) or some Romantic source text
  • melodramatic vocabulary (gloomy, dead dreams, grave and death death DEATH)
  • long histrionic sentences, as if written not to be read but declaimed from the stage in some Gothic melodrama

A.W. Raitt’s notes

The notes in this 1985 Oxford University Press edition by de L’Isle-Adam scholar A.W. Raitt are a droll delight. Apart from annotating particular aspects of the text, his throwaway references to aspects of de L’Isle-Adam’s life create a kind of collage biography. Thus:

  • Villiers (as Raitt calls him; much shorter and easier) was very proud of his skill as a boxer and at one time earned money as a sparring partner in a gymnasium (p.261)
  • Villiers was a devoted monarchist and stood unsuccessfully as a royalist candidate in the 1881 elections to the Paris Municipal Council (p.262)
  • the poet Stéphane Mallarmé was for many years Villiers’s best friend and wrote a mighty funeral oration for him (p.264)
  • Villiers was an ardent Wagnerian and visited the great man in Switzerland in 1969 and 1870 (p.265)
  • as a Breton, Villiers had a great love of the sea (p.266) [in which case it’s striking how few of his stories feature it; most are firmly wedged in Paris]
  • Villiers had a morbid interest in the guillotine and was a regular attender at executions (p.270)
  • Villiers was a member of the Parnassian group of poets who were routinely accused of being too cold and clinical in their approach (p.272)
  • Villiers believed he had the makings of a great actor (p.273)
  • Villiers was well-known for stopping in the street to gaze at his own reflection in mirrors and shop fronts (p.273)
  • his uncle (his father’s younger brother) was a parish priest in Brittany for his entire life (p.278)
  • Villiers was extremely suspicious and regularly took elaborate precautions to defend himself (p.279)
  • towards the end of his life Villiers, obviously unwell, returned to his Catholic faith (p.281)

The funniest biographical snippet concerns Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, third Marquess of Salisbury who succeeded Disraeli as the leader of the Tory Party in 1881. Villiers named a character in his novel ‘The New World’ Lord Cecil and sent a copy of the book to the Marquess along with a flattering letter. Having read Andrew Roberts’s vast and hugely enjoyable biography of Cecil, I’m not surprised that the Marquess a) was polite enough to write a reply which was b) studiedly distant. But it was enough to delude the ever-hopeful Villiers into believing he had at last found the wealthy patron who would make his name and fortune, and Villiers proceeded to bombard the Marquess with copies of each of his new works as they were published. Villiers did, in fact, finally meet the Marquess in Dieppe when the latter was on holiday there in 1888, but was intensely disappointed that nothing came of the encounter (p.286).

It is richly comic to imagine the response of the immensely wealthy, profoundly conservative, philistine and reactionary Cecil to the tactless importuning of a poverty-stricken, scandalously immoral Bohemian depicter of Paris’s high-class prostitutes and dissolute wastrels. Hard to imagine two more opposite types.

At one point he sums up Villiers’ profile in a snappy sentence:

Breton origins, illustrious forebears, present poverty, nostalgia for past glories. (p.284)

Credit

Contes Crueles by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam was published in France in 1883. Oxford University Press published an English translation, ‘Cruel Tales’, translated by Robert Baldick, in 1965. Extensive notes and a new introduction by Oxford academic A.W. Raitt were added in a revised edition published in 1985.

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No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe (1960)

‘A man who lives on the banks of the river Niger should not wash his hands with spittle.’
(Traditional Igbo proverb, No Longer At Ease, chapter 1)

‘Na so did world be.’
(Igbo proverb, p.230 and elsewhere)

Chinua Achebe’s second novel is closely linked to the first, Things Fall Apart. The protagonist of that book was Okonkwo, a big man in the village of Umuofia, of the Igbo people in what would later become south-east Nigeria. Three-quarters of Things Fall Apart depicts the culture and practice of the Igbo people in the 1890s; the final quarter depicts the slow but unstoppable arrival of British colonial rule bringing with it European religion, administration, law and order, and showing the adverse affect these had on traditional Igbo culture and on Okonkwo in particular.

This second novel leaps forward about 60 years, to the late 1950s, to describe the life of Okonkwo’s grandson, Obi Okonkwo. In Things Fall Apart one of the many ill effects of the arrival of the British was that Okonkwo’s eldest son, Nwoye, converted to Christianity and moved out of the district altogether, changing his name to Isaac, betraying his heritage and rejecting his (often violent) father. We are told that Nwoye moved to the nearest big town, Umura, where he enrolled in teacher training college. Well, the protagonist of this book, Obi, Okonkwo, is Nwoye’s son (page 159; his mother is named Hannah Okonkwo, p.158).

An executive summary is pretty simple. Obi is a smart young man who gets the opportunity to study law in Britain. After graduating, Obi returns to his native Nigeria and gets a job in the public administration. Here he is shocked to discover that local government, already, before independence (which came in 1960), is mired in corruption.

In various ways, Obi’s attempts at honesty are rebuffed or mocked. He meets a young woman and falls in love, sharing with her the moral dilemmas he is faced with. Just paying to maintain his status, for example, paying the insurance on his car, stretch his resources. then his mother falls ill and needs medical treatment. Then he gets his girlfriend pregnant and has to pay for an abortion. The bank start pressing him about his ever-growing overdraft. Obi starts accepting bribes. The climax comes when he accepts one from an undercover policeman and is subsequently arrested, charged and taken to court for bribery.

The novel opens at the end of the plot, with Obi in court on trial for corruption and the narrative takes the form of flashbacks, back to all the moments which led up to him standing in court, broken and demoralised.

Chapter 1

Chapter 1 describes responses to Obi’s arrest and trial. White colonials (notably Obi’s boss, Mr Green) are depicted as dismissing all Africans as corrupt. He and his cronies are described drinking and pompously laughing at the exclusive white men’s club, served by discreet black stewards.

By complete contrast we are then introduced to the Umuofia Progressive Union, formed 6 or 7 years earlier (i.e. about 1950) by men from Obi’s village of Umuofia, with a view to subsidising the education of the best and brightest among them (p.157).

Obi was the first candidate chosen under this scheme and had been loaned £800 to study in England, to be repaid over 4 years after his return – and now here he is, on trial, bringing shame on his village and clan, harshly criticised by some in the Union. In fact, he had already outraged many in the Union, years earlier, by changing the subject he studied in England from the (useful) Law to (useless) English (p.158).

The narrative then moves further back in time to the big prayer meeting held in Umuofia and hosted by his father, the retired Christian catechist, where Obi is toasted as the pride of the community and given blessings and presents and advice for his trip, first to Lagos, then to London.

Chapter 2

Stories about big city Lagos told by soldiers who’d fought for the British in the Second World War, when they returned to Umuofia. En route to the UK, Obi looks up a friend from his school, Joseph Okeke (‘a second class clerk’), who briefs him about life in the big city.

Then the scene cuts to four years later, with Obi returned from the UK and living in Lagos, now attached to his girlfriend, Clara, and discovering seedier, poorer slums of the city which he hadn’t seen on his brief stay en route to England.

Quite quickly we are immersed in Obi’s post-British life in Lagos, complete with girlfriend Clara Okeke who is a nurse, puts up with Obi reading his poems, prefers to go to trashy violent American movies. His friend Christopher, a graduate from the London School of Economics. They have long arguments about the future of Nigeria and the role of bribery already present in the black administration.

Chapter 3

The reader is getting used to the narrative jumping around in time. Now we leap back to when Obi and Clara first met, at a dance in St Pancras Town Hall in London. Obi was clumsy and gauche. Eighteen months later they meet by chance on the boat back to Nigeria, the MV Sasa, sailing from Liverpool.

Evocative description of the sea journey, companions at dinner, the changing moods of the sea. Obi has bad sea sickness and formerly aloof Clara is kind enough to give him some pills for it. Obi becomes firm friends with a white man, John Macmillan (p.172). They discover they’re both 25 years old.

The ship docks at Funchal, largest city in the Madeira islands. Obi, John and Clara explore the city together. That evening, back on board ship, they have their first kiss.

Chapter 4

On arriving at Lagos a local official tries to extract a £5 import duty on Obi’s radiogram. It’s a symbolic re-introduction to African corruption. ‘Dear old Nigeria,’ he said to himself (p.176).

The officials of the Umuofia Progressive Union arrange a grand gala reception for the prodigal son. We learn his first name is actually Michael, Michael Obi Okonkwo (p.177). The scene is played for laughs (I think) with a big discrepancy between Obi’s informal approach (dressing in shirtsleeves, delivering an informal speech about education) which contrast strongly with the shirt and tie formality of the Union’s officials and a grandiose speech about obi representing their village in the Great Future of the Country etc.

After the reception his friend Joseph takes him to a bar for a drink. Obi wants to eat traditional Nigerian food but finds it impossible to order. Nobody with ambition eats the old-style food (roast yams and bitter-leaf soup).

A flashy car draws up outside the club and out gets the super-popular, handsome and well-groomed politician the Honourable Sam Okoli. Happening to be in a chair facing that way, Obi sees he has a female companion in his flash car. It is Clara.

Bribery and corruption

In the 20 or so books about post-independence Africa I’ve read this year, corruption emerges as such a consistent universal feature of African states and economies that you eventually realise it is the system, the way things are run and managed from the lowest to the highest levels, while the fol-de-rol about democracy or transparent governance etc are formal hoops African leaders have to jump through in order to get their next tranche of World Bank loans, half-mocking lip service paid to western banks.

So this book is a fascinating insight into how the issue of corruption was perceived, discussed and addressed by Africans at the time of independence, over 60 years ago. Just the fact that Achebe chose to make the topic a central theme of his second book, with repeated discussions of it by the characters, is itself hugely revealing. Regarded just as documentary evidence for social history, it’s a fascinating body of evidence. I was riveted by passages like this:

In Nigeria the government was ‘they’. It had nothing to do with you or me. It was an alien institution and people’s business was to get as much from it as they could without getting into trouble. (p.178)

Chapter 5

Obi writes a paper expressing his view that corruption is caused by the older generation and will be stamped out once a new, young generation of university graduates like himself rise to the top. He interviews for a job in the civil service, led by a white man who is happy to discuss recent literature with Obi (recent literature including Graham Greene’s ‘The Heart of The Matter’). This man asks him point blank if he wants to the job (Secretary to the Scholarship Board) so he can take bribes? Obi is understandably furious but also demoralised that this is the universal and low expectation of even educated young Nigerians (cf. p.212 where Joseph’s friends simply expect Obi to take bribes).

While waiting to hear the result, Obi takes a ‘mammy-wagon’ i.e. a packed bus, the 500 miles from Lagos to Umuofia.

On the way corrupt policemen pull them over for a bribe. Obi watches the driver about to pay and both participants shy away from being directly witnessed. This only leads to the driver motoring a bit further on then stopping and running back to pay the policemen. Instead of the standard 2 shillings the bribe is jacked up to 10 shillings. Everyone in the car blames Obi for his goody two shoes, over-educated fussiness which has only ended up making them worse off. Obi despairs of wiping out corruption. Educating the masses would take centuries. It has to come from changing the people at the top. Maybe a benign dictator.

An enlightened dictator. People are scared of the word nowadays. But what kind of democracy can exist side by side with so much corruption and ignorance? (p.186)

This book was published in 1960, just as Nigeria gained independence, six years before it had its first military coup in 1966. To date there have been five military coup d’états in Nigeria. Between 1966 and 1999 Nigeria was ruled by a military government apart from the short-lived Second Nigerian Republic of 1979 to 1983 = 29 years of military rule.

The mammy wagon arrives at the famous market town of Onitsha, allowing Obi to wander round it and Achebe to slip in a description of it, before he completes the last 50 miles to Umuofia. There’s a heartfelt passage, which feels very autobiographical, on how lonely Ibo felt in London, and how he felt like a cultural traitor, studying the language of the colonist, instead of his own culture.

Back in the village he is greeted by a great assembly, featuring his father the Christian but plenty of village elders who have refused to become Christians, and speak and think in the old ways, sitting on goatskin, unable to imagine a ship which sails the oceans, only able to conceive of Obi’s trip as a voyage to the land of the spirits. The old culture lives on very powerfully in Umuofia.

Pidgin

Many of the characters, the minor uneducated ones, appear to speak pidgin English. It feels like this novel is a good source of information about the state of pidgin in 1950s Nigeria, but I am too uneducated / ignorant of the subject to comment.

Christopher’s prowess at pidgin i.e. being able to switch between English, Igbo and pidgin to suit the company, time and situation (p.238).

Chapter 6

When everyone else has left, an intimate portrait of Obi’s family, his mother, father, brother, six sisters (p.196). His father, Isaac, is officious and bossy about his Christian faith in a way reminiscent of his tyrannical father, Okonkwo. Isaac forbade his wife, Obi’s mother, Hannah, to tell her children the old folk stories (p.197). Obi remembers being a boy at the village school and humiliated because when called on by the teacher to stand before the class and tell a folk story, he couldn’t. He went home in tears and told his mother. She said wait till your father goes to his next evening prayer meeting, then she told Obi a folk tale. Then he was able to tell it in school. These all feel like pure autobiography of Achebe whose father was a teacher and evangelist. Achebe’s father took the Christian name Isaiah; Obi’s father takes the Christian name Isaac.

It’s difficult to convey how candid and moving these passages are. No great excitement, no arguments, no historical moments, just a sense of the warmth and companionableness of a large family who enjoy teasing and entertaining each other. Made me jealous.

Chapter 7

He remembers the second white man he saw, a Mr Jones who was a school inspector 20 years previously i.e. about 1937 (in fact, later in the text the narrator dates it to 1935, p.235). Mr Jones was tall and drove a big motorbike which he left half a mile from the school so he could arrive unannounced and detect faults. How he interrupted the black headmaster, Mr Nduka and then, in his rage, slapped him. How Mr Nduka was an expert wrestler and in a flash had Mr Jones on the floor in a wrestling hold. How all the children fled in terror.

Obi presumably passed his interview because we now see him starting h is first job, in government administration. His boss is the rude Mr Green, while his immediate manager is the old and cowering African, Mr Omo, who has bad teeth and can only speak pidgin.

As a new senior civil servant Obi is awarded a clothing allowance and a car. He phones Clara who is thrilled. he discovers the Honourable Sam Okoli has no designs on Clara, in fact is soon to marry her best friend. Sam lives in a massive house. There was controversy when the government blew £35,000 on each new house for its ministers. He shows off to Clara and Obi his gramophone and tape machine. He has immaculate flunkeys to wait on him. All this before independence. You can see why post-colonial critics accuse the Europeans of establishing a template of gross inequality between governors and governed which the African ruling classes simply copied.

Clara tearfully tells Obi she can’t marry him because she is an osu, a kind of Igbo version of the Indian ‘untouchable’, from a family which devoted itself to a particular tribal god and became outcasts (defined on pages 207, 208 and 256). Obi, as an educated man, consider all this gibberish, insists that he will marry her, buys an engagement ring.

The friend in Lagos, Joseph Okeke, whose place he’s still staying at, argues with him, saying his parents, Christians though they may be, will reject an osu as a bride, specially for the local boy made good Obi. (Later Clara says she doesn’t like Joseph because ‘he’s a bushman’ i.e. uneducated, close to the old tribal rural ways, p.237.)

The first educated Nigerian generation

Sprinkled through the book are references to the idea that they – Obi, Clara, Joseph et al – belong to the new young generation, they are going to do things a new way, not just re. corruption, but bringing western education, standards of behaviour etc, in exactly such things as this ridiculous superstition about osu. But some of them are aware that, being a pioneer generation means they can’t change everything at once. For example, his educated friend Christopher coming down on his parents’ side, regarding Clara:

‘You may say that I am not broad-minded but I don’t think we have reached the stage where we can ignore all our customs.’ (p.264)

Chapter 8

We learn the years is 1956 because the Umuofia Progressive Union holds its next meeting on 1 December 1956 (p.212). You can see why the UPU exists, to promote the interests of men from the village who have moved to the big city and have formed what is in effect s self-help group. But you can also see how it itself fits into the matrix of corruption in the sense that, having got ‘one of theirs’ into a good government job, they expect him to speak up for his clansmen and use his influence to get them jobs and money.

In the event Obi makes a gracious speech and a good impression until the President of the UPU (‘the father of the Umuofia people in Lagos’) very mildly starts to refer to Clara as bad company. He had barely hinted at her osu background (‘a girl of doubtful ancestry’) when Obi, trembling with fury, leaps to his feet, shouts abuse at the President and, despite plenty of voices telling him to calm down, storms out of the meeting and has his driver roar off.

Having just read Things Fall Apart I see that Obi has inherited the fiery temper which characterised and was the downfall of his grandfather, Okonkwo.

Chapter 9

At his new work Obi is given an office with Mr Green’s secretary, Miss Marie Tomlinson. She seems to be sweet and friendly although Obi suspects her of being a spy set to catch him out.

Obi has been back from Britain for 6 months when he is first tempted by a bribe. An inoffensive looking man named Mr Mark offers him a bribe to give preferential treatment to his daughter. Obi chases him out of the office, not least because Miss Marie Tomlinson has witnessed the entire thing.

Obi is as proud of himself for resisting temptation as he was after he lost his virginity (to a white woman in England, p.220).

Money pressure. Obi is paid a monthly salary of £47 ten shillings, but from this he is paying back his loan from the UPU at £20 a month, and sending £10 to his parents, and promised his father, on his visit back to Umuofia, that he would pay his younger brother, John’s, school fees.

That evening Mr Mark’s 17 or 18 year old sister, Elsie Mark (p.222) knocks on his apartment door. He kindly invites her in and she tells her sad story, that the family spent all their money on her elder brother who failed all his exams, so now it’s desperately important that she goes to university in order to get a good job with lots of money to support her family and she’ll do anything to get a recommendation from Obi in his capacity as Secretary to the Scholarship Board. I think the implication is she is prepared to sleep with him but at this moment Clara bursts through the front door, bridles when she sees the girl, helps herself to a drink from the fridge, asks about the soup she made for Obi and generally makes it crystal clear that he is her man. But she needn’t have bothered. The poor young girl is humiliated. Obi kindly offers to run her back into town (taxis are expensive) and all the way back Clara gives him a hard time.

Chapter 10

A year later the insurance on Obi’s car is due, £40. He only has £13 in the bank. Not least because he sent his mother £35 to be given private medical treatment. Then there’s his electricity bill. And the tyres have gone and need renewing.

He decides he has to take out a £50 overdraft with the bank. Which all leads to an argument with Clara. Her way of arguing is to go completely silent and, since she does most of the talking, creating a great silence, which eventually intimidates Obi into capitulating.

Chapter 11

Obi’s speculation about Mr Green, who works very hard at the job but, Obi thinks, for a vision of Nigeria which doesn’t exist, for the Nigeria of his western colonialist dreams. Clara sends a package via a messenger from her hospital, which contains £50. Obi goes to see her, to tell her he can’t accept it. They argue about it.

Obi and Clara go to see his friend, Christopher the economist, and his latest girlfriend, Bisi, who persuade them to go dancing at the Imperial Hotel. Interesting description of dancing styles to high-life music. When they emerge from the bar in the early hours it’s to discover that someone’s broken into Obi’s car and stolen the box with Clara’s £50 in it.

Chapter 12

Mr Green is depicted as a bigot who, despite having ‘served’ in the country for 15 years, makes a point of telling everyone that all Africans are corrupt and lecturing Obi on his fellow ‘educated’ Nigerians who expect the Government to pick up the tab for their lives.

He’s obviously meant to be a narrow-minded bigot but I couldn’t help having a sneaking liking for him, as I did for the bigoted ex-pats in Ronan Bennett’s novel about Congo at the time of independence, The Catastrophist. On the face of it they’re illiberal bigots except that they turn out to predict the future (political chaos, violent secessions, civil war, white flight) with perfect precision, while the sympathetic liberal characters, who hoped for the best, turn out to be completely wrong.

Mr Green is more obnoxious than that, he goes out of his way to be offensive and insulting. He’s an arse, basically. But there’s enough truth mixed up in his prejudice to make him an interestingly complicated character.

Obi receives a letter from his father saying his mother requires further medical treatment.

Then he has a day with friend Christopher going to chat up two Irish Catholic girls he knows, then onto Bisi’s place, then to his latest girlfriend’s, Florence. Obi tells him about the girl, Elsie Mark, who appeared to offer herself in order to win a scholarship. She got it anyway and is studying in England, now. Christopher calls him a fool for turning down sex with her. She probably slept with the rest of the Board. Maybe, Obi says, but can’t he see how corrupt it is. They go out for dinner and argue about definitions of bribery late into the night.

Chapter 13

February 1957 (p.249). Clara again tells him she wants to break off the engagement. She says it’s because his parents will disapprove. He reassures her, they kiss, they make love.

Obi takes a week’s leave back home. He explains how villagers like his expect the local boy who made good in the big city to shower them with largesse except that, as we’ve seen, he’s actually broke (specially as he’s just paid John’s fees for one term, £16 ten shillings), so that’s a problem (p.251).

When he gets to Umuofia he discovers his mother is very weak and ill and old, with hands like claws. He tries to contain his sorrow. Performers from a funeral pass by and stop to serenade them. His mother likes music, ‘even when it was heathen music’.

Chapter 14

Still on this week’s leave at his village, Obi finally has the conversation about Clara with his father. His father tells him point blank he cannot marry Clara. They debate it, Obi saying it’s ridiculous superstition and will have disappeared in ten years’ time, his father insisting he will curse himself, his sons and daughters, their sons and daughters, for generations to come. In a funny way Obi enjoys the argument because he feels he is engaging with his father in a way he never has before, in all his 26 years (p.257).

The next morning he is up early to attend family prayers led by his father. Then he is alone with his very sick mother who horrifies him by telling him that if he marries an osu she will kill herself and he will have her blood on his hands!

Obi retires to his bed, claiming to be too tired from the long journey to see anyone, which neighbours and people who’ve come to visit consider a great insult. In the evening his father comes quietly into his bedroom but instead of discussing the osu issue, Obi’s father tells him about how he rebelled against his father and how his father cursed him, and all his life he’s lived under this shadow.

Chapter 15

Obi drives the 500 kilometres all the way back to Lagos in one go, without stopping, nearly crashing into a mammy-wagon on the way. He washes, changes, goes to Clara’s apartment, tells her about his mother, tries to make it sound like a small impediment which can be fixed, but Clara says ‘I told you so’ and hands him back her engagement ring (p.263). Then she lowers her voice and says there was something else she wanted to tell him, but…she’ll sort it out herself. Presumably she means she’s pregnant.

Obi drives to see his friend Christopher who 1) takes his parents’ side, saying he personally would never marry an osu; and 2) he can get him the addresses of some abortionists, though again he personally thinks it’s the woman’s responsibility, not least because you can never be sure whether you’re the father.

The first doctor they go to see is an old guy who refuses point blank to perform an abortion. The second one is much younger and demands £30 in cash. Both ask Obi why doesn’t he simply marry her?

Chapter 16

Obi sweats about where to get the money, rejecting the options of a moneylender, his friends let along the President of the Umuofia Union. He settles on the smooth and handsome and rich Honourable Sam Okoli.

At 2pm the next day Obi is at the clinic and hands the doctor £30 in cash. The doctor tells Clara to stay and Obi to return at 5pm. Obi goes out and gets into his parked car, watches Clara exit the clinic and get into the doctor’s car and they drive away. After a few seconds Obi panics and lurches after them. He’s too late but he drives all over Lagos like a mad thing trying to find them.

At 5pm he’s back at the clinic but the doctor is alone, telling him he wants to keep Clara in overnight in case of complications. Next day Obi’s back at the clinic and pushes past the nurse and all the waiting patients to see the doctor. The doctor very casually says Clara had a few complications but is now at a private clinic being looked after by a colleague of his. Obi races over to the address he gives him, and is told Clara is seriously ill and cannot see visitors.

Chapter 17

Next morning Obi is back at work and the last thing he needs is the poisonous bigot Mr Green criticising the number of holidays Nigerians treat themselves too etc. He had gone to see Clara at the hospital but when she spotted him she simply turned to the wall. All the other patients saw this. Obi has never felt so humiliated.

His finances are pressing. He wants to pay Clara back the £50 that was stolen. He goes see Mr Omo about his advance. I didn’t understand this. I think he got an advance for his visit back to his parents in Umuofia but didn’t realise it was a loan and had to be paid back, retaining a sum calculated according to mileage. He does the sums and discovers he can only claim for £15 for his drive to and from Umuofia. He’ll have to lie and say he went further, say to Cameroon.

When Obi considers the total situation, he realises it’s the burden of having to pay £20 back to the Union which is screwing his finances. He decides to unilaterally stop paying it, without telling them.

He writes and rewrites a long self-extenuating letter to Clara but can’t get the tone right. Yes, great at quoting T.S. Eliot, but rubbish at managing his job, finances and relationships. Portrait of a callow young man.

Chapter 18

Clara is in hospital for five weeks then goes on 70 days sick leave without contacting him. Then he gets a demand from the Revenue for income tax £32. Then his mother dies and, although he sends money, it isn’t enough to pay for an impressive funeral, which is noted by the entire town, and reported back to the UPU in Lagos. An avalanche of troubles and failures.

By this stage it is clear Obi is a man crushed by a combination of circumstances rather than any particular Grand Flaw. Early on in the novel he had argued with the white man who interviews him for his job that tragedy isn’t a matter of one Grand Event which brings closure and satisfaction to all concerned. Real tragedy is the daily grinding down of people by circumstances. You can see how that speech was inserted as a comment on this entire narrative.

The vexing thing is, of course, that everybody misinterprets his actions. We hear a load of speeches at the Union from old timers who’ve seen it happen all-too-often, the young man who gets an education, moves to the big city, is seduced by the sweets of sin i.e. women, and forgets his family, his village and the old ways. They are like the Chorus of a Greek tragedy, or Achebe’s reimagining of a Greek tragedy as one of grinding crushing circumstances rather than a grand climax.

His work gives him leave, he goes home, cries his eyes out and sleeps like a baby. Then Joseph, the ‘bushman’, arrives with a crate of beers to be put in the fridge, and then in groups about 25 of the UPU arrive at Obi’s flat. Joseph may be a ‘bushman’ but he understands his people better than Obi. The arrivals condole with Obi who is genuinely touched, then get on with gossiping about news and current affairs.

The indictment of a young man who doesn’t respond appropriately to his mother’s death reminded me of Albert Camus’s novel The Outsider.

‘Poor mother!’ he said, trying by manipulation to produce the right emotion. But it was no use. The dominant feeling was of peace. (p.280)

Chapter 19

Suddenly the novel ends. Just four more pages, in which Obi feels as if he’s been through the wringer, been through the fire, and emerged new-forged.

It is the season when students applied for their scholarships. Obi has brought a lot of the paperwork home. A flash car pulls up in front of his apartment block. A confident flash man enters his flat and proffers £50 cash if Obi will recommend his son for the scholarship to study in Britain. He goes on to say they ought to become friends, and he will nominate him to become a member of Lagos’s premier club. Then he walks out ignoring Obi’s feeble protestations. The money lies there all the rest of the day and the night while Obi agonises.

In a few swift paragraphs we cut to a scene of Obi dancing with a young girl who is on the short list of candidates. He manoeuvres her to the bedroom. They have sex though it isn’t in the event, very fulfilling. He drives her back to her place then drops round to friend Christopher’s to joke about it.

Obi has, in other words, been thoroughly corrupted. He pays off Sam Okoli who loaned him money, he pays off his bank overdraft. Then someone brings £20. He takes it but a few minutes later the same man returns with a police officer. They search Obi, find the marked notes and he is charged with corruption. The rest is like a dream, he sleepwalks through it in a daze.

And in a quick throwaway paragraph, Achebe brings us back to the very start of the novel with Obi standing in the dock, listening to a series of witnesses to his life saying none of them understand how a fine, upstanding man with all the privileges and perks of his fine education let himself sink to the blah blah blah.

High life music

In chapter 11 Obi and Clara, Christopher and his latest girlfriend, Bisi, go to the Imperial hotel where the band plays this song and the dancefloor is immediately packed.

It’s followed by ‘Gentleman Bobby’.

Music dates stories faster, more completely, than language. This novel is as old as this music and doesn’t the music sound dated, messages from another, more innocent world?

Thoughts

Corruption is the nominal central theme of the novel, as discussed above. But from this emerges the bigger one of the clash of cultures and values over this question of osu, a clash which remains as fierce and intractable as when the missionaries first arrived in Umuofia 60 years earlier. In this respect the novel paints a really persuasive, compelling portrait of the way the old African traditions not only lived on and continued to thrive but presented an ever-wider chasm with the values of ‘the modern world’. It is this clash which the novel really presents, with the power which comes from the slow patient accumulation of thousands and thousands of tiny details, of language and description and characterisation.

Then there’s sexual politics. Clara’s abortion nearly kills her. So no-one dies but Clara nearly does and the foetus does, victims of the failure of a traditional patriarchal society to join the modern world. Mind you, as so often, the real blocker to a rational solution is not Obi’s father, who is presented as almost a victim, a sensitive man who laboured under a lifelong curse – it’s his mother, the caring woman he thought he had a special bond with, who threatens to kill herself if he should marry an osu. He thinks he can talk his father round. With his mother’s absolute ban there can be no negotiation.

Achebe is great for all kinds of reasons, for being the first great African novelist, for his style, for his loyalty to his roots, for his phenomenal ability to completely immerse you in the African milieu. All the way through I was trying to put into words the thing which makes his books so immensely enjoyable, and I think it’s his sincerity. There’s no bullshit, contrivance or pretence, for effect. It feels like he’s giving you his own experiences, slightly tweaked to fit into a novel narrative, but without pretence or contrivance. You feel like you’re reading something really profound and true. Sounds silly but it’s almost an honour to read Chinua Achebe’s novels.

Conrad and Heart of Darkness p.235.

Credit

No Longer At Ease by Chinua Achebe was published in 1960 by Heinemann Books. References are to the 2010 Everyman’s Library hardback edition.

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by Simon on January 17, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 17, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/01/17/no-longer-at-ease-chinua-achebe/

On Transience by Sigmund Freud (1916)

Written during the Great War, this little essay is a useful outline of the psychology of atheism. Many adolescents, troubled by the world, realising for the first time the fact of their mortality, ask what’s the point of being alive? This short essay is by way of being Freud’s existentialist response.

Freud tells us he was out walking with a poet (not named in the piece but, in fact, the eminent Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke) who said: ‘Everything will die and pass away, what’s the point of even being alive?’ Freud, solid, sensible, stoic, replied: The brevity of life is all the more reason to value things, flowers, friends, works of art – to appreciate and value them properly while they’re here.

The proneness to decay of all that is beautiful and perfect can, as we know, give rise to two different impulses in the mind. The one leads to the aching despondency felt by the young poet, while the other leads to rebellion against the fact asserted. ‘No! It is impossible that all this loveliness of Nature and Art, of the world of our sensations and of the world outside, will really fade away into nothing. It would be too senseless and too presumptuous to believe it. Somehow or other this loveliness must be able to persist and to escape all the powers of destruction.’

But this demand for immortality is a product of our wishes too unmistakeable to lay claim to reality: what is painful may nonetheless be true. I could not see my way to dispute the transience of all things, nor could I insist upon an exception in favour of what is beautiful and perfect. But I did dispute the pessimistic poet’s view that the transience of what is beautiful involves any loss of its worth.

On the contrary, an increase! Transience value is scarcity value in time. Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of an enjoyment. It was incomprehensible, I declared, that the thought of the transience of beauty should interfere with our joy in it. As regards the beauty of Nature, each time it is destroyed by winter it comes again next year, so that in relation to the length of our lives it can in fact be regarded as eternal. The beauty of the human form and face vanish forever in the course of our own lives, but their evanescence only lends them a fresh charm. A flower which blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account less lovely. Nor can I understand any better why the beauty and perfection of a work of art or of an intellectual achievement should lose its worth because of its temporal limitation.

A time may indeed come when the pictures and statues which we admire today will crumble to dust, or a race of men may follow us who no longer understand the works of our poets and thinkers, or a geological epoch may even arrive when all animate life upon the earth ceases; but since the value of all this beauty and perfection is determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives, it has no need to survive us and is therefore independent of absolute duration.

So: enjoyment of life is an act of the will, is a choice. Freud’s calm defence of enjoyment (not just of the body, but of the mind) looks back to the calm, sensible hedonism of Horace (Epistles) and anticipates the willed leap of faith into positive action taken by the existentialists.

For my money the best, the most practical and least politically compromised of those post-war European thinkers was Albert Camus. His early essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1939) starts from a meditation on suicide (‘What’s the point of living in a world without God or meaning?’) works its way round to affirming man’s rebellion against a world without God or meaning, and ends up by describing the physical, sensual pleasure of being alive, swimming and sunbathing and smoking by the sea and drinking wine and laughing with friends, sensations which were to be marvellously captured in many of his later novels and stories.

Credit

The history of the translations of Freud’s many works into English form a complicated subject in their own right. The very short essay ‘On Transience’ was first translated into English in 1957 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. My quote is from the version included in Volume 14 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘Art and Literature’, published in 1985.

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by Simon on June 26, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 26, 2023

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Seneca’s Plays

What follows are notes on E.F. Watling’s introduction to his translation of Seneca’s plays, published by Penguin Books in 1966, then a summary with comments of the four Seneca plays it contains:

Seneca’s biography

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born in 4 BC Corduba, Spain, the second son of Annaeus Seneca the Elder. His father had studied rhetoric in Rome and returned to Spain to bring his sons up with respect for the traditional virtues of the Roman Republic, which had ceased to exist a generation earlier, following the victory of Octavian against Anthony at Actium in 31 BC.

As a young man Seneca the Younger studied Stoic philosophy. He lived in Egypt for a while, probably due to ill health (tuberculosis?) and because his aunt was the wife of the prefect there. By 33 AD he was back in Rome, married to his first wife (whose name is unknown) and achieving recognition as a lawyer and teacher of rhetoric.

Seneca had run-ins with several of the early emperors. At one point he was forced to retire into private life due to the suspicions of Caligula. He returned to public life on the accession of the emperor Claudius but in the very same year, 41 AD, was exiled to Corsica, accused of adultery with the new emperor’s niece, Julia, probably at the instigation of Claudius’s scheming third wife, Valeria Messalina. Seneca spent eight years on Corsica during which he wrote a number of philosophical works.

In 48 Claudius had Messalina executed for (supposedly) conspiring to overthrow him, and married his fourth wife, the equally scheming Agrippina. But it was Agrippina who asked for the recall of Seneca and made him tutor to her 12-year-old son, Lucius Domitius, the future emperor Nero. When Nero came to power 6 years later, in 54 AD, aged just 17, Seneca became his principal civil adviser (Nero had a separate adviser for military affairs, Sextus Afranius Burrus).

Some attribute the fact that the first five years of Nero’s reign were relatively peaceful and moderate to Seneca’s restraining influence. According to Tacitus’s Annals, Seneca taught Nero how to speak effectively, and wrote numerous speeches for him to address the senate with, praising clemency, the rule of law, and so on.

However, palace politics slowly became more poisonous, Nero came to rule more despotically, and Seneca’s position and wealth made him the target of increasing political and personal attacks. In 62 Seneca asked to be allowed to retire from public life, a conversation with Nero vividly described (or invented) in Tacitus’s Annals. Emperor and adviser parted on good terms but, over the next few years, Seneca’s name was cited in various plots and conspiracies.

The largest of these was the conspiracy of Gaius Calpurnius Piso in 65, a plot to assassinate Nero which was discovered at the last moment (the morning of the planned murder), and which, as the suspects were interrogated and tortured by Nero’s Guard, turned into a bloodbath of the conspirators.

Historians think Seneca was not an active conspirator, and debate how much he even knew about the plot, but whatever the precise truth, Nero ordered him put to death. Hearing of this, Seneca, en route back to Rome from Campania, committed suicide with a high-minded detachment that impressed the friends who attended the deed, and made him a poster boy for Stoic dignity. Many classic paintings depict the noble scene. Nero himself was, of course, to commit suicide just three years later, in 68 AD.

The Death of Seneca by Manuel Dominguez Sanchez (1871)

Seneca’s works

Seneca was a prolific writer. He wrote 12 philosophical essays, an extensive work of natural science, and 124 letters of moral exhortation to his friend Lucilius. The letters are probably his most accessible and popular work.

But Seneca is also credited as the author of ten plays (though scholars bicker: maybe it’s nine; maybe it’s eight). The plays are all tragedies, loosely modeled on Greek tragedy and featuring Greek tragic protagonists. The Romans had a technical term for these, fabula crepidata, meaning a Roman tragedy with a Greek subject.

Seneca’s plays make a striking contrast to his philosophical works not only in tone but also in worldview. The Letters to Lucilius go into great detail about how to banish all attachments, emotions and feelings from your life in order to achieve a calm, rational, Stoic detachment. By contrast, the plays are full of gruesomely bloodthirsty plots and characters wrought to the utmost degree of emotional extremity. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance the works seemed so utterly different in worldview that scholars thought Seneca the moral philosopher and Seneca the dramatist were two different people.

Critics have been very harsh indeed about these plays. The editor of the Penguin edition, E.F. Watling, accuses them of ‘bombastic extravagance’, of ‘passionate yet artificial rhetoric’. The German critic Schlegel is quoted accusing them of ‘hollow hyperbole’, ‘forced and stilted’. Watling cites the consensus among scholars who condemn them as:

horrible examples of literary and dramatic incompetence, travesties of the noble Greek drama, the last wretched remnant of declining Roman taste. (Introduction, p.8)

And yet Seneca’s plays had a very important influence on Renaissance theatre, influencing Shakespeare and other playwrights in England, and Corneille and Racine in France.

Seneca’s tragedies are customarily considered the source and inspiration for what became known as the genre of ‘Revenge Tragedy’ in Elizabethan theatre, starting with Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy of the 1580s, and continuing on into the Jacobean era (the reign of King James I, 1603 to 1625).

Their importance to Elizabethan drama explains why so fastidious a critic as T.S. Eliot, obsessed as he was with the period, praised Seneca’s plays, singling out Phaedra and Medea – although most critics consider Thyestes to be Seneca’s ‘masterpiece’.

Seneca’s tragedies

  • Agamemnon
  • Hercules or Hercules furens (The Madness of Hercules)
  • Medea
  • Oedipus
  • Phaedra
  • Phoenissae (The Phoenician Women)
  • Thyestes
  • Troades (The Trojan Women)

The Penguin paperback edition of the plays, edited and translated by E.F. Watling, contains four of the ‘best’ plays – Thyestes, Phaedra, Oedipus and The Trojan Women. (It also contains an oddity, a play titled Octavia, which resembles Seneca’s tragedies in melodramatic tone but, since it features Seneca as a character, and describes his death, cannot have been by him. Scholars guesstimate that it was probably written soon after Seneca’s death by someone influenced by his style and aware of the events of his lifetime.)

Watling’s critique

Watling’s introduction pulls no punches in detailing Seneca’s shortcomings:

He was not a constructor of tragic plots; his plays are not concerned with the moral conflict between good and good which is the essence of true tragedy: he only recognises the power of evil to destroy good. He does not delay or complicate the issue by any moral dilemma exhibiting the conflict of justifiable but mutually incompatible ambitions; his tragedy is simply a disastrous event foretold and anticipated from the start and pursued ruthlessly to its end. (p.25)

Seneca routinely stops the action of his ‘plots’ to give characters long, highly-strung, melodramatic speeches, which might not even be particularly relevant to the plot and often take no account of who else is on stage at the time.

His technique of dramatic speech is extremely narrow, having only two modes: either a character is delivering a long monologue, or he deploys stichomythia, where just two characters swap exchanges of dialogue; rarely anything more complicated than that.

Many of the long speeches and even some of the exchanges are so stock and stereotyped that they could easily be swapped from one play to another without anyone noticing. Watling names some of these stock topics – the ‘simple life’ speech, the ‘haunted grove’ speech and ‘the king must be obeyed’ dialogue, which all crop up in several of the plays.

The climax of all the plays is always a gruesome barbarity and Seneca uses the Greek conventions of having it take place offstage and described by a breathless messenger who comes onstage hotfoot from the scene. The messengers’ speeches all follow the exact same formula: the description of the place, the horror of the act, the stoical courage of the sufferer.

Seneca’s use of the Chorus is for the most part flaccid and unconvincing. (p.24)

The Chorus declaims its verse in a different metre from the rest of the play. They are known as Choric odes. The Choric odes’s main purpose is to comment on the main action but they often feature a clotted recital of myths or legends similar or related to the one we are witnessing.

The Chorus also often expresses ideas which contradict the worldview of the play and even of the main action. For example they will powerfully express the idea that death is the end of life and there is nothing after, except that… the plays feature ghosts and numerous descriptions of the classic souls in hell (Sisyphus, Tantalus, Ixion). There is no attempt at consistency – immediate and sensational effect is what is strived for.

The sense of unnecessary repetition is echoed at a verbal level where Seneca creates a drenched and intense effect by repeating synonyms for just one idea – Watling says examples in English would be larding a speech with the synonymous words anger-rage-ire, or fear-terror-dread. No idea is left to float subtly but is bludgeoned into submission by repetition.

Watling sums up Seneca’s plays as 1) sporting a bombastic, over-the-top rhetoric, deriving from 2) gruesomely bloodthirsty plots, which 3) are staged with a remarkable lack of dramatic invention i.e. very clumsily and straightforwardly.

But despite all these shortcomings, the sheer visceral intensity of his plays goes some way to explain why they were useful models for the earliest Elizabethan playwrights writing the first attempts at English tragedy, influencing Kyd, Marlowe and the early Shakespeare of Titus Andronicus (which contains several quotes from Seneca’s Phaedra).

To return to T.S. Eliot who I mentioned above, we can now see why Eliot (in an introduction to a 1927 reprint of Elizabethan translations of Seneca) made the characteristically perceptive remark that, foregrounding vivid rhetoric over more traditional notions of plot or characterisation as the do, might make Seneca’s plays suitable for what was (in 1927) the very new medium of radio – rhetoric i.e. the power of words alone, triumphing over all other factors. A surf of sensationalist sound. The bombastic power of words superseding all considerations of ‘plot’ or ‘characterisation’.

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Plots of the four plays

1. Thyestes

Summary

It’s a tragedy of two brothers who hate each other, Atreus who takes a horrific vengeance on his brother, Thyestes.

Background

Tantalus was a son of Jupiter. He killed, cooked and served up his own son, Pelops, at a banquet of the gods. For this atrocity he was condemned to eternal punishment in hell, fixed in a pool of water, dying of thirst but unable to bend down to scoop up any of the water, and dying of hunger, but unable to touch any of the fruit growing just out of reach above him. Hence the English verb to tantalise. Jupiter restored Pelops to life but he himself went on to win a wife and a kingdom by treachery. Pelops banished his two grown-up sons, Atreus and Thyestes, for the murder of their half-brother, Chrysippus. When Pelops died, Atreus returned and took possession of his father’s throne, but Thyestes claimed it too. Thyestes seduced Atreus’s wife, Aërope, who helped him steal the gold-fleeced ram from Atreus’s flocks which was said to grant the kingship. But instead of gaining the crown he was banished. Despite sitting pretty, Atreus wants to make his ascendancy over his brother complete, so he is now planning to recall Thyestes from banishment on the pretext of sharing the throne with him, but in fact carrying out an atrocious act of revenge.

Act I

A Fury raises Tantalus’s miserable spirit from the underworld. He moaningly asks if even more pain and suffering await him. The Fury delivers an extraordinary vision of the sins of the house of Peolops, ramifying out to undermine all the order in the world. The Chorus comes onstage. It consists of citizens of Argos. They invoke the presiding gods of the cities of Greece in the hope they can prevent the tragedy.

Act II

Atreus consults with his minister about the best way of carrying out vengeance on his brother. The minister wonders how he can do this, allowing Atreus to explain that he will offer forgiveness and a share in the crown to lure Thyestes back to Argos, where he can carry out his revenge; what it will be, exactly, he is still considering but it will be awful. The Chorus reproves the ambition of rulers, describing the character of a true king, before singing the praises of a retired life.

Act III

Thyestes, having been invited back to his homeland by Atreus, arrives with his three young sons and expresses his distrust and sense of approaching disaster. Atreus applauds himself: his plan is working. The Chorus, apparently oblivious of the preceding act, praises the fraternal affection of Atreus for putting aside the brother’s enmity.

Act IV

With no development of plot or character, with melodramatic abruptness, a messenger appears who describes to the appalled Chorus the grotesque climax of the play which is that Atreus had Thyestes’s three children killed, cooked and served up to Thyestes at the brothers’ reconciliation feast. It takes the form of a question and answer session, the Chorus asking what happened next, the messenger answering. The Chorus, observing the going down of the Sun, hysterically fears that this criminal act might tear apart the whole fabric of the universe.

Act V

Atreus congratulates himself on his cruel revenge. Thyestes trembles with premonition that something terrible has happened. The Atreus reveals to him that he has just eaten his own beloved sons.

(Incidentally, the curse on the house of Pelops was to continue into the next generation in the persons of Agamemnon, son of Atreus, who was murdered on his return from the Trojan War, by Aegisthus, son of Thyestes – the subject of one of Seneca’s other plays.)

Thyestes demonstrates the classic characteristics of a Seneca play. It maintains a continuous, shrill, hyperbolic tone. Hyperbolic exaggeration Here’s the Fury seeing the feud escalate into end-of-the-world anarchy:

Vengeance shall think no way forbidden her;
Brother shall flee from brother, sire from son,
And son from sire; children shall die in shames
More shameful than their birth; revengeful wives
Shall menace husbands, armies sail to war
In lands across the sea; and every soil
Be soaked with blood; the might of men of battle
In all the mortal world shall be brought down
By Lust triumphant. In this house of sin
Brothers’s adultery with brothers’ wives
Shall be the least of sins; all law, all faith
All honour shall be dead. Nor shall the heavens
Be unaffected by your evil deeds:
What right have stars to twinkle in the sky?
Why need their lights still ornament the world?
Let night be black, let there be no more day.
Let havoc rule this house; call blood and strife
And death; let every corner of this place
Be filled with the revenge of Tantalus!
(Fury, Act 1)

Here’s Atreus whipping himself up to commit the worst crime in the world:

Sanctity begone!
If thou wast ever known within these walls.
Come all the dread battalions of the Furies!
Come, seed of strife, Erinys! Come, Megaera,
With torches armed! My spirit yet lacks fire;
It would be filled with still more murderous rage!
(Atreus, Act 1)

In the introduction Watling talks up the discrepancy between Seneca the lofty Stoic and Seneca the author of blood-thirsty, amoral plays. But there is some overlap, some places where characters appear to speak the language of Stoic detachment, such as the second Choric ode which describes the true nature of kingship as not being power or riches but resilience and mental strength. The true king

is the man who faces unafraid
The lightning’s glancing stroke; is not dismayed
By storm-tossed seas; whose ship securely braves
The windy rage of Adriatic waves;
Who has escaped alive the soldier’s arm,
The brandished steel; who, far removed from harm,
Looks down upon the world, faces her end
With confidence, and greets death as a friend.
(Chorus, Act 2)

That’s the Chorus, but Thyestes himself also declaims an ‘advantages of the simple life‘ speech to his son as they arrive at Atreus’s palace:

While I stood
Among the great, I stood in daily terror;
The very sword I wore at my own side
I feared. It is the height of happiness
To stand in no man’s way, to eat at ease
Reclining on the ground. At humble tables
Food can be eaten without fear; assassins
Will not be found in poor men’s cottages;
The poisoned cup is served in cups of gold.
(Thyestes, Act 3)

(Words which resonate with Seneca’s experiences in the fraught court of the emperor Nero.) In the final act, just before Atreus reveals to Thyestes what he’s done, Thyestes feels a powerful, world-shaking sense of doom, very reminiscent of the same premonition characters experience in Shakespeare’s tragedies:

The table rocked, the floor is shaking.
The torches’ light sinks low; the sky itself
Hangs dull and heavy, seeming to be lost
Between the daylight and the dark. And why –
The ceiling of the heavens seems to shake
With violent convulsions – more and more!
The murk grows darker than the deepest darkness,
Night is engulfed in night; all stars have fled!
(Thyestes, Act 5)

Once the deed has been revealed, here’s the Chorus reciting a welter of classical precedents in an effort to capture the enormity of the event:

Are the Giants escaped from their prison and threatening war?
Has tortured Tityos found strength in his breast again to renew his old aggression?
Or has Typhoeus stretched his muscles to throw off his mountain burden?
Is Ossa to be piled on Pelion again
To build a bridge for the Phlegrean Giants’ assault?
Is all the order of the universe plunged into chaos?
(Chorus, Act 4)

These are all formulae or stock ingredients, which are repeated in all the other plays, and were to be enthusiastically taken up by the Elizabethan playwrights striving for sensational effects in the 1590s and early 1600s.

2. Phaedra

Background

Theseus was a typical Greek ‘hero’ i.e. an appalling human being, guilty of countless crimes, infidelities, murders and rapes. But the play isn’t about him, it’s about his second wife and his son. In his first marriage Theseus married the Amazon warrior Antiope, also known as Hippolyta, who bore him a son, Hippolytus. This Hippolytus grew up despising love, refusing to worship at the temples of Venus. He preferred Diana and the joys of the hunt. During this time, Theseus divorced his first wife and married Phaedra, daughter of Minos, king of Crete (following his adventure on Crete where he slew the Minotaur).

Now, Hyppolitus had grown to be a handsome young man and Phaedra was a mature woman when Theseus left his kingdom for a while to help his friend Peirithous rescue Persephone from the underworld. During his absence, the goddess of love, Venus, determined to take her revenge on Hippolytus for spurning her worship, inflamed his stepmother, Phaedra’s, heart with insatiable desire for the handsome young man.

Prelude (Hippolytus)

Hippolytus soliloquises on the joys of the hunt, delivering a long list of Greek hunting locations to his companions. It not only reveals Hippolytus’s character but impresses the audience with Seneca’s detailed and scholarly knowledge of Greek geography.

Act 1 (Phaedra and the nurse)

Phaedra soliloquy in which she laments that Theseus has gone off to the underworld, abandoning her in a place she has never liked, exiled from her beloved Crete. She wonders that she has recently become obsessed with the hunt.

(Her mother was Pasiphae, wife of King Minos who notoriously allowed herself to be impregnated by a bull, giving birth to the Minotaur. More relevant, though, is that Pasiphae was a daughter of Phoebus the sun god, and Venus the goddess of love has a long-running feud with him. Which explains why Venus is also against Phaedra.)

It is the nurse who makes explicit the fact that Phaedra has fallen in love with her stepson. Phaedra says her infatuation is driving her so mad she wants to kill herself.

Unreason reigns
Supreme, a potent god commands my heart,
The invincible winged god, who rules all earth,
Who strikes and scorches Jove with his fierce flame…

Interestingly, the nurse insists that all this talk of Venus and Eros is rubbish. There is no little god with a bow and arrow fluttering about in the sky. Instead it is the corruption of the times: ‘Too much contentment and prosperity and self-indulgence’ lead to new desires. In fact she states the Stoic theme that the simple life is best and luxury leads to decadence.

Then the Chorus delivers a long impressive hymn to the power of Eros or Love, as demonstrated by mating behaviour throughout the animal kingdom. As a Darwinian materialist I, of course, agree that the urge to mate and reproduce is the primary function of all life forms, including humans.

Act 2

The nurse describes to the Chorus Phaedra’s ever more miserably lovelorn state, pale face, tearful eyes etc. We are shown Phaedra in her boudoir angrily bossing her attendants about, despising her traditional dresses and jewellery, wanting to wear the outfit of a hunting queen and roam through the woods after her beloved.

Enter Hippolytus. The nurse tells him to stop hunting so hard, relax, find love, enjoy his youth. She counsels him to reproduce; if all young men were like him, humanity would cease to exist. Hippolytus replies not really to her points, instead declaring that he prefers simple rustic rural life in its honest simplicity to the deceit of courts and the city, mob rule, envy etc – turns into an extended description of that old chestnut, the sweet and innocent life of the age of Saturn, before cities or ships or agriculture, before war itself. Illogically this long speech ends with a swerve into his hatred of women, who he blames for all conflict and wars, and explains why he shuns women like the plague.

Enter Phaedra and metaphorically falls at Hippolytus’s feet, swearing she will be his slave and do anything for him. He mistakes, thinking she is upset because of the long absence of her husband, his father, Theseus in the underworld. He tries to reassure her, while Phaedra cannot contain her made infatuation:

Madness is in my heart;
It is consumed by love, a wild fire raging
Secretly in my body in my blood,
Like flames that lick across a roof of timber.

Phaedra describes how beautiful Theseus was as a young man when he came to Crete to kill the Minotaur and sue King Minos for the hand of his daughter, Ariadne. But all this leads up to Phaedra kneeling in front of Hippolytus and declaring her love for him. Hippolytus responds with end-of-the-world bombast:

For what cause shall the sky be rent with thunder
If no cloud dims it now? Let ruin wreck
The firmament, and black night hide the day!
Let stars run back and all their courses turn
Into confusion!..
Ruler of gods in heaven and men on earth,
Why is thy hand not armed, will not thy torch
Of triple fire set all the world ablaze?
Hurl against me thy thunderbolt, thy spear,
And let me be consumed in instant fire.

He rebuffs her. She throws herself into his arms, swearing to follow him everywhere. He draws his sword. Yes! She begs to be killed and put out of her misery. He realises it will defile his sword and all the oceans will not be able to clean it. (A very common trope in tragedy, originating with the Greeks, repeated in, for example, Macbeth, one thousand five hundred and fifty years later.)

Phaedra faints, Hippolytus flees. The nurse steps forward to comment and make the suggestion that, now Phaedra’s criminal love is revealed and Hippolytus has rejected her, to deflect blame she ought to accuse him of propositioning her. She yells ‘Help! Rape!’ as the Chorus enters, representing ‘the people’, showing them the sword Hippolytus dropped in his flight and the Queen, lying distraught on the ground, her hair all dishevelled.

The Chorus apparently ignores the cries of the nurse and instead proceeds with a 3-page hymn to Hippolytus’s matchless male beauty.

Act 3

Weirdly, act 3 opens with the self-same Chorus only now summarising the situation i.e. the queen intends to pursue her utterly false claim of rape against Hippolytus. But the Chorus hasn’t got far before who do we see arriving but Theseus, the mature hero, who describes how he has been in the underworld for four long years, only able to return because Hercules rescued him. But what is all this weeping and lamentation he hears?

The nurse explains her wife is distraught and some kind of curtain is lifted or something removed to reveal an ‘inner scene’ where we see Phaedra holding a sword as if to kill herself. Theseus interrogates Phaedra who refuses to explain. So – in the kind of casual mention of hyper violence to servants and slaves which always disturbs me – Theseus says he’ll have the nurse bound and scourged and chained and whipped till she spills the beans.

But before he can do this, Phaedra says Hippolytus tried to rape her, saying this is his sword which he left in his flight. Theseus now delivers the ‘Great gods, what infamy is this!’ type speech. Interestingly, he accuses Hippolytus not only of the obvious things, but accuses him of hypocrisy in his ‘affectation of old time-honoured ways’ i.e. Seneca has expanded Hippolytus’s traditional character of hunter to include this extra dimension of him being a proponent of the whole back-to-the-ways-of-our-ancestors movement, a view Seneca himself propounds in the Letters to Lucilius.

Theseus accuses Hippolytus of being the worst kind of hypocrite, in language which reminds me of Hamlet berating his uncle Claudius, then vows to track him down wherever he flees. He tells us that the god Neptune granted him three wishes, and now he invokes this promise, demanding that Hippolytus never sees another dawn.

The Chorus steps in to lament why the king of the gods never intervenes to ensure justice, why men’s affairs seem governed by blind fate, why the evil triumph and the good are punished.

Act 4

Enter the messenger with stock tears and reluctance to tell what he has seen. Theseus commands him and so the messenger describes the death of Hippolytus. The youth fled, jumped into his chariot, and whipped the horses off at great speed but that is when a strange enormous storm arose at sea, vast waves attacking the land, and giving birth to a monster, a bull-shaped thing coloured green of the sea with fiery red eyes. This thing proceeds to terrify Hippolytus’s horses which run wild, throwing him from the chariot but tangling his arms and legs in the traces, so that he is dragged at speed over the clifftop’s ragged rocks and flayed alive, his body disintegrating into pieces until he collided with a fallen tree trunk and was transfixed in the groin. Theseus laments that his wish has been so violently fulfilled.

The Chorus repeats the idea which I’m coming to see as central to the play, less about love or lust etc but the safeness of the humble life, not exposed to the decadent living, random lusts and shocking violence associated with the rich.

Peace and obscurity make most content,
In lowly homes old age sleeps easily…
For Jupiter is on his guard
And strikes whatever comes too near the sky.
The thunder rumbles round his throne,
But no great harm can come to common folk
Who dwell in modest homes.

If you think about this for a moment, you’ll realise it’s bullshit. Poor people living in lowly homes often have terrible lives, scarred by poverty, ignorance and, of course, the random violence of their superiors who might, for example, decide to start a civil war and devastate the homes and livelihoods of ‘common folk’ in entire regions. Think of Julius Caesar laying waste entire regions of Gaul, burning cities to the ground and selling their entire populations into slavery. It’s the kind of patronising crap rich people tell themselves to convince themselves that they, the filthy rich, living in the lap of luxury, eating at gluttonous banquets, waited on hand and foot by literally hundreds of slaves, and filling their day with sexual perversions, that they are the ones who have it rough.

Act 5

Barely has Theseus heard all from the messenger than Phaedra enters, wailing and wielding the sword. She begins her lament as the ruined corpse of Hippolytus is brought onstage and continues, lamenting his death, berating her treachery and falsehood, confessing to Theseus that Hippolytus was totally innocent, then stabbing herself to death.

Theseus then laments a) was it for this that he was allowed to escape from hell, into a hell of his own devising? And then lists all the ingenious punishments he saw in hell and says none of them are adequate for him.

The Chorus intervenes to advise that they honour and bury the body first and then, very gruesomely, specifically directs Theseus in placing the left hand here and the right hand over here, and so on, as they assemble his body parts, a ghoulish jigsaw.

In the final lines, Theseus orders his staff to a) go scour the landscape to find the last missing bits of Hippolytus and b) and as for the wicked Phaedra:

let a deep pit of earth conceal
And soil lie heavy on her cursed head.

3. The Trojan Women

Background

The Trojan War has ended. Troy has fallen. Outside the smouldering ruins of the city huddle the surviving royal women, rounded up by the victorious Greeks and awaiting their fate. The leading women are Hecuba, widow of King Priam, and Andromache, widow of the great Trojan warrior, Hector.

Act 1

Hecuba opens the play with a long lament about the fall of Troy, symbol of the uncertainty on which all pomp and power is based. She interacts with the Chorus of Trojan women. She makes them unbind their hair and loosen their tunics to expose their bare breasts which they then proceed to beat in lament for Hector, wall of Troy, and Priam its murdered king. But at least they are at peace now and will never be led as slaves to foreign lands.

Happy is Priam, happy every man
That has died in battle
And taken with him his life’s fulfilment.

(The literal baring and beating of their own breasts occurs in several of the plays. Was it performed literally in ancient times? Women mourning in ancient times were meant to not only beat their bare breasts but scratch their faces till they bled. If taken literally, surely this would be as difficult to perform persuasively onstage as a sword fight.)

Act 2

The Chorus wonders why the Greeks are delaying. Talthybius describes the momentous appearance of the ghost of Achilles, demanding the sacrifice he was promised before the fleet can sail. A prime slab of Senecan bombast:

A rift appeared,
Caves yawned, hell gaped, earth parted and revealed
A way from worlds below to worlds above.
His tomb was burst asunder and there stood
The living ghost of the Thessalian leader…

Pyrrhus, son of dead Achilles, takes up the case for his father, first listing his great victories before he even came to Troy, then insisting the Greeks fulfil their vow and make a human sacrifice at his tomb. Agamemnon sharply refuses, saying he regrets the blood and cruelty of the night of the sack of Troy but it was sort of justified by bloodlust. But now in the cold light of day, sacrifice a human being? No. This dialogue turns really bitter as the two Greeks insult each other, accusing each other of cowardice and crimes.

Agamemnon calls for Calchas the soothsayer. Enter Calchas who announces that the gods demand two sacrifices: a young woman dressed as a bride must be sacrificed on Achilles’ tomb; and Priam’s grandson must be thrown from the battlements of Troy. Then the Greek fleet can sail.

The Chorus delivers quite a profound speech about death: is there anything afterwards, does the spirit live on, or is this all? It concludes:

There is nothing after death; and death is nothing –
Only the finishing post of life’s short race.

Therefore, ambition give up your hopes, anxiety give up your fears. (This is the third play in which, contrary to Watling’s comments in the introduction, we find Seneca’s characters delivering very clearly Stoic beliefs, entirely in line with Seneca the philosopher.)

Act 3

Andromache berates the Trojan women for only just learning grief, whereas for her Troy fell and the world ended when her husband, Hector, was killed. Now she only resists the death she wants to protect their son, Astyanax. An Elder performs the function of the nurse in other plays i.e. asks questions and is a sounding board for Andromache’s thoughts. She tells how the ghost of Hector came to her in a dream warning her to hide their son. Now she has come to the tomb of her husband and pushes the boy to go inside it (through gates) and hide, which he does without a word.

Then the Elder warns that Ulysses approaches. Ulysses announces he has been drawn by lot to ask Andromache for her son. While the son of Hector lives no Greek can rest, knowing he will grow up to restore Troy and relaunch the war. Andromache pretends her son was stolen from her during the sack of the city and laments his whereabouts and fate. Ulysses sees through her lies and threatens her with torture. Andromache welcomes torture and death. Ulysses understands her mother love and says it is love of his son, Telemachus, which motivates him.

At which point Andromache, to the accompaniment of fierce oaths, makes the ironic lie that her son right now is entombed with the dead (he, as we saw, is hiding in the tomb of Hector). Ulysses detects that Andromache is still anxious, pacing, muttering, as one who had lost everything would not. She is lying. He orders his men to tear down Hector’s tomb with the aim of scattering the ashes on the sea.

Andromache agonises over whether to surrender her son to save the ashes of her husband. She places herself before the tomb defying the soldiers to kill her first. Ulysses orders them on. She falls to her knees and clasps Ulysses’ legs and begs him to have mercy. She calls forth the boy, who comes from the tomb, she tells him to kneel before Ulysses.

Andromache ridicules the idea that this poor boy but himself could rebuild the walls of the ruined city. She begs Ulysses to let the boy become his slave. But Ulysses ducks responsibility, saying it is not his decision but Calchas’s.

Andromache despises him, but Ulysses says time is marching on, the ships have weighed anchor. He allows her a moment to lament her son and Andromache gives a page-long speech describing Astyanax growing to manhood and being a wise and noble king, which will not now happen. Andromache bids him go with the Greeks, but the boy clings on to his mother and doesn’t want to leave, but Andromache says there is no choice and bids him take a message from her to his father. Ulysses, bored of all this yap, commands his soldiers to take him away.

The Chorus of Trojan women pulls back, as it were, from this immediate scene, to consider the general problem, what will become of them, where will they be sent, whose slaves will they become?

Act 4

Helen laments that she has been ordered by the victorious Greeks to lie to Priam’s daughter Polyxena, and persuade her she is to be married to Pyrrhus. It is, of course, a lie, she is going to be sacrificed, but Helen dutifully tells her to rejoice and dress as a bride. Andromache, hearing all this, is filled with disgust that anyone can think of rejoicing at this disastrous time, and at the unremitting evil Helen represents, ‘bringer of doom, disaster and destruction’.

Helen replies to this attack, saying she had no say in the matter, was handed over like an object won in a competition, has endured 10 years of exile, and is now hated by all sides. Andromache knows Helen is telling lies and orders her to tell the truth. Herself weeping, Helen comes clean and says Polyxena is to be sacrificed, burned, and her ashes scattered over Achilles’ tomb.

Andromache is shocked that Polyxena takes the news that she is about to die with alacrity and enthusiastically changes clothes, braids her hair etc. It means exit from this misery and avoiding a lifetime of slavery. Not so happy is her mother, Hecuba, who laments.

Now Helen tells the Trojan women have been parcelled out to, Andromache to Pyrrhus, Hecuba to Ulysses, Cassandra to Agamemnon. Hecuba rains down curses on Ulysses, hoping that storm and sea will plague his return to Ithaca. And, as Pyrrhus appears, she extends her curse of storms and shipwreck to the entire Greek fleet.

The Chorus of Trojan women point out there is comfort in numbers, it is easier to mourn or suffer with colleagues, and describes how it will feel to be rounded up into the ships and sail away and slowly lose sight of their homeland, the smoke rising from their ruined city, Mount Ida, all fading over the horizon.

Act 5

The messenger arrives and announces the boy has been flung from the tower, the girl has met her death. The women ask for a detailed account, which he gives them. Both died with tremendous bravery, shaming the Greeks.

The last word goes to Hecuba who laments that death has come to everyone in her family, but will not come to her, to ease her suffering.

Thoughts

  1. The supernatural element of Achilles’ ghost rising up from the underworld is very unlike the chaste, restrained style of Euripides’ tragedy on the same subject. it feels closer in style to the Middle Ages or Gothic horror.
  2. The choral ode in act 2 persuasively argues that there is nothing after death, death is the end, our minds expire with our bodies – which is flatly contradicted by everything else in the play, including Achilles’ miraculous appearance, the ghost of Hector, and so on.
  3. The other plays feature a unified chronological plot. The Trojan Women is interesting because it has what feels like two plots, featuring two women (Hecuba and Andromache) running in parallel, though linking up at places. Its emphasis on the suffering of women reminds me of Ovid’s Heroides. It’s my favourite.

4. Oedipus

Background

The most famous Greek myth. A soothsayer tells Oedipus’s parents, Laius and Jocasta, the rulers of Thebes, that their unborn son will kill his father and sleep with his mother. Horrified, the royal couple deliver the baby, but then expose him in the country. To avoid the prophecy coming true they have the baby’s ankles pierced and joined together with a strap. (This caused the child’s feet to swell up and gave rise to Oedipus’ name, which literally means ‘swollen foot’.)

A peasant finds him and takes him to the king of the neighbouring realm, Polybus of Corinth who, being childless, considers him a providential gift from the gods and adopts him. As Oedipus grows to be strong and virile, his peers taunt him that he can’t be the son of the mild and gentle Polybus. So he travels to Delphi where the oracle tells him he is fated to kill his father and sleep with his mother. Horrified, Oedipus vows never to return to Corinth. On the way back he gets into an argument in a narrow path with an old man driving a chariot and hits him so hard he accidentally kills him. On the same journey he comes across the half-human, half-animal sphinx who won’t let him pass unless he answers the riddle: What walks on 4 legs in the morning, 2 legs at noon, and 3 legs in the evening. Oedipus answers correctly that it is Man. He travels on to Thebes to discover that the entire city had been terrorised by the Sphinx but he has saved them all. Not only that, but news has come that old King Laius has been killed. As saviour of the city, Oedipus is offered the hand of the widowed queen and marries Jocasta and becomes the new king.

The play opens as a plague is ravaging Thebes. A sequence of events, and messengers bringing news, slowly reveal to Oedipus that he was never the natural son of King Polybus, that he was adopted, that his true parents were Laius and Jocasta and then…that the old man he killed in the fight in the road was Laius and…he has been sleeping with Jocasta, his own mother, for years. At which point a) Jocasta hangs herself and b) Oedipus blinds himself.

Act 1

Oedipus outlines the situation i.e. he is king at Thebes, the city is stricken with plague which is striking down everyone but himself, he has sent to the oracle at Delphi which has sent back the horrifying prediction that he will kill his father and sleep with his mother. He is pleased he fled his homeland and his father Polybus, but feels a terrible sense of dread.

I see
Disaster everywhere, I doubt myself.
Fate is preparing, even while I speak,
Some blow for me.

Of course the blight of the plague gives Seneca scope for some typical hyperbole, ‘the murk of hell has swallowed up the heavenly citadels’ and so on. The description of the plague goes on at length, describing people too sick to bury the dead and so on, reminding me of the vivid description of the plague which ends Lucretius’s long poem De Rerum Natura, premonitory of Albert Camus’s great novel about a 20th century plague. Oedipus says maybe he brought the bad luck, maybe must leave the city.

His queen (and unbeknown to him, his mother) tells him a true king grasps misfortune with a steady hand.

Oedipus describes his encounter with the Sphinx who is made to sound a hellish beast surrounded by the bones of those who failed her riddle. Well, he triumphed over her but now seems to have himself brought the plague to Thebes.

The Chorus is made up of Theban elders. It gives a 4-page-long, vivid description of the plague, how it first struck animals then moved to humans. With characteristic bombast it then shrilly describes:

Out of the depths of Erebus their prison
The Furies have rushed upon us with the fire of hell.
Phlegethon, river of fire, has burst its banks,
The River of Hades is mingled with the River of Cadmus.

The act ends as Oedipus sees Creon, Jocasta’s brother, arriving. He has been to the oracle.

Act 2

Creon described to Oedipus the mood of horror at the oracle, till a superhuman voice declared that only when the murderer of Laius is driven out will Thebes know peace. Oedipus then makes one of those ironic vows, vowing to all the gods that the murderer of Laius will never know rest but live in permanent exile, a wandering nomad, and find no pardon – ignorant of the fact he is cursing himself.

On a more mundane note Oedipus now asks Creon how Laius met his death. He was attacked and murdered at a crossroads out in the countryside, says Creon.

Enter the old blind prophet Tiresias, led by his daughter, Manto. He tells Oedipus he can interpret the situation through a sacrifice, so a bull and heifer are brought in and the sacrificial flame rises and parts in two parts which fight each other.

[This is a classic example of the way these plays would be hard to stage but work very well when read, or read aloud, or broadcast. The getting onstage of the animal, its execution and especially the behaviour of the flame would be impossible to create onstage but work pretty well when read out.]

Manto describes the strange behaviour of the flame which Tiresias interprets as the gods themselves being ashamed of the truth. Tiresias asks how the animals behaved when sacrificed and Manto tells him the heifer submitted but the bull shied and defied the blows. The heifer bled freely but the bull’s blood not at all, while dark blood poured from its eyes and mouth. When they examined the entrails, they were in bad shape, the heart was shrunk, the veins were livid, part of the lungs was missing, the liver was putrid. Far, far worse, the virgin heifer turned out to be pregnant and the deformed life in her stirred. The fire on the altar roared, the hearth quaked etc.

Oedipus begs to know what this all means, but Tiresias pushes the play deep into Gothic territory by saying they will have to perform a magic rite to call the soul of the dead king himself up from hell to tell them. Oedipus must not attend, so he nominates Creon to go in his place.

Incongruously, oddly, the Chorus sing a sustained hymn to the Bacchus, god of the vine, listing his adventures and achievements – notably the occasion when he scared pirates who had captured him into jumping overboard and being changed into dolphins, and the time he rescued Ariadne from Naxos and proceeded to marry her.

Act 3

Creon enters. Oedipus asks what he saw at the ceremony. Creon is so terrified he repeatedly refuses to speak until Oedipus forces him. Then Creon gives a terrific description of the dark and ill-fated glade where they took Tiresias and dug a ditch and burned animal sacrifices and chanted evil spells and a great chasm opened up and hordes of the dead appeared before them. Last of all came the reluctant figure of Laius, still dishevelled and bloody, who proceeds to give a long speech saying the plague on Thebes is due to the current king, who killed his father and has slept with his mother and had children by her. Only when he is cast out as an unclean thing will Thebes be cured.

Oedipus is appalled but refuses to believe it: after all, his father Polybus lives on at Corinth and he’s never laid a finger on his mother, Merope. Oedipus refuses to believe it and says Creon is conspiring with Tiresias to seize the crown. Creon, for his part, advises Oedipus to abdicate now, to step down to a humbler position before he is pushed. They proceed to have a page of dialogue which turns into a debate about whether a subject should stand up to the king, Oedipus dismissing these as typical arguments of the revolutionary.

The Chorus gives a potted history of the land of Thebes, and the wider region of Boeotia, populated by Cadmus in search of his abducted sister Europa, of the many monsters which have been spawned in this region, with a final mention of the myth of Actaeon, turned into a stag and ripped apart by his own hunting dogs.

Act 4

Oedipus is confused, he asks Jocasta how Laius died and is told he was struck down by a young man when travelling with his entourage at a place where three roads meet. It jogs a faint memory in Oedipus’s mind but then a messenger comes to interrupt his attempts to remember with news that his ‘father’, King Polybus of Corinth, has passed away peacefully in his sleep.

The old man/messenger requests him to come to Corinth to attend the dead king’s funeral, but Oedipus refuses, saying he is afraid of being alone in the company of his mother. The old man reassures him that Meropa was not his real mother and proceeds to tell the full story of how he, the old man, was given Oedipus as a baby, his ankles bound together with a metal pin. ‘Who by?’ Oedipus asks. ‘The keeper of the royal flocks,’ the man replies. ‘Can he remember his name?’ Oedipus asks. No, but he might remember the face. So Oedipus orders his men to assemble all the royal shepherds.

The old man warns Oedipus to stop probing while he still has time, but Oedipus insists he has nothing to fear and the truth will set him free. Poor dupe of fate.

Enter Phorbas, head of Thebes’s royal flocks. He begins to remember the old man. He confirms that he handed the old man a baby but doubts if it can have lived because its ankles were pierced through with an iron bolt and infection had spread.

Who was the baby, Oedipus demands. Phorbas refuses to say so Oedipus says he will order hot coals to torture him with. Phorbas replies with one line: ‘Your wife was that child’s mother.’

With that one line the truth comes flooding in on Oedipus. He is not Polybus and Meropa’s child; they adopted him; he is the child of Laius who he killed at the crossroads and of…Jocasta, the woman he has married and had children with. Oedipus is, understandably, distraught, and expresses it with full Senecan hyperbole:

Earth, be opened!
Ruler of darkness, hide in deepest hell
This monstrous travesty of procreation!

The Chorus continues its very tangential relationship with the story, not commenting on this amazing revelation at all, but instead wishing its ship of life was riding on milder waters to a gentler wind. And then goes off at a real tangent, briefly describing the story of Daedalus and Icarus to show that living in moderation, the golden mean, is best.

Act 5

The Chorus sees a messenger approaching. Never good news these messengers, and this one is no exception. He describes in great detail how distraught Oedipus went into the palace, grabbed a sword and made a great speech about killing himself, but then realised it wasn’t punishment enough, was too quick and easy. Something was demanded to placate the gods and end the curse and the plague, more like a living death, where he would die again and again every day. Then it comes to him to blind himself and the messenger gives a very gory description of Oedipus plucking his own eyes out.

The Chorus gives a brief didactic explanation that Fate is unchangeable, one iron chain of endless causes and consequences. No man can escape it.

Enter Oedipus blinded, freed from the light of the accusing sun.

The Chorus describes Jocasta coming onstage, distraught, uncertain whether to address her son and husband.

Jocasta addresses Oedipus who is horrified and says they must never speak, never be in the same country together. Jocasta seizes his sword and, after some debate exactly where to stab herself, stabs herself in her womb, seat of all her sinfulness, and falls dead.

In his final soliloquy Oedipus says he has expiated his sin and now will set out on his wanderings. He promises the poor suffering people of Thebes that he will take with him the capitalised allegorised figures of infliction and free them at last. What better companions and tormentors could he hope for on his endless wanderings and punishments.

Moral of the story

Even if you’re a childless couple, desperate for a baby, do not accept the gift of a little baby boy whose ankles are pierced together by an iron bar!

*************

Big ideas

When I was a boy reading these Penguin introductions, it was often not specific criticism of specific aspects of the play which stuck with me, but when the scholars and editors made throwaway generalisations which in a flash helped me make sense of an entire genre or period of history.

Thus, in among his detailed critique of specific plays or aspects, Watling offers three big, memorable ideas about Seneca’s influence on English Renaissance literature.

1. One is that Seneca is often blamed for Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights’ addiction to ghosts, ghosts of gruesomely murdered figures who return to the land of the living to trigger the action of the plot (p.28). The ghost of the dead Spanish officer Andrea appears at the start of the archetypal Elizabethan revenge tragedy, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and ghosts are important in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Julius Caesar and central to the plot of his greatest play, Hamlet. In fact, Watling refutes this by pointing out there are only two ghosts in Seneca’s oeuvre, Tantalus in Thyestes and Thyestes in Agamemnon.

2. The other is the simple but illuminating comment that:

The language of Elizabethan drama would not have reached its height of poetic eloquence without the infusion of the classical voice – the Ovidian mythology and the Senecan rhetoric. (p.32)

Aha, Ovid and Seneca – so that was their influence and how they fit together to flow through all Elizabethan drama: Ovid for mythological stories, with their bucolic settings, flowers and curlicues; Seneca for accusing ghosts, characters howling for revenge and invoking the shadows of Erebus and darkest night.

3. There’s a third insight, not so striking as the first two, maybe, and this is that, despite the best efforts of scholars and academically-minded authors like Philip Sidney or Ben Jonson to import the so-called Dramatic Unities and impose them on contemporary drama, they failed; they failed to dent the English preference for ‘straggling narrative plays‘ which cheerfully ignore the cardinal unities of time or place or even action (p.35).

In Watling’s words 1) Senecan rhetoric of extreme emotions was grafted onto 2) plots which lacked Senecan focus and concision, to create a ‘fusion of classical uniformity with romantic multiformity in the Elizabethan theatre.’ (p.37).

In the greatest Elizabethan plays, the theme, the form and the language may have crystallised into an impressive whole:

but yet not so perfect as to tidy up all the loose ends or exclude the superfluities and irrelevances which make the Elizabethan drama of life a different thing from the Roman sculptured monument of death. (p.38)

Messy, mongrel literature has always been our style.

Credit

E.F. Watling’s translation of Four Tragedies and Octavia was published by Penguin Books in 1966.

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Another Day of Life by Ryszard Kapuściński (1976)

The image of war is not communicable – not by the pen, or the voice, or the camera. War is a reality only to those stuck in its bloody filthy insides. To others it is pages in a book, pictures on a screen, nothing more.
(Another Day of Life, page 108)

Ryszard Kapuściński

Ryszard Kapuściński (1932 to 2007) was a Polish journalist, photographer, poet and author. He received many awards and was at one point considered for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Kapuściński started working as a journalist soon after leaving Warsaw University in 1955. He was sent abroad and ended up developing an award-winning career as Poland’s leading foreign correspondent, working for the communist government-approved Polish Press Agency. By the end of his career, Kapuściński calculated that he had lived through twenty-seven revolutions and coups, been jailed 40 times and survived four death sentences.

In the 1960s developed a reputation for reporting from Africa, where he witnessed first-hand the end of the European colonial empires. But he was quite the globetrotter, reporting from central Asia in 1967, then from South America before moving to Mexico for a spell (1969 to 1972) and then returning to Poland.

In 1975 Kapuściński flew out to Angola to cover the chaos surrounding the country’s independence from Portugal after a long and bitter war for independence (1961 to 1974). He witnessed the wholesale flight of the country’s 300,000 Portuguese and the outbreak of civil war between the three largest independence movements: the MPLA based in the capital Luanda, the FNLA based in the north, and UNITA based in the rural east and south.

It was this trip and reporting which formed the basis for his first book, Another Day of Life, the first in a series of six or so book-length accounts of key coups and overthrows, which established his reputation in the English-speaking world (others in the series described the overthrow of Haile Selasse in Ethiopia and the Shah of Iran).

Another Day of Life

First things first, this is a very short book, weighing in at just 136 pages. It’s divided into five ‘parts’, topped and tailed by empty pages so it’s more like 120-something pages. So it feels both literally and content-wise a very light book. 123 pages of text.

This is reinforced by the almost complete absence of hard facts. Once you start reading, what becomes quickly obvious is that this isn’t traditional reporting. It doesn’t have the close description of actual events found in Fergal Keane’s book about Rwanda or the fact-heavy account by Daniel Metcalfe of his journeys through Angola. Both contained a lot of facts, dates, places, names. By contrast Kapuściński’s text has almost no dates, very few references to specific identifiable historical events.

And as for the names, there are named people in the text but they are suspiciously emblematic, idealised representations of the kinds of people you ought to find in the kinds of scenes he describes. They are often suspiciously like characters in a play, undergoing archetypal experiences such as you’d expect in a novel or play or movie rather than the ragged realities of life.

In fact by about page 30 I realised this is more like a fairy tale than either journalism or history. His stories are very pat, they fall just so, are very rounded and neat. They have the rounded perfection and the symbolic weight of allegory.

All this explains why you can read clean through the entire 136-page text and not be slowed down by a single fact. There are only two or three actual facts in the entire book. All the effects are literary and derive from his conceptualising of scenes as scenes, staged and arranged for literary effect.

Part one (25 pages)

In the first sentence he tells us he stayed in Angola for three months, in a room in the Hotel Tivoli. It is notable that he doesn’t say which months or the year, although after a few pages he mentions spending September there and we know he’s there I suppose we’re for the runup to independence ie September, October, November 1975.

Books of this sort always require eccentric neighbours so he supplies some, Don Silva a diamond merchant who has diamonds sewn into the lining of his suit but can’t leave town because his wife is in the final stages of terminal cancer and therefore deep in her deathbed.

Instead of facts, what Kapuściński conveys is mood and atmosphere. The stricken Silva’s are heavily symbolic of the entire white European culture which is coming to an end in Angola, rich but stricken and trapped.

Kapuściński describes the rumours circulating among the panicking Portuguese that the Holden Roberto’s guerrilla movement, the FNLA, has thousands of members hiding in the capital just waiting for the signal to attack the terrified whites and murder them in their beds. He describes everything as a novelist would:

Rumour exhausted everyone, plucked at nerves, took away the capacity to think. The city lived in an atmosphere of hysteria and trembled with dread. People didn’t know how to cope with the reality that surrounded them, how to interpret it, get used to it. Men gathered in the hotel corridors to hold councils of war. (p.6)

Because it is about panic-stricken people trapped in a city it reminds me a bit of The Plague by Albert Camus, but also because Kapuściński plays up the generic and allegorical aspects of the situation, as does Camus.

People escaped as if from an infectious disease, as if from pestilential air that can’t be seen but still inflicts death. Afterwards the wind blows and the sand drifts over the traces of the last survivor. (p.13)

Because it’s specifically about the slightly hysterical inhabitants of one building it reminds me of J.G. Ballard’s shocker High Rise (published the same year Angola’s independence cause the Great Flight).

You can tell almost immediately that Kapuściński’s prose is translated from another language. English is full of phrases and idioms. Very often all these get omitted by translators keen to translate the sense of the foreign text into smooth, untroubled English. Hence the rather rounded, smooth finish of the prose, which always plumps for the euphonious word and the mellifluous phrase. This is one of the reasons why reading Kapuściński is like eating ice cream in a nice restaurant. Smooth and pleasurable and flavoursome without any sharp angles or surprises.

Everybody was in a hurry, everybody was clearing out. Everyone was trying to catch the next plane to Europe, to America, to anywhere. Portuguese from all over Angola converged on Luanda. Caravans of automobiles loaded down with people and baggage arrived from the most distant parts of the country. The men were unshaven, the women tousled and rumpled, the children dirty and sleepy. (p.10)

He conveys the sense of bad-tempered bickering among the queues of hot impatient white refugees, with whites saying the country will go to the dogs once the blacks take over (as, indeed, it did), how they’ve worked here for forty years, given the best years of their lives etc etc. They argue about who should have priority onto the flights, pregnant women, women with babies, women with young children, women with children, women with no children, well, why not men, then? And so on.

He has an extended riff about crates, about how Luanda was transformed into a city of crates for people to pack their stuff into, big create, small crates, wide crates, narrow crates, crates for the wealthy, crates for the poor. In high allegorical style Kapuściński describes how the ‘city of stone’ (ie bricks and mortar, buildings, homes) was transformed into a city of wood (crates piled high in every direction. Then they were loaded onto ships and sent off into the blue.

Nowhere else in the world had I seen such a city, and I may never see anything like it again. It existed for months, and then it began suddenly disappearing. Or rather, quarter by quarter, it was taken on tricks to the port. Now it was spread out at the very edge of the sea, illuminated at night by harbour lanterns and the glare of lights on anchored ships. (p.17)

See what I mean by fairytale simplicity. Although it’s about a war and fighting and refugees somehow it  is told with the clarity and simplicity of a children’s story, or a certain kind of simplified science fiction story.

The nomad city without roofs and walls, the city of refugees around the airport, gradually vanished from the earth. At the same time the wooden city deserted Luanda and waited in the port for its long journey. Of all the cities on the bay, only the stone Luanda, ever more depopulated and superfluous, waited. (p.22)

See what I mean by ice cream? Kapuściński’s simplified, smoothed-out prose slips down a treat. Then he begins a new riff, based around the categories of basic worker who are leaving. First all the policemen leave, with a paragraph pondering what that means for a city. Then all the firemen leave, ditto. And then all the garbagemen. How do we know? Because very quickly the rubbish starts piling up in heaps. For some reason all the cats start dying. Luanda turns into an abandoned city from a science fiction story.

In a way what’s most interesting in this long enjoyable semi-fictional description is the absence of Africans. Kapuściński reports on a worldview in which, when the Europeans leave, Luanda is deserted. But of course, it wasn’t. Far more blacks lived in Luanda than whites. But they were confined to the black slums at the edge of the city, unknown slums renowned for their lawlessness and extreme poverty.

Two points. One: it is fascinating to enter, through this text, into a worldview of Africa where Africans are banished, invisible and don’t count even in their own country. Two: as a kind of spooky proof of this enormous conceptual divide, even after the whites have mostly left, the Africans don’t come pouring into the abandoned capital. They continue living in their slums even while properties throughout the city fall empty, while the nice, European part of the city become a ghost town.

Having just soaked myself in Dan Metcalfe’s travelogue of modern Angola which is, of course, populated almost entirely by black Angolans, it is striking, strange and mysterious to be taken back to the weeks of independence, not because of their political importance, but because they represented an enormous imaginative shift; from a capital city run by and for Europeans, to one which was inhabited, run by and for Africans.

Part two (11 pages)

Having watched the capital empty of its European owners, Kapuściński goes to be with the soldiers at the front, to the town of Caxito 60 km north of Luanda where MPLA forces have held off an attack by the FNLA.

Part two rotates around Commandante Ndozi of the MPLA, who explains the capital city is being threatened by the FNLA from the north and UNITA from the south. He has been fighting for a long time and Kapuściński portrays his experience through a sort of extended monologue in which Ndozi shares his experiences.

But the highlight of the little chapter, and one of the memorable moments of the book, is the insight into the way inexperienced soldiers fire so much and so loudly so as to drown out their own terror.

A green soldier fears everything. When he is transported to the front, he thinks death is watching him on every side. Every shot is aimed at him. He doesn’t know how to judge the range or direction of fire, so he shoots anywhere, as long as he can shoot a lot without stopping. He is not hurting the enemy, he is killing his own terror. (p.32)

This segues into a description of the MPLA commissar attached to the unit, Commandante Ju-Ju. Despite his name Ju-Ju is a white Angolan. Kapuściński explains that the way to be white and part of The Struggle is to have a beard, the bigger the better. Then the soldiers will call you camarada and assume you are someone important.

Kapuściński watches Ju-Ju politely question FNLA soldiers the MPLA captured. What comes over is how young, uneducated, illiterate and simple they are. A man of the Bakongo people explains that he, like many of his tribe, was pressganged in Kinshasa by Joseph Mobutu’s soldiers, then packed off to join the FNLA. He liked in the FNLA because they gave you something to eat, goat and rice during the week and beer on Saturdays. Better than starving. Another prisoner looks about 12, claims he’s sixteen, and explains that he was told that if he went to the front as a fighter, they’d let him go to school, which is what he really wants to do, so he can become an artist.

Walking round the little town Kapuściński comes to the compound where the 120 or so prisoners are being watched over by a dozen armed guards. They’re all very young men and they’re engaged in a good natured argument about football, as young men everywhere ought to be. Only these men are going to continue fighting and dying. (We modern readers know they would continue fighting and dying for another 27 years. It’s just as well we can’t see the future, isn’t it?)

Part three (18 pages)

Having visited the north, he wants to head south. A digression on the management of roadblocks, which are everywhere. There are 3 phases to the roadblock:

  1. the explanatory section
  2. bargaining
  3. friendly conversation

From a distance you can’t be sure which side is manning the roadblock. Since none of the 3 forces have regular uniforms but ragged combinations of whatever they’ve been able to purloin, it’s difficult to tell. If you hail the soldiers as camarada! and they belong to Agostinho Neto’s MPLA they will hail back. But if they belong to the FNLA or UNITA who prefer to call each other irmão or brother, then they’ll kill you. You need the right papers but it also helps if you take time to chat. Kapuściński gives an example of how he likes to distract the soldiers by telling them about Poland, basic facts which the mostly illiterate soldiery refuse to believe.

He travels all the way south to Benguela, through countless checkpoints, perfecting his essay on the metaphysics of the checkpoint.

There’s a passage which told me more about the physical terrain of Angola than anything in the Metcalfe book, which really brings out how hot and barren and dusty the landscape is.

The road from Luanda to Benguela passes through six hundred kilometers of desert terrain, flat and nondescript. A haphazard medley of stones, frumpy dry bushes, dirty sand, and broken road signs creates a grey and incoherent landscape. In the rain season the clouds churn right above the ground here, showers drag on for hours and there is so little light in the air that day might as well not exist, only dusk and night. Even during heat waves, despite the excess of sun, the countryside resembles dry, burnt-out ruins: It is ashy, dead, and unsettling. People who must travel through here make haste in order to get the frightening vacancy behind them and arrive with relief at their destination, the oasis, as quickly as possible. Luanda is an oasis and Benguela is an oasis in this desert that stretches all along the coast of Angola. (p.53)

Paints a vivid picture, doesn’t he? He finds Benguela even more deserted than Luanda and reflects on the strangeness of the way the blacks haven’t moved into the empty houses and flats abandoned by the whites.

Because it didn’t actually happen while he was there this enormous shift in imaginative possibilities is nowhere directly addressed, but it peeps out from cracks in the narrative.

Kapuściński meets Commandante Monti a white man who is MPLA commander here in Benguela. While he’s waiting to talk to the commandante, a four-man TV crew from Portugal arrives (p.55). They start squabbling about whether to proceed to the front or not. It’s dangerous. But then Monti assigns them an escort, the 20-year-old woman fighter, Carlotta.

Kapuściński is funny and shrewd about the way the Portuguese immediately start vying for her affections but, more than that, the way all five of them conspire to create a kind of collective myth about her, all conspiring to find her attractive and romantic and glamorous. Later on, Kapuściński develops the photos he took of her and realises she isn’t at all attractive. But at that time and that place they needed her to be.

In this slightly delirious mood, they agree when Commandante Monti rustles up a couple of civilian cars for them to be driven the 160 kilometers to the frontline town of Balombo. Through the landscape of war: a damaged bridge, a burned-out village, an empty town, abandoned tobacco plantations.

They arrive at Balombo, a village in the jungle which was taken by 100 MPLA only that morning. Almost all the ‘troops’ are 16 to 18, high school kids. The boys are driving an abandoned tractor up and down the high street. The camera crew film, Kapuściński takes photographs. The sun falls and they get impatient to get away. The jungle comes right up to the houses. The enemy could counter-attack at any moment.

As they climb into the waiting cars to drive them the 160km back to Benguela, all five foreigners remember it was exactly the moment when the driver put the car in gear that Carlotta decided she must stay with the fighters and gets out. Sad goodbye and they roar off into the deepening twilight.

Later they learn that UNITA counter-attacked, took the town and Carlotta was killed. Tough guy sentimentalism not a million miles from Hemingway. They insist they hadn’t been fleeing fighting, there wasn’t any fighting when they left. But if they’d heard gunshots would they have been brave enough to turn round etc?

So there probably is a village called Balombo and it probably was taken by the MPLA then retaken by UNITA and maybe there was someone called Carlotta, but the factual basis of the story has been rounded out, perfected in order to become allegorical, a symbol of the collective male delusions involved in war, and a sentimental tear for its sadness and waste.

Part four (23 pages)

Next day Kapuściński watches the plane carrying the camera crew fly out heading for Portugal. There happens to another small plane at the airport, but this one is heading south to collect a last bunch of white refugees from Lubango, which also happens to be base to the southern command of the MPLA. On an impulse Kapuściński blags his way onto the flight. Having landed, he moves through the desperate white refugees and finds someone who can take him to MPLA HQ. The man in charge is an Angolan white, Nelson, who scribbles Kapuściński a pass for the front and pushes him out the front door where a big, knackered old Mercedes lorry piled with ammunition and six soldiers is about to set off on the long drive south. Kapuściński crams into the cab and off they rumble.

The leader of the little troop, improbably named Diogenes, explains to Kapuściński that they are driving 410km south to the town of Pereira d’Eça, the MPLA’s most remote outpost. They hold the towns but the entire countryside is in the hands of UNITA who may attack at any moment. They have ambushed all previous convoys and killed the troops. Kapuściński conveys the enormous sterility of the Angolan desert very vividly, in fact I remember his invocation of the country more than the people.

Time is passing, but we seem to be stuck in place. Constantly the same glimmering seam of asphalt laid on laid on the loose red earth. Constantly the same faded, cracked wall of bush. The same blinding white sky. The same emptiness of a deserted world, an emptiness that betrays life neither by movement nor by voice. Our truck wobbles and rolls through this unmoving, dead landscape like a small tin car in the depths of a carnival shooting gallery. The owner turns the crank and the toy, stamped out of tin, bucks from side to side, and whoever wants to take a shot is welcome. (p.71)

You can see why the literary reviewers of the time compared him to Graham Greene or V.S. Naipaul the two British writers of the 1970s most associated with exotic settings and colonial conflicts. The text is packed with evocative literary descriptions like this.

After a long day’s drive of nail-biting stress, expecting bullets to fly at every bend in the road, they arrive at the dusty abandoned settlement of Pereira d’Eça which is run by Commandante Farrusco (another white Angolan). They are welcomed. The sun sets. They meet the commandante. Food, cigarettes, conversation. Backstory on Farrusco who during the independence war fought in a Portuguese commando unit, but on the outbreak of hostilities between the three independence armies, volunteered for the MPLA and showed them how to take Lubango and Pereira d’Eça.

Then there is one of Kapuściński’s highly finished, semi-symbolic incidents. A dishevelled man is brought in by the troops to face the Commandante. He is a Portuguese named Humberto Dos Angos de Freitas Quental. He fled with his wife and four children to Windhoek, capital of Namibia to the south. But his 81-year-old mother refused to leave. She is deaf and has run the town bakery time out of mind. All she told him was to come back with some flour, which is running low. So having settled his family in Windhoek, against his better judgement, the man returned with a carful of bags of flower and was picked up by the MPLA troops.

But he has something very important to say. In Windhoek and a couple of settlements on the road in Namibia, everyone is saying the South Africans are about to launch an attack into southern Angola in support of UNITA. Kapuściński realises this is Big News and asks Farrusco for help getting back to Luanda so he can file his story. But nothing moves along the road at night. He has to stay.

Next morning he is up and in a different vehicle, a Toyota being driven by 16-year-old Antonio, along with the Commandante, heading back along the 400km road to Lubango. En route the commandante explains a basic fact about the war which is that the territory is so vast and the number of troops in it so pitifully small that it is like no conventional war. There is nothing like a ‘front’.

On any road, at any place, there can be a ‘front’. You can travel the whole country and come back alive, or you can die a meter from where you’re standing. There are no principles, no methods. Everything comes down to luck and happenstance. (p.83)

Again, you have the feeling of an allegorical, metaphysical force behind these words, spoken by a character in a kind of modern version of Pilgrim’s Progress, with Kapuściński as Pilgrim, stumbling through panic-stricken cities, empty towns and the wide stony desert.

In a new section Kapuściński and the reader are rudely awakened by banging. He made it to Lubango safe and sound and slept in the building commandeered by Commandante Nelson. Now he’s being woken in the early hours because Nelson is going to be driven by his aide Manuel and whiskey-swilling colleague Commandante Bota, all the way back to Benguela. Only catch is there’s some kind of battle going on somewhere on the road.

Sure enough, a few hours later they start to hear bangs as of mortars, then some kind of grenade goes off raining shrapnel on the car roof. As the slow to avoid a parked lorry a soldier leaps out in front of them. He is MPLA and terrified. He tells them UNITA have them surrounded and he needs gasoline to fuel the vehicles to make an assault. Nelson tells him they have none to spare, to get some from the nearest town and then – heartlessly – Manuel the aide steps on the gas and they accelerate through the firefight, such as it is, seeing tracer bullets flying through the night sky. Then the road dips between walls of earth where there’s no firing and they encounter two young black soldiers who are running away from the fighting. They stop and Commandante Nelson tells them sternly to return. But he and Manuel and Kapuściński drive on.

As dawn rises they reach the town of Quilengues which is eerily, surreally empty, not only of humans but any form of life. They tiptoe through the town to make sure there’s no enemy soldiers, no sudden ambush. And then, suddenly confident, Commandante Nelson announces, “Another day of life” and starts to do a round of vigorous callisthenics!

Part five (46 pages)

The fifth part is by far the longest. After his adventures our hero is back in Luanda, in familiar room 47 in the Hotel Tivoli. After a night of feverish dreams he wakes determined to phone or telex his Big News Story about an impending South African invasion of southern Angola through to his employers in the Polish Press Agency. After days of intense travel he feels delirious and has a metaphysical moment:

I looked at the calendar, because I no longer had a feeling for time, which means that time had lost all sense of division for me, all measurability, it had fallen apart, it had oozed out like a dense tropical exhalation. Concrete time had ceased to signify anything and for a long while now the fact that it was Wednesday or Friday, the tenth of the twentieth, eight in the morning or two in the afternoon, had meant nothing to me. Life had propelled me from event to event in an undefined process directed towards an unseen goal. I knew only that I wanted to be here until the end, regardless of when it came, or how. (p.94)

Then he shakes himself and gives us one of those rarities in a Kapuściński narrative, namely a specific concrete fact. It is, he tells us, Saturday 18 October 1975. Four weeks before the date set for independence.

One of the hotel staff gives him a number to call. Secretive voices answer and switch to Spanish. They come round to his room, a big black guy and a stocky white guy, and reveal they are military ‘advisers’ from Cuba, sent to train the army, only they can’t find an army, only small units scattered over a wide area. Kapuściński tells them what he’s heard about the South Africans being about to launch an invasion, and they mull over the scenarios, then leave.

He tells us about Operation Orange which was South Africa’s plan to mount a three-pronged attack on the MPLA designed to seize Luanda by 6pm on 10 November i.e. the day before independence, in order to announce a western-friendly joint government by UNITA-FNLA. He describes how Commandante Farrusco drove south towards the border, until he suddenly encounters the South African column which opens fire, badly wounding him, his driver reverses and drives like a madman back to Pereira d’Eça.

Meanwhile, back in Luanda Kapuściński describes the weird atmosphere in the big empty city, abandoned by its European owners, as the stayers-on hear the sound of artillery fire from the north and  FNLA leaflets are dropped from a plane announcing Holden Roberto will be in the city centre in 24 hours.

He walks to the offices of a local newspaper where the journos tell him that all the FNLA forces, five battalions from Zaire plus mercenaries are attacking from the north. One of the reasons this last part is longest is because Kapuściński includes the texts of telex conversations he has with his managers back in Poland, as they offer to fly him out, he insists on staying but warns communications may be cut at any minute, no-one knows what is happening, anything might happen.

Kapuściński sardonically counterpoints the ‘grand plans, global strategies’ (p.108) he hears on radio discussions – call in the UN, convene a conference, get the Arabs to pay, get behind Vorster the leader of South Africa etc etc – and the cruder reality on the ground. For example the way, in the absence of working radio, one of the few people with any idea what’s going on is Ruiz who flies a beaten up old two-engine DC3 to various MPLA-held points of the country, dropping supplies picking up news and gossip.

He is woken in the middle of the night and has a fearful presentiment that it is the FNLA come to arrest him as a spy. In the event it is Commandante Nelson, along with Bota and Manuel, filthy and hungry and exhausted after a long drive from their southern outpost. They tell him the South Africans have rolled up all the MPLA’s southern positions and are at Benguela, 540km to the south.

Then the format of the text changes to diary entries for the last key week leading up to independence, a day-by-day account of life in Luanda starting on Monday 3 November 1975.

Monday 3 November 1975

The Cubans pick him up and drive him to the front line just beyond the city limits. Earlier in the book Kapuściński had a whole passage about the etiquette of roadblocks and checkpoints, the sussing out, the demand for papers, the drawn-out negotiations, the attempts to extort money of cigarettes. But all the Cubans have to do is say “Cubano” and they are waved through as though they have magic powers.

Kapuściński surveys the landscape all the way to the enemy lines. A message is brought to the Cuban that Benguela has fallen, all the Cubans there were killed. He sees lorries full of Portuguese troops. They have lost all discipline, have no belts, beards, they sell their rations on the black market and loot houses, packing everything into crates. They are scheduled to leave the day before independence and have nothing to lose.

Ruiz the pilot of the only plane the MPLA possesses flies south carrying sappers and explosives to blow the bridge over the Cuvo River which will cut the road between Benguela and Luanda. That night Kapuściński telexes Polish Radio the news.

Tuesday 4 November

Kapuściński is woken along with all the other guests and the hotel manager, Oscar, by armed men, who claim they are infiltrators, fifth columnists. They are sweating and tense and might shoot at any moment. While they wait for transport to take their prisoners away the MPLA press attaché arrives and sends them packing. Kapuściński clearly enjoys privileged status.

It is nowhere stated but I wonder how much this was because he was with the official press agency of an Eastern Bloc country, Poland i.e. a country controlled by the Soviet Union which the Marxist-Leninist MPLA needed as a backer for its attempts to become the new government.

A week earlier he had gone with four other journalists to the town of Lucala 400km east of Luanda which had recently been recaptured from the FNLA. The road to the town was strewn with corpses. The FNLA killed everyone and then decapitated or eviscerated them. Women’s heads littered along the road. Bodies with liver and heart cut out. Cannibals. Drunken cannibals. Hence the panic-fear in Luanda a week later that these are the people threatening to take the city by storm.

Wednesday 5 November 1975

A friend of a friend drives him to Luanda airport. It is almost abandoned and covered in litter and detritus, the wreck left by the hundreds of thousands of Portuguese who have fled. The friend, Gilberto, takes him up the control tower. And as they watch a pinprick of light appears in the dark sky and grows larger. then three more. Minutes later four planes land, taxi to a halt in front of the control tower and disgorge their passengers – scores of Cuban soldiers, battle-ready in their combat fatigues. Next day they are despatched to the front. Lucky Kapuściński happened to be there right at that moment. Or is it another one of his embellished, polished, symbolic fictions?

Right here at the end of the book he makes what is maybe a subtle self defence. He describes the challenges facing any journalist sent by their editor to Luanda and told to report on the fighting: the government will tell him nothing; the MPLA press office stays silent; he can’t get to any front because Luanda is a closed city and he is turned back at the first checkpoint; rumour is rife but there is no radio or any other communication with any part of the country. Brick wall. Hence the temptation to write the story his editors want to hear.

At this point he gives a page and a half long definition of the concept of confusão being a specially Portuguese notion of impenetrable, causeless, fruitless chaos, a handy explanation for all life’s screw-ups. Daniel Metcalfe liked this concept and explanation so much he quotes it in its entirety in his book about Angola written forty years later. Maybe every nation, or culture, has its own distinctive form of confusão.

Monday 10 November 1975

On Monday the last of the Portuguese garrison sailed away, ending nearly 500 years of Portuguese occupation. There is no love lost with the locals who look forward to freedom, but Kapuściński became friendly with some of the officers who he thought behaved with professionalism and courtesy. He notes that they at no point threatened the Cuban military advisers who, after all, were flying in to what was still Portuguese territory.

That night a lorry goes round Luanda removing all statues of Portuguese from their plinths, goodbye to the sailors and geographers and soldiers and administrators and kings, goodbye.

Tuesday 11 November 1975

At midnight it becomes Tuesday, independence day after 500 years of oppression. Kapuściński is with the big crowd assembled in Luanda’s central square. A handful of international dignitaries had flown in for the ceremony, not many because there were rumours one or other of the attacking forces would bomb the airport therefore making departure impossible. MPLA leader and Angola’s new president, Agostinho Neto, makes a short speech then the lights are put out for fear of air raids.

Kapuściński sends a dispatch back to Poland explaining that the FNLA and UNITA have come to a deal and declared their own independent government of Angola to be based at the inland city of Huambo.

He hops a lift with Ruiz and flies down to the southern front at Porto Amboim on the Cuvo River where the bridge has been blown up, leaving South Africa armoured units on the south side and MPLA bolstered by an ever-increasing number of Cubans on the north side. He investigates the front in a downpour of rain. Troops are leading women and children who’ve crossed the river from the south in search of food. That night he flies back in a plane carrying soldiers wounded in a firefight further up the river.

In one of his last dispatches to Warsaw he says the nature of the war has significantly changed in his time there. To begin with it was a conflict of pinpricks without a formal front, as explained by Commandante Farrusco. But the incursion of the South Africans changed that. They have armoured vehicles, artillery and good military discipline. They expect to fight battles. On the other side the MPLA army has been feverishly recruiting and is being whipped into shape by significant numbers of battle-hardened Cuban officers and trainers. In three short months it’s gone from being a desultory guerrilla  conflict to something much more like a conventional war.

He asks to come home. He’s shattered. His managers agree. He says his goodbyes, most notably to the new president, Agostinho Neto who, we learn at this late stage in the day, Kapuściński knows well enough to pop in on. Neto is, among many other things, a poet, and Kapuściński can quote some of his poetry by heart. They sit in the president’s book-lined room chatting. Friends in high places.

Next day he flies back to Europe, itself awash with troops and frozen in a Cold War which was to divide the continent from 1945 to 1990.

Coda

There’s a two-page coda dated 27 March 1976 i.e. four months later. He reports that the last South African units have left Angola, crossing a bridge over the Cunene River where they were reviewed by the South African Defence Minister Piet Botha. Kapuściński writes as if the war is over.

We, now, 45 years later, know that it was only just beginning. There were to be 26 more years of civil war in Angola, leaving 800,000 killed, 4 million displaced, and nearly 70,000 Angolans amputees as a result of the millions and millions of land mines planted throughout the land. Well done, everyone. Bem feito, camaradas.

Thoughts

No doubt most of this did happen. The big picture stuff certainly. Probably most of Kapuściński’s excursions also, yes. But the way he shapes the material, turning the ordinary ramshackle events of life into symbolic moments, turning ugly, stupid or drunk people into Emblems of War – this is all done with the artistry of the imaginative writer, the novelist or playwright. He paces his scenes so as to create maximum impact, giving his characters wonderfully lucid and meaningful dialogue to speak, and punctuating the narrative with profound asides about the nature not only of war, but of time, the imagination, fear and compassion.

At first sight only a skimpy 126 or so pages long, this book nevertheless packs a range of profound punches to the imagination and intellect.

Map of Kapuściński’s Angola

Locations mentioned in Another Day of Life in the order they appear in the text.

  1. Luanda – capital of Angola
  2. Caxito – 60km north of Luanda where MPLA forces have held off an attack by the FNLA
  3. Benguela – 540km south of Luanda, to the MPLA garrison run by Commandante Monti, where he hooks up with the Portuguese TV crew and Carlotta before driving on to…
  4. Balombo – the recently taken town where Carlotta is killed
  5. Lubango – where Kapuściński cadges a flight to, base of the southern command of the MPLA run by Commandante Nelson; and then further south to…
  6. Pereira d’Eça – (subsequently renamed Ondjiva, which is how it appears on this map) the MPLA’s most remote outpost, run by Commandante Farrusco
  7. Quilengues – the deserted town they arrive at having run the gauntlet from Lubango, where Commandante Nelson utters the sentence which gives the book its title and then does his callisthenics
  8. Lucala – town 400km east of Luanda where he sees evidence of FNLA cannibalism
  9. Huambo – city 600km south east of Luanda where the FNLA and UNITA set up their rival government to the MPLA
  10. Porto Amboim – where he hitches a ride to in Ruiz’s plane, 260km south of Luanda to the new southern front, to see the South Africans hunkered down on the other side of the Cuvo River
  11. Chitado – the crossing over the Cunene River where South African troops exit Angola at the end of the narrative

Map of Angola showing locations referred to in the text. Source map © Nations Online Project

Credit

Jeszcze dzień życia by Ryszard Kapuściński was published in Polish in 1976. It was translated into English as Another Day of Life in 1987. All references are to the 1987 Pan paperback edition.

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Happy Days by Samuel Beckett (1961)

Beckett wrote a lot of plays, 19 of them according to the Beckett On Film project, more than 30 if you include the seven plays for radio and the various fragments and dramaticules.

But only a handful of them are ‘full length’ enough to sustain an evening at the theatre, being: Waiting For Godot (1953), Endgame (1958), Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) and Happy Days (1961).

To verify this assertion I made this table based, in a very rough and ready way, on the duration of the plays as filmed for the Beckett On Film project (indicated by an asterisk) or according to the durations of the most popular recordings on YouTube.

Play Duration   
*Waiting For Godot (1953) 120
*Endgame (1958) 84
*Happy Days (1961) 79
All That Fall (1957) (Radio play) 70
*Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) 58
Beginning to End (1965) (Television production)   49
Embers (1959) (Radio play) 45
Words and Music (1961) (Radio play)   42
*Rough For Theatre II 30
*Footfalls (1976) 28
Quad I and II (1980) (Television play) 23
Cascando (1961) (Radio play) 22
Eh Joe (1967) (Television play) 20
*Rough for Theatre I 20
*A Piece of Monologue (1978) 20
*That Time (1975) 20
Rough for Radio I (Radio play) 17
Rough For Radio II (Radio play)
*Play (1963) 16
*Act Without Words I (1957) 15
*Rockaby (1981) 14
*Not I (1972) 14
*Ohio Impromptu (1980) 12
*What Where (1983) 12
*Act Without Words II 11
… but the clouds … (1977) (Television play)   10
*Come and Go (1965) 8
*Catastrophe (1982) 7
*Breath (1969) 45 seconds 

Obviously, performance times can vary quite a bit from production to production, so these figures are the opposite of definitive, they are merely indicative, but the result tends to show two things:

1. Only a surprisingly small handful of Beckett plays amount to anything like an evening in the theatre, and that’s why they’re the ones we’ve heard about. The great majority of Beckett’s plays are short, often very short.

2. The last evening-length drama he produced was Happy Days in 1961. From that point onwards, for the next 23 years, Beckett’s plays become progressively shorter and can only be staged in an evening of such fragments, as additions to the other plays. That’s why the Beckett on Film project was so very useful, because it allows us all to see stagings of ‘dramas’ which are so brief or fragmentary that they might never be staged in a theatre in our lifetimes. Many of them are almost like thoughts or sketches for dramas, hence the word dramaticules which is often used about them.

Happy Days

The premise of most of even the full-length Beckett plays is simple. There is generally just the bare minimum of characters required to enable a dialogue. Thus:

  • Waiting For Godot is mostly about the relationship between Vladimir and Estragon
  • Endgame similarly is mostly about Clov and Hamm
  • Krapp’s Last Tape is (ingeniously) about the relationship between an old man and the tape recordings he made of his thoughts as a young man

And Happy Days follows the formula by being entirely about just two characters, Winnie (a woman of about 50) and her husband Willie (a man of about 60). Like Godot it is a play of two halves and, exactly like Godot, if the first half finds the characters in a bad plight, part two shows a significant deterioration in their condition.

Thus the first half of Happy Days finds Winnie buried up to her waist in a mound of sand or rubbish. Surreally, she completely ignores her plight, accepting it all as completely normal, wakes up and starts fussing about her day. She fusses about her handbag and applies her makeup, all the time throwing comments at her husband who is lying on the other side of the mound, out of sight of the audience, apparently reading a paper, mostly ignoring her endless prattle, occasionally grunting a reply.

In part two the curtains open to reveal Winnie now up to her neck in sand or detritus or whatever the play’s producers choose. Throughout her fiddly fussy prattle she repeats the refrain that it is ‘a happy day’, a lovely day, mustn’t complain, can’t grumble, and so on.

In other words, Happy Days is a classic epitome of the theme of decline and fall, degradation and entropy, which characterises all of Beckett’s work. It’s also typical, in a slightly less obvious way – to anyone who’s read quite a lot of his works, as I now have – in the extreme banality of the content.

Many of Beckett’s works, from the early novels through to the late mimes and dramaticules, may be off-the-scale in their avant-garde experimentalism. But it is striking how utterly thumpingly banal much of the actual content is. Characters prattle on about catching their train, or how tight their boots are, fuss – as here – about their lipstick and makeup, remember inconsequential details of their former lives, love affairs, sitting on Charlie Hunter’s knee, her first kiss – a torrent of trivia.

Now, learnèd professors and Beckett scholars have managed to find in his works a steady stream of references to many aspects of Western philosophy, quotes from Spinoza, rebuttals of Descartes, critiques of the Rationalist tradition, and so on. They argue that these fragments and snippets provide a kind of foil against which is set against the bustling twaddle of Winnie’s monologue. And even a non-philosopher like myself can spot it when the characters suddenly switch register and quote a bit of Shelley, or are suddenly dazzled by a memory or phrase which clearly indicates a moment of deeper reflection or emotion…

Nonetheless, the most powerful impact of so many of these works is of a prattling inconsequentiality completely at odds with the dramatic and stricken situations in which the characters find themselves.

My reading of Albert Camus is that this is what he meant by The Absurd – the yawning gap between human beings’ longing for meaning and purpose in their lives and the steadfast refusal of the universe to give them any – in fact its tendency to block and frustrate petty human wishes at every turn.

But there’s another feeling you get from watching a play like this which is that the mis-en-scène is striking and imaginative, like a surrealist painting, like a mind-blowing picture by Max Ernst. But as soon as the characters start talking there’s an odd sense of letdown and anti-climax. Very rarely does anyone in a Beckett play say anything which really lives up to the astonishing starkness of the scenarios he’s thought up.

Almost all the common Beckett quotes come from Waiting For Godot which was not only the turning point in his career as a writer, but somehow summarised the best of the preceding prose works, their complex interweaving of themes and registers of language, in their peak form. For this reason, maybe, it is by far the longest of his plays. It feels like he’d stumbled across the new format and tried to pack everything into it, with the result that it is by far the richest play to read and study, there’s so much going on.

Less so in Endgame, which is still long and complex and (hauntingly) set in an apparently post-apocalyptic world. A lot less so in Krapp’s Last Tape, one sad old man in his garret. And again, here in Happy Days, the scenario is astonishing, but then the actual words you listen to are, well, a bit disappointing.

It’s amazing that just 31 pages of text result in an hour and twenty minutes of stage time. It shows the importance of:

  1. the numerous pauses throughout the play
  2. the often elaborate stage ‘business’ that is involved in Beckett plays, in this case Winnie’s fussing and fretting with her handbag and makeup

Film version

This is a very good film version of the play starring Rosaleen Linehan as Winnie and Richard Johnson as Willie, directed by Patricia Rozema.

We watch a woman buried up to her waist in sand woken by an alarm bell, saying her daily prayers, brushing her teeth and then nattering on and fussing about make-up and medicine while her husband sits wearing his boater occasionally reading out bits of his newspaper (Reynolds News, according to Winnie towards the end of the play).

Maybe the point is how most people comfort themselves with endless natter and chatter while ignoring the reality of their ‘plight’, in the view of the existentialist school of philosophy, thrown into a godless universe, abandoned, stricken, trapped in lives of pointless repetition and futile routine.

Going on

Just like Malone and the Unnamable, and as Vladimir and Estragon frequently point out that they’re doing, maybe Winnie talks interminably simply to be able to go on with life, but the obvious objection to this entire train of thought is that it only makes sense if you think that ‘going on’ i.e. carrying on living, is an enormous challenge which requires the tactic of endlessly prattling and telling yourself interminable stories to make it at all manageable.

But language is not an abstract form like painting or music. Language is a means of communicating, and that is what becomes, ultimately, so wearing about the Beckett Trilogy of novels, that the reader submits to reading so many hundreds of pages which convey almost no information at all.

I understand the point (I think): that language in all of Beckett’s works is not intended to convey any important information – or maybe that all language is equally meaningful or meaningless, and that, therefore, language’s ultimate purpose is as a flow of sound designed to comfort the speaking characters, and insulate them from the ‘horror’ or ’emptiness’ of existence.

And thus the entire play amounts to yet another enactment of the basic principle defined in the talismanic phrase which ends the 1953 novel, The Unnamable:

You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

In Winnie’s characteristically more verbose rendering:

So that I may say at all times, even when you do not answer and perhaps hear nothing, something of this is being heard, I am not merely talking to myself, that is in the wilderness, a thing I could never bear to do – for any length of time. [Pause] That is what enables me to go on…

‘That is what enables me to go on’. Happy Days is cast in a different setting, in fact in a different medium from The Unnameable (stage compared to prose). But it is the same idea. The identical idea. Repeated. Again and again. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. I’ll tell myself stories. That is what enables me to go on…

Details

The ringing bell reminds me of the whistle blown to torment the protagonist of Act Without Words I or the whistle Hamm blows to summon Clov in Endgame.

Credit

Happy Days by Samuel Beckett was written in English in 1961, and the author then translated it into French by November 1962.

Related link

Samuel Beckett’s works

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

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

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Acts Without Words I and II by Samuel Beckett

Act Without Words I

Act Without Words I (a mime for one player) is a short mime piece written by Samuel Beckett. It was originally performed after Beckett’s major play, Endgame, during the latter’s first run in London. It was Beckett’s first attempt at the genre and dates from a period when he had just experimented with his first play, Waiting For Godot, and his first radio play, All That Fall. You can view a modern production of it on YouTube.

The scene is a desert on to which a man is abruptly ‘flung backwards’. Mysterious whistles draw his attention in various directions. A number of more or less desirable objects, notably a carafe of water, are dangled before him. He tries to reach up to the water but it is out of reach.

A number of cuboid boxes, obviously designed to make it easier for him to reach the water, descend from the flies, each one’s arrival signalled by a blast on the whistle. But however ingeniously he piles them on top of one another, the water is always moved to be just out of reach.

After ten or so minutes of painfully frustrated efforts, in the end the protagonist sinks into complete immobility. The whistle sounds – but he no longer pays attention. The water is dangled right in front of his face, but he doesn’t move. Even the palm tree in the shade of which he has been sitting is whisked off into the flies. He remains immobile, looking at his hands.

The meaning(s)

With its figure abandoned in a desert and subject to endless frustration, Act Without Words I feels like a variation on the theme of Godot except with one protagonist instead of the four we meet in the play.

Tragic

If you take a bleak and nihilistic view of Beckett, then the mime depicts a man flung on to the stage of life, at first obeying the call of a number of impulses, drawn to the pursuit of illusory objectives by whistles blown from the wings, but finding peace only when he has learned the pointlessness of even trying to attain any of these objective, and finally refusing any of the physical satisfactions dangled before him. He can find peace only through ‘the recognition of the nothingness which is the only reality’.

Actually a number of Beckett critics including Ruby Cohn and Ihab Hassan have dismissed it as too obvious and too pat. ‘Oh dear, life is meaningless, what shall I do?’ When stated that bluntly, it is a cliché.

Comic

That said, the putting of a man through a number of humiliating tasks which he can never achieve, in a wordless mime, is strikingly similar to the early, black-and-white, comedy films which Beckett loved. Take the 1916 short film One am written, directed and starring Charlie Chaplin. In its 34-minute duration a posh man in a top hat who is very drunk is dropped off outside his house by a taxi and then spends the next 30 minutes trying to find his key, get into the house and then taking an awesome amount of time getting up the stairs.

Or take the Laurel and Hardy comedy short, The Music Box, in which the hapless duo are deliverymen tasked with delivering a big, heavy piano up the longest flight of stairs in California.

The point is that both these movies are about protagonists facing a series of frustrations and setbacks exactly as the protagonist of Act Without Words I does. Viewed through this lens, and if you watch the Beckett on Film version, it feels like the protagonist is reduced not to philosophically noble, nihilistic despair, but to childish, sulky refusal to take part in this stupid game. Much more like the comic protagonist of a silent movie.

Portentous

In The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett, C.J. Ackerley and S.E. Gontarski suggest that the protagonist’s final refusal to play, to be tempted by the water dangling in front of him, is not a childish sulk, but represents his rejection of purely physical needs and his rebellion against his fate as a human. In refusing and rising above purely physical needs, he is enacting the psychological process described by Albert Camus in his lengthy and popular sociological work, The Rebel (1951).

From a deluge of words to wordlessness

What strikes me most about this piece is the fact that a mime, in effect, consists entirely of stage directions.

In this respect Beckett’s work presents an interesting trajectory, from the vast solid cliffs of prose in The Beckett Trilogy via the light and fast-moving dialogue of his main plays (Waiting For Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape) to the abandonment of the written or spoken word altogether and the reduction of the dramatic event to action, pure and simple, of wordless mime consisting solely of stage directions. In this it anticipates a number of Beckett’s later works which will be wordless mimes.

Beckett’s stage directions

It also reminds the viewer of the extreme precision and pedantry of Beckett’s stage directions. Beckett was always obsessive about the physical behaviour of his characters, regarding humans as closer to automata than people, as evidence in the numerous obsessively detailed descriptions of physical options and behaviours in the novel Watt.

He carried this obsessive attention to the minutiae of physical action over into his plays and became notorious among directors and actors for the extreme precision of his stage directors and his inflexible insistence that they must be followed to the letter, precisely as he had written them.

As you read through the plays, as you come across more mimes and musical movements and so on, you realise that the composition of the stage directions was every bit as precise and detailed and calculated for effect as the actual prose and dialogue and speeches.

And of course no member of the audience is aware of this but the reader of the piece sees that it ends with the four-times repeated stage direction He does not move, reminding us of the famous stage direction at the bitter end of Godot – They do not move.

Suicide

Speaking of Waiting For Godot at one point in Act Without Words the protagonist takes the length of rope he’s been given and obviously plans to hang himself from the palm tree which is more or less the only feature in the desert landscape.

This reminds us of Estragon’s throwaway suggestion in Waiting For Godot that the two tramps hang themselves and, of course, both suggestions turning out to be fruitless. You don’t get out of it that easy, this thing called life.

Act Without Words II

Act Without Words II is another short mime, written a few years after the first one. It, also, was composed in French before being translated into English by the author although, being a mime, there was no dialogue to translate, just the stage directions. The London premiere was directed by Michael Horovitz and performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on 25 January 1960.

Even more than the first one, number II is another work which depends entirely on the precision of the choreography. Two men are in sacks. A long stick enters from stage right and pokes one of the sacks. Character A struggles out of his sack and elaborately gets dressed before picking up the second sack and placing it further from the stick, before undressing and getting back into his sack. The same procedure is then applied to the other sack containing Character B, who is poked, struggles out of his sack, does callisthenics, cleans his teeth, gets dressed and so on. His job is to move the other sack, containing Character A further along the stage, before he, too, undresses and gets back into his sack. And so on, Forever.

Anyone who’s read Watt or Molloy will recognise the helpless, Aspergers syndrome-like obsessiveness of the repeated behaviour, of numerous apparently pointless repetitions carried out with minute variations and exasperating precision. This, the work says, is how utterly pointless our lives are with all the gettings-up and breakfasts and showers and dressing and going to work. All variations on the same bloody pointless and endlessly similar actions. Is this it? Is this all?

To emphasise the precision he wants and the clinical emptiness of the actions, Beckett includes a diagram of the changing positions of the sacks relative to each other.

The Goad

At the height of the Swinging Sixties, in 1966, photographer Paul Joyce (the great-grand-nephew of James Joyce) saw Act Without Words II as part of a Sunday evening performance at the Aldwich theatre and thought it would make a fun short experimental film. Joyce approached the cast, Freddie Jones and Geoffrey Hinscliff, and they said okay, so, after a little thought, Joyce transposed the production from the theatre to a rubbish dump in Rainham, Essex.

The way there are two characters who fuss about their clothes, and wear silly outfits, and both wear bowler hats, reminds us of Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting For Godot – just as Character A eating a carrot reminds us of Vladimir offering Estragon a carrot, who proceeds to make such a palaver about eating it, in act one of Godot.

Having started to think about silent comedy classics, it’s hard not to miss the suggestion that Character A’s ill-fitting suit and round hat is at least in part a reference to Charlie Chaplin’s tramp character, while Character B’s skinny physique, bony face and pork pie hat is strongly reminiscent of Buster Keaton.

It is an absurdist reductio ad absurdum, but it is telling us something less about Life, than about literature and film – namely that the comic and the bleakly nihilistic are very closely allied. If you slip on a banana skin and band your nose it’s a tragedy; if someone else does, it’s a comedy.

Both these mimes strike me as having next to nothing to say about ‘Life’ – what a ridiculous idea! – but do make you reflect a bit about the thin line which separates tragedy from comedy, the humdrum from the absurd, the serious and po-faced from the farcically hilarious.

Related link

Samuel Beckett’s works

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

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

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Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett (1953)

ESTRAGON: Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!

Beckett dashed off Waiting For Godot in just four months, October 1948 to January 1949. It was written in a break between the second novel of the Beckett Trilogy, Malone Dies (written November 1947 to May 1948) and the third and final instalment of the trilogy, The Unnamable, which Beckett laboured over from March 1949 to January 1950.

Godot was, therefore, written during the Berlin Airlift (June 1948 to September 1949) when many people thought Europe was on the brink of a Third World War, when nuclear apocalypse was on a lot of people’s minds.

All these books were first written in French, as was Waiting For Godot, whose original French title is En Attendant Godot.

Waiting For Godot was first produced at a tiny French theatre, the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris, starting in December 1952. It was an immediate critical success, moved to a larger theatre, and at a stroke established Beckett in the front rank of contemporary theatre, aligning him with the movement called Theatre of the Absurd. The English-language version premiered at the Royal Court in London in 1955. [I’m flattered that noted Beckett scholar Stanley E. Gontarski took the trouble to point out that the facts in this paragraph are wrong. I give the corrected dates in the comment at the bottom of this review.]

It’s odd to consider that Godot came at the end of such a sustained run of prose writings. It’s not as if it was the glorious conclusion of a lifetime spent in the theatre, the exact opposite; with the exception of a minor play, Eleutheria, which wasn’t published in English till 1996, Godot was the first proper play Beckett wrote and certainly his first staged play. I wonder how many other playwrights achieved such international fame on the basis of their first play?

Roots in the Beckett Trilogy

The prose of its immediate predecessors in Beckett’s oeuvre, Molloy and Malone Dies can be characterised in lots of ways, but among these are that it is:

Dense

Molloy only has two paragraphs, the second one being well over a hundred pages long. The point being the reader is confronted with a solid, uninterrupted, dense and clotted wall of prose which is very difficult to parse and make sense of it. Reading blocks like this makes you realise how hugely important it is that most texts (novels, poems, newspaper or magazine articles) are chopped up into bite-sized chunks, into paragraphs, sometimes with headings, into chapters, sometimes with titles, and in a conventional novel, when there’s dialogue each new speech from different characters generally starts a new paragraph. Not in the Beckett Trilogy texts.

Episodes

This explains one of the most salient but little-noticed aspects of the three novels, which is that, when they are presented, for example in readings, dramatic productions, on the radio or on TV they are broken up into episodes. This indicates both that it is very hard to process the novels as one continuous block, but also indicates that, despite the appearance of a wall of text, they are in fact composed of discrete sections, up to a point anyway.

Comedy

If you have the stamina to read them closely, you also notice there’s actually quite a variety of styles in the prose. A high-level categorisation might suggest about four approaches.

There’s the main, core Beckett style in which characters bemoan their fate – ‘no hope, I don’t know, I don’t understand, was it he, am I me, I can’t go on, I must go on’ – that kind of thing. In the play Vladimir is fond of repeating ‘Nothing to be done’.

There’s the learnèd style, when the character, on the face of it a tramp or derelict or senile hospital inmate, surprises you with a learned disquisition, begins to talk about hypotheses, and let us consider the evidence, and on the one hand this but on the other hand that – and slips into Latin and makes learned references to Greek myths or the arcane mysteries of astrology or uses rare and obscure terminology.

The ‘academic’ style reaches a deranged apogee in Lucky’s long, dementedly learned soliloquy in act 1.

There’s the swearing. Not many of the commentators I’ve read mention the fact that Beckett’s characters from time to time drop the pretence of being university lecturers and just say fuck it, balls to all that, what a load of ballocks, and go on to dwell at length on their ability to have a good shit, piss against a tree, masturbate with a good hard prick and gain entry now and then to a juicy cunt.

In Waiting For Godot the tramps suggest hanging themselves on the basis that at least it will give them erections, and half-way through act one, Vladimir runs offstage to have a pee. Elsewhere, swearwords are freely used.

VLADIMIR: That seems intelligent all right. But there’s one thing I’m afraid of.
ESTRAGON: What?
VLADIMIR: That Lucky might get going all of a sudden. Then we’d be ballocksed

And there’s the moment towards the end when Vladimir, Pozzo and Lucky are in a heap and Estragon asks, ‘Who farted?’ It doesn’t get more crude or Rabelaisian than that.

Lastly, there’s the comedy. Some is broad physical farce, as when the characters fall over as when Moran and his son fall off their overloaded bicycle. Some derives from the demented precision with which his autistic characters describe physical processes in autistic obsessive detail, as when Molloy takes a page to describe all the ways he can arrange sixteen sucking stones in his four pockets. Some could almost come from a character-based sitcom, as the couple of pages describing the romance of mad Malone and senile old Moll.

Othertimes there’s sly comedy, as when the unnamable says he’ll stop asking questions and immediately goes on to ask four questions in a row. And there are other, more elusive moments of humour, which depend on the switch from one register to another as when, after a prolonged learned lecture about something, the narrator might make a very blunt, down-to-earth Irish comment (and this is where a lot of the swearing comes in).

Differences between the monologues of the Beckett trilogy and a stage play

So, quite clearly, I am not considering Waiting For Godot as a standalone play, but considering it as situated, almost embedded within, the writing of the Trilogy, which took place around it, before and after it, and with which it shares almost all its themes and style.

From this perspective, there are four standout features about the play – its brevity, dialogue, action and the present.

The qualities of a monologue

Part of the reason the novels are so dense is because Beckett cast them all in the form of monologues. Now the thing about a monologue – as Beckett and his readers find out, to their cost – is you can’t have an intermission. In a novel, characters can come together and have an important scene but then you can cut away to anything you want, to other characters, to descriptions of the setting, to philosophical musings, whatever. But a monologue, by its nature, has to carry on.

By contrast, Waiting For Godot is broken up into dialogue, true dialogue, dialogue which doesn’t have to explain everything (as a monologue tends to have to), which can be supplemented by the actors’ physical gestures, and so can be brief, incredibly brief, sometimes just a few words, sometimes no words at all, just a look or gesture.

So someone like me, who has just struggled through the 400 dense pages of the Beckett Trilogy, can hardly believe how empty Waiting For Godot is. There’s more empty space on the page than text.

And, as mentioned, you also realise what an enormous amount of information is conveyed when two characters converse. As any human knows, the real meaning of an exchange need not be at all what is said in the words. It can be the opposite of what is said, or fractions of the overt meaning which are refracted through sarcasm, irony, tone of voice and the situation, such as saying ‘Oh great’ when the wings fall off your airplane.

Dealing in dialogue creates entire new dimensions of meaning which were unavailable in the monologues.

Physical activity

The third aspect is physical activity. Characters can do things onstage which are just as eloquent as any words they say, such as shoot someone, kiss someone and so on.

Now the characters in the Trilogy monologues often remembered incidents and conversations, such as Jacques Moran’s arguments with his maid Martha and his endless bullying of his son. But these dialogues or conversations, such as they are, are always viewed through the narrating consciousness and this, in all three books, is mad, weird, demented, gaga, deranged, so highly biased. Everything is perceived through the same rather grim, grey spectacles.

In the real world

Lastly, it happens before our eyes. It’s difficult to over-emphasise what a difference this makes from the huge, leviathan monologues. In those vast swamps of prose, each word or phrase potentially brings to mind other incidents or characters or phrases we have read about earlier, creating a hyper-complex polyphonic texture of references and echoes, which Beckett works hard to make sometimes unbearably dense and heavy.

Now, human beings are predatory mammals and we are designed to watch, monitor and assess all the activity in our surroundings for threat or promise. So by startling contrast to the book-bound monologues, there is a huge sensory and psychological pleasure to be had just from watching people move about on stage. We are designed to always be fascinated by what other people are doing.

And the vital corollary of this is that it is soooooooo much easier to watch a couple of guys pottering about onstage and, at long intervals saying a few words to each other, so much easier than it is reading the monologues. It feels like Friday night down the pub after a very hard week’s work. Waiting For Godot is an almost physically easier, lighter, more understandable and pleasurable read than the Trilogy.

Waiting For Godot, the plot

So a couple of tramps, Vladimir (‘Didi’) and Estragon (‘Gogo’), are onstage, outdoors somewhere, fussing with their boots, squabbling about trivia, and tell each other (and thereby the audience) that they can’t go anywhere or settle to do anything because they are waiting for Godot.

Whether you want to interpret the poverty of their language, physical decrepitude and mental abilities as a comment on the human condition or just take them as a pair of tragi-comic tramps, and whether you want to interpret Godot as referring to God or Death or some other factor which brings meaning to human life but which is always just out of reach or unattainable – all this is entirely up to you.

The play is in two parts. Now, given that Beckett’s central theme is decline and fall and entropy and collapse and deterioration, if you think about it, the minimum number of parts he’d require to dramatise this theme is two – one before and one after, or, more accurately, ‘Now’, followed by ‘A little later’.

Beckett could have used more parts, but a third or fourth part would simply have demonstrated even more decline and collapse. It is more tactful – it says enough – just to have the two. Thus in part two we meet the two tramps exactly where we left them, except worse off, degraded in clothes and attitude.

Then there’s the other two characters, Pozzo and Lucky. Coming to it cold, it feels very much as if the play, as well as the characters, are killing time a bit before Pozzo and Lucky arrive. Pozzo is a fountain of energy. He is leading Lucky (ironic name) by a thick heavy rope, Lucky being little more than an exhausted slave who he abuses, whips and insults.

And it is entirely predictable that, when they reappear in act two, this pair also will be significantly degraded – most strikingly, and cruelly, in the fact that the once-ebullient Pozzo is now blind.

Details

Bowler hats

All four characters in Waiting For Godot and several characters in the Trilogy wear hats, specifically Gaber when he comes to give his ‘mission’ to Moran. On an obvious visual level, Vladimir and Estragon with their bowler hats and their incessant repartee can easily be made to appear an absurdist Laurel and Hardy.

There’s a small tic or trope which combines the comedy of their repartee with the more ‘serious’ theme of the way they’re blocked, the way their conversations, their language – like them – gets nowhere. This is when their conversation turns a bit lyrical and they try to outdo each other with comparisons or analogies:

VLADIMIR: It’s only beginning.
ESTRAGON: It’s awful.
VLADIMIR: Worse than the pantomime.
ESTRAGON: The circus.
VLADIMIR: The music-hall.
ESTRAGON: The circus.

The point being the way that in these little passages, Estragon always repeats his comparison definitively and aggressively with an air of finality, bringing the pair’s little flight of imagination to a roadblock halt.

VLADIMIR: It’d pass the time. (Estragon hesitates.) I assure you, it’d be an occupation.
ESTRAGON: A relaxation.
VLADIMIR: A recreation.
ESTRAGON: A relaxation.

Maybe it’s a tiny symptom of their lack of imagination, or maybe Estragon’s refusal to let the flight of fancy fly… but either way, it’s a small symptom of the way they are trapped, cabined and confined by themselves.

Comedy

Obviously everything depends on your definition of comedy or your sense of humour, how dark or light it is. The notion that they suggest hanging themselves (‘well, it’d pass the time’) is funny. When Estragon comes to the front of the stage, looks out over the audience and declares ‘Inspiring prospects!’, that’s funny, and like lots of tricks is repeated in act 2 when they contemplate escaping in the direction of the auditorium, but then recoil, as if in horror of the audience!

Or when at the start of act 2, Vladimir tries to lift Estragon’s mood by persuading him to say ‘I am happy’ and then, after a pause, Estragon dolefully says, ‘What shall we do now we’re happy?’

Godot

Estragon says that Godot is Vladimir’s friend. Vladimir says Godot said he’d be along for them on Saturday. At least he thinks it was Saturday. Godot has a horse. Pozzo knows that Godot has the tramps’ immediate future in his hands. Estragon asks why they don’t just drop waiting for bloody Godot and leave?

VLADIMIR: He’d punish us.

Inconsequentiality

I identified the central role played by inconsequentiality in the monologues, the way subjects often crop up with no relation, or the narrator says something, rejects it, moves on as if it doesn’t matter, in fact all the monologuists in the Beckett Trilogy continually repeat the notion that ‘it doesn’t matter’.

Similarly, when you look at the dialogue in Godot you realise Vladimir and Estragon move from one subject to another with no link or thread. Their arbitrary disconnectedness is part of the so-called absurdity.

For example, Estragon suggests they hang themselves which sounds quite tragic, but then goes onto undermine any sense of seriousness by commenting, ‘After all, it would pass the time’. Nothing matters. Or only the trivial matters, like who’s wearing whose shoes, or hat. That’s what I mean by the play’s studied inconsequentiality.

Lucky’s monologue

It may seem deranged to the average theatre-goer, but it is a small excerpt of the kind of thing you encounter in the Trilogy by the hundreds of pages.

One of the thieves

Vladimir points out to Estragon that one of the thieves was saved, a ‘reasonable percentage’. Now, the story of the thief who was saved (Christ was crucified in the middle of two thieves undergoing the same punishment; one of them said he believed in Jesus and Jesus promised he’d see him that day in Paradise) occurs not once but twice in the trilogy (once in a particularly grotesque satire, because the decrepit old lady Moll has two ear-rings which depict the two thieves, and one massive canine in her mouth which has been ingeniously carved to depict Christ on the cross).

The extended and comically pedantic explanation of the theological problems this story throws up are reminiscent of the comically pedantic episode of Molloy and the sucking stones and its avatars in the other novels. The elaborate swapping round of inanimate objects anticipates the comic business with the hats in act 2.

Passing the time

Basically the play is about the activity of waiting. It consists of the two characters wondering how to pass the time before Godot arrives. This is more or less the same plight as Malone in Malone Dies who spends some 150 pages telling himself stories to pass the time until he, well, dies, and, in a much more confused way, in The Unnamable where the narrator talks interminably about making time pass and creating an endless discourse to fill time.

Vladimir asks Estragon if ‘they’ beat him, certainly they did, Estragon replies. This interested me because an omnipresent and menacing ‘they’ dominate the long text Beckett went on to write immediately after this, The Unnamable. What’s notable about this little exchange – as so many aspects of Beckett – is how inconsequential it is. The characters don’t seem to care much and the subject doesn’t recur.

At one point in act two Estragon remarks ‘that wasn’t such a bad little canter’, referring to a patch of conversation they’ve managed to rustle up, to pass the time. In act two they have the bright idea of abusing each other (‘it’d pass the time’). This is exactly the mentality of Malone, who tells the reader he is going to try out different subjects, and tell entire stories, to while away the time until he dies.

Estragon says they’ve been trying to pass the time like this for half a century.

Philosophy

Obviously Godot was premiered just as the Existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and to some extent Albert Camus was sweeping the cultural strongholds of the Western world i.e. art, literature, theatre and universities. Everyone wanted to live in Paris, wear black polo-necked jumpers and shades, smoke Gauloise cigarettes, and talk smoochily about the pointlessness of life, the futility of existence, and outdo each other’s expressions of Despair.

Beckett’s novels were little known because they are so damn difficult to read, but Godot, for the reasons I’ve explained above, is a masterpiece of simplification and dramatisation. It’s almost like an advert for the Existentialist movement, with the ‘why are we here? what is it all about?’ existentialism of Gogo and Didi, supplemented by what could easily be interpreted by communist and Marxist critics (ten a penny in Paris – France had the largest Communist Party in the free West) as the searing indictment of the Master-Slave relationship in the characters of Pozzo and Lucky.

It had the lot.

But 70 years later, in the post-modern era of identity politics and digital technology, a lot of the so-called philosophy of the piece has been superseded. For most students nowadays, the meaning of life is trying to find a job, somewhere to live and pay off their student debts. All of us are now caught up in the coronavirus pandemic and some of us were very worried about global warming before the virus hit.

In this content, I tentatively suggest that the philosophy of the play feels dated and contrived. The most famous moment in the play is when Pozzo, in the second act now blind, suddenly bursts out in anger at the endless questioning of Vladimir and says:

POZZO: One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (Calmer.)

And then delivers the play’s Big Message.

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.

In the Faber edition I have, and the online edition I used, this line is printed in bold, just to make it perfectly clear to the slow learners at the back of the class that this is THE AUTHOR’S MESSAGE. I couldn’t help finding that rather funny.

But also find it, how shall I be tactful – untrue. I was present in the operating theatre when they delivered my children, both times by Caesarian section, and my wife did not give birth astride the grave. My kids are now in their twenties and, believe me, their lives have not consisted of a brief gleam of light and then the grave, but an incredible number of nappies which needed to be changed, meals cooked, and school runs undertaken.

When I was 17 I could work myself up into hysterics about the fact that I was going to die, Oh my God! Die! Cease to be! Is there a God? An afterlife? Will I go to hell? What if there’s nothing? What if you feel the worms eating through your rotting flesh etc?

But you grow up. You have to get a job, find somewhere to live, maybe marry, maybe have kids, then find yourself on the treadmill of mortgages and schools. Nothing ever feels that dramatic, pure and intense ever again.

To sum up, for me Godot resonates with not one but two kinds of nostalgia. Nostalgia for a Paris of the 1950s and 60s which I never experienced but read about and seemed so cool and ‘deep’ and intense. And nostalgia for myself at 17, when I found statements like this impossibly deep and meaningful, when they shook me to my core.

Now reading Godot doesn’t stir me in either of these ways, but it does impress me with the artfulness of its construction, the variety of tones and registers, the range of humour and comic styles from bleak nihilism to Charlie Chaplin slapstick. Now, I am impressed by its complexity and success as a work of art and for the way that, while you read it and a little afterwards, its stirring rhetoric and bleak vision is genuinely moving and disturbing… until the realities of the actual world reassert themselves.

Going on

The phrase ‘go on’, as in ‘I can’t go on’, ‘we must go on’ emerges as the key phrase and concept of The Unnamable and is given pride of place right at the end of that text.

… it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know. I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

Two points:

1. This same phrase, about ‘going on’, is also used throughout Waiting For Godot. Both Vladimir and Estragon, at various points, wailing that they can’t go on.

2. But Beckett wasn’t a fool, he wasn’t going to use the same phrase to conclude two big works of art, and so Godot ends with another talismanic phrase, ‘Let’s go’ and the famous stage direction (They do not move).

What I’m getting at is the way Beckett a) very consciously ended these works with heavily meaningful and symbolic phrases, and b) that they are carefully prepared for by seeding the phrase (and idea) throughout the preceding text. Thus the simple words ‘let’s go’ have already appeared at least half a dozen times in the course of the play, meaning that by the time they’re used as the final words they have built up a poetic charge, a resonance, which strikes the imagination.

This careful preparation, this artful leading up to their final words partly explains why, for many people, the last words of both The Unnamable and Waiting For Godot are the best known. (And they share the word ‘go’ and the underlying thought that ‘going’ is impossible.)

Summary

Any reader of the Beckett Trilogy can see how Beckett took its themes and tricks of style and structure and reduced them, in Waiting For Godot, to an almost bare minimum. But by casting them in dramatic form, with undeniably ‘real’ physical characters, and tapping into all the energy and dynamism created by real dialogue and physical activity onstage (there’s a surprising amount of running about, falling over, whipping, dancing and so on in the play), created a completely new thing – a devastatingly brilliant, funny, terrifying, and linguistically powerful, varied and haunting work of art.

Godot may no longer have the impact it once had because social conditions and beliefs have changed so much. But it is still a work of genius.

VLADIMIR: That passed the time.

Credit

En Attendant Godot by Samuel Beckett was published in French in 1953. The English translation by Beckett himself was published in 1958. Page references are to the 1988 Faber paperback edition.

Related links

Samuel Beckett’s works

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

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

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by Simon on November 18, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on November 18, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/11/18/waiting-for-godot-samuel-beckett/

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