All posts tagged Caliban

Oscar Wilde’s anti-English attitudes

Oscar Wilde was Irish through and through, born of Irish parents, raised and educated in Dublin. His father was Ireland’s pre-eminent eye and ear surgeon and his mother was a fiery Irish nationalist who wrote poems about an independent Ireland under the nom-de-plume of Speranza or ‘Hope’. (In De Profundis Wilde writes that his mother ‘intellectually ranks with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and historically with Madame Roland’, DP p.224). Wilde was raised in an atmosphere sympathetic to anti-British rebels and revolutionaries.

So although he moved to England and, after some struggle, established himself as a writer in London’s competitive literary world, and although he invoked and catered to the English upper classes in all his entertainments, he was consistently, sometimes astonishingly rude about the English, sometimes straightforwardly insulting.

I searched his works for quotes mentioning ‘England’, ‘English’, ‘British’ and ‘this country’ to build up a collage of his opinions.

The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891)

English philistinism:

 …the stupidity and hypocrisy and Philistinism of the English…

…the vulgar theatre-going public of English men and women…

English law:

So completely has man’s personality been absorbed by his possessions that the English law has always treated offences against a man’s property with far more severity than offences against his person…

When private property is abolished there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to exist. Of course, all crimes are not crimes against property, though such are the crimes that the English law, valuing what a man has more than what a man is, punishes with the harshest and most horrible severity…

English charity:

In the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good…

The arts in England:

In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone. In the case of the novel and the drama, arts in which the public do take an interest, the result of the exercise of popular authority has been absolutely ridiculous. No country produces such badly-written fiction, such tedious, common work in the novel form, such silly, vulgar plays as England.

And a really sustained broadside against the stupidity and vulgarity of the English public, he turns to their attitudes to ‘the classics:

This acceptance of the classics does a great deal of harm. The uncritical admiration of the Bible and Shakespeare in England is an instance of what I mean. With regard to the Bible, considerations of ecclesiastical authority enter into the matter, so that I need not dwell upon the point. But in the case of Shakespeare it is quite obvious that the public really see neither the beauties nor the defects of his plays. If they saw the beauties, they would not object to the development of the drama; and if they saw the defects, they would not object to the development of the drama either. The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist. A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry, and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions – one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this: When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. The former expression has reference to style; the latter to subject-matter. But they probably use the words very vaguely, as an ordinary mob will use ready-made paving-stones. There is not a single real poet or prose-writer of this century, for instance, on whom the British public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality, and these diplomas practically take the place, with us, of what in France, is the formal recognition of an Academy of Letters, and fortunately make the establishment of such an institution quite unnecessary in England.

You can see how he engineers a position from which he can regard the accusations of ‘immorality’ routinely made against his work, with pride.

The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself. But I can fancy that if an artist produced a work of art in England that immediately on its appearance was recognised by the public, through their medium, which is the public press, as a work that was quite intelligible and highly moral, he would begin to seriously question whether in its creation he had really been himself at all, and consequently whether the work was not quite unworthy of him, and either of a thoroughly second-rate order, or of no artistic value whatsoever.

Therefore:

On the whole, an artist in England gains something by being attacked. His individuality is intensified. He becomes more completely himself. Of course, the attacks are very gross, very impertinent, and very contemptible. But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or style from the suburban intellect. Vulgarity and stupidity are two very vivid facts in modern life. One regrets them, naturally. But there they are.

And the attempt to be genuinely, unselfishly sympathetic is particularly difficult in that particularly selfish, unsympathetic nation, England:

In the modern stress of competition and struggle for place, such sympathy is naturally rare, and is also very much stifled by the immoral ideal of uniformity of type and conformity to rule which is so prevalent everywhere, and is perhaps most obnoxious in England.

Which explains why her greatest artists had to flee:

Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction. Byron’s personality, for instance, was terribly wasted in its battle with the stupidity, and hypocrisy, and Philistinism of the English. Such battles do not always intensify strength: they often exaggerate weakness. Byron was never able to give us what he might have given us. Shelley escaped better. Like Byron, he got out of England as soon as possible. But he was not so well known. If the English had had any idea of what a great poet he really was, they would have fallen on him with tooth and nail, and made his life as unbearable to him as they possibly could. But he was not a remarkable figure in society, and consequently he escaped, to a certain degree. Still, even in Shelley the note of rebellion is sometimes too strong. The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.

The Critic as Artist (1891)

I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering; which, however, is, no doubt, the true explanation of their popularity, as the English public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.

ERNEST: I have a foolish habit of reading periodicals, and it seems to me that most modern criticism is perfectly valueless.
GILBERT: So is most modern creative work also. Mediocrity weighing mediocrity in the balance, and incompetence applauding its brother — that is the spectacle which the artistic activity of England affords us from time to time.

There is no country in the world so much in need of unpractical people as this country of ours. With us, Thought is degraded by its constant association with practice. Who that moves in the stress and turmoil of actual existence, noisy politician, or brawling social reformer, or poor narrow-minded priest blinded by the sufferings of that unimportant section of the community among whom he has cast his lot, can seriously claim to be able to form a disinterested intellectual judgment about any one thing?

England will never be civilised till she has added Utopia to her dominions.

The real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete armaments or unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts, but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual.

I need hardly say, Ernest, how far we in England have fallen short of this ideal, and I can imagine the smile that would illuminate the glossy face of the Philistine if one ventured to suggest to him that the true aim of education was the love of beauty, and that the methods by which education should work were the development of temperament, the cultivation of taste, and the creation of the critical spirit.

England has done one thing; it has invented and established Public Opinion, which is an attempt to organise the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force. But Wisdom has always been hidden from it. Considered as an instrument of thought, the English mind is coarse and undeveloped. The only thing that can purify it is the growth of the critical instinct.

How little we have of this temper in England, and how much we need it! The English mind is always in a rage. The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians. It was reserved for a man of science to show us the supreme example of that ‘sweet reasonableness’ of which Arnold spoke so wisely, and, alas! to so little effect. The author of the Origin of Species had, at any rate, the philosophic temper. If one contemplates the ordinary pulpits and platforms of England, one can but feel the contempt of Julian, or the indifference of Montaigne. We are dominated by the fanatic, whose worst vice is his sincerity. Anything approaching to the free play of the mind is practically unknown amongst us. People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful, but the stupid, who are our shame. There is no sin except stupidity.

The Decay of Lying (1891)

Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity. I only hope we shall be able to keep this great historic bulwark of our happiness for many years to come.

Robert Elsmere is of course a masterpiece — a masterpiece of the genre ennuyeux, the one form of literature that the English people seem to thoroughly enjoy. A thoughtful young friend of ours once told us that it reminded him of the sort of conversation that goes on at a meat tea in the house of a serious non-comformist family, and we can quite believe it. Indeed it is only in England that such a book could be produced. England is the home of lost ideas.

In the English Church a man succeeds, not through his capacity for belief but through his capacity for disbelief. Ours is the only Church where the sceptic stands at the altar, and where St. Thomas is regarded as the ideal apostle. Many a worthy clergyman, who passes his life in admirable works of kindly charity, lives and dies unnoticed and unknown; but it is sufficient for some shallow uneducated passman out of either University to get up in his pulpit and express his doubts about Noah’s ark, or Balaam’s ass, or Jonah and the whale, for half of London to flock to hear him, and to sit open-mouthed in rapt admiration at his superb intellect. The growth of common sense in the English Church is a thing very much to be regretted. It is really a degrading concession to a low form of realism.

The dreams of the great middle classes of this country, as recorded in Mr Myers’s two bulky volumes on the subject and in the Transactions of the Psychical Society, are the most depressing things that I have ever read. There is not even a fine nightmare among them. They are commonplace, sordid and tedious.

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

Of Lord Henry’s uncle, Lord Fermor:

On succeeding…to the title [he] had set himself to the serious study of the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing. He had two large town houses, but preferred to live in chambers as it was less trouble, and took most of his meals at his club. He paid some attention to the management of his collieries in the Midland counties, excusing himself for this taint of industry on the ground that the one advantage of having coal was that it enabled a gentleman to afford the decency of burning wood on his own hearth. In politics he was a Tory, except when the Tories were in office, during which period he roundly abused them for being a pack of Radicals. He was a hero to his valet, who bullied him, and a terror to most of his relations, whom he bullied in turn. Only England could have produced him, and he always said that the country was going to the dogs

‘There is no literary public in England for anything except newspapers, primers, and encyclopaedias. Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature.’

LORD HENRY: ‘If one puts forward an idea to a true Englishman — always a rash thing to do — he never dreams of considering whether the idea is right or wrong. The only thing he considers of any importance is whether one believes it oneself. Now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.’

DORIAN: ‘I know how people chatter in England. The middle classes air their moral prejudices over their gross dinner-tables, and whisper about what they call the profligacies of their betters in order to try and pretend that they are in smart society and on intimate terms with the people they slander. In this country, it is enough for a man to have distinction and brains for every common tongue to wag against him. And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.’

BASIL: ‘England is bad enough I know, and English society is all wrong.’

LORD HENRY: ‘Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues. You, as a good Tory, must not underrate them. Beer, the Bible, and the seven deadly virtues have made our England what she is.’

Mr. Chapman began to talk in a loud voice about the situation in the House of Commons. He guffawed at his adversaries. The word doctrinaire — word full of terror to the British mind — reappeared from time to time between his explosions. An alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory. He hoisted the Union Jack on the pinnacles of thought. The inherited stupidity of the race — sound English common sense he jovially termed it — was shown to be the proper bulwark for society.

‘The inherited stupidity of the race’. Did Wilde actually hate the English?

Lady Alice Chapman, his hostess’s daughter, a dowdy dull girl, with one of those characteristic British faces that, once seen, are never remembered; and her husband, a red-cheeked, white-whiskered creature who, like so many of his class, was under the impression that inordinate joviality can atone for an entire lack of ideas.

Some of this is just wit and banter, but still…

‘You don’t like your country, then?’ she asked.
‘I live in it.’
‘That you may censure it the better.’
‘Would you have me take the verdict of Europe on it?’ he inquired.
‘What do they say of us?’
‘That Tartuffe has emigrated to England and opened a shop.’
‘Is that yours, Harry?’
‘I give it to you.’
‘I could not use it. It is too true.’
‘You need not be afraid. Our countrymen never recognize a description.’
‘They are practical.’
‘They are more cunning than practical. When they make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy.’
‘Still, we have done great things.’
‘Great things have been thrust on us.’
‘We have carried their burden.’
‘Only as far as the Stock Exchange.’
She shook her head. ‘I believe in the race,’ she cried.
‘It represents the survival of the pushing.’

Obviously the word ‘burden’ rings bells for anyone familiar with Kipling’s 1899 poem, The White Man’s Burden, and is a kind of pre-emptive mockery of it.

‘My dear boy, they have only been talking about it [Basil Hallward’s mysterious disappearance] for six weeks, and the British public are really not equal to the mental strain of having more than one topic every three months.’

‘By the way, what has become of that wonderful portrait he did of you?…Oh! I remember your telling me years ago that you had sent it down to Selby, and that it had got mislaid or stolen on the way…What a pity! it was really a masterpiece. I remember I wanted to buy it…It belonged to Basil’s best period. Since then, his work was that curious mixture of bad painting and good intentions that always entitles a man to be called a representative British artist.’

De Profundis

(Page references are to the 1979 Oxford University Press paperback edition of The Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde edited by Rupert Hart-Davis.)

Writing about Jesus, Wilde says:

His chief war was against the Philistines. That is the war every child of light has to wage. Philistinism was the note of the age and community in which he lived. In their heavy inaccessibility to ideas, their dull respectability, their tedious orthodoxy, their worship of vulgar success, their entire preoccupation with the gross materialistic side of life, and their ridiculous estimate of themselves and their importance, the Jews of Jerusalem in Christ’s day were the exact counterpart of the British Philistine of our own.

Christ mocked at the ‘whited sepulchre’ of respectability, and fixed that phrase for ever. He treated worldly success as a thing absolutely to be despised. He saw nothing in it at all. He looked on wealth as an encumbrance to a man. He would not hear of life being sacrificed to any system of thought or morals. He pointed out that forms and ceremonies were made for man, not man for forms and ceremonies. He took sabbatarianism as a type of the things that should be set at nought. The cold philanthropies, the ostentatious public charities, the tedious formalisms so dear to the middle-class mind, he exposed with utter and relentless scorn…

In a completely different vein, Wilde execrates Lord Alfred Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, and his motives for bringing the court case against Wilde, namely to get his name in the papers.

To pose as a champion of purity, as it is termed, is, in the present condition of the British public, the surest way of becoming for the nonce a heroic figure. Of this public I said in one of my plays that if it is Caliban for one half of the year, it is Tartuffe for the other… (p.226)

And on the same subject:

The fact that your father loathed you and you loathed your father was not a matter of any interest to the English public. Such feelings are very common in English domestic life and should be confined to the place they characterise: the home. (p.232)

No great conclusions to make. Just awe at the sustained animus and occasional real vitriol of Wilde’s attacks which are easy to overlook in the broader contexts of the essays and plays. And helps you understand the widespread support for his prosecution which came from a public he had been bating and insulting for years. On Clapham Junction station, standing chained in prison clothes, the crowd jeered and spat at him. It was an appalling experience but was he really all that surprised?

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Shakespeare and War @ the National Army Museum

A tale of two Henries

In 1944 Laurence Olivier produced, directed and starred in a movie version of Shakespeare’s play ‘Henry V’. Shot in bright primary colours it dealt in bright primary patriotic emotions and 30 years later my Dad and his best friend could remember seeing it in the cinema as 12-year-old kids and being stirred by its patriotic fervour, its stirring invocation of England’s valour and fortitude, at a time when German V rockets were falling on London and the south-east. (A V2 rocket fell on the house next door to my Dad’s, killing the occupants. The one time he mentioned it was the only time I ever saw him cry. Britain needed all the patriotism and determination it could muster.)

Installation view of ‘Shakespeare and War’ at the National Army Museum showing posters, cartoons, photos and programmes from the Second World War including a poster for Olivier’s Henry V

Those ardent schoolboys will have noticed that the film was ‘dedicated to the ‘Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain the spirit of whose ancestors it has been humbly attempted to recapture’ because this appears as a caption at the start of the film, but won’t have known that the production was partly funded by the British government as a form of soft propaganda.

Forty five years later, in 1989, the actor widely seen as inheriting Olivier’s mantle, Kenneth Branagh, directed and starred in a new movie version of ‘Henry V’. Much was made of the fact that, instead of stylised sunny sets, the play went for a darker, grittier look, most notably in the battle of Agincourt scenes, filmed on a lovely sunny day in the Olivier version, but in a downpour of rain in the Branagh, which turns the battlefield into a quagmire, spattering all the characters with mud and also gore from the countless bodies which have been hacked and stabbed. Critics weren’t slow to point out that it was made in the aftermath of the Falklands War and so carried a strong message against war and warmongering.

Poster for the original 1984 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Henry V directed by Adrian Noble and starring Kenneth Branagh, as featured in ‘Shakespeare and War’ at the National Army Museum

The same play, the same author, the same plot, the same characters, the same stage directions and the same words – and yet supporting two very different productions, reflecting very different societies, mindsets and values.

These are just two examples of the way Shakespeare’s plays about war – the causes of war, the preparations for war, the experience of war, wartime emotions from terror to exhilaration – and the greatly varying opinions of his many different characters about war and warfare, have been quoted, adapted, distorted, illustrated and recycled, used both to support and attack Britain’s wars, in the 400 years since his death.

Shakespeare and War

The National Army Museum in Chelsea is currently holding a FREE exhibition titled ‘Shakespeare and War’ which sets out to review the huge history of the national playwright’s role in Britain’s many wars and conflicts and how his words, stories, characters and scenes have been used in widely different times and situations.

The exhibition sets out to document how the plays, characters and speeches have been excerpted and exploited propagandists, governments, commentators, satirists and anti-war activists, soldiers and civilians – during the turbulent 400 years since Shakespeare’s death, in 1616. As the curators put it:

The plays have been used to rally the nation at times of crisis and to reflect on the human cost of conflict. But they have also been used to critique war and to consider the more challenging aspects of the military experience. They have inspired soldiers and civilians alike, helping people face adversity on the battlefield and at home.

After Shakespeare

Thus the exhibition starts after Shakespeare’s death. There’s none of the usual fol-de-rol about his biography or the Globe Theatre or the parabola of his career, just the blunt facts that he was a very successful actor-dramatist-manager, who died in 1616, before the British Army even existed.

Instead we are thrown straight into the first major conflict which occurred after his lifetime, the civil war or wars of three kingdoms which broke out 23 years after his death, in 1639, and lasted until Cromwell’s pacification of Scotland in 1653.

The exhibition is divided into six broad historical sections, each of which is introduced by a wall label and then features all sorts of bric-a-brac from the period in question – broadsheets, posters, cartoons, pamphlets which cite or reference, quote or parody scenes, characters or speeches from the plays to suit the purpose of polemicists and propagandists of the moment, paintings or photos of Shakespearian actors or patrons, posters for productions through the ages, and then – in the modern era – recordings of radio and TV productions and so on. At the most basic level, it’s a curiosity shop of historical Shakespeariana.

1. Royal Shakespeare: The Civil War and Beyond

During the English Civil War Shakespeare was often associated with the monarchy. While in prison awaiting trial, King Charles I read Shakespeare’s (Second) Folio (the First and Second Folios were the first attempts to publish all Shakespeare’s works in one volume). The King made notes on its pages and the exhibition has his copy on show. This did not go unnoticed by the great poet and Puritan propagandist, John Milton, who is represented here by a first edition of his pamphlet, Eikonoklastes.

Installation view of the civil war part of ‘Shakespeare and War’, showing, on the left, engravings of Charles I (above) and Cromwell (below) along with Charles’s copy of the Second Folio beneath an English mortuary sword (photo by the author)

This little collocation of objects overflows with meanings. Eikonoklastes was written and published late in 1649 to justify the execution of King Charles which took place on 30 January 1649. It was a point-by-point rebuttal of a pamphlet titled Eikon Basilike, a Royalist propaganda work, which purported to be a spiritual autobiography of the saintly king. The Basilike set Charles up as the type of a perfect enlightened monarch who ruled by the Divine Right of Kings and through the ancient constitution. Milton refuted all these points and more, claiming that Charles’s rule had degenerated to a tyranny over a people who could only be free by executing him and abolishing the monarchy altogether.

Where does Shakespeare come in all this? Well, he was part of the culture wars between the two sides. Theatre was encouraged and sponsored by the King, the Court and aristocrats. Shakespeare’s younger contemporary, Ben Jonson, ended up writing masques – elaborate ritualistic performances, accompanied by music – for the King and Court, which reinforced the ideology of royalty and monarchical rule and in some of which the king himself took part.

In the eyes of radical Puritans all this was blasphemy. Representing people on stage came close to breaking the commandment about not worshipping images. Plays diverted people’s minds away from the only thing they should be contemplating, the glory of God. Playhouses were notorious sites of crime and prostitution. Shakespeare’s plays, even the sternest tragedies, are littered with outrageously rude puns and euphemisms, the kind of thing Parliamentary Puritans had in mind when they accused the theatre of staging ‘spectacles of pleasure, too commonly expressing lascivious mirth and levity.’

For all these reasons and more the Puritans protested against the theatre in the years leading up to the war, and this explains why, when Parliament took control of the capital in September 1642, they promptly shut down all the playhouses. Which explains why there’s an engraving of Cromwell in this exhibition showing him wearing a suit of armour above a pile of discarded theatrical bric-a-brac, such as masks and disguises. For 18 long years the theatres were dark. Shakespeare’s Globe was torn down in 1644 and turned into ‘tenements’.

The Restoration

In 1660 the monarchy was restored and Charles II assumed the Crown. His 25-year reign was troubled by political and religious issues along the old civil war schism, at its most fundamental the clash between devotees of the Protestant cause and Charles’s Court which became tainted with accusations of Catholic sympathy, especially after he married the Catholic princess Catherine of Braganza in 1662.

Like his father Charles was a great patron of the arts, including theatre, and his rule saw the flourishing of the movement referred to as Restoration Comedy. The theatre once again became associated with all the vices of Londoners at play, and this, like the theatre of his father, became the target of religious criticism. The ongoing schism between Catholic-leaning court and Protestant nobles came to a head during the three-year reign of Charles’s brother, James II, who with typical Stuart arrogance, not only took a Catholic wife but made it clear that the new infant son she bore him would be raised a Catholic. The Protestant aristocracy rebelled and overthrew him in what their propagandists named The Glorious Revolution, inviting the Protestant Prince of Orange (in modern Holland) to come and be our king.

The curators skimp a bit on this period, displaying just one work, a copy of a book by the playwright John Crowne adapting Henry VI parts 2 and 3 and titled ‘Misery of Civil War’.

Shakespeare’s history plays

The thing is, Shakespeare’s history plays amount to a sustained investigation of the nature of authority and ‘good’ rule. All of them are named after the English king they focus on and ask questions like, What makes a good king? What makes a bad king? Are nobles, or ‘the people’, ever justified in overthrowing a king? If two noble houses fight for the crown, what are ordinary people to do? Follow their conscience, try to avoid the conflict, or fight for their local lord and master? Is there such a thing as a ‘just’ war in which case, how do you define one?

Questions like these echo throughout the obvious plays i.e. the ones about English history, but are also central to the Roman plays and three of the four great tragedies.

The history plays are usually divided into three groups:

  • the series depicting the Wars of the Roses, being: Henry VI parts 1, 2 and 3, and Richard III (4 plays)
  • the second tetralogy – including Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, and Henry V
  • the standalone plays King John, Edward III and Henry VIII

The Roman plays which discuss the nature of authority and leadership focus on Julius Caesar and its sequel, Antony and Cleopatra. Both cover wars and include battle scenes.

The tragedies all feature war, in different ways. Macbeth is about a successful soldier and includes actual battle scenes. King Lear and Hamlet feature the invasion of their respective countries (England by the French and Denmark by the Swedes) but no actual fighting. And Othello is all about a highly successful mercenary general, which features no battles but is drenched in reminiscences of fighting and the rhetoric of battle.

What I’m trying to convey is that these 17 or so plays are rarely about war as such, but but are far more about the nature of power and authority and what happens when authority collapses.

The eight classic history plays are about the collapse of authority in one country and civil war among the English. The two Roman plays are the same: in both the Romans aren’t fighting any external enemy, but among themselves. Similarly, the three tragedies (excluding Othello) are about the collapse of royal authority in one country – the French only invade England in Lear and the Swedes invade Denmark in Hamlet once the native rulers have made a complete horlicks of trying to rule themselves.

And again, although the English come to the aid of the rightful heir to the throne at the end of Macbeth, they only have to do so because, yet again, the ruling class of the country in question (this time Scotland) have made a total mess of ruling themselves, as a result of all the murders Macbeth finds himself voodooed into committing.

Thus, the seventeen or so plays about history are almost entirely about the collapse of political authority in one country leading to civil war. The fifty years from the collapse of Charles I’s power in the 1630s through to the Glorious Revolution in 1688 are, therefore, the most relevant or applicable to Shakespeare’s concerns. It is, therefore, strange and intriguing that contemporaries, apparently, according to this exhibition, made so little application of the huge amount Shakespeare wrote on this subject to the one era in the past 400 years which most suited it.

This little survey of Shakespeare’s history plays also explains something else. Henry V is the only one in which is not about a civil war. Henry V is the only one in which we are not fighting among ourselves, but go abroad and fight somebody else. This explains why Henry V crops up in this exhibition as the spearhead for patriotic fervour more times than the ten other history plays put together – because once we’d sorted out our own political problems via the civil wars and rebellions of the seventeenth century, we turned our warlike energies against foreigners.

2. Revolutionary Shakespeare: Change and Political Debate

The late eighteenth century saw a major global war (against France) and two revolutions (in America and France) which changed the world. In each of these conflicts Shakespeare’s plays, characters and the Shakespeare brand were used to define, critique and support both a patriotic war and new political movements.

The Seven Years War

By the start of the eighteenth century Shakespeare had become established by numerous writers, critics and commentators as a national icon. The exhibition skips over the wars of the early 18th century, in Europe and India:

  • War of the Spanish Succession 1701 to 1714
  • Great Northern War 1717 to 1720
  • War of the Austrian Succession 1740
  • Carnatic Wars 1744 to 1763

Instead it jumps to the Seven Years’ War (1756 to 1763), the war against France which saw British victories on the Continent, in India, in the Caribbean and North America. The exhibition includes a number of interesting mementoes from the war.

David Garrick, the leading figure in London theatre by the mid-century, wrote a Dialogue to preface a 1756 production of The Tempest, in which two characters debate the rights and wrongs of the new war. It reminds us that for hundreds of years actors, managers and playwrights felt perfectly free to preface Shakespeare productions with prologues like this, tailoring the play to the issues of the day, or even cutting and rewriting bits of the plays to reflect current concerns.

In 1768 Edward Capell produced an edition of the plays in which he states what had, by then, become orthodoxy, that the 38 or so plays amount to ‘a part of the kingdom’s riches’. Not only this, but Britain’s standing ‘in the world’ depended on ‘the esteem within which these are held.’

The fact that Shakespeare’s one play which takes a foreign enemy is directed against the French did not escape numerous writers and commentators as Britain embarked on a global struggle against…the French. There’s a playbill for a production of Henry V staged in Covent Garden in 1761 which has two significant aspects. 1) For this occasion, the play was unsubtly subtitled ‘the Conquest of France’ and 2) each of the 23 productions were followed by a lavish recreation of the coronation of King George III which had just taken place (22 September 1761).

If Shakespeare’s association with kingship had been deeply problematic for Milton in the 1640s, long before a century had passed the name of Shakespeare, the Shakespeare brand, had become indissolubly linked to celebration of the solidly Protestant and anti-French monarchy.

The American War of Independence (1775 to 1783)

Following on from, and partly a result of, the Seven Years War, came the American War of Independence. Unsurprisingly, American patriots seeking to break from Britain drew on Shakespeare’s classical histories. Plays like ‘Julius Caesar’ and ‘Coriolanus’ helped support the idea of republican government and liberation from imperial rule.

The two sides (British and American) both staged plays and the curators display playbills from both sides, which use Shakespeare texts to propagandise for their cause. So there’s a playbill for an American production of Julius Caesar which applauds the ‘noble struggles for Liberty by that renowned patriot Marcus Brutus.’

There are rather more relics from the British side and the curators display pictures focusing on New York. This is because early on in the war, the British Army under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Clinton occupied New York City and turned it into a garrison town. Members of the Army staged regular productions of Shakespeare at the newly-renamed Theatre Royal, confirming the by-now well-established link between drama and royalty. the performances were staged ‘with permission’ of Clinton, who was also a patron of the performances. Plays were staged to raise funds for wounded soldiers. The British tended to favour Shakespeare’s monarchical plays, whilst American Patriots used plays with a republican ethos (such as Julius Caesar and Coriolanus) in their satirical prints and posters.

Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Clinton, 1st Regiment of Foot Guards, 1758 (National Army Museum)

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1789 to 1802, 1805 to 1815)

As explained above, Shakespeare’s plays can be used to provide examples of resistance to oppression and corrupt politics and so justify insurrection against corrupt rulers. The French Revolution amounted to a massive ideological upheaval in the thinking of all Europe. In the three years after the initial overthrow of the monarchy in 1789, politicians and intellectuals all across Europe took the sides of either the revolutionary liberators or the rule of monarchy, hierarchy and order. But in 1792 revolutionary France declared war on Austria and Prussia and the conflict became military in nature. Many former sympathisers retracted their support, especially after the situation in Paris descended into The Terror of 1793 to 1794.

The French Revolutionary War lasted from 1792 to 1802, when it was terminated by the Treaty of Amiens. Fighting broke out a year later in what came to be called the Napoleonic Wars which were to last from 1803 to 1815.

During this long period of ideological and military conflict, Shakespeare plays, characters and lines were mobilised to justify both sides of the ideological and military divide. In Britain, politicians, public figures, actors, and the Army drew on the playwright’s characters and speeches to justify their reasons for going to war, and to criticize rebellions against royalty.

This 25-year period also happened to be a golden age of political satire, featuring two of the greatest British caricaturists and cartoonists, James Gillray (1756 to 1815) and Isaac Cruikshank (1764 to 1811). Amid the many visual jokes and references they and many cartoonists and commentators like them used to pillory the politics of the day, Shakespearian references loomed large.

So the exhibition has some excellent cartoons by both men, which invoke Shakespearian references for the purposes of mockery and exaggeration. This print by Cruikshank uses The Tempest to praise the patriotic Tory Prime Minister William Pitt and ridicule his chief political opponent, Charles James Fox, an opponent of the British monarchy who was an initial supporter of the French Revolution.

Prospero and Caliban in the Enchanted Island by Isaac Cruikshank (1798)

Smoothly dressed Pitt is depicted as the wonder-working magician Prospero, telling his creature:

Hence! – fetch us fewel and be quick
Thou wert best – shrugst thou malice?
If thou dost unwillingly what I command
I’ll rack thee with old cramps –

While Fox, portrayed as big ugly Caliban, and wearing a tricolour scarf (symbol of the revolution) shrugs with savage disgust, saying:

I must obey! his art is of such power
It would control a Setebos,
And make a vassal of him.

There’s a brilliantly vivid print by Gillray titled ‘A phantasmagoria – conjuring up an armed skeleton’ which depicts contemporary politicians as the three witches from Macbeth. The print criticises the Treaty of Amiens which was widely seen as a capitulation to France. In the picture the witches are replaced by three leading supporters of the treaty, Henry Addington, Lord Hawkesbury and William Wilberforce and their magic spells for peace have, it is implied, reduced Britannia to a skeleton. Note the sack of gold at bottom left implying that these ‘traitors’ were bribed to betray their country and the French cockerel at bottom right, mockingly standing astride a skinned British lion.

‘A Phantasmagoria; — Scene – Conjuring-Up an Armed-Skeleton’ by James Gillray (1803)

The exhibition includes probably Gillray’s most famous image, ‘The Plumb-pudding in danger; – or – State Epicures taking un Petit Souper’. The image depicts British Prime Minister William Pitt and French Emperor Napoleon carving up the world between them. I’ve seen it many times but didn’t realise that the epigraph directly under the title, at top right, is an adapted quote from The Tempest, namely ‘”The great globe itself and all that it inherits” is too small to satisfy such insatiable appetites’.

The Plumb-pudding in danger; – or – State Epicures taking un Petit Souper by James Gillray (1805)

In these cartoons you see something interesting happening. Many of the previous objects (from the Seven Years or American Revolutionary Wars) indicated that Shakespeare was best promulgated via productions of entire plays. Here, in these cartoons, you can see the way that Shakespearian tags and clichés now lend themselves to much more pithy and succinct visual media.

Satirical prints had been around all through the 18th century, in fact they go back to Shakespeare’s day and even earlier. But somehow the Gillray and Cruikshank feel new. They demonstrate how Shakespeare, as well as representing the ‘the kingdom’s riches, according to high-minded editors such as Edward Capell, could also be the source of popular jokes and gags.

From now on, alongside all the stirring patriotic stuff, the exhibition features a strand of often very funny works using Shakespeare for comic purposes.

3. Imperial Shakespeare: The Victorian Army

After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the British Army’s role began to change. Rather than fighting major campaigns on the Continent, it was regularly used to protect and expand Britain’s imperial possessions, to fight Queen Victoria’s ‘small wars‘. But further to what I just mentioned about comedy, my favourite bits from what amounts to the Victorian section of the exhibition, were comic.

It must be said that some of the exhibits in the show seem to bear a pretty slender relationship with its supposed subject, Shakespeare and War. For example, the eighteenth century section has a set of images around the death of General James Wolfe at the 1759 Battle of Quebec which have no direct relation to Shakespeare, don’t quote or cite Shakespeare, seem to have no relationship except that Wolfe’s death was made the subject of ‘patriotic plays’.

Less utterly irrelevant is this entertaining print. In 1823 British aristocrats still carried out duels and this print mocks the practice by having the duellers and their seconds portrayed as monkeys. Apparently the title derives from a quote from ‘The Merchant of Venice’ but it’s a pretty flimsy pretext for including it in an exhibition about Shakespeare and War.

Awful Moments or Monkeys of Honour, colour print by John Lewis Marks after an unknown artist (1823)

More directly relevant if irreverent are the excellent prints taken from a later book, the Military Misreadings of Shakespere by Major Thomas Seccombe. It contains 31 beautifully delineated cartoons of military cockups, clumsiness and pratfalls, each offset by an ironically serious Shakespeare quotation. In this one a beautifully dressed member of the Life Guards has just been thrown by his horse to the accompaniment of a grand quote from Titus Andronicus: ‘That what you cannot, as you would, achieve, you must perforce accomplish as you may’ which thus acquires a completely comic meaning.

‘That what you cannot, as you would, achieve, you must perforce accomplish as you may’ from Military Misreadings of Shakespere (1880)

The Crimean War (1853 to 1856)

It wasn’t all lolz. The great exception to the century of generally small colonial wars which the British Army fought was the Crimean War, the one major conflict we were involved in in the century between the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) and the start of the Great War (1914). This famously highlighted significant problems with the Army’s organization, notably in the famous and futile Charge of the Light Brigade. Newspapers reported on the poor conditions in which soldiers found themselves, leading to demands for improvements and reforms to the Army’s culture and structure.

Only one exhibit relates to this badly managed and bitter war, a watercolour done by the Swedish artist Egron Sellif Lungren which depicts a kind of cinematic reimagining of a production of Henry V (what else?) staged by Charles Kean at the Princess’s Theatre in 1859 i.e. a few years after the war ended. Queen Victoria attended the play and commissioned Lundgren to do a watercolour version of it for her Theatre Album. Of all the scenes in the play Lundgren chose to depict the siege of Honfleur which is not only the setting for Henry’s famous speech ‘Once more unto the breach dear friends’, but will have reminded many people of the long and gruelling British siege of Sebastapol.

Installation view of ‘Shakespeare and War’ at the National Army Museum showing Egron Sellif Lungren’s watercolour plastered across one wall, with Gillray and Cruikshank cartoons on the left

Imperial Shakespeare

Obviously the nineteenth century was the one in which Britain cemented its grasp over the largest land empire the world has ever known, as well as almost total control of the world’s oceans. This is a very big subject indeed and it is not really properly explored. Take just India. Were there no British theatres in India, Shakespeare productions in India? Did the growing Indian middle class every stage Shakespeare productions with Indian casts? Was Shakespeare’s name, plays or quotes never invoked to justify British rule in India? Were there comic or satirical pamphlets or prints using Shakespeare quotes to mock British rule in India? Not in this exhibition, nor anything about the British Army’s involvement in Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East or Far East.

Instead, as I’ve already pointed out, some of the exhibits have only a tenuous or oblique connection to the exhibition topic. For example, a picture caption tells us that amateur theatricals were often staged by regiments and soldiers as peacetime entertainments, which we might well have guessed. And that’s the fairly flimsy pretext for sharing a photo of members of the East Yorkshire regiment staging a production of Hamlet at their barracks in Cheltenham in 1895.

The Cast of Hamlet, Winter Gardens, Cheltenham, 1895 (National Army Museum)

Meanwhile, there’s nothing about the second war of the period which shook British confidence, the Boer War of 1899 to 1902. Were there no Shakespeare productions mounted here in England to raise funds or stir patriotic fervour? Did the besieged populations of Ladysmith, Mafeking or Kimberley put on productions to keep their spirits up? Didn’t domestic commentators or cartoonists use Shakespeare quotes or characters as material? If so, none of it is displayed here.

4. Patriotic Shakespeare: The First World War (1914 to 1918)

During the First World War great service and sacrifice were required of both the Army and the civilian population. As in the last great campaign in Europe a century before, Shakespeare was used in Britain to rally the troops and the country behind a sense of national duty.

As mentioned above, some exhibits are included on pretty flimsy grounds: for example, there’s no real reason to include some of Lord Kitchener’s recruitment posters (Your country needs You) except for the fact that, after Kitchener drowned when the ship he was sailing in hit a German mine (HMS Hampshire, 5 June 1916) the League of the Empire started publishing and presenting special editions of the ‘Complete Works of Shakespeare’ to wounded and disabled soldiers in his name, an edition which quickly became known as ‘the Kitchener Shakespeare’ – but there’s nothing at all about Shakespeare in the famous posters.

‘Lord Kitchener’s Appeal’, recruiting poster, 1914 (National Army Museum)

More tenuous examples include: a sketchbook by a John Henry Jenkins, a front line soldier, which depicted not only trench life but the watercolours of amateur theatricals which the soldiers put on, although Shakespeare is nowhere mentioned; or a 1915 recruitment poster which includes the image of St George and the dragon and so, the curators suggest, might have reminded some viewers of Henry V’s famous call, ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’ Pretty tenuous.

Much more relevant is a book of Shakespeare quotations arranged under themes or headings relevant to the war and distributed to soldiers, ‘Shakespeare in Time of War: Excerpts from the Plays arranged with Topical Allusions’, edited by the artist Francis Colmer and published in 1916.

Another apparently random object is this photo of Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps personnel packing boxes in a factory in 1918. Spot the Shakespeare connection? No, because there isn’t one…

Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps personnel packing boxes in factory, 1918

…until you look at the photo beneath it, which is a photo of Maggie Smale’s all-women production of Henry V, staged in a munitions factory in Leeds which had been operated by the ‘Barnbow Lasses’ during the Great War. Is this to do with feminism? Or pacifism? Or a celebrating of provincial grit? I wasn’t sure.

Still from Maggie Smale’s all-female production of Henry V as featured in ‘Shakespeare and War’ at the National Army Museum. Photo by Mike Oakes

Amateur productions of Shakespeare were mounted across the country, sometimes to raise morale, to entertain wounded soldiers, for the benefit of the public. Three hundred years after his death Shakespeare was not only a well-known brand but possibly the only literary writer a lot of working class people had heard of. As in his own time, he catered for an audience of elite intellectuals, the educated middle classes, and illiterate workers. You can see why Shakespeare productions abounded because he was 1) possibly the only playwright everyone had heard of and 2) safe –unlike more recent troubling playwrights of the previous generation (Shaw, Ibsen etc).

There’s a clip from an official film showing wounded soldiers watching open air production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Scenes like this 1) the British heritage which the soldiers were fighting for 2) to a wider audience demonstrated the care the government was taking of its fighting men. This clip appeared alongside footage of scenes of artillery and war preparation, thus dovetailing Britain’s cultural heritage into the war effort.

in my own life I’ve met plenty of people who don’t give a toss about official culture, art or theatre. You’ve got to wonder how many of the sock and maimed soldiers forced to watch this kind of thing actually enjoyed it or even understood it. Because that’s a thing about Shakespeare – unless you’re pretty familiar with the play beforehand, it’s impossible to get the most out of a theatrical production, in fact it’s often impossible to understand what’s going on and especially difficult to get any of the comedy in his plays.

It’s fascinating to learn about the Shakespeare Hut. In February 1916, to commemorate 300 years since his death, this mock-Tudor retreat was opened on a plot of land in Bloomsbury. The hut was built on a site cleared for a planned Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, which was abandoned because of the war.

The aim was to provide shelter for wounded Australian or New Zealand troops. Over the next two years it would welcome in more than 100,000 soldiers far from their New Zealand homes. Queen Mary visited in 1917, took up her post behind the tea counter, and poured cups for all the men.

The troops were subjected to regular Shakespeare productions, including an all-female Henry V starring Ellen Terry, one of the most famous actors of her day. Hah! So the Maggie Smale production was following in venerable footsteps.

The exhibition features photographs and playlists from the Hut and you can read more and see photos in an interesting Guardian article about it. Interesting to learn that it the site is now occupied by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

One of the most interesting learnings from the exhibition is about the role of theatricals among British prisoners of war held in Germany. The exhibition focuses on the Ruhleben Camp in Germany which housed some 5,000 POWs. Prisoners were allowed to construct a theatre and, for the same tercentenary which prompted the Shakespeare Hut, staged a series of productions, including Twelfth Night and Othello. The exhibition features photos and a programme from a 1915 production of As You Like It.

In a similar spirit, the British Red Cross mounted a Shakespeare Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in 1917. Quite clearly, if you go looking for Shakespeariana during the First World War, you’ll find it.

Installation view of ‘Shakespeare and War’ at the National Army Museum, showing a poster for the Red Cross Shakespeare Exhibition of 1917 (photo by the author)

5. Democratizing Shakespeare: The Second World War

Same goes for the Second war. Once again Shakespeare was trotted out as the exemplar of the culture and values that were under attack from Nazi Germany, that we were fighting to preserve. The motives and means were very similar to the first war – am dram productions across the country to entertain wounded troops or raise money, leading actors of the day giving patriotic productions in London to stir patriotic fervour, footage of productions shot to be show in cinemas and raise morale.

With the new angle of radio. For the first time productions could be broadcast, to a large radio audience which steadily grew throughout the six war years. As part of the government’s attempt to mobilize society to support the war effort, British theatre was sponsored by the state for the first time in its history.

The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) was created to promote and maintain the fine arts and British cultural life. It later became the Arts Council of Great Britain. The Entertainment National Services Association (ENSA) provided for the forces, organising shows and performances by well-known actors, singers, and comedians.

Photo of an ENSA production staged in a London underground station in 1942 (National Army Museum)

Despite the challenges of wartime, both theatre and Shakespeare thrived. Once again, his words helped to frame the experience of conflict both in Britain and across the world. The exhibition features a recording of a radio programme originally broadcast by the BBC Overseas Services on Shakespeare’s birthday on 23 April 1942. It included extracts from ‘As You Like it’, Henry IV part 1 and, of course, Henry V. It was introduced and performed by leading Shakespearean actors Peggy Ashcroft, Robert Donat, Edith Evans and Ralph Richardson. You can listen to it on headphones and marvel at their phenomenally posh plummy English voices.

There’s a section devoted to the Laurence Olivier production of Henry V described at the start of this review.

And once again there’s a section devoted to British prisoners of war staging Shakespeare productions in camps in Germany. The exhibition includes a list of plays staged at Stalag 383 in Hohenfels, which included ‘The Merchant of Venice’.

6. Just Shakespeare: Adapting After 1945

After the Second World War the patriotic tone of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V lingered throughout the 1950s. But the second half of the 1960s saw radical changes in all aspects of art and culture, with a variety of new approaches to all the arts including theatre. This included the anti-war movements triggered by Vietnam, as well as new attitudes to sex and nudity, which now began to appear in Shakespeare productions.

For 200 years the name and plays of Shakespeare had acted as a kind of recruiting sergeant for the British Army and rallying point for the nation in times of real threat (particularly during the Napoleonic, First and Second World Wars). From the late 60s onwards, Shakespeare’s relationship with the state, the Establishment and the Army came under increasing critical scrutiny. Not in every production, but in an increasing number.

Hence Kenneth Branagh’s 1984 RSC production. Unlike earlier productions it shows the execution of French prisoners onstage and then left the bodies and corpses from the Battle of Agincourt at the back of the stage, behind a gauze curtain, for the later, supposedly reconciling scenes between the English king and his French bride-to-be.

The last section of the exhibition, in the central booth of the (fairly small) exhibition space, takes the Branagh production as setting the tone for productions which followed the Falklands War (1982), the Gulf War (1990 to 1991), and the Iraq War (2003 to 2011).

It includes video clips of stage productions including:

  • a 2013 production of ‘Othello’ which depicts the characters in the modern-day Army uniform used during the Iraq War
  • a 2015 production of ‘Othello’ which features graphic scenes of waterboarding Iraqi suspects
  • ‘Days of Significance’, a play by Roy Williams based on ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ which looks at the impact of British troops who fought in the Iraq War

The strong anti-war flavour of these productions and the pretty intense criticism of the British Army and its techniques, could hardly be more unlike the innocent patriotism of the Shakespeare Hut or the brightly colours optimism of Olivier’s Henry V. If we go to war with Russia I wonder if Shakespeare will be trotted out to inspire patriotic spirit as it was 100 and 70 years ago. I doubt it. Shakespeare hasn’t changed, that’s to say the texts remain pretty much what they were 400 years ago. But our understanding of war, gained in the brutal conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, has made any thoughts about the glamour or heroism of war impossible to modern Brits.

Availability bias

This is a fascinating premise for an exhibition and I thoroughly enjoyed working my way through the wealth of objects and their captions. It proves that Shakespeare is like the Bible, so compendious and diverse that you can find words to justify more or less any opinion on any subject (as demonstrated by the opposing sides in the American War of Independence using Shakespeare to bolster their arguments).

However, it throws up an obvious issue which is to do with the availability of objects to display. The exhibition was curated by – and is based on the scholarly books by – two Shakespeare scholars, Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai, namely Wartime Shakespeare: Performing Narratives of Conflict. Just from the synopsis on Amazon you can see how a book-length work like this is free to range over all and any productions it likes because words are easy. On the other hand, an exhibition in a museum is severely limited by the objects it can get its hands on.

In fact, like every exhibition at every gallery or museum, this one is an exercise in the art of the possible. Objects which denote important productions or topics may not be available (or may not even exist) while other topics throw up a glut of barely relevant artefacts.

In addition, it’s difficult and expensive to get objects on loan from other collections whereas it’s cheap and easy to get them from your own storeroom, so all exhibitions in all galleries are biased towards the host institution and its collection.

Plus there’s the common problem with any historical overview which is that objects from three or four hundred years ago are rare whereas, as you get closer to the present day, the number of objects rapidly increases, until you are drowning in a surfeit of stuff.

These imbalances in the real world threaten to unbalance or distort the picture painted by any exhibition, an imbalance which is easily managed in books and articles where issues and ideas can be easily conveyed by text alone.

So, at various points, I couldn’t help feeling that the curators had included some objects more because they were just related to one of the conflicts during the period in question than for their Shakespearian relevance. As mentioned above I couldn’t see any Shakespeare connection to the three or four pictures of General Wolfe and the capture of Quebec except that the event was turned into patriotic plays and prints. To put it another way, some of the links between specific conflicts and Shakespeare were pretty tenuous. I still don’t understand why there was an English mortuary sword in the Civil War section except that maybe the curators felt they just needed a physical object, any object, to go alongside the half dozen books and pamphlets.

All the objects (photos, pamphlets, diaries and whatnot) are interesting, it’s just that I was left scratching my head why some of them were included.

Shakespeare and conflict

There’s another, more scholarly, issue. This, as I touched on earlier, is that taken together, Shakespeare’s dozen or so history plays, plus the relevant Roman plays and the tragedies, build up into a subtle, sophisticated, multifaceted meditation on the themes of power, authority, legitimacy, insurrection, rebellion, revolt and overthrow.

Arguably, to really address the topic which this exhibition sets out to explore, you would need a really sound grasp of how all these issues are dramatised and explored in the 20 or so relevant plays, before you even started your review of how they’ve been applied to Britain’s wars and Britain’s Army.

But this, of course, is a massive task – after a lifetime reading Shakespeare I still haven’t read all the history plays and have nothing like a complete grasp of the issues of legitimacy and political power which they raise.

And an exhibition like this has to be practical, finite and manageable. This one achieves what it sets out to do, in a relatively small space, as well as it probably could do. But, in my opinion, the ghost of the larger political, social and cultural issues raised by the plays hover over it, unmentioned and undiscussed.

To take just one aspect of what I’m driving at, many of the characters in the history plays (the ones I’m familiar with) describe and discuss the horror of war, the fear experienced by soldiers, the terror of innocent civilians, the horrific injuries, killing and massacres involved, the fields strewn with bodies, the devastated landscapes and ruined economies. Descriptions of these kinds of things are commonplace in the plays and yet, somehow, hardly occur anywhere in this exhibition.

At some point I realised that this is not an exhibition about Shakespeare and War as about Shakespeare and the British Army. This explains why it’s divided into chronological periods based entirely around conflicts the British Army engaged in right up to the present day, rather than the themes of war encountered in the plays which I have just listed. And this is why, although it’s a very enjoyable trot through British military history, with an emphasis on how Shakespeare’s name, characters and words have been exploited in times of war – it feels, ultimately, despite being packed with shiny objects, intellectually thin.

You can see how an exhibition about Shakespeare and war would actually be something quite different: instead of taking a chronological approach it would take the topics I’ve mentioned several times now – the collapse of authority, civil war, rebellion, interstate war – and then the aspects of war – recruitment, training, fighting, sieges, inspirational rhetoric, the exhilaration of fighting, the horror of wounding, the devastation of the countryside, the mourning of widows – and explore how all of these are described and critiqued in Shakespeare’s multifaceted dramas. It would be something completely different from this exhibition. But then again, maybe what I’ve got in mind would be so wordy and text-heavy that it couldn’t be staged as an exhibition at all.

What this exhibition does, it does very well. It is small but beautifully staged and is FREE.

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Posted by Simon on July 20, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/07/20/shakespeare-and-war-the-national-army-museum/

Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard (1974)

Concrete Island continues the obsession with cars and car crashes which was evident in the experimental texts which made up The Atrocity Exhibition and which then exploded into the fetish pornography of Crash.

It’s a short novel and a lot more restrained than either of its predecessors, but still explores a mind-bending situation and eventually takes us into familiar Ballard psychotic territory.

35-year-old Robert Maitland is a partner in a successful architectural practice in Marylebone. He is married and lives with his wife Catherine and eight-year-old son David somewhere near Richmond. He is, rather inevitably, having an affair with a younger woman at work, Helen Fairfax, and has spent the past few nights with her. This, apart from showing what a rake he is, is important to the plot.

(In the 1960s it seems to have become fashionable to have extra-marital affairs, amid much talk about free love and the death of marriage and women’s liberation, see, for example, the fiction of John Updike, specifically Couples. At some point during the 1970s it just became a rather tiresome tic of bourgeois fiction. And by the 1980s it had become a really hackneyed cliché, the subject of bloated, boring mainstream fiction [see Stanley and the Women or The Russian Girl by Kingsley Amis]. The decline of the ‘affair’ as a token of intellectual adventurousness into a symptom of middle-aged complacency can be tracked in the fiction of J.G. Ballard).

The plot

The novel opens dramatically with a clinical description of a car crash.

Soon after three o’clock on the afternoon of April 22nd 1973, a 35-year-old architect named Robert Maitland was driving down the high-speed exit lane of the Westway interchange in central London. Six hundred yards from the junction with the newly built spur of the M4 motorway, when the Jaguar had already passed the 70 m.p.h. speed limit, a blow-out collapsed the front nearside tyre.

The Jag careers through some wooden barriers lining the road and plunges down an embankment into a large overgrown grassy area.

When he comes round from his daze, Maitland staggers up the loose earth of the embankment, which has recently been covered with fresh soil and hasn’t grown firm with grass yet, to the verge of the motorway and the hard shoulder where he weaves in a daze shouting and waving his arms at passing cars, and nearly hit by several of them.

It is this second accident rather than the crash itself which clinches the situation, because Maitland doesn’t see a sports car hurtling along the flyover towards him until too late, the car swerves and hits one of the wooden barriers which whiplashes brutally against his legs, hurling Maitland back down the earth embankment. It is this, second accident, which seals his fate.

Because when he comes to several hours later, Maitland discovers his thigh and hip are so badly injured that he can barely walk and, when he slowly painfully drags himself back to the earth embankment, he finds it is too loose and soft and friable – and he is now to weak – for him to climb up it. He tries repeatedly but only gets half way up then slips and tumbles back down, eventually giving up the effort.

The island

Maitland’s thigh and hip have been badly damaged by the impact of the wooden barrier. The Jag is among a band of other wrecked and derelict cars in the long grass. Maitland makes a crutch and hobbles around the grassy space and makes a discovery – there is no other way off this patch of abandoned waste land: he is trapped on this ‘island’.

The island is a long thin V shape, with the unclimbable embankment along one side; a sheer concrete wall leading up to another motorway which curves round to join the one he was driving along on the second side; and a tough ten-feet-tall wire mesh fence on the third side. At least I think that’s right. To be honest I found Ballard’s descriptions of the island a bit confusing and sometimes contradictory. Here’s the longest and clearest description:

Shielding his eyes from the sunlight, Maitland saw that he had crashed into a small traffic island, some two hundred yards long and triangular in shape, that lay in the wasteground between three converging motorway routes.

The apex of the island pointed towards the west and the declining sun, whose warm light lay over the distant television studios at White City.

The base was formed by the southbound overpass that swept past seventy feet above the ground. Supported on massive concrete pillars, its six lanes of traffic were sealed from view by the corrugated metal splash-guards installed to protect the vehicles below.

Behind Maitland was the northern wall of the island, the thirty-feet-high embankment of the westbound motorway from which he had crashed.

Facing him, and forming the southern boundary, was the steep embankment of the three-lane feeder road which looped in a north-westerly circuit below the overpass and joined the motorway at the apex of the island. Although no more than a hundred yards away, this freshly grassed slope seemed hidden behind the overheated light of the island, by the wild grass, abandoned cars and builder’s equipment. Traffic moved along the westbound lanes of the feeder road, but the metal crash barriers screened the island from the drivers. The high masts of three route indicators rose from concrete caissons built into the shoulder of the road.

As I read on, I wondered if the story refers to an actual physical location, or is imaginary. Here’s a piece from the Ballardian magazine where writer Mike Bonsall suggests a plausible location for the island, in a long narrow strip of grass running south from the raised roundabout junction of the Westway and the A3220, not far from Latimer Road tube station.

The location and rough shape seem plausible, but every photo of it which Bonsall has taken seems wildly unlike the place Ballard describes. It looks bland and flat and lacks the prison-like walls which Ballard describes. It looks like you could just stroll across the road from Bonsall’s ‘island’. All of which leads to the conclude that Ballard’s ‘concrete island’ is very much an island of the mind.

I read this book some time in the 1980s and retained the impression that it really was a ‘concrete’ island. I had completely forgotten that there’s a lot more to it than that. For a start it’s big enough for him to get lost in. Over the next few days, he discovers that at one end are the ruined walls and foundations of Victorian houses. In the middle are a number of bomb shelters with steps down into them hidden by nettles and long grass. At one point there’s an overgrown graveyard, with references made to the tombstones. And believe it or not there’s the ruins of a small fleapit cinema, with a ticket booth and the shape of the crescent of seats. And somewhere in the centre the array rusting cars which he calls ‘the wreckers’ yard’.

In the description above, Ballard claims it is only 200 yards long, but Maitland’s subsequent adventures make it feel more like a village than the concrete island of the title.

All of this is overgrown by long swaying grass and castles of wild nettles, lush greenery which leads Maitland, as he develops a fever, and becomes dehydrated, to really think of it as an ‘island’.

Fever

Because that’s what happens: fever from his injuries overtakes him. There’s some wine in the boot of the jag but that just dehydrates him more. After a night and a day on the island he is in bad shape and goes steadily downhill from there. He loses weight, he is starving, he begins to hallucinate. The novel charts his descent not only into physical collapse, but this is accompanied by a wonderful description of his mind decaying, starting off lucid and determined to escape, and then charting his slow lapse into drunkenness (when he drinks a bottle of wine in shock), delirium, dehydration. After several days with no food and little to drink except rainwater, he is in serious psychological trouble.

Maitland’s descent is marked by a series of incident:

  • initial accident at 3pm
  • hit by sports car and crash barrier about 4pm
  • wakes at 1.45 having lain unconscious at the bottom of the embankment, trousers and shirt ripped
  • drinks a bottle of wine to damp the pain
  • wakes at 8am the next morning feeling terrible
  • makes a crutch from the rusted exhaust of one of the other derelict cars
  • reflects that he is marooned like Robinson Crusoe
  • dehydrated, he rips open the windscreen wiper reservoir of the Jag and greedily drinks the water
  • explores the perimeter of the island, realising he’ll never cut through or climb the high wire fence
  • back at the Jag he tries to clean his grazed hands and wounded hip an legs with cologne and rags
  • there’s a brief rainstorm and he positions the bonnet of one of the ruined cars to create a funnel channeling rainwater so he can drink it
  • strips off ruined clothes and changes into dress shirt he keeps in the boot and drinks another bottle of wine
  • fever: time passes; he dozes, comes round
  • dusk falls; a motorist chucks a cigarette from a car whizzing along the motorway and it occurs to Maitland to set the car alight
  • he does this, creating a leak in the fuel tank and using the cigarette lighter to start it – but the blaze is not like the movies, surprisingly brief and only succeeds in gutting his car
  • 10pm on the second day and a passing motorist chucks a half eaten chicken sandwich out his window which tumbles down the embankment; ravenous, Maitland chomps it down, dirt and all; he sleeps till dawn
  • dawn of the second day: Maitland vomits and is feverish; he sees an old man walking a motorbike along the hard shoulder and instead of shouting to him, becomes incoherently terrified that it is a horrific implement of torture and the old man is coming to chain him to it, so he hides
  • he stumbles across to the supporting wall of the other flyover, the one curving into the one he crashed off, and uses the charcoal off the burnt spark plugs to try and write a message big enough for passing motorists to see: HELP INJURED DRIVE CALL POLICE
  • he realises there’s a sheet of greasy newspaper nearby and excitedly reaches for it; sure enough it has a few cold soggy chips attached to it which he wolfs down
  • it starts to rain and he sets off hobbling with the use of the exhaust pipe-crutch back to the Jag but gets lost and finds amid the nettles, an entrance to some kind of mouldy basement where he holes up during the shower; when he emerges he sees the big Help message he’s written on the motorway wall has been erased

And so it goes on in the same vein, with Maitland struggling to even walk, struggling to keep a sense of purpose, experiencing light-headedness due to hunger, dehydration and the recurrent fevers caused by the severe injuries to his hip and thigh, which sweep over him, making him vomit, pass out, come to with no memory of where he is and, increasingly, who he is.

Jane and Proctor

On the third day Maitland discovers the island already has two inhabitants, the fifty-year-old mental case, Proctor:

The man was about fifty years old, plainly a mental defective of some kind, his low forehead blunted by a lifetime of uncertainty. His puckered face had the expression of a puzzled child, as if whatever limited intelligence he had been born with had never developed beyond his adolescence. All the stresses of a hard life had combined to produce this aged defective, knocked about by a race of unkind and indifferent adults but still clinging to his innocent faith in a simple world. Ridges of silver scar tissue marked his cheeks and eye-brows, almost joining across the depressed bridge of his nose, a blob of amorphous cartilage that needed endless attention. He wiped it with his strong hand, examining the phlegm in the paraffin light. Though clumsy, his body still had a certain power and athletic poise. As he swayed from side to side on his small feet Maitland saw that he moved with the marred grace of an acrobat or punch-drunk sparring partner who had gone down the hard way.

And a young woman with red hair wearing a combat jacket, Jane Sheppard.

Lit by the paraffin lamp behind her, her red hair glowed like a wild sun in the shabby room, shafts of light cutting through the home-set waves that rose above her high forehead.She was about twenty, with an angular, sharp-witted face and strong jaw. She was good-looking in an almost wilfully tatty way.

He blunders into a fight with Proctor and Jane rescues him. Maitland recovers consciousness on her bed in the bunker she’s sort of decorated in the basement of the derelict cinema. It’s lined with posters of Charlie Manson and Black Power. She’s a drop-out from a troubled middle-class family. She is spiky but vulnerable. After a few days we realise she is a hooker and puts on shiny clothes and stilletos to go get business. She returns with groceries from a local shop. Maitland realises she knows a way out and yet… by this stage… he is in such a strange zone that he doesn’t ask her… not just yet, anyway… sometime…. not yet.

The rest of this very short novel charts the slowly changing relationships between these three, as they play off one another. By about page 100 of the 126-page-long version I have Maitland realises that he can dominate them both, and sets about managing Proctor with a combination of ‘presents from his car, and strategic cuffs and blows.

Maitland realises that Proctor actually wants to be mastered and controlled, he offers up his scar for whipping, it confirms his self-image as a humiliated loser. In what I suppose was a shocking scene for 1974 Maitland asserts his authority when Proctor is lying drunk on the grass after drinking one of Maitland’s last bottles of wine, by undoing his flies and urinating all over the mental defective. From now on, he is boss.

Jane watches him do it, and the gesture asserts control over her, too, although only intermittent, and subject to her own unpredictable mood swings.

And reflecting on his urge to humiliate both of these outcasts, Maitland can’t help reflecting that he, too, is not the great white success he likes to think. His marriage with Catherine was on the rocks, he wasn’t happy in his work. Is Jane right when she suggests that his arrival on the island wasn’t an accident: that at some deep unconscious level, Maitland wanted to crash?

‘Oh, come on… why don’t you straighten your life out? You’ve got a hundred times more hang-ups. Your wife, this woman doctor – you were on an island long, before you crashed here.’

The novel moves quickly towards a harsh climax. A repair truck parks on the hard shoulder of the overpass with ropes and a workman’s cradle hanging down. Proctor climbs up in it to impress Maitland with his acrobatic abilities. But the truck pulls off unexpectedly and Proctor becomes entangled in the ropes and is swept backwards, helplessly, into a vast concrete stanchion where his body is smashed and he is garrotted, the ropes snapping and dropping his body to the ground as the truck carries on regardless.

Cut to Jane and Maitland by Proctor’s broken body. Sobered, Jane announces she is leaving the island. She says she’ll phone for help, she’ll get the police and an ambulance, hey can be there in half an hour. But Maitland insists she doesn’t, insists she leave him be. He wants to leave, ‘but in his own way’, when he’s ready, and not before.

Janes packs a shabby suitcase and heaves it up the embankment – she has no secret way out, she just has two functioning legs, unlike the cripple Maitland. After she’s gone he is happy. He spends hours of back-breaking labour digging a grave for Proctor in the old cemetery, drags him over to it and buries him.

Now the island is finally his without any interference. He’ll leave. Of course, he’ll leave. When he’s good and ready. In his own time…

Style

Losing rationality

Only as Maitland began his mental collapse, did I realise the significance of the opening lines. I had liked them because I like factual accuracy…

Soon after three o’clock on the afternoon of April 22nd 1973, a 35-year-old architect named Robert Maitland was driving down the high-speed exit lane of the Westway interchange in central London.

But then I realised Ballard is doing something canny: the book opens with the height of factual, police evidence-level pedantic precision. Clarity and lucidity and accuracy. Because these are the very things which the protagonist proceeds to slowly loses as he descends into into fever dreams and increasingly weird psychic states.

The grass

There’s an appealing thread running through the book, which is the importance of the grass. As Maitland goes out of his mind he begins to think the long grass on the island is talking to him, encouraging him, urging him on, and he starts talking back to the grass, sharing his plans with it.

The grass lashed at his feet, as if angry that Maitland still wished to leave its green embrace. Laughing at the grass, Maitland patted it reassuringly with his free hand as he hobbled along, stroking the seething stems that caressed his waist.

I’m not being too cute when I say that the grass was my favourite character in the book, preferable to the Caliban-clumsiness of Proctor, and to the unhappy mood changes of neurotic Jane who – alas and alack – inevitably eventually gets her kit off and has sex with Maitland on her smelly mattress in the basement of the ruined cinema. That eventuality had a thumping inevitability, whereas the character of the grass, that’s not something you read every day.

The grass seethed and whirled around him, as if sections of this wilderness were speaking to each other… The grass flashed with an electric light, encircling his thighs and calves. The wet leaves wound across his skin, as if reluctant to release him…

No point in going back to the car, he told himself.
The grass seethed around him in the light wind, speaking its agreement.
‘Explore the island now – drink the wine later.’
The grass rustled excitedly, parting in circular waves, beckoning him into its spirals.

Yes, you can make a strong case for the grass being the most sympathetic character in the book.

Melodrama

Having just read the short story collection Vermilion Sands my head was reverberating from Ballard’s extravagant over-use of Edgar Allen Poe-level over-the-top Gothic terminology – everything in Vermilion Sands is a nightmare, a living hell, demented and insane.

Regrettably, a little of that hysterical tones seeps into what is, for the most part, the much sober style of the story.

  • He lurched into the roadway again, blocking the outer lane and waving his briefcase like a demented race-track official
  • When she came into the room she turned up the lamp and glared down drunkenly at Maitland. Her wild hair flamed around her in the vivid light like a demented sun
  • By some nightmare logic he was convinced that the old man was coming for him,
  • He began to tell the young woman about his crash, eager to fix his nightmare ordeal in someone else’s mind before it vanished

There’s a particularly over-ripe moment when it occurs to Maitland that his plight, marooned in this no-mans’-land has an improbably vast symbolism.

Catherine would be sleeping quietly in her white bedroom, a bar of moonlight across her pale throat. In fact, the whole city was now asleep, part of an immense unconscious Europe, while he himself crawled about on a forgotten traffic island like the nightmare of this slumbering continent.

Pretty over-ripe – although, to be fair, Maitland is feverishly hallucinating at the time

Ballard is capable of thinking things nobody else had ever thought, and often framing it in wonderfully bizarre and inventive purple prose. But at his most flaccid, he is also capable of a kind of second-hand bombast which suddenly makes you sit up and ask yourself: ‘Actually, is this brilliant or… is it over-the-top rubbish?’

Conclusion

It’s a brilliant, vivid and haunting novella.

It feels a long, long way from the trilogy of florid disaster novels in the early 1960s or from the jewelled prose of Vermilion Sands and the more lush and decadent of his many short stories, a long way from the dead astronauts and drained swimming pools of the desert resorts.

It’s West London in 1973 – and yet it is a vivid, a disturbingly super-vivid, picture of how quickly the most successful, articulate, intelligent and rational people in our culture can be reduced by a relatively minor twist of fate to abject squalor and mental collapse.

It feels astringent and modern and is at its most effective when, in prose terms, it is most restrained.

After the next book, High Rise, was published in 1975, it became possible to see the three novels – Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974), High Rise (1975) – closely linked as they are by publication date and subject matter – as a trilogy, and sure enough, they’ve come to be referred to as the ‘urban disaster’ trilogy.

Original covers of Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975)

High-minded critics may well laud Ballard’s avant-garde experimentalism and analyse his post-modern fictional strategies and his prophetic insights into the post-modern condition – but it’s funny to realise that, at the time, his publishers still marketed his books with images of bare boobs and tough guys.

Credit

‘Concrete Island’ by J.G. Ballard was published by Jonathan Cape in 1974. Page references are to the 1985 Triad/Panther Books paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.

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The Festival of Insignificance by Milan Kundera (2014)

The Festival of Insignificance is by far Milan Kundera’s shortest book at just 115 pages. Four men live in Paris, four men of varying ages, pottering round, bumping into each other, in the street, at parties, having thoughts and conversations.

Alain is walking down the street fascinated by the way all the girls these days wear low-slung jeans and crop tops, showing off their navels. Ramon strolls through the Luxembourg Gardens. D’Ardelo visits his doctor with a heavy heart, convinced his symptoms are cancer. The doctor assures him they’re not.

Moments later D’Ardelo bumps into Ramon in the Luxembourg (they use to work in the same institute) and D’Ardelo a) asks Ramon whether he knows someone who can organise a little cocktail party to celebrate his (D’Ardelo’s) birthday and b) deceitfully tells Ramon he has just been diagnosed with cancer. His friend commiserates. As he walks away even D’Ardelo doesn’t understand why he lied.

An hour later Ramon is at Charles’s apartment and asks if he and his partner, an unemployed actor named Caliban, can cater for this cocktail party. Sure. Ramon explains the client with a story designed to show the difference between Brilliance and Insignificance. D’Ardelo is at a party preening like a peacock and spinning jokes, whereas Quaquelique is a discreet, quiet presence. Not silent, just uttering the occasional platitude. Ramon explains how D’Ardelo’s brilliance intimidates the women he talks to, they struggle to rise to his repartee.Whereas it is Quaquelique who leaves with the beautiful woman at the end of the party.

Insignificance trumps brilliance.

Part two – the marionette theatre

Introducing the anecdote Stalin told the Politburo about how, when he was a boy, he came across 24 partridges sitting on the bough of a tree. He had his shotgun with him, but only 12 cartridges. So he shot the first twelve birds, then walked home with the bodies, collected 12 more cartridges, walked back to the tree to find the other 12 partridges sitting there peacefully and shot them too. The Politburo listened in stunned silence. Only after the meeting had ended and they all went to the loo, while Stalin went off to his private room, did the Politburo burst out in guffaws of outraged laughter at Stalin’s outrageous lies.

We know the story because it is told in Khruschev’s memoirs which Charles owns a copy of. On another occasion Charles explains why the Russians renamed Koenigsberg Kaliningrad. It’s because of a Politburo member Kalinin, in fact president of the Supreme Soviet, who had a particularly weak bladder, and Stalin liked to keep waiting or late at meetings until he wet  his pants. Naming a city after this man was the whim of a dictator who felt something like genuine affection for this poor weak man.

Part three – Alain and Charles often think about their mothers

Alain, still thinking about girls’ navels, has a memory of being ten, of his mother paying a rare visit to the family home, of him climbing out of the family swimming pool and going over to where she’s sitting, and of her reaching out and touching  his navel.

There is an unexplained cut to an unnamed woman who drives to a bridge over a river and jumps in, attempting to drown. She hears a man’s voice, a man dives in and swims out to rescue her. Vengefully she drags the man down under the surface, lying athwart his body till he is still, then swimming up to the surface, walking wetfoot to her car, driving off…

On his way to his apartment, Alain is jostled by a brisk young woman who calls him an idiot. He phones Charles who tells him about his sick mother. Alain for some reason imagines her as an angel, and this leads to a brief consideration of angels, and a mild comparison of Alain, who’s mother left him when he was a baby, and Charles’s mother, who he’s known all his life and is now old and frail and a burden.

Part four – They are all in search of a good mood

Caliban the unemployed actor decided that, if he was going to work as a waiter for Charles, it would be fun to act a role, and so pretends to be from Pakistan. They get dressed up in waiter costume and drive to Madame D’Ardelo’s, unpack food and drink, get it ready to be presented etc. There’s a Portuguese waitress there (who hates speaking French) and, somehow, she gets into speaking to him in Portuguese while he replies to her in (largely made-up) Pakistani. Despite talking at complete cross-purposes (as so many Kundera characters do) they sort of fall in love.

Meanwhile, Alain is in his apartment which is decorated with just one photo, of the mother who didn’t want to have him. She told his father to be careful when making love but he came inside her nonetheless (making the modern reader realise this act of love happened before the coil or the pill i.e. in another universe).

She, we now learn, is the young woman who jumped into the river, because she was pregnant and didn’t want it. The drowning of the man is just one of the many fantasies Alain projects onto the mother he never knew. He talks to the photo and, in a mild outbreak of magical realism, she talks back. He reflects that, being gentle and weak, and yet an intruder into his life, he was born to be an Apologiser.

Ramon arrives at the party. He hates these posh people. He’s retired i.e. older than D’Ardelo. He watches an amusing scene in which some grande dame, Madame Franck (whose husband recently died) stuffs a canapé in her face while rudely ignoring the pushy, social-climbing daughter of M and Mme D’Ardelo.

Alain is pleased to bump into his old friend, Quaquelique, on the scout, as ever, for a new girlfriend. Alain bumps into a woman he knows, Julie, who flirts with him, then walks away waggling her bottom.

Part five – A little feather floats beneath the ceiling

The narrative becomes slowly more fantastical. Charles the bartender is looking up at a tiny feather drifting down from the ceiling. Remember the conversation earlier about angels? He wonders if this is a tiny token of an angel. Madame Franck notices it too and holds out her finger for it to land on.

Somehow this scene morphs into the Politburo standing round while Stalin calls them to order and then laughs at his own joke of renaming Koenigsberg after pitiful comrade Kalinin.

Ramon engages in conversation with Caliban, agreeing that their tactic of speaking in ridiculous languages does, to some extent, mollify the humiliation of making their living by being lackeys at parties of the rich.

We’ve known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There’s been only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously. (p.75)

But now he wonders if we are in a post-joke era. As if to confirm it they both notice a man who appears to be eavesdropping on them, on Caliban. Suddenly he is seized with anxiety: what happens if a French security man or policeman realises he is a Frenchman masquerading as Pakistani? Arrest. Interrogation. Prison, Deportation. (This seems to me a bit weak; if Kundera wanted to raise the spectre of 9/11 and the war on terror, why not have a Muslim or Arab character?)

Which leads Ramon to remind them of the story of Stalin and the partridges. One way of interpreting it is that Stalin didn’t expect to be believed, he was telling a joke, but the Politburo didn’t get it because they were too sacred. Ramon grandly announces that this moment symbolised the start of the Post-Joke Age (p.77). This is such palpable bollocks it barely seems worth engaging with. Do you think we live in a Post-Joke Age?

Madame Franck finally catches the feather on her finger and announces it is a symbol. Ramon slips out the door and hails a taxi in the street. Alain’s mother speaks to him from her photo, describing an enormous fantasy in which all humanity is still connected via their umbilical cords back to their mothers who are connected back to their mothers and so on in a vast tree back to Eve. Alain’s mother wanted to destroy the tree and wipe out the memory of humanity.

Part six – Angels falling

The party is over. Charles and Caliban change back into their ordinary clothes. The young waitress, whose name is Mariana, adores Caliban even more. She intercedes with Charles to speak on her behalf, but then Caliban walks over and kisses her. But she remains chaste and rushes off. The two men reflect on chastity.

Caliban wants to go see their friend Alain and drink to chastity. They call up from the street, Alain lets them in, Caliban teeters on a chair to reach the bottle of vintage Armagnac brandy Alain has placed high on his armoire, but the chair breaks and Caliban topples to the floor, mashing the brandy.

Meanwhile, the narrative cuts back to an extended sequence with Stalin and Politburo. First of all he asks them if they know what Kant’s great idea was: It was the Ding an sich, the notion that there is a reality out there, but we can never know it. Against this he describes the central idea of Schopenhauer, namely that the world is made of Will and Representation. Everyone in the world has their different representations of it. Which ones triumph depends on the force of will. And he, Stalin, has done more than any man in history to impose his Will, and his Idea, on humanity.

But now he feels tired and, looking round at the imbeciles in the Politburo, he wonders what he sacrificed his life to. He thumps the table which shakes.

That thump coincides with Caliban falling off the chair in Alain’s flat with a bump.

And the door closing in Julie’s flat. Without quite understanding how, she seems to have left the party with Quaquelique and to have slept with him.

But the Politburo are distracted by an amazing sight. Outside the Kremlin window, from high in the air, angels are falling. What does it mean? While they are distracted Stalin changes into his hunting gear, grabs his shotgun, and goes stalking off down the Kremlin corridors.

Part seven – The festival of insignificance

It gets weirder and weirder, and more fantastical and inconsequential.

It’s the morning after the party. Alain gets on his motorbike and feels the presence behind him of the mother he’s never known. She now reads him a bitter lecture about people, humans and the way none of us asked to be born, the way we have our existence, our gender, our physical characteristics, and the era we’re born into, thrust on us. After all that how can there be a thing called ‘freedom’?

Alain arrives at the Luxembourg Gardens to meet Ramon. They had planned to go the Chagall exhibition at the museum but, once again, the queue is too long and puts Alain off. Instead they stroll, and Alain takes the opportunity to expand on his theories about the navel. Previously, he said, women’s bodies had three distinct erogenous zones, the breast, buttocks and thighs. These were individual and distinctive. Now, Alain claims, we live in the era of the navel (two young women walk past displaying their navels as he speaks) and the navel is anonymous and identical. We live in an era of uniformity. Everyone must conform to the same values and music and fashion. We live in a culture which promotes all the values of ‘individuality’ and yet… there is no individuality left.

In the past, love was a celebration of the individual, of the inimitable, the tribute to a unique thing, a thing impossible to replicate. But not only does the navel not revolt against repetition, it is a call for repetitions. And in our millennium we are going to live under the sign of the navel. (p.107, italics added)

I think he means endless pointless reproduction, and mass uniformity.

D’Ardelo arrives and he and Ramon greet each other warily. All three are interrupted by two events. One is a flood of children streaming into the gardens who arrange themselves in a circle to take part in some kind of musical performance.

Much more striking is the arrival of Stalin in his hunting gear. Yes. Josef Stalin runs into the scene, looking manly and virile.

All around people stop and watch, startled and sympathetic. (p.110)

His appearance is that of a ladies’ man, a village rake, an adventurer. The morning crowds in the Luxembourg warm to this fellow (is this satire? on how the conformity of the modern world is preparing the way for new dictators? or whimsy?).

He takes up his shotgun and fires at one of the many statues of French queens in the park, blowing the nose off Marie de Medici. Why? Because Kalinin – remember him of the weak bladder – is having a pee behind it. Stalin explains that pissing in the park is illegal and roars a great Georgian laugh and the crowd warms to his honest, free-spirited hi jinks.

He bursts into laughter, and his laugh is so gay, so free, so innocent, so rustic, so brotherly, so contagious, that everyone around, as if relieved, starts laughing as well. (p.111)

From time to time the narrative has told us that Charles dreams of putting on a play, maybe a play performed by marionettes. Now Ramon turns to Alain and says, ‘Does the hunter remind you of anyone?’ Yes, Charles.

‘Yes. Charles is here with us. It’s the last act of his piece.’ (p.112)

‘His piece’? What piece? Is the implication that some or more of the text is part of Charles’s ‘play’? Surely not. So is it really Charles or really Stalin? Charles, apparently. Both men conclude the Stalin and the Kalinin are the high jinks you’d expect of two actors trying to keep in practice.

Then Ramon delivers a long speech about the subject of the novel:

‘Insignificance, my friend, is the essence of existence. It is all around us, and everywhere and always. It is present even when no one wants to see it: in horror, in bloody battles, in the worst disasters. It often takes courage to acknowledge it in such dramatic situations, and to call it by name. But it is not only a matter of acknowledging it, we must love insignificance, we must learn to love it. Right here, in this park, before us – look, my friend, it is present here in all its obviousness, all its innocence, in all its beauty. Yes, its beauty. As you yourself said, the perfect performance [referring to the actors dressed as Stalin and Kalinin]… and utterly useless, the children laughing… without knowing why, isn’t that beautiful? Breathe, D’Ardelo, my friend, inhale this insignificance that’s all around us, it is the key to wisdom, it is the key to a good mood…’ (p.113)

Alain’s mother whispers in his ear that she is truly happy. Ramon sees that his speech about insignificance has not pleased D’Ardelo, a man who is more attracted by the weighty and the significant. So he changes tack and flatters him by telling him he saw how much Madame Franck was eyeing him at the party last night: surely they must be secret lovers – which sends D’Ardelo off with a spring in his step.

And an old-fashioned horse and carriage draws up, and ‘Stalin’ and ‘Kalinin’ climb into it, waving to the crowd, as the children’s choir strikes up a rendition of La Marseillaise.

Thoughts

By the end I think you’re meant to have realised that the entire book is a festival of insignificance. To use the comparison explained by Ramon back at the start, it avoids the off-putting brilliance of a D’Ardelo, and adopts the steady unobtrusive burbling of a Quaquelique, and wins the pretty girl in the end.

But no, that can’t be right. Because the whole short narrative is far from unobtrusive burbling: it is made up of bravura displays and performances – the sudden unexplained story of the woman who tries to drown herself but drowns her would-be rescuer – the story of Stalin terrifying the Politburo – Caliban’s jokey adoption of Pakistani – the way Alain’s photo of his mother regularly talks to him and holds conversations. And from time to time the characters mention their Master, who I didn’t immediately understand meant the author, the man who dreamed them up and is manipulating them as they speak and act.

These are not quiet and unobtrusive events, they are surreal or magical realist tokens: they strike me as being displays of whimsical narratorial brilliance.

But why? Why choose Stalin to be a central figure in his last novel? Why not some figure from Czech history? Is it a poke in the eye at all the people who expect him to write about Czech history and issues, who expect him to conform to what their idea of a political writer or an émigré writer should be (as the Czech émigré Irena is irritated by all the French people telling her how much she ought to be caring about her homeland when communism collapses in 1989)?

Is he demonstrating the complete freedom of the novelist to write about whatever takes his fancy? Is the insignificance of the entire story part of its resistance to the forces of Kitsch and earnest conformity, which he identifies in his earlier novels?

Maybe. But I can’t help feeling there’s a quality of disappointment about these later novels. I mean that, when you hand over your time and effort to a writer, you expect, to some extent, a kind of rounded experience, one with a beginning, middle and an end.

That sounds crude, but what I’m driving at is the way this book, like Slowness and Identity, starts off with high hopes and expectations, with promising and interesting characters and immediately hits you with some of his trademark meditations about ideas and notions about the meaning of life and memory and love and so on…. but then, somehow, lose their way, fails to deliver, fizzle out – as Slowness leads up to Vincent’s frustrated copulation by the pool of the hotel and the last third of Identity, even worse, turns out all to have been a dream.

Somehow the cleverness of the meditations and digressions, and of many of the incidents, is not, ultimately, matched by a cleverness of form or shape. That’s what I mean by disappointing. They don’t quite deliver the intellectual or imaginative punch they start out promising.

But maybe, again, he is reacting against giving the audience what is expects. If that’s what we want, maybe we should go watch a Hollywood movie. Fiction does something different. It intrigues and beguiles. And puzzles… Maybe this book is intended to be an entertainment, a beguilement and a puzzle… Pretty obviously it is saying: ‘If you want a serious message… my serious message is… that nothing is serious :)’

Credit

The Festival of Insignificance by Milan Kundera was first published in the English translation by Linda Asher by Harper Collins in 2015. All references are to the 2016 paperback edition.

Related links

Milan Kundera’s books

1967 The Joke
1969 Life Is Elsewhere
1969 Laughable Loves (short stories)

1972 The Farewell Party
1978 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

1984 The Unbearable Lightness of Being
1986 The Art of the Novel (essays)

1990 Immortality
1995 Slowness
1998 Identity

2002 Ignorance
2014 The Festival of Insignificance

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by Simon on September 7, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 7, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/09/07/the-festival-of-insignificance-milan-kundera/