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Ulysses by James Joyce: Stephen’s theories

One of the thousands of factors which make both ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ and ‘Ulysses’ complicated reads is that in both of them the protagonist – the over-educated literature student Stephen Dedalus – expounds a detailed aesthetic theory. What complicates things further is that 1) the theories don’t really match the novels they’re embedded in, and 2) the two theories contradict each other. What are these theories and which, if either, reflects Joyce’s own position?

Theory 1: Aristotle and Aquinas

In Chapter 5 of ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ Stephen Dedalus, now a student at the university, expounds his aesthetic theory during the course of a long walk round central Dublin with his friend Lynch. Stephen’s theory distinguishes between impure kinetic art – art which arouses emotions of desire or repulsion, movement towards or away from the artwork – and pure art which, in his opinion, creates a mood of aesthetic stasis.

In my review of ‘Portrait’ I say that I’m not particularly convinced by this because The Novel is not at all a ‘static’ art form unlike, say, a painting or a statue. The opposite: a novel is a dynamic art form because 1) as you read through it your understanding of everything – plot, characters, themes etc – is continually changing. And 2) because this dynamic process continues even after you’ve finished reading, as you reflect on the novel or maybe read reviews or essays or the Wikipedia article about it or any other random comments you happen to come across online. Or maybe 3) go on to read another book by the same author which radically influences your opinion of the first book. And so on.

Reading a novel is, in other words, a never-ending and dynamic process. Even if Stephen only meant to draw a distinction between 1) works which create a strong sense of attraction or repulsion (such as, for example, pornography at one end of the spectrum and horror stories at the other) and 2) the kind of work he has in mind which leaves an impression of clarity and detachment, with no emotions of any kind triggered – even this kind of model doesn’t really apply to novels, which people tend to either like or dislike for hundreds of highly personal reasons which could never be fully tabulated.

Theory 2: Shakespeare

So much for Stephen’s first theory as expounded in ‘A Portrait’. As to theory two, in chapter 9 (the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ chapter) of ‘Ulysses’, the very same Stephen Dedalus, now a few years older and having left university, expounds a drastically different theory, using the works of Shakespeare as his test bed.

There are some key facts to get clear about this. For a start, the Shakespeare theory isn’t abstract like theory 1. Theory 1 relies on Stephen’s clever redefinition of concepts first propounded in the aesthetic theories of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas – in other words, its comes directly out of his scholastic learning. Theory 2, on the contrary, is practical, in the sense that it arises not from the abstract aesthetic theories of ancient philosophers, but derives from Stephen’s own personal reading of the plays of Shakespeare. So straightaway the two theories inhabit a spectrum between abstract and applied.

But the content of the theories is also diametrically opposed. Theory 1 famously leads up to the conclusion that, if the ideal work of art creates a sense of stasis, then the ideal work of literature should strive to be as objective as possible, should be a work in which the personality of the author disappears. This theory posits that the highest genre of literature is drama because in drama (I’ve put in bold the really famous part of this speech, which is quoted in all discussion of the subject):

The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood [in lyric poetry] and then a fluid and lambent narrative [in epic poetry], finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of aesthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

Theory 2, by contrast, is an elaborate statement of the exact opposite proposition, which is that all the key figures and all the key relationships in Shakespeare’s plays, derive from his own family, are fundamentally autobiographical. Far from being refined out of existence, Stephen now argues that Shakespeare’s personal biography is now everywhere present in his plays.

Stephen focuses on ‘Hamlet’ which he tries to persuade us is Shakespeare’s most autobiographical play. He says one driver for the play was Shakespeare’s trauma at learning about the infidelity of his (older) wife, Anne Hathaway. Many readers think of Hamlet the prince as somehow expressing Shakespeare’s own opinions about life (the powerful speeches about the meaning of life, suicide and so on) but Stephen says the real avatar of the middle-aged, successful playwright stricken with grief at the infidelity of his wife is not the young student prince, but the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father.

To put it in the rather convoluted language of the book, the idea is that Shakespeare was, like King Hamlet, cuckolded by his brother, Richard. Betrayed by his wife (Ann Hathaway/Gertrude) and betrayed by his brother (Richard Shakespeare/Claudius) Shakespeare is embodied in King Hamlet, the murdered father who returns as a ghost, and we know that Shakespeare played the role of the ghost in the first productions of the play, opposite a much younger actor playing the prince.

Far from refining himself out of existence, the author – in this theory – makes art out of the sordid mess and messy emotions of his own life.

Adding further evidence to the betrayal theme, in a passage about uncles, Stephen name-checks Shakespeare’s brothers Richard and Edmund, describes his assumed rivalry with them, and then goes on to point out how many wicked uncles (and wicked Richards and Edmunds) there are in his plays, notably Richard III and scheming Edmund in King Lear. Surely more evidence for his adulterous betrayal theory?

Having established his approach using ‘Hamlet’, Stephen goes on to talk about other Shakespeare plays, namely the so-called Romances written at the end of his career, which all feature the reconciliation of a father with his daughter (Prospero and Miranda (The Tempest), Leontes and Perdita (The Winter’s Tale), Pericles and Marina (Pericles). There must, Stephen insists, also be a biographical basis to this trope in Shakespeare, so long away in London, being reconciled with his alienated daughter (or grand-daughter?).

Disappointment

I remember being bitterly disappointed when I read this passage as a student. I was hoping one genius would have dazzling insights into another genius but it turns out Joyce had nothing of the sort. The idea that a writer uses his own experiences of his own family relationships in his works is so obvious as to be bathetic.

Far from giving new and unexpected insight into the creative process, the chapter suggests that all literature is autobiographical, is a projection of the artist’s (fractured) self and that the creator (Shakespeare / Joyce) is always present in his creations (Hamlet / Stephen-Bloom). This is not only not very interesting but, taken at face value, it diminishes both Shakespeare and Joyce.

In a dramatic context

To try and read Stephen’s presentation as a lecture or essay is to be disappointed so maybe a more profitable way to think about it is as part of the dramatic content of the novel. In other words, it is not interesting for what it tells us about Shakespeare (next to nothing, apart from a few details Stephen throws into his descriptions, for example of William’s daily walk to work along the Thames to the Globe theatre) so much as for 1) what it tells us about Stephen the fictional character, 2) the light it sheds on the themes of ‘Ulysses’, and 3) the broader artistic world of the day.

Fathers and sons

1. Regarding what the theory tells us about Stephen the fictional character, this is easy. It reveals that Stephen is obsessed with father-son relations, circling round and round the troubled relationship between Hamlet and his dead father, and the sad experience of Shakespeare and his dead son, Hamnet (who died aged 11 in 1596, as depicted in the current movie of the subject). Grandfathers, fathers and sons.

2. And this itself is, of course, entirely fitting in a novel which strongly features themes of fathers and sons: Stephen is anxious throughout the book that, instead of becoming the Great Writer he wants to be, he might instead be turning into a witty, garrulous drinker and failure like his father, Simon.

3. The novel also, of course, features Leopold Bloom who throughout Bloomsday repeatedly thinks about his own son, Rudy, who died when he was just 11 days old (Rudy 11 days, Hamnet 11 years – there are always patterns in Joyce). Bloom also resurrects his own father, Rudolf Virág, in one of the many ‘hallucinations’ in the delirious ‘Circe’ chapter.

4. And, of course, The Odyssey which ‘Ulysses’ is to some extent ‘based on’ (or aligned with or riffs off), is in part a poem about a young son (Telemachus) looking for his long-lost father (Odysseus).

5. Which is itself (sort of) echoed in the overall narrative arc whereby, in the final chapters of the book, young Stephen encounters Bloom in the role of father figure, and Bloom for a while takes a fatherly concern for Stephen (although, as is well known, the analogy doesn’t really hold because Stephen isn’t Bloom’s son and so, far from forging some kind of father and son relationship, Stephen in the end stumbles off into the night probably never to see Bloom again).

In other words, Stephen’s elaborate and contrived theory of Shakespeare not only need not be ‘true’ about Shakespeare, but doesn’t even need to be believable, because it’s not a public lecture or critical essay, it’s the speech of a character in a novel, and so only needs to 1) reflect the personality of the character (as it does) and 2) reflect or refer to some of the wider issues raised in the novel (as it does).

Performance, first aspect

Two more things undermine Stephen’s Shakespeare presentation as a theory. Most obviously, it is a performance. Stephen has arrived at Dublin’s National Library, in the head librarian’s office where are assembled some heavy hitters from the Dublin literary scene, the key figure being the poet A.E. (George Russell), an exponent of mysticism, Platonism, and emotive Irish nationalism. Also in the room are Mr Best (librarian, ‘tall, young, mild, light’) and John Eglinton (a pseudonym for real-life essayist William Kirkpatrick Magee, a literary figure and librarian).

These men know Stephen’s father, Simon Dedalus, and have heard tell of, but never yet met, his super-clever son (also promoted, among others, by his buddy Malachi Mulligan, as Eglinton attests: ‘—I was prepared for paradoxes from what Malachi Mulligan told us…’).

And so the whole situation is by way of Stephen’s opportunity to impress (some of) his elders and betters from the (small) Dublin literary scene. This situation explains why Stephen is so nervous, why he rambles on, and why he overstates and muddles his case (as my rather muddled summary of it indicates) and so is not really believable. It is a dramatic situation in which our hero has to continually gee himself up and keep at it:

Anxiously he glanced in the cone of lamplight where three faces, lighted, shone.

And, as his theory unfurls with increasing improbability, he comes to doubt it himself:

What the hell are you driving at? I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons.

A clash of worldviews

One of the reasons for his nervousness is because Stephen isn’t just confronting eminent figures but eminent figures with a completely opposed aesthetic worldview. It is easy to forget that the whole episode is set in a particular time and place, namely Dublin 1904. Now as I’ve emphasised previously, this means it is describing a society, culture and characters which are in almost every aspect still late Victorian. And one of these aspects is that many of the leading literary figures of the time were still in thrall to fin-de-siecle aestheticism, art for arts sake, and continental Symbolism, all flavoured with the high-minded nobility of the Celtic Revival.

Which means that buried beneath the maze of banter and learnèd references which all the characters in this scene throw around, there is a pretty straightforward clash going on, between the old world of mazy Celtic twilights and high aesthetic values, and Stephen’s aggressively rude insistence on the thumpingly material facts of life, on eating, drinking, peeing, pooing, sex and masturbation.

The elder statesman and poet A.E. represents the school which believes art to be intensely spiritual and to inhabit a realm of neo-platonic forms and perfections. For him and his ilk art must be uplifting and inspiring to take us out of the deadening quotidian world and raise us to the spiritual uplands. In this view, Shakespeare is a genius and genius has access to insights and worlds deprived us ordinary mortals. A.E. says:

—Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our minds into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato’s world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.

(Gustave Moreau, here, being used as the epitome of Symbolist painting.)

From my summary, above, you can see how Stephen (and by implication his creator) is against all this. For Stephen great art begins not in a realm of ‘formless spiritual essences’ but in the muck and mess of human existence. This is why Joyce venerated the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and wrote a long critical essay about his plays, even writing the man himself a fan letter. It’s because Ibsen represented a complete departure from late-romanticism with its fairies and legends, and instead portrayed messy real modern life, complicated relationships driven by his characters’ fierce internal psychological battles.

But Stephen goes further than this. Ibsen never portrayed someone having a poo or masturbating or farting or having a pee in the garden (all of which happen in ‘Ulysses’). In his own way, Ibsen still respected Victorian manners and conventions. Not so Joyce. Along with all the other achievements of ‘Ulysses’, it brought the crudest physical bodily activities within the realm of artistic discourse. The book sets out to cover all of human life and so how could he leave out the basics?

Ezra Pound wasn’t wrong to see ‘Ulysses’ as a continuation of the meticulous realism of Flaubert, the taking of that kind of realism and accuracy to the limit and then beyond, exploding the bounds of the late-nineteenth century realist novel and going on to invent something completely new.

Back to the theory: hopefully you can now see that it is less valuable as an interpretation of Shakespeare (as which, it is pretty worthless) than as a dramatisation of Stephen (and Joyce’s) fierce punk opposition to the nose-holding high-mindedness of the older, Victorian generation.

Performance, second aspect

OK, so when Stephen presents his theory, he is doing it to not just a sceptical older generation but a generation with fundamentally different ideas about art than he holds and who he is, to some extent, baiting with his transgressive ideas.

But then something else happens to make it even more complicated. This is the arrival half way through Stephen’s nervous presentation of his frenemy and contemporary, the young wit Malachi ‘Buck’ Mulligan, who we saw teasing and antagonising Stephen in the very first scene in the opening chapter.

Half way through Stephen’s presentation shallow Buck arrives in the room and joins in the chorus of witty banter which accompanies every one of Stephen’s propositions, often with barely concealed mockery, for example when he gives his own not inaccurate parody of Stephen’s idea:

—It is quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.

In this respect the whole thing, although radically different in content, echoes in structure the presentation of theory 1 in ‘Portrait’. In that book, although Stephen’s theory is often quoted out of context as a standalone statement, it is actually delivered in a dynamic context, expounded during a long walk with a fellow student Lynch, who continually intervenes with deflating mockery of Stephen’s highfalutin theories.

Same here, only instead of just one set of interlocutors Stephen was already struggling to cope with – AE, Best, Eglinton, the occasional interventions of the chief librarian who pops in and out of the room – the arrival of Mulligan adds a whole new layer of mockery and chaffing to the mix.

So setting aside the radical dissimilarities of content, both theories have this in common, that they are delivered in the course of embattled dialogue with others.

Scylla and Charybdis

I’m aware I haven’t presented all these ideas in a perfect order. It’s quite difficult to do so when everything in the text is connected to everything else. But one last point. As I’ve reread it I’ve come to realise that the A.E. and John Eglinton’s traditional romantic neo-platonic theory is so clearly indicated or defended in its own right, that the chapter in effect contains not one but two aesthetic theories And when you come to think about it, this maybe sheds light on the Homeric parallel.

Scylla and Charybdis – who Joyce’s schemas tell us preside over this chapter – are famous sea monsters from Greek mythology, who lived on opposite sides of the narrow Strait of Messina. Scylla was a six-headed monster living on a cliff, who snatched sailors from passing ships, while Charybdis was a massive whirlpool that swallowed ships whole. Which is why they came to be used as a proverb symbolizing an inescapable dilemma, where avoiding one peril means falling victim to the other.

So: are these two aesthetic theories, the extreme of spiritual neoplatonism facing off against a theory of authorial autobiography, are these the Scylla and Charybdis of the title? In the Homer story, Odysseus’s ship has to sail a perfect middle course between the two perils. Does this suggest that Joyce does not stand behind Stephen’s theory, but somewhere between the two positions?

We know that Stephen has rejected his schoolboy theory of high aesthetic stasis and gone right over to the other end of the spectrum, deliberately shocking his fusty listeners with his insistence on the origins of Shakespeare’s works in the messy biographical details of sex and infidelity, jealousy and death.

But maybe this theory, theory 2, is also only dramatically appropriate to the character of Stephen Dedalus and didn’t represent Joyce’s own final view.

This interpretation is supported when, at the conclusion of his presentation, one of the auditors, John Eglinton, asks Stephen whether he believes his own theory and Stephen immediately (and with uncharacteristically blunt clarity) says No.

—You are a delusion, said roundly John Eglinton to Stephen. You have brought us all this way to show us a French triangle. Do you believe your own theory?
—No, Stephen said promptly.

(The French triangle is Eglinton’s way of saying Stephen’s theory reduces the genesis of one of the masterpieces of European literature, ‘Hamlet’, to the author’s involvement in a sordid little affair of adultery and his wife’s infidelity, a ‘French triangle’.)

But the point of the exchange is obviously Stephen’s immediate ‘No’. Now on one level this reflects the witty tone of banter in which the whole thing takes place, in which everyone is hyper-aware of all the literary references they’re making, distorting and parodying for comic purposes, in which everyone is showing off. To spend an hour delivering a convoluted theory and then reply so bluntly that he doesn’t even believe it himself, is a stylish and witty manoeuvre – its Wildean brashness makes Stephen more worthy to be a member of this caste of witty litterateurs than the original theory.

But it also gestures towards the solution of the puzzle. When faced with a rock and a hard place the solution is neither. Or both. Or parts of both. Maybe the theory is included not just to further delineate Stephen’s character, or because Joyce identifies with it, but because it requires the worldview it’s opposing. Stephen can only express his debunking theory if he has something to debunk and so he needs A.E. and Eglinton and (appearing half-way through, Mulligan) to argue back or mock his theories because the real world is made out of precisely such conflicts and antitheses.

Maybe the point isn’t Stephen’s first theory or second theory or A.E.s platonic theory but a dynamic interplay between all three.

A ghostly answer

In his 1982 book about ‘Ulysses’, Canadian critic Hugh Kenner suggests a typically playful solution. Maybe Joyce’s aesthetic approach can be likened to the figure of Hamlet’s ghost who wanders through Stephen’s exposition of the play, as he, indeed, wafts in and out of the Shakespeare play itself. Like old King Hamlet’s ghost, maybe Joyce’s own autobiography moves in and out of the text, putting in appearances, disappearing but, like the ghost, dominating the entire action even in its absence. Which makes theory 2, instead of a rejection of theory 1 whereby the artist:

remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails

More like a subtle extension of it. Maybe the ghost author can drift in and out of the narrative at whim, trailing elements of autobiography like a ghostly cloak, at moments coming powerfully into focus, at others disappearing altogether and so allowing Joyce to believe in both his theories and neither. After all, as Richard Ellmann jokes in his 1972 book, ‘Ulysses on the Liffey’:

Whenever confronted by a choice between two possible things to include, Joyce chose both. (p.34)

So maybe that’s what he’s craftily doing here.

Credit

‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce was published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922.

Joyce reviews

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by Simon on February 20, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Literary criticism

Posted by Simon on February 20, 2026

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The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse (1938)

The sinister affair of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, old Pop Bassett, Stiffy Byng, the
Rev HP (‘Stinker’) Pinker, the eighteenth-century cow-creamer and the small brown leather-covered notebook.
(Bertie summarises the plot at the beginning)

‘Man and boy, Jeeves,’ I said, breaking a thoughtful silence which had lasted for about eighty-seven
miles, ‘I have been in some tough spots in my time, but this one wins the mottled oyster.’
(and the plot hasn’t really kicked in yet)

‘Travel is highly educational, sir.’
‘I can’t do with any more education. I was full up years ago.’
(Servant and Master repartee)

‘Good old blackmail ! You can’t beat it. I’ve always said so and I always shall. It works like magic in an emergency.’
(Aunt Dahlia proving what a good egg she is)

‘Didn’t you tell me once that the Code of the Woosters was “Never let a pal down”?’
(Stiffy explaining the title of the book)

‘The Code of the Woosters’ is the third full-length novel to feature Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves.

The Jeeves and Wooster narratives come in two forms: in the 1920s Wodehouse published about 35 J&W short stories; thereafter he switched to novels and wrote 11 novels (from 1934 to the last one, in 1974). What’s interesting is the way the novels refer back to events in the short stories. It’s as if the short stories defined a sort of palette of colours, which he then invoked in the larger canvases of the novels. To be less pretentious, the novels regularly refer back to incidents featured in the stories, say something like ‘Remember old so-and-so; it was him I was involved with in the adventure of the so-and-so’. Thus at various points Bertie, the posh dim narrator, reminds us:

that his Aunt Dahlia edits a lady’s magazine to which he once contributed an article (as told in ‘Clustering Round Young Bingo’)
that Madeline Bassett’s father is a judge who once fined him £5 for disorderly conduct (as told in ‘Without The Option’)
of the occasion when Gussie Fink-Nottle gave a speech at a school prize-giving while very drunk (in the previous novel in the series, ‘Right Ho, Jeeves”))
(twice) of the time Roberta Wickham persuaded him to sneak into the bedroom of a fellow guest at a country house and puncture his hot-water bottle with a darning-needle on the end of a stick (‘Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit’)
of the time when the American millionaire J. Washburn Stoker kidnapped Bertie who escaped by blacking up with boot polish to pretend to be part of a minstrel party (‘Thank You, Jeeves’)
the time a temporary replacement for Jeeves named Brinkley, tried to attack Bertie with a carving knife then set fire to his cottage (‘Thank You, Jeeves’)
the time Bertie had to look after his Aunt Agatha’s dog (‘Jeeves and the Dog McIntosh’)
the time Bertie saved the Cabinet Minister A.B. Filmer from a wild swan (‘Jeeves and the Impending Doom’)

The effect is very much to create a world of its own, full of references to a fairly small number of characters in its orbit. Bertie himself is made to notice the fact:

It bore out what I often say—viz, that it’s a small world.

Except that it is very much not a small world. It is a very big world with over 8 billion people in it who mostly speak languages you and I can’t speak, and hold values and beliefs we can’t relate to. Which is why it’s so comfy and reassuring to retreat to a small, hermetically sealed and safe place like WoosterWorld.

The cup of tea on arrival at a country house is a thing which, as a rule, I particularly enjoy. I like the crackling logs, the shaded lights, the scent of buttered toast, the general atmosphere of leisured cosiness.

Nothing wrong with that. Highfalutin’ critics like to claim that fiction engages with the world, subverts this or that power structure etc, missing the obvious point that sitting in a quiet room or train or plane, quietly reading a novel is more or less the opposite of engaging with the world.

The Mixture as Before

When Somerset Maugham published a volume of short stories in 1936 The Times rather rudely described it as ‘the mixture as before’. This nettled Maugham so much that he titled his next short story The Mixture As Before. The same could be said of Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster novels. He had established a set of comic conventions for the series, including:

Bertie struggles to find the right word

There was a brief and—if that’s the word I want—pregnant silence.
A confirmed recluse you would have called him, if you had happened to know the word.
She made what I believe is known as a moue…. Is it moue?.. Shoving out the lips, I mean, and drawing them quickly back again.
‘What? Incredulous!’
‘Incredible, sir.’
‘Thank you, Jeeves. Incredible!’
‘Spode, qua menace… is it qua?’
‘Yes, sir. Quite correct.’
‘I thought so.’

Bertie struggles with classic quotes

‘You remember that fellow you’ve mentioned to me once or twice, who let something wait upon something? You know who I mean the cat chap.’
‘Macbeth, sir, a character in a play of that name by the late William Shakespeare. He was described as letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would, ‘like the poor cat i’ th’ adage.’
‘Well, that’s how it is with me. I wabble, and I vacillate—if that’s the word?’
‘Perfectly correct, sir.’

The joke in this one is you have to know that ‘The Sensitive Plant’ is the name of a poem by the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, the kind of thing soppy Madeline knows and Bertie is clueless about.

‘I remembered something Jeeves had once called Gussie–’A sensitive plant, what?’
‘Exactly. You know your Shelley, Bertie.’
‘Oh, am I?’

Shelley crops up again later on:

After what Gussie had said, I ought to have been expecting Stiffy, of course. Seeing an Aberdeen terrier, I should have gathered that it belonged to her. I might have said to myself : If Scotties come, can Stiffy be far behind?

Which is a reference to Shelley’s well-known poem, ‘Ode to the West Wind’, the line being ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ Mind you, Bertie can pull off the big quotes when he wants to; in a previous novel he referred to Keats’s sonnet ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer and he goes to town on the key lines here.

Pop Bassett, like the chap in the poem which I had to write out fifty times at school for introducing a white mouse into the English Literature hour, was plainly feeling like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken, while Aunt Dahlia and Constable Oates resembled respectively stout Cortez staring at the Pacific and all his men looking at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien.

And it’s not just Bertie who struggles with classic quotes and has to be put right by Jeeves. Here’s Stiffy struggling to remember the right name of a literary character:

You remind me of Carter Patterson… no, that’s not it… Nick Carter… no, not Nick Carter… Who does Mr Wooster remind me of, Jeeves?’
‘Sidney Carton, miss.’
‘That’s right. Sidney Carton.’

That would be the Sidney Carton who ends up being the hero of Charles Dickens’ novel ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ by offering to lay down his life to be executed by the French revolutionaries so that the male lead of the story, Charles Darnay, can escape. Not that Bertie sees him as the hero. Later on he reflects:

I drew no consolation from the fact that Stiffy Byng thought me like Sidney Carton. I had never met the chap, but I gathered that he was somebody who had taken it on the chin to oblige a girl, and to my mind this was enough to stamp him as a priceless ass.

Jeeves’s literary quotes

It feels slightly new that Jeeves recites famous literary quotations in their entirety, not prompted by Bertie, with the comic intention of showing that Bertie hasn’t a clue what he’s on about. Mostly from Shakespeare because it’s a fair bet that Wodehouse’s original audience should have known their Shakespeare:

‘I quite understand, sir. And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pitch and moment in this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.’
‘Exactly. You take the words out of my mouth.’
(Shakespeare: Hamlet)

‘Childe Roland to the dark tower came, sir,’ said Jeeves, as we alighted, though what he meant I hadn’t an earthly.
(Shakespeare: King Lear)

I remember Jeeves saying to me once, apropos of how you can never tell what the weather’s going to do, that full many a glorious morning had he seen flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye and then turn into a rather nasty afternoon.
(The italicised phrase is from Shakespeare, Sonnet 33)

Jeeves and clothes

In almost all the stories, right at the start Jeeves and Bertie have a falling out over an item of clothing, there follows the long complicated narrative, and by the end of the story Bertie is so grateful to him for solving everything that he gives in. Not in this one. But there are still some choice ‘clothes moments’. Bertie is getting dressed for dinner when Jeeves advises a quarter inch adjustment in the trousers, prompting Bertie to say:

‘There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself “Do trousers matter?”‘
‘The mood will pass, sir.’

In this case, the plan which starts the story, Jeeves’s wish which Bertie categorically refuses but then, by the end of the complex series of events, finds himself exhaustedly acquiescing in, is the idea of going on a cruise.

The comic strategy of stating the obvious

I call her a ghastly girl because she was a ghastly girl. The Woosters are chivalrous, but they can speak their minds.

The antique shop in the Brompton Road proved, as foreshadowed, to be an antique shop in the Brompton Road.

I spoke with satirical bitterness, and I should have thought that anyone could have seen that satirical bitterness was what I was speaking with.

He had been looking like a man who had missed the finer shades, and he still looked like a man who had missed the finer shades.

Clash of registers

It’s a tried and tested comic trope to have two characters who speak in different registers – the straight man who expresses things in a high-falutin pretentious style, and then the comic who puts it in the crudest demotic. Jeeves and Wooster embody a variation on this comic trope. Bertie expresses something in his poshboy slang and then Jeeves repeats the same idea but expressed in his refined, restrained, verbosely intellectual manner. The result = comic contrast.

‘You agree with me that the situation is a lulu?’
‘Certainly a somewhat sharp crisis in your affairs would appear to have been precipitated, sir.’

The village constable

Speaking of registers, Wodehouse briefly gives the village constable a comic accent, the tone of the officious provincial copper.

‘I was proceeding along the public highway,’ he began, in a slow, measured tone, as if he were giving evidence in court, ‘and the dorg leaped at me in a verlent manner. I was zurled from my bersicle.’

Abbreviations

Either a) trimming a word of a few syllables or b) paring it right back to the first letter. Sometimes a little hard to follow.

Trimmed

And now it was plain that he was hep.

I uttered an exclamash.

That is the posish, I fear.

I had managed to put in two or three hours’ sleep in my cubicle, and that, taken in conjunction with the healing flow of persp. in the hot room and the plunge into the icy tank, had brought the roses back to my cheeks to no little extent.

The gravity of the situash had at last impressed itself upon her.

It was entirely owing to Stiffy that I found myself in my present predic.

One letter

I told the man to take me to the nearest Turkish bath. It is always my practice to linger over a Turkish b.

That sojourn of mine in the T. bath had done much to re-establish the mens sana in corpore
what-not.

I sank into a c. and passed an agitated h. over the b.

‘Let me explain, aged r.’

I sank into the chair which she had vacated, and mopped the b.

The sight of Gussie and Madeline Bassett sitting side by side at the other end of the table turned the food to ashes in my m.

‘You’re talking absolute rot,’ she said, but it was with a quaver in the v.

I turned on the h. again.

Kipling was right. D. than the m. No getting round it.

I proceeded to work off the pent-up f’s.

I let out a mirthless l.

Formulaic phraseology

Homer is famous for coining poetic phrases or formulas to describe common objects (rosy-fingered dawn, wine-coloured sea) and Wodehouse does something similar by devising humorous phrases for common elements in Bertie’s life. They’re a sort of Metonymy which is ‘a figure of speech where a word or phrase is replaced by another’, in this instance by related adjectives but shorn of the expected noun – so in that respect also a kind of abbreviation.

I was able to imbibe about a fluid ounce of the hot and strengthening before he spoke. [tea]

Her eyes were misty with the unshed, and about the size of soup plates. [tears]

Inappropriate

Related to which is using inappropriate terminology, often using phrases normally used to describe inanimate objects to people, as if from sales brochures advertising houses or cars.

I looked round. Those parted lips… Those saucerlike eyes… That slender figure, drooping slightly at the hinges…

For Madeline Bassett was undeniably of attractive exterior—slim, svelte, if that’s the word, and bountifully equipped with golden hair and all the fixings.

Slang phrases

Sometimes Bertie uses phrases which may reflect the slang of his class but are obscure to us.

In that shop, on the other hand, he had given the impression of a man who has found the blue bird. [?]

After that exhibition of his at the prizegiving, she handed Gussie the mitten. [dumped him]

The news of the betrothal was, therefore, conveyed to him by letter, and I imagine that the dear girl must have hauled up her slacks about me in a way that led him to suppose that what he was getting was a sort of cross between Robert Taylor and Einstein. [boasted]

‘Suppose old Bassett does find that book, what do you think will ensue?’ I could answer that one. ‘He would immediately put the bee on the wedding.’ [cancel]

‘Consult Jeeves, you mean?’ I shook the lemon. [head]

Stiffy’s map, as a rule, tends to be rather grave and dreamy. [face]

I can testify that when you are riding [a bicycle] without your hands, privacy and a complete freedom from interruption are of the essence. The merest suggestion of an unexpected Scottie connecting with the ankle-bone, at such a time, and you swoop into a sudden swerve. And, as everybody knows, if the hands are not firmly on the handlebars, a sudden swerve spells a smeller.

The nibs [higher-ups, those in authority, clever ones, superiors]

‘Ha!’ said Spode, and biffed off with a short, sharp laugh. [left, walked away]

I got into the full soup and fish, and was immediately conscious of a marked improvement. [evening dress]

Brass rags had been parted by the young couple… [they’d broken up]

I racked the bean. [head, brain, mind]

‘Who do you think you are, coming strolling into a girl’s bedroom, sticking on dog about the right way and the wrong way of pinching helmets?’

I lit a cigarette and proceeded to stress the moral lesson to be learned from all this rannygazoo.

Aunt Dahlia’s insults

In the second novel it became noticeable how Aunt Dahlia lost no opportunity to cheerfully insult Bertie and the pattern continues here. She calls him:

‘Hello, ugly’
my little chickadee
young hound

What feels new is that Bertie feels confident enough to bandy friendly nicknames right back at her, to her face calling her:

aged relative
my fluttering old aspen
my dear old mysterious hinter
old ancestor
old flesh and blood
old thicker than water
My dear old faulty reasoner
my misguided old object

Jeeves’s wisdom

‘We are as little children, frightened of the dark, and Jeeves is the wise nurse who takes us by the hand and–’,
‘Switches the light on?’
‘Precisely.’

Sir Roderick Spode

Rather surprisingly, this Sir Roderick Spode turns out to be leader of a Fascist party i.e. is a satire on the real-world English fascist leader, Oswald Mosely.

‘Don’t you ever read the papers ? Roderick Spode is the founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organization better known as the Black Shorts. His general idea, if he doesn’t get knocked on the head with a bottle in one of the frequent brawls in which he and his followers indulge, is to make himself a Dictator.’

Bertie clarifies an important element:

‘By the way, when you say ‘ shorts,’ you mean ‘ shirts,’ of course.’
‘No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.’
‘Footer bags, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘How perfectly foul.’
‘Yes.’
‘Bare knees?’
‘Bare knees.’
‘Golly!’
‘Yes.’

Spode is a huge, threatening bully right up to the moment when Bertie discovers he has a dark secret and threatens to reveal it – at which point he becomes oilily sycophantic i.e. like all bullies, can be instantly deflated. When pressed, right at the end of the novel, Jeeves reveals Spode’s guilty secret: it is that he moonlights as a designer of women’s underclothing and is the uncredited owner of the emporium in Bond Street known as Eulalie Soeurs. Would ruin his reputation as a manly Fascist if that ever came out. A ludicrous puncture of his sub-Mussolinian braggadocio.

Plot

This third Jeeves and Wooster novel feels longer and even more insanely complicated than its predecessors. Wodehouse has this reputation for comedy and I start off loving the tone and characters but do rather find that halfway through the novels they begin to seem quite long, and the blizzard of farcically improbable twists and turns does, eventually, become quite wearing. I’m always very relieved as I enter the final furlongs.

As briefly as I can:

Uncle Tom Travers is a collector of silverware and has his eye on a fine silver cow creamer at an antique shop on the Brompton Road. His wife, Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia, wants Tom not to buy it, as she needs to touch him for money to fund her magazine, Milady’s Boudoir, particularly as she has just signed up an expensive lady novelist to write some articles for it.

In the event the cow creamer is purchased by Sir Watkyn Bassett, the odious magistrate who fined Bertie £5 for drunkenly stealing a policeman’s helmet a few years earlier, and who has now retired to his country estate, Totleigh Towers. This Bassett has a daughter, soppy Madeline Bassett, who’s still in love with the hopeless newt-fancier, Bertie’s friend Gussie Fink-Nottle, who Sir Watkyn thoroughly disapproves of. At the same time, Bassett’s niece, Stephanie ‘Stiffy’ Byng, who lives at the Towers, is in love with the local curate, another old college pal of Bertie’s, one Harold ‘Stinker’ Pinker. Another guest of Sir Watkyns is a giant of a man called Roderick Spode—leader of a silly fascist organisation called the Black Shorts—who takes an instant dislike to Bertie when he happens to bump into him in the Brompton Road antique shop, and keeps a fierce and jealous eye over Stephanie Byng. There’s one last element which is that Gussie, a guest at Totleigh Towers, has been keeping a notebook containing very unflattering portraits of both Bassett and Spode.

Right. That’s a summary of the cast and main issues. The ball gets rolling when Bertie is summoned to Totleigh by a telegram from Madeline, asking his help to sort out her troubled engagement to Gussie; but he has simultaneously been instructed to get his hands on the silver cow creamer, in order to placate her husband Tom. Then Stiffy arbitrarily decides to test her boyfriend Harold’s devotion to her, by demanding that he knock off and steal the helmet of the local constable, Oates, because she thinks he’s been beastly to her beloved dog, Bartholomew. Then Gussie stupidly manages to lose the notebook full of incriminating descriptions of Bassett and Spode.

For an impressive 300 pages, Wodehouse manages to wring every conceivable variation on these themes, having all the couples fall out with each other, make impossible demands, threaten Bertie, while the silver cow, the notebook and the policeman’s helmet all get stolen, stolen again, hidden, found, searched for, accompanied by all manner of threats and blackmail between various characters far too complicated to set down in detail.

In the end it is Jeeves who saves the day, managing to blackmail both Sir Watkyn (with a suit for malicious libel and damages) and Spode (with revealing his guilty secret) into acquiescing in the marriages of the two young couples, and releasing Bertie from the various charges he faced. This is because, at various points, Bertie is angrily accused of stealing all the two central objects – the cow creamer and the policemen’s helmet – which he keeps being caught red-handed with because the actual thieves (Aunt Dahlia and Stiffy, respectively) dump them on him at incriminating moments – anyway, once all the comic complications have been utterly wrung out of the plot, Jeeves manages to get Bertie cleared of all charges, in return for which, as I mentioned above, Bertie acquiesces in Jeeves’s wish to go for a big cruise.

Cast

Bertie Wooster – narrator of the stories, amusingly dim upper-class layabout
Jeeves – his suave and hyper-intelligent valet
Aunt Dahlia aka Mrs Dahlia Travers
Uncle Tom Travers – her husband, famous for his delicate digestion, and (newly introduced in this novel) a keen silverware collector:

This uncle is a bird who, sighting a nephew, is apt to buttonhole him and become a bit informative on the subject of sconces and foliation, not to mention scrolls, ribbon wreaths in high relief and gadroon borders, and it seemed to me that silence was best.

Anatole – their legendary cook, from Provence
Gussie Fink-Nottle – ‘a fish-faced pal of mine who, on reaching man’s estate, had buried himself in the country and devoted himself entirely to the study of newts’
Madeline Bassett – ‘A droopy, soupy, sentimental exhibit, with melting eyes and a cooing voice and the most extraordinary views on such things as stars and rabbits’
Sir Watkyn Bassett, CBE – retired judge, father of Madeline, residing at Totleigh Towers, Totleigh-in-the-Wold, Gloucestershire
- Butterfield – his butler
Sir Roderick Spode – guest of Sir Watkyn’s and leader of the Fascist organisation, the Saviours of England; according to Bertie a ‘Big chap with a small moustache and the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces’
Pomona Grindle – popular novelist – funny how popular novelists like Wodehouse or Agatha Christie, enjoy putting fictional popular novelists into their novels to satirise
Miss Stephanie Byng aka Stiffy – Madeline’s cousin, who lives at Totleigh Towers
- Bartholomew – her dog
Constable Oates – the local policeman
Harold Pinker aka Stinker Pinker – village curate who Stiffy’s engaged to – ‘a large, lumbering, Newfoundland puppy of a chap—full of zeal, yes—always doing his best, true, but never quite able to make the grade; a man, in short, who if there was a chance of bungling an enterprise and landing himself in the soup, would snatch at it’

The Junior Ganymede club

The Junior Ganymede is a club for gentlemen’s personal gentlemen in Curzon Street, to which Jeeves has belonged for some years. Under Rule Eleven, every new member is required to supply the club with full information regarding his employer. This not only provides entertaining reading, but serves as a warning to members who may be contemplating taking service with gentlemen who fall short of the ideal.

Menus

I have often lamented that in the majority of Great Literature people regularly have meals, lunches and dinners, but the author never tells you what they ate, which is extremely frustrating. In this book there’s a rare mention of a complete menu of a country house dinner:

Grade A soup (content unknown)
a toothsome fish (species unknown)
a salmi of game which
asparagus
a jam omelette
some spirited sardines on toast

A jam omelette?

On aunts

One minute aunts are the bane of his life:

‘If I had my life to live again, Jeeves, I would start it as an orphan without any aunts. Don’t they put aunts in Turkey in sacks and drop them in the Bosphorus?’
‘Odalisques, sir, I understand. Not aunts.’
‘Well, why not aunts ? Look at the trouble they cause in the world. I tell you, Jeeves, and you may quote me as saying this—Behind every poor, innocent, harmless blighter who is going down for the third time in the soup, you will find, if you look carefully enough, the aunt who shoved him into it.’

But on the other hand:

‘I should have known better than to doubt Aunt Dahlia. Aunts always know. It’s a sort of intuition.’

Why so many aunts? And why are aunts such figures of fun? Aunts dominate almost all the J&W stories and crop up in many others outside the series. They are also prominent in works by other popular authors as figures of fun, such as Agatha Christie. Why? Two big reasons.

1. Because aunts are parent replacements. They are parents but without the strict control of parents. They are representatives of the older and so, in theory, controlling generation, the generation which should bridle and control the young, but without any of an actual parent’s actual legal responsibilities and duties. This is partly why they’re figures of fun: they’re parents but stripped of all actual parental authority.

2. Because they’re female. A hundred years ago fathers were figures with total legal control over their children until they reached the age of 21, as well as dominating moral and psychological power. An uncle is a male authority figure from the parental generation but, typically, stripped of responsibility, is classically considered a more approachable and sympathetic figure, someone you can turn to for help and advice, maybe. Whereas an aunt is two times removed from the figure of authority being a) not the legal guardian and b) a female, and so one step removed from the classically male patriarchal authority role.

Why are they funny, exactly? Tradition

P.S. Mind you, the whole point of the 1920s was the widespread feeling that the younger generation scorned parental control, something Bertie himself comments on:

A glance at her [Madeline] was enough to tell one that she belonged to that small group of girls who still think a parent should have something to say about things…

Bertie on girls and women

This aunt is a formidable old creature, when stirred.

Earnest Americans, academics and feminists have plenty of ammunition to denounce Bertie – and through him, Wodehouse – as a misogynist. Certainly he misses no opportunity to roll his eyes about women, and the underlying premise of the stories is his morbid fear of ever losing his bachelor status and getting hitched to a woman. I read it, I’m aware of it, but I read it as a comic trope, like Bertie’s own stupidity, his heedless drunkenness, like Jeeves’s Godlike omniscience, like the bad-tempered old judge, the priceless chef, and so on. They’re all stereotypes. But for the record I’ll record some of the grosser incidences.

I stared at the young pill, appalled at her moral code, if you could call it that. You know, the more I see of women, the more I think that there ought to be a law. Something has got to be done about this sex, or the whole fabric of Society will collapse, and then what silly asses we shall all look.

When you really read many of these comments them, you realise the real victim of them is Bertie, because any time he expresses any opinion about anything, he reveals what a dimwit he is.

‘I am implying nothing derogatory to your cousin Madeline, when I say that the idea of being united to her in the bonds of holy wedlock is one that freezes the gizzard. The fact is in no way to her discredit. I should feel just the same about marrying many of the world’s noblest women. There are certain females whom one respects, admires, reveres, but only from a distance. If they show any signs of attempting to come closer, one is prepared to fight them off with a blackjack.

If you wanted to take a feminist line, I suppose you could say that, no matter how humorously intended, the anti-women sentiments which are found throughout Wodehouse’s works are just one more brick in the huge wall of misogynistic patriarchy which dominated British society until late in the 20th century and can, of course, still be found in many places. I.e. the humorous context doesn’t count, or doesn’t invalidate the essentially negative attitude. Whether funny or not, it’s still negative.

‘You know, Jeeves,’ I said, ‘when you really start to look into it, it’s perfectly amazing how the opposite sex seems to go out of its way to snooter me. You recall Miss Wickham and the hot-water bottle?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And Gwladys what-was-her-name, who put her boy friend with the broken leg to bed in my flat?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And Pauline Stoker, who invaded my rural cottage at dead of night in a bathing suit?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What a sex! What a sex, Jeeves! But none of that sex, however deadlier than the male, can be ranked in the same class with this Stiffy.’

Or:

‘She wasn’t kidding. She meant business. She was fully aware that she was doing something which even by female standards was raw, but she didn’t care. The whole fact of the matter is that all this modem emancipation of women has resulted in them getting it up their noses and not giving a damn what they do. It was not like this in Queen Victoria’s day. The Prince Consort would have had a word to say about a girl like Stiffy, what?’

It’s a literally humourless interpretation, but I’m sympathetic to it…

Bertie and Sherlock and Hercule

In my review of the previous novel, ‘Right Ho, Jeeves’, I pointed out the surprisingly large influence on Wodehouse of Sherlock Holmes, so much so that Bertie refers to his adventures as ‘cases’ and the people who come to him and Jeeves for help as ‘clients’. And very obviously the entire idea of a partnership solving problems, one of whom is the super-intelligent problem-solver while the other is his dim sidekick (i.e. Jeeves and Wooster), obviously echoes Holmes and Watson.

The Holmes influence is toned down in this novel so that there’s only one reference to Watson and one to Holmes. Instead what surprised me is that Wodehouse chucks in a reference to Hercule Poirot! It’s an interesting indication of how Christie’s detective had penetrated so deeply into popular culture that he could be jokily referenced in other popular fiction.

I mean, imagine how some unfortunate Master Criminal would feel, on coming down to do a murder at the old Grange, if he found that not only was Sherlock Holmes putting in the weekend there, but Hercule Poirot, as well!

But in fact there’s more to it than that. Wodehouse deliberately drops a number of Christie references throughout the novel, turning the text itself into a sort of Christie-esque mystery.

Bertie is reading a murder mystery

To while away the time I pulled the arm-chair up and got out the mystery story I had brought with me from London. As my researches in it had already shown me, it was a particularly good one, full of crisp clues and meaty murders and I was soon absorbed.

And the novel even gives him clues what to do, as when he’s looking for the hidden notebook and the mystery he’s reading has the detective recommend looking on top of the suspect’s wardrobe.

Comparison with thrillers: Here’s Bertie recruiting Jeeves to help him write out a summary of the situation:

‘I think it would help if we did what they do in the thrillers. Do you ever read thrillers?’
‘Not very frequently, sir.’
‘Well, there’s always a bit where the detective, in order to clarify his thoughts, writes down a list of suspects, motives, times when, alibis, clues and what not. Let us try this plan. Take pencil and paper, Jeeves, and we will assemble the facts. Entitle the thing ‘ Wooster, B.—position of.’

That’s exactly what Poirot does in many of his stories.

Adversary Earlier there’d been a passing reference in a telegram. Bertie had described Bassett being suspicious of him as:

like ambassador finding veiled woman snooping round safe containing secret treaty.

This is precisely what happens in one of Christie’s early spy adventures, The Secret Adversary.

Fiddling Further, in chapter 4 while wondering what to do, Gussie stands at the mantlepiece and fiddles with a statuette on it. This is exactly what Poirot does in many of the Christie stories, rearranging bits and bobs on mantlepieces or desks under the influence of his symmetry obsessive compulsive disorder.

Little grey cells And it becomes unquestionable that Wodehouse is parodying Poirot when a moment later:

He pondered, frowning. Then the little grey cells seemed to stir.

This phrase is copyright Poirot, occurs in all the stories, and lays any doubt to rest.

Psychology Christie was at pains to distinguish Poirot from Holmes in all sorts of ways but one is to make Poirot focus not on material clues but on analysing the psychology of the murderer. Well, it’s no coincidence that throughout this novel Bertie, and others, insist on Jeeves’s superior reading of psychology. It is clearly meant to align him with Christie’s Poirot.

In these delicate matters of psychology [Jeeves] never errs.
‘I think we can find one [a solution], sir, if we approach the matter from the psychological angle.’
‘Oh, psychological?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘The psychology of the individual?’
‘Precisely, sir.’
‘Jeeves,’ I explained to Stiffy, who, of course, knew the man only slightly, scarcely more, indeed, than as a silent figure that had done some smooth potato-handing when she had lunched at my flat, ‘is and always has been a whale on the psychology of the individual. He eats it alive.’

Gooseflesher Incidentally, Bertie converts the thriller into his own poshboy argot and refers to it as a gooseflesher.

Comic phrases

About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.

I had described Roderick Spode to the butler as a man with an eye that could open an oyster at sixty paces, and it was an eye of this nature that he was directing at me now. He looked like a Dictator on the point of starting a purge.

‘Oh, Bertie,’ she said, in a low voice like beer trickling out of a jug, ‘you ought not to be here.’

She looked at me like someone who has just solved the crossword puzzle with a shrewd ‘Emu’ in the top right-hand corner.

Stiffy stood for a moment looking after him a bit yearningly, like a girl who wished that she had half a brick handy.

I turned to Aunt Dahlia, who was making noises like a motorbicycle in the background.

Animal similes

He paused, and swallowed convulsively, like a Pekingese taking a pill.

The Dictator had to shove his oar in. He asked if he should call a policeman, and old Bassett’s eyes gleamed for a moment. Being a magistrate makes you love the idea of calling policemen. It’s like a tiger tasting blood.

I turned to Gussie, who was now looking like a bewildered halibut.

He gave me a hard stare. The eyes behind the spectacles were cold. He looked like an annoyed turbot.

Old Bassett had been listening to these courtesies with a dazed expression on the map—gulping a bit from time to time, like a fish that has been hauled out of a pond on a bent pin and isn’t at all sure it is equal to the pressure of events.

I now gazed at him hopefully, like a seal awaiting a bit of fish.

However, the last female had no sooner passed through the door than Gussie, who had been holding it open, shot after her like a diving duck and did not return.

He was staring incredulously, like one bitten by a rabbit.

She snorted like a bison at the water-trough.

Old Bassett, who had gone into a coma again, came out of it and uttered a sound like the death-rattle of a dying duck.

There came the sound of furniture being dragged away, and presently the door opened and his head emerged cautiously, like that of a snail taking a look round after a thunderstorm.

I don’t say I didn’t leave my chair like a jackrabbit that has sat on a cactus.

The Drones club

Wodehouse’s fictitious Drones Club was located in Dover Street, off Piccadilly. A drone is a male bee that does no work and lives off the labour of others so the name is a satire on the 1920s stereotype of rich, idle young men. The Drones Club appears in not just the Jeeves and Wooster stories, but the Psmith and Blandings series, as well as others. Members mentioned in this book are:

Bertie
Freddie Widgeon
Bingo Little
Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright
Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps
Oofy Prosser

Addresses

Bertie’s address:

Bertram Wooster
Berkeley Mansions
Berkeley Square
London

Aunt Dahlia’s address:

Mrs Dahlia Travers
47 Charles Street
Berkeley Square
London.

Credit

‘The Code of the Woosters’ was published in 1938 by Herbert Jenkins. I read it online.

Related reviews

P.G. Wodehouse reviews

This lax post-war world

She was naming the Price of the Papers. In other words, after being blackmailed by an aunt at breakfast, I was now being blackmailed by a female crony before dinner. Pretty good going, even for this lax post-war world.

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by Simon on December 8, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, English literature, Novel

Tagged A Tale of Two Cities, A.B. Filmer, abbreviations, Aberdeen terrier, Anatole, Aunt Dahlia, Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps, Bartholomew, Bertie Wooster, Bingo Little, Black Shorts, Bond Street, braggadocio, Brompton Road, Butterfield, Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, Charles Dickens, comic novel, Comic simile, Constable Oates, Curzon Street, dictator, Dover Street, Dr Watson, Drones Club, Einstein, Eulalie Soeurs, fascism, Feminism, fiction, Freddie Widgeon, Gloucestershire, gooseflesher, Gussie Fink-Nottle, Hamlet, Harold Pinker, Herbert Jenkins, Hercule Poirot, humour, J. Washburn Stoker, Jeeves, Jeeves and Wooster, Junior Ganymede, Keats, King Lear, Kipling, little grey cells, Macbeth, Madeline Bassett, metonymy, Milady's Boudoir, misogyny, Murder Mystery, Mussolini, newts, novel, Ode to the West Wind, Oofy Prosser, Oswald Mosely, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Piccadilly, Poirot, Pomona Grindle, Pop Bassett, Provence, Psychology, Queen Victoria, rannygazoo, Rev HP Pinker, Robert Taylor, Roberta Wickham, Roderick Spode, Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, Sidney Carton, silverware, Sir Roderick Spode, Sir Watkyn Bassett, Somerset Maugham, Spode, Stiffy Byng, Stinker Pinker, the Black Shorts, the Code of the Woosters, the Drones Club, The Junior Ganymede club, the Saviours of Britain, The Secret Adversary, The Sensitive Plant, The Times, Totleigh Towers, Totleigh-in-the-Wold, Uncle Tom Travers, Upon Reading Chapman's Homer, WoosterWorld

Posted by Simon on December 8, 2025

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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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by Simon on July 20, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Exhibition, Great War, History, Literature, Second World War, War, World War One

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The Soul of Man under Socialism by Oscar Wilde: quotes and commentary

The key thing to grasp about this essay is that, although it’s routinely touted as Wilde’s one engagement with politics, it is not really about politics at all but centred on the more familiar Wildean subject of the cultivation of individualism.

His entire worldview boils down to the need for everyone to throw off the various shackles of society and cultivate their true selves. So Wilde isn’t interested in socialism as it is usually defined – ‘a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.’ His form of socialism means ‘a political and economic theory of social organization which enables the greatest possible development of each citizen, the fullest possible blossoming of their selves.’

Socialism = liberation from others Thus he opens the essay by saying that the chief benefit of socialism would be liberating us from ‘the sordid necessity of living for others’. Throughout history only a handful of men have been able ‘to realise the perfection of what was in him’ (in his century, Darwin, Keats, Renan) but most people are prevented from becoming their true selves by the necessity of living for others. In the nineteenth century this is because of the spectacle of ‘hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation’ which surrounds them.

Charity is harmful to giver and receiver alike Thus they embark on charity to alleviate the sufferings of the poor but this is wrong. Charity is wrong. In fact the people who set out to do the most good end up doing the most harm. They are like the ‘good’ slave owners who were kind to their slaves and so prevented the true horror of the system from being more evident and the whole thing being ended earlier.

The state of the poor He gives a paragraph on the state of England’s urban poor, ‘living in fetid dens and fetid rags, and bringing up unhealthy, hunger-pinched children in the midst of impossible and absolutely repulsive surroundings’ and pitifully dependent on the weather i.e. whenever there’s a frost the streets are full of whining beggars and crowds queueing for entry to ‘loathsome’ shelters.

Under Socialism…each member of the society will share in the general prosperity and happiness of the society…

Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material well-being of each member of the community. It will, in fact, give Life its proper basis and its proper environment. But for the full development of Life to its highest mode of perfection, something more is needed. What is needed is Individualism.

Individualism The ideal world will be ideal because it will allow everyone to flourish and develop their own individual uniqueness. Under present conditions quite a few people are well off enough to develop a limited form of individualism.

These are the poets, the philosophers, the men of science, the men of culture – in a word, the real men, the men who have realised themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains a partial realisation.

But, of course, the majority are forced to do the work of beasts of burden, live on the brink of starvation, under the tyranny of want. All this will be abolished by socialism.

Private property At the root of inequality is the concept of private property which is why Socialism is committed to abolishing it. However, Wilde, with typical paradox and wit, points out that private property is not only ruinous for those that don’t have it (i.e. the poor) but is also very deleterious for those that do, the middle and upper classes.

The possession of private property is very often extremely demoralising…It involves endless claims upon one, endless attention to business, endless bother… and that is, of course, one of the reasons why Socialism wants to get rid of the institution.

Why? Because getting it and keeping it, maintaining it and worrying about it, are all distractions from what Wilde sees as the purpose of life, which is to cultivate your individuality. All the duties which come with wealth are a burden. Abolishing private property will free not only the poor but the rich as well.

In praise of the rebellious poor Many of the poor accept high-minded charity quiescently but Wilde is on the side of the rebellious poor, who revolt against their wretched condition and recognise charity as the feeble attempts to plaster over a wicked system which they are.

The best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so.

And:

Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

And:

A poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented, and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him. He is at any rate a healthy protest. As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid.

(You can see why after just a few pages of this the average Victorian reader would be outraged. So far he has said he wants to abolish all private property, abolish the distinctions between the classes along with the intricate hierarchy of rank, that he is against that great Victorian institution of philanthropy and in favour of the most rebellious, mutinous and violent type of proletarian protester. Radical scandalous stuff.)

The need for agitators Obviously bourgeois Victorians had a great fear of agitators who would rouse the downtrodden masses from their slumber, hence the vicious laws passed against early attempts to form trade unions, but Wilde, with a typically paradoxical flourish, says that this is precisely why they are so important.

What is said by great employers of labour against agitators is unquestionably true. Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community, and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilisation.

American slavery For the second time he cites the example of slavery in America. First time was to claim that the ‘good’ slave owner only made the situation worse by glossing over the true horror of the institution. Now he cites the way slavery was abolished not by the slave owners, and certainly not by the utterly cowed slaves themselves, but by outside agitators, the Abolitionists from the North (starting in high-minded Boston) who entered the slave states from outside and often behaved illegally (he doesn’t explain how but I assume in helping to liberate slaves and transport them to freedom in the North).

Against authoritarian socialism Switching theme a bit he repeats the notion that an authoritarian socialism would defeat the object – well, what he sees as the object of such a social transformation, which is the undoing of all restrictions which prevent people from becoming their true selves.

It is to be regretted that a portion of our community should be practically in slavery, but to propose to solve the problem by enslaving the entire community is childish. Every man must be left quite free to choose his own work. No form of compulsion must be exercised over him.

Unfortunately, as we discovered in the twentieth century, because so many people are opposed to a completely propertyless society the only way a socialist state can be made to work is by imposing it by force and maintaining it via surveillance, spies and prison camps… Anyway he writes this because:

Many of the socialistic views that I have come across seem to me to be tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual compulsion. Of course, authority and compulsion are out of the question. All association must be quite voluntary.

How individualism will flourish without private property It’s true that:

A few men who have had private means of their own, such as Byron, Shelley, Browning, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and others, have been able to realise their personality more or less completely. Not one of these men ever did a single day’s work for hire. They were relieved from poverty. They had an immense advantage.

Will not we lose the lovely productions of such writers if we abolish the system of private property which produced them? No. Because with the advent of propertyless socialism all people will be freed to cultivate their personalities, it will release ‘the great actual Individualism latent and potential in mankind generally’.

How private property destroys individualism

Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false…It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is.

Private property debars the great mass of the population from becoming individuals by impoverishing and starving them, but it has trammelled the middle and upper classes by persuading them to devote their lives to money, greed, property, wealth and so on. It has persuaded people that the sole purpose of life is to:

accumulate this property, and to go on wearily and tediously accumulating it long after he has got far more than he wants, or can use, or enjoy, or perhaps even know of. Man will kill himself by overwork in order to secure property, and really, considering the enormous advantages that property brings, one is hardly surprised. One’s regret is that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him – in which, in fact, he misses the true pleasure and joy of living.

So abolish the entire system of private property and the relentless competition to acquire it:

With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Have we ever seen the full expression of a personality in all human history? No. Rather arbitrarily Wilde selects Julius Caesar and Marcus Aurelius from Roman history, the one the most successful general and statesman of his time the other widely thought to be the model of a philosopher-emperor. But both dragged down and prevented from perfection by their multitudinous cares and duties.

Making a wild and drastic leap forward to his own century, Wilde cites the cases of two poets, Byron and Shelley, more to bring out a new theme which is the opposition of brutish philistine English society to any attempt to cultivate your individuality and become a personality. His characterisation of the two men and poets is shrewd and so worth quoting at length:

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.

What is this individualism? Since it underlies his entire worldview, it’s worth giving his definition, in its entirety:

It will be a marvellous thing – the true personality of man – when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be. It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us, by being what it is. The personality of man will be very wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.

Christianity Surprisingly, Wilde invokes Christianity in his crusade to promote individualism. This raises obvious issues which I’ll address in a moment. First his argument: First of all he says that men may, or may not, invoke Christianity in their personal development. Straightaway that is denying Christianity the kind of absolute truth which its adherents (most of Victorian society) gave it.

Then he gives a lengthy summary of Christ’s teachings reinterpreted solely in terms of his own ideology of self-development and completely omitting a) any mention of God, creator of the universe and of each of us b) of a soul c) of the redemptive power of the crucifixion, resurrection and of the true believer’s faith that we, ourselves, can be reborn through true faith. In other words, Wilde omits the entire theological side of Christianity and reduces it to little more than an optional accessory in the quest for personal development.

The message of Christ to man was simply ‘Be thyself.’ That is the secret of Christ…When Jesus talks about the poor he simply means personalities, just as when he talks about the rich he simply means people who have not developed their personalities…

And so completely rewrites Jesus’ doctrine, in his own terms:

What Jesus meant, was this. He said to man, ‘You have a wonderful personality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you. If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you. And so, try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you. And try also to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. Personal property hinders Individualism at every step.’

What Jesus says that man reaches his perfection, not through what he has, not even through what he does, but entirely through what he is. And so the wealthy young man who comes to Jesus is represented as a thoroughly good citizen, who has broken none of the laws of his state, none of the commandments of his religion. He is quite respectable, in the ordinary sense of that extraordinary word. Jesus says to him, ‘You should give up private property. It hinders you from realising your perfection. It is a drag upon you. It is a burden. Your personality does not need it. It is within you, and not outside of you, that you will find what you really are, and what you really want.’

To his own friends he says the same thing. He tells them to be themselves, and not to be always worrying about other things. What do other things matter? Man is complete in himself. When they go into the world, the world will disagree with them. That is inevitable. The world hates Individualism. But that is not to trouble them. They are to be calm and self-centred. If a man takes their cloak, they are to give him their coat, just to show that material things are of no importance. If people abuse them, they are not to answer back. What does it signify? The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to the same low level.

Above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin his true perfection.

You’ve got to be impressed by the way Wilde has assimilated and rethought the most powerful ideology in human history in order to suit his own worldview, subtly realigning all Jesus’ sayings so as to underpin Wilde’s own concerns for personal development and individualism. You can also see how scandalous this would be to your average Victorian. As would…

The end of marriage Many communists and socialists thought of marriage and the family as coercive patriarchal institutions, established to allow the dominance of men over women and forming a kind of model for the domination of the rich over the poor (notably Friedrich Engels in his 1884 work ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’). Wilde sympathises with those who wanted to abolish marriage along with private property:

Socialism annihilates family life, for instance. With the abolition of private property, marriage in its present form must disappear. This is part of the programme. Individualism accepts this and makes it fine. It converts the abolition of legal restraint into a form of freedom that will help the full development of personality, and make the love of man and woman more wonderful, more beautiful, and more ennobling.

This he cites Jesus himself as rejecting family life – in the New Testament this is for the sake of following Jesus and becoming closer to God, in Wilde’s reinterpretation it is in order to cultivate the uniqueness of the self:

Jesus knew this. He rejected the claims of family life, although they existed in his day and community in a very marked form. ‘Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?’ he said, when he was told that they wished to speak to him. When one of his followers asked leave to go and bury his father, ‘Let the dead bury the dead,’ was his terrible answer. He would allow no claim whatsoever to be made on personality.

And so Wilde zeroes in on this one aspect of Jesus’ preaching to underpin his own ideology:

And so he who would lead a Christlike life is he who is perfectly and absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of science; or a young student at a University, or one who watches sheep upon a moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about God, like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who throws his net into the sea. It does not matter what he is, as long as he realises the perfection of the soul that is within him. All imitation in morals and in life is wrong.

In praise of anarchism The fundamental premise of anarchism as a political belief is that nobody should rule over others, that we all be absolutely free. It’s debatable, then, whether Wilde is really praising socialism or anarchism.

Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to. As a natural result the State must give up all idea of government. It must give it up because, as a wise man once said many centuries before Christ, there is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there is no such thing as governing mankind. All modes of government are failures. Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things. Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and ochlocracies are unjust to the few. High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out. I must say that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.

Socialism will bring the end of crime In a wildly utopian extrapolation, Wilde asserts that if you abolish authority i.e. one class or group compelling everyone else to live a certain way, then crime will disappear. This leads him to the counter-intuitive and scandalous thought that it is not crime which requires punishment, but the elaborate set of grotesque punishments which create crime.

The less punishment, the less crime. When there is no punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist, or, if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as a very distressing form of dementia, to be cured by care and kindness.

This utopian claim is based on the notion that all crimes are crime of want and poverty and hunger:

For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals at all. Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime. That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a class, so absolutely uninteresting from any psychological point of view. They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins. They are merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be if they had not got enough to eat.

Therefore, create a fair society, where everyone has enough for their needs, and crime will disappear:

When private property is abolished there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to exist…though a crime may not be against property, it may spring from the misery and rage and depression produced by our wrong system of property-holding, and so, when that system is abolished, will disappear.

Crimes of passion i.e. not incited by poverty and want?

Jealousy, which is an extraordinary source of crime in modern life, is an emotion closely bound up with our conceptions of property, and under Socialism and Individualism will die out. It is remarkable that in communistic tribes jealousy is entirely unknown.

Machines will set men free Up to the present men have been the slaves of the machines they have invented:

Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants.

The role of machinery must be completely rethought:

Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing.

Thus:

While Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure – which, and not labour, is the aim of man – or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work.

Machines will be the new slaves For the third time he cites slavery:

The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

The role of Art

About half way through the essay it feels as though Wilde has dealt with the organisational, political aspects of the issue of the socialist transformation of society (insofar as he does) and moves onto the subject which really interests him and is the core theme of almost everything he wrote, which is the role of art, the artist and criticism. Thus:

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist.

Wilde’s concept of art and his ideology of individualism are intimately linked, two sides of the same coin.

Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known.

The philistine public It is telling that Wilde has barely got going about art before he has to start attacking the philistine (English) public. What he doesn’t directly say but is so obvious from his writings is that his entire conception of art is defined in opposition to the vulgarity of the public.

Art is this intense form of Individualism that makes the public try to exercise over it in an authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as corrupting as it is contemptible. It is not quite their fault. The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity.

The attempt:

on the part of the community, or the Church, or the Government, to interfere with the individualism of imaginative art…is aggressive, offensive and brutalising.

Which arts escape the public? In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the public take no interest, such as poetry which it doesn’t read. By contrast the philistine public gets very worked up about the ‘immorality’ of contemporary novels or plays (think of the outcry over the ‘immorality’ of Thomas Hardy’s novel, ‘Jude the Obscure’ which led him to abandon writing novels, or the outcry when Ibsen’s plays were staged in London). Partly this is because:

The one thing that the public dislike is novelty. Any attempt to extend the subject-matter of art is extremely distasteful to the public; and yet the vitality and progress of art depend in a large measure on the continual extension of subject-matter.

The public dislike novelty because they are afraid of it. It represents to them a mode of Individualism, an assertion on the part of the artist that he selects his own subject, and treats it as he chooses. The public are quite right in their attitude. Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.

And he laments the way the general public assimilate then ossify and hollow out the so-called classics:

The 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…

By now you can see that he’s said far less about any particular artist or writer or work of art or literature than he has done about the philistine public. It’s excoriating their stupidity and philistinism which really gets his juices flowing and, you realise, is a vital prerequisite for his entire theory. When he returns to writing about ‘the artist’ he’s curiously thin and unimpassioned:

The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself.

That, in itself, is a bit boring and anodyne and so, as if sensing it, Wilde goes on to define what he means by a passage with much more life which is, as I’ve explained, slagging the public.

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.

Morbidity In the same vein, further passages about ‘the artist’ really derive their energy from Wilde starting off by describing how the stupid philistine public use certain boo words to try and categorise and control new art, the examples he gives being how the public describes work it doesn’t understand as ‘morbid’ or ‘unhealthy’ or ‘exotic’. As for ‘morbid’, it gives Wilde the pretext to repeat a central theme of his which is that a work of art is neither morbid nor immoral, exotic nor unhealthy, because the artist stands at one remove from his subject matter and merely deploys it to create effects:

[Morbid] is, of course, a ridiculous word to apply to a work of art. For what is morbidity but a mood of emotion or a mode of thought that one cannot express? The public are all morbid, because the public can never find expression for anything. The artist is never morbid. He expresses everything. He stands outside his subject, and through its medium produces incomparable and artistic effects. To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote ‘King Lear.’

Public attacks make the artist stronger

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.

Not least because they are the products of:

that monstrous and ignorant thing that is called Public Opinion, which, bad and well-meaning as it is when it tries to control action, is infamous and of evil meaning when it tries to control Thought or Art.

Healthy versus unhealthy The accusation of ‘unhealthy’ is so frequently made against modern art that Wilde devotes a paragraph to very entertainingly standing the definition on its head:

What is a healthy, or an unhealthy work of art? All terms that one applies to a work of art, provided that one applies them rationally, have reference to either its style or its subject, or to both together. From the point of view of style, a healthy work of art is one whose style recognises the beauty of the material it employs, be that material one of words or of bronze, of colour or of ivory, and uses that beauty as a factor in producing the aesthetic effect. From the point of view of subject, a healthy work of art is one the choice of whose subject is conditioned by the temperament of the artist, and comes directly out of it. In fine, a healthy work of art is one that has both perfection and personality.

Of course, form and substance cannot be separated in a work of art; they are always one. But for purposes of analysis, and setting the wholeness of aesthetic impression aside for a moment, we can intellectually so separate them. An unhealthy work of art, on the other hand, is a work whose style is obvious, old-fashioned, and common, and whose subject is deliberately chosen, not because the artist has any pleasure in it, but because he thinks that the public will pay him for it. In fact, the popular novel that the public calls healthy is always a thoroughly unhealthy production; and what the public call an unhealthy novel is always a beautiful and healthy work of art.

The philistine press and canting journalism As I’ve commented, for several pages Wilde has defined his ideas of individualism and art by contrasting them with the stupidity, shallowness and vulgarity of the general public which is happier in conservatism, conformity and hates anything which is new and beautiful. Now he moves onto the vehicle of their prejudices, and gives a sustained critique of journalism and the press, purveyors of ‘prejudice, stupidity, cant, and twaddle.’ Nowadays ‘We are dominated by Journalism’ and:

In England, Journalism, not, except in a few well-known instances, having been carried to such excesses of brutality [as in America], is still a great factor, a really remarkable power. The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over people’s private lives seems to me to be quite extraordinary. The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. In centuries before ours the public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump. That was quite hideous. In this century journalists have nailed their own ears to the keyhole. That is much worse. And what aggravates the mischief is that the journalists who are most to blame are not the amusing journalists who write for what are called Society papers. The harm is done by the serious, thoughtful, earnest journalists, who solemnly, as they are doing at present, will drag before the eyes of the public some incident in the private life of a great statesman, of a man who is a leader of political thought as he is a creator of political force, and invite the public to discuss the incident, to exercise authority in the matter, to give their views, and not merely to give their views, but to carry them into action, to dictate to the man upon all other points, to dictate to his party, to dictate to his country; in fact, to make themselves ridiculous, offensive, and harmful.

The private lives of men and women should not be told to the public. The public have nothing to do with them at all. In France they manage these things better. There they do not allow the details of the trials that take place in the divorce courts to be published for the amusement or criticism of the public. All that the public are allowed to know is that the divorce has taken place and was granted on petition of one or other or both of the married parties concerned.

In France, in fact, they limit the journalist, and allow the artist almost perfect freedom. Here we allow absolute freedom to the journalist, and entirely limit the artist. English public opinion, that is to say, tries to constrain and impede and warp the man who makes things that are beautiful in effect, and compels the journalist to retail things that are ugly, or disgusting, or revolting in fact, so that we have the most serious journalists in the world, and the most indecent newspapers.

In praise of Sir Henry Irving Wilde devotes a rare paragraph of unqualified praise, in this case to the great late-Victorian actor-manager Sir Henry Irving. At this point a dash of background from Wikipedia is necessary:

Sir Henry Irving (1838 to 1905) was an English stage actor in the Victorian era, known as an actor-manager because he took complete responsibility for all aspects of productions (supervision of sets, lighting, direction, casting as well as playing the leading roles) for season after season at the West End’s Lyceum Theatre, establishing himself and his company as representative of English classical theatre. In 1895 he became the first actor to be awarded a knighthood, indicating full acceptance of the profession into the higher circles of British society.

In Wilde’s view Irving’s great achievement has been NOT to pander to the lowest common denominator but stay true to his vision as an artist and, slowly slowly, raise the public’s standards.

Had his sole object been to give the public what they wanted, could have produced the commonest plays in the commonest manner, and made as much success and money as a man could possibly desire. But his object was not that. His object was to realise his own perfection as an artist, under certain conditions, and in certain forms of Art. At first he appealed to the few: now he has educated the many. He has created in the public both taste and temperament…I often wonder, however, whether the public understand that that success is entirely due to the fact that he did not accept their standard, but realised his own.

The importance of ‘receptivity’ Why has the public accepted productions of a higher standard at Irving’s theatres than at others? It is a question of receptivity. Antone who encounters a work of art must cultivate receptivity to its qualities.

If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master is to play. And the more completely he can suppress his own silly views, his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art should be, or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the work of art in question.

A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art.

Receptivity in the theatre Of all the arts, drama is the one which requires most ‘receptivity’. By its nature a play creates mysteries and uncertainties in the first act which the audience has to wait to have resolved. If the audience started shouting at the end of the first act that they don’t understand what’s going on, they would be idiots. Even a London audience knows that it has to wait and see, and so submit to its artistic effect.

The honest man is to sit quietly, and know the delightful emotions of wonder, curiosity, and suspense. He is not to go to the play to lose a vulgar temper. He is to go to the play to realise an artistic temperament. He is to go to the play to gain an artistic temperament. He is not the arbiter of the work of art. He is one who is admitted to contemplate the work of art, and, if the work be fine, to forget in its contemplation the egotism that mars him – the egotism of his ignorance, or the egotism of his information.

In this way drama, or art in general, is ‘elevating’ in that it exposes us to artistic influences – more complicated, subtle new and insightful than our run-of-the-mill thoughts and perceptions – and, as he’s explained earlier, these are not to be judged in terms of the ‘morality’ of the vulgar herd, as ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’, ‘moral’ or ‘immoral’, but purely by aesthetic criteria, of whether the style matches the subject matter, whether the subject matter is adequately elaborated and so on.

Receptivity in the novel Same with the novel:

Popular authority and the recognition of popular authority are fatal.

A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent. He has no poppied or honeyed cakes through which to give the monster sleep or sustenance. He leaves that to the popular novelist.

Interestingly, Wilde thinks the pre-eminent serious novelist working in the England of his time (essentially the 1880s) was George Meredith:

To him belongs philosophy in fiction. His people not merely live, but they live in thought. One can see them from myriad points of view. They are suggestive. There is soul in them and around them. They are interpretative and symbolic. And he who made them, those wonderful quickly-moving figures, made them for his own pleasure, and has never asked the public what they wanted, has never cared to know what they wanted, has never allowed the public to dictate to him or influence him in any way but has gone on intensifying his own personality, and producing his own individual work. At first none came to him. That did not matter. Then the few came to him. That did not change him. The many have come now. He is still the same. He is an incomparable novelist.

The decorative arts Wilde knew a thing or two about this subject having written extensively about domestic furnishing and been the editor of The Woman’s World magazine from 1887 to 1889. As you might expect, he thinks popular taste is dire. He calls the famous 1851 exhibition held in Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, ‘the Great Exhibition of international vulgarity’ which led to ‘traditions…were so appalling that the houses in which people lived were only fit for blind people to live in.’

Despite much abuse a new generation of artists and designers has, in fact, produced much beautiful work, effecting a ‘revolution in house-decoration and furniture so that ‘it is almost impossible to enter any modern house without seeing some recognition of good taste, some recognition of the value of lovely surroundings, some sign of appreciation of beauty.’ Presumably he’s referring to the Arts and Crafts movement, most associated with William Morris but with many other designers? It’s irritating that he isn’t clearer.

And ironic that we now regard his idea of beautiful furnishings and furniture as extraordinarily dark, overwrought and cluttered. It’s all very well visiting exhibitions of Morris and Arts and Crafts ware but thank God for the Bauhaus and associated movements which led, eventually, maybe only in the 1970s and 80s, to most people decluttering and streamlining their living spaces.

What kind of government should the artist live under?

The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous. It has been stated that under despotisms artists have produced lovely work. This is not quite so. Artists have visited despots, not as subjects to be tyrannised over, but as wandering wonder-makers, as fascinating vagrant personalities, to be entertained and charmed and suffered to be at peace, and allowed to create. There is this to be said in favour of the despot, that he, being an individual, may have culture, while the mob, being a monster, has none. One who is an Emperor and King may stoop down to pick up a brush for a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw mud. And yet the democracy have not so far to stoop as the emperor. In fact, when they want to throw mud they have not to stoop at all. But there is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.

Passages like this show pretty clearly that Wilde wasn’t a socialist so much as an anarchist. Not a socialist government – no government is his utopian ideal.

Three types of despotism The essay feels like it’s running out of steam when Wilde tacks on a consideration of what he considers the three types of despotism, namely despotism of the soul, of the body, and of the soul and body. Despotism of the body was exercised by princes. Some of these, particularly during the Renaissance, were immensely tasteful and commissioned great works, but were always dangerous, and imprisoned, exiled or executed as many artists as the commissioned. Despotism over the soul Wilde associates with the Papacy, where much the same applied i.e. some popes were enlightened patrons but also very dangerous, not just to artists but, via their authority over all thought, to free thinking.

It is an obvious shortcoming of this little overview that it is so limited, based on such limited examples from such a rarefied and precious period i.e. the Renaissance. Modern history ranges over the entire history of all peoples and all times and so makes Wilde’s little nostrums feel like dilettantism.

The Renaissance and Louis XIV Same goes for his other sweeping historical generalisations which are interesting for what they say about him more than for the actual periods:

The Renaissance was great because it sought to solve no social problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so had great and individual artists, and great and individual men. One might point out how Louis XIV, by creating the modern state, destroyed the individualism of the artist, and made things monstrous in their monotony of repetition, and contemptible in their conformity to rule.

Wilde is anti-democracy The third tyranny, over body and soul, he attributes to Democracy and the People. Important to point out that Wilde despises democracy as pandering to the lowest common denominator of the vulgar herd.

High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out.

And:

An Emperor and King may stoop down to pick up a brush for a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw mud. And yet the democracy have not so far to stoop as the emperor. In fact, when they want to throw mud they have not to stoop at all.

And:

As for the People…their authority is a thing blind, deaf, hideous, grotesque, tragic, amusing, serious, and obscene. It is impossible for the artist to live with the People. All despots bribe. The people bribe and brutalise. Who told them to exercise authority? They were made to live, to listen, and to love…

So – Wilde is profoundly anti-democratic. His idea of socialism is for it to allow a world of people like him to flourish, to create a world of Oscar Wildes.

Wilde’s view of human nature His generalisations reach their most sweeping when he reveals his fundamental view of human nature: this is that human nature is continually changing and evolving.

It is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The conditions will be done away with, and human nature will change. The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.

(After the catastrophes of the past century, I think most people would agree that, despite superficial changes in technology, underlying human nature is sadly impervious to change but born again in each generation with the same vices and weaknesses.)

More anarchic assumptions

Individualism…does not come to man with any claims upon him at all. It comes naturally and inevitably out of man. It is the point to which all development tends. It is the differentiation to which all organisms grow. It is the perfection that is inherent in every mode of life, and towards which every mode of life quickens.

And so Individualism exercises no compulsion over man. On the contrary, it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him. It does not try to force people to be good. It knows that people are good when they are let alone. Man will develop Individualism out of himself. Man is now so developing Individualism. To ask whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether Evolution is practical. Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution except towards Individualism.

A lovely dream for individuals to dream. Never going to happen. As someone who bases his entire worldview on evolutionary materialism, I can’t help smiling at the fairy tale claim that ‘there is no evolution except towards Individualism.’ This obviously has nothing to do with the science of evolution, but it’s not even true in sociological terms. If the triumph of social media over the past 15 years shows anything it’s that people want to find their tribes and then conform to them, adopt their rules, manners, clothes and attitudes. People are naturally anti-individualist.

Paradoxical definition of affectation Again Wilde uses the accusations of the stupid public as the springboard for some witty inversions of conventional thinking. A man (himself, of course) is criticised for being ‘affected’ if he dresses as he wants to but, claims Wilde, he is merely doing what comes naturally i.e. pleasing himself. What is affected is going out of your way to make sure you dress exactly like everyone else, ‘dressing according to the views of one’s neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid.’

True definition of selfishness Or a man is called ‘selfish’ if he:

lives in the manner that seems to him most suitable for the full realisation of his own personality; if, in fact, the primary aim of his life is self-development. But this is the way in which everyone should live. Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them.

You can see here how Wilde’s Anglo-Saxon version of anarchism is a kind of liberalism without limits, with all the social limits and restrictions and safety guards which John Stuart Mill and his followers wrestled with, at a stroke removed. And as such, completely impractical. But his redefinitions of selfishness and unselfishness are extremely persuasive and attractive:

Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognises infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it. It is not selfish to think for oneself. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of ones neighbour that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently.

More praise of individualism

Under Individualism people will be quite natural and absolutely unselfish, and will know the meanings of these words, and realise them in their free, beautiful lives.

Nor will men be egotistic as they are now. For the egotist is he who makes claims upon others, and the Individualist will not desire to do that. It will not give him pleasure. When man has realised Individualism, he will also realise sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously.

Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too.

One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life’s sores and maladies merely, but with life’s joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom.

So Wilde looks forward to a time when 1) socialism has solved the problem of poverty and 2) science has solved the problem of disease. Is this utopian? So be it.

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

Last thoughts about Christianity As the essay draws to a close Wilde tacks on a further page about individualism and Christianity. If the earlier passage was broadly sympathetic, largely because Wilde rewrote Christ’s message in his own terms, this second passage is a lot more historically accurate and a lot less sympathetic.

Wilde makes the point that ‘Christ made no attempt to reconstruct society’ and draws the questionable conclusion that ‘consequently the Individualism that he preached to man could be realised only through pain or in solitude’.

Christian solitude Taking those early Christians who chose to go and live in the desert, Wilde says that, maybe by being far from the crowd some of them may have expressed their personalities, but they were liable to be a rather ‘impoverished personality’. (This is open to the obvious criticism that these anchorites and monks and cenobites were seeking the opposite of Wilde’s self-expression, were seeking to annihilate their own personalities in order to be closer to God.)

Christian pain No, many more Christians have sought to express themselves through the path of pain. Wilde’s aim here is to draw a sharp distinction between medieval Christianity (bad for individualism) and the Renaissance (good for individualism).

The Medieval world with its obsession with gruesome suffering, with ‘its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods’, this bloody mediaevalism is the real Christianity, and the mediaeval Christ is the real Christ.

By contrast, the Renaissance dawned upon the world and brought with it the new ideals of the beauty of life and the joy of living. The result was that artists could not understand the Biblical Christ. They painted him as a harmless baby, as a boy playing.

Even when they drew him crucified they drew him as a beautiful God on whom evil men had inflicted suffering. But he did not preoccupy them much. What delighted them was to paint the men and women whom they admired, and to show the loveliness of this lovely earth.

They painted many religious pictures – in fact, they painted far too many, and the monotony of type and motive is wearisome, and was bad for art. It was the result of the authority of the public in art-matters, and is to be deplored. But their soul was not in the subject. Raphael was a great artist when he painted his portrait of the Pope. When he painted his Madonnas and infant Christs, he is not a great artist at all.

No, the Renaissance couldn’t understand the true, medieval Christ, because he was a kind of epitome of pain and human suffering and the Renaissance artists were too full of Italian joie de vivre to understand.

Christ had no message for the Renaissance, which was wonderful because it brought an ideal at variance with his…to find the presentation of the real Christ we must go to mediaeval art. There he is one maimed and marred; one who is not comely to look on, because Beauty is a joy; one who is not in fair raiment, because that may be a joy also: he is a beggar who has a marvellous soul; he is a leper whose soul is divine; he needs neither property nor health; he is a God realising his perfection through pain.

I suppose the contradiction with his earlier passage about Christ is only apparent. It can be explain by saying that the earlier passage, which made Jesus an evangelist for self discovery and self expression, is Wilde’s interpretation of Jesus’s message – while this passage about the medieval and renaissance Jesus are about how he has been portrayed in the history of art which is, I suppose, a different thing.

Russia and pain Right at the end of the essay he extends this thought into a description of contemporary Russian art and literature. (He mentions no names but surely he is thinking of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.) Russia’s social system (i.e. the discrepancy between the tiny affluent class and the widespread serfdom and astonishing poverty of the masses) demands that its art be obsessed with pain.

Even now, in some places in the world, the message of Christ is necessary. No one who lived in modern Russia could possibly realise his perfection except by pain. A few Russian artists have realised themselves in Art; in a fiction that is mediaeval in character, because its dominant note is the realisation of men through suffering. But for those who are not artists, and to whom there is no mode of life but the actual life of fact, pain is the only door to perfection. A Russian who lives happily under the present system of government in Russia must either believe that man has no soul, or that, if he has, it is not worth developing. A Nihilist who rejects all authority, because he knows authority to be evil, and welcomes all pain, because through that he realises his personality, is a real Christian. To him the Christian ideal is a true thing.

As history shows, Russia’s addiction to gargantuan suffering, largely self-inflicted, was to be amply demonstrated in the twentieth century. Has it ended yet?

Conclusion With a few deft strokes Wilde brings his essay back from this digression about pain to repeat his generalisations about the brave future, when socialism will have solved the problem of poverty and science solved the problem of pain.

the modern world has schemes. It proposes to do away with poverty and the suffering that it entails. It desires to get rid of pain, and the suffering that pain entails. It trusts to Socialism and to Science as its methods. What it aims at is an Individualism expressing itself through joy. This Individualism will be larger, fuller, lovelier than any Individualism has ever been.

Pain is not the ultimate mode of perfection. It is merely provisional and a protest. It has reference to wrong, unhealthy, unjust surroundings. When the wrong, and the disease, and the injustice are removed, it will have no further place. It will have done its work. It was a great work, but it is almost over. Its sphere lessens every day.

Obviously as wrong as a social prediction could possibly be.

Vision of the future perfection of man

Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly. When he can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilised, more himself.

Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.

The new Individualism, for whose service Socialism, whether it wills it or not, is working, will be perfect harmony. It will be what the Greeks sought for, but could not, except in Thought, realise completely, because they had slaves, and fed them; it will be what the Renaissance sought for, but could not realise completely except in Art, because they had slaves, and starved them. It will be complete, and through it each man will attain to his perfection.

Thoughts

The most obvious points, for me, are that 1) this essay is very, very long, 2) it is packed with ideas, brilliantly expressed and 3) that it is remarkably consistent, it is the expression of a coherent worldview worked out to some depth and in great detail, taking in a vision of human nature, of history, of different historical epochs, of social change, alongside a coherent attack on the institution of property and its distorting harmful effects on individuals and societies.

It is possible to take issue with numerous aspects of his argument but, insofar as it is not trying to be an essay about evolution or science or economics or history in the scholarly sense, but is more the expression of a particular worldview, it is astonishingly wide-ranging and persuasive. Like the works of art he talks about, there’s not much point quibbling with this or that sweeping generalisation, it’s more a case of submitting to the pace, to the tremendous fluency, and the utopian loveliness of his vision. For the duration of your reading and, therefore, of your submission, his vision of a utopian human nature is beautiful and therefore, in his own terms, as imaginatively true as any work of art.

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by Simon on July 15, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Essays, Literary criticism, Literature

Tagged #democracy, Abolitionists, agitator, American slavery, anarchist, art, Arts and Crafts Movement, Be yourself, Beauty, Bible, Byron, Catholic church, Charity, Christian pain, Christianity, Communism, Crystal Palace, Darwin, despotism over the body, Despotism over the soul, egotism, England, English literature, essay, France, Friedrich Engels, George Meredith, Henry Irving, immoral, individualism, journalism, Julius Caesar, Keats, King Lear, Literature, Louis XIV, Lyceum Theatre, machinery, Marcus Aurelius, marriage, mediaevalism, medieval Christianity, morality, nihilism, nineteenth century England, philistine public, political essay, Politics, poverty, private property, Public Opinion, Rebellion, Renan, Russia, Russian culture, Science, Shakespeare, Shelley, Slavery, socialism, socialist state, the Great Exhibition, The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State, the papacy, the Renaissance, theatre, Victorian England, William Morris

Posted by Simon on July 15, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/07/15/the-soul-of-man-under-socialism-quotes-and-commentary/

Freud on art and literature

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian or bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

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In the realm of fiction we find the plurality of lives which we need.
(Thoughts on War and Death, Pelican Freud Library volume 12, page 79)

Introduction

Volume 14 of the Freud Pelican Library pulls together all of Sigmund Freud’s essays on art and literature.

From my point of view, as a one-time student of literature, one of the most obvious things about all Freud’s writings, even the most ostensibly ‘scientific’, is that he relies far more on forms of literature – novels, folk tales, plays or writers’ lives – than on scientific data, data from studies or experiments, to support and elaborate his theories.

In my day job I do web analytics, cross-referencing quantitative data from various sources, crunching numbers, using formulae in spreadsheets, and assigning numerical values to qualitative data so that it, too, can be analysed in numerical terms, converted into tables of data or graphical representation, analysed for trends, supplying evidence for conclusions, decisions and so on.

So far as I can tell, none of this is present at all in Freud’s writings. A handful of diagrams exist, scattered sparsely through the complete works to indicate the relationship of superego, ego and id, or representing the transformation mechanisms of wishes which take place when they’re converted into dream images, repressed, go on to form the basis of compromise formations, and so on. But most of Freud is void of the kind of data and statistics I associate with scientific writing or analysis.

Instead Freud relies very heavily indeed on works of fiction and literature, folk tales and fairy tales, the myths and legends of Greece and Rome, anecdotes and incidents in the lives of great writers or artists (Goethe, Leonardo).

Right from the start Freud’s writings provided a new model for literary, artistic and biographical interpretation and so it’s no surprise that psychoanalytical theory caught on very quickly in the artistic and literary communities, and then spread to the academic teaching of literature and art where it thrives, through various reversionings and rewritings (Lacan, feminist theory) to this day.

It’s probably too simplistic to say psychoanalysis was never a serious scientific endeavour; but seems fair to say that, in Freud’s hands, it was always an extremely literary one.

What follows is my notes on some, not all, of the essays contained in Volume 14 of the Freud Pelican Library.

1. Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ (1907)

It was Jung, a recent convert to psychoanalysis, who brought this novel, Gradiva, by the German novelist Wilhelm Jensen, published 1903, to Freud’s attention. It is the story of an archaeologist, Norbert Hanold, who comes across an ancient bas-relief of a girl who is walking with a distinctive high-footed step. He names her ‘Gradiva’, which is Latin for ‘light-tripping’, and becomes obsessed with the image.

Cast relief of ‘Gradiva’ (1908), which, as a result of Freud’s essay on the novel, he bought and hung on his study wall

It comes into Hanold’s head that the relief is from Pompeii and that he will somehow meet the girl who is the model for it if he goes there. So off to Pompeii he goes and, one summer day, walking among the ruins, comes across an apparition, a hallucination, of the self-same girl!

They talk briefly and then she disappears among the ruins but not before displaying the unique walk depicted in the frieze. A second time he meets her and their talk clears his muddled mind. Over subsequent meetings and conversations it becomes clear that she is the girl who lives across the road from him in Berlin, named Zoe Bertgang, and whom he loved playing with as a boy.

What happened is that, at puberty, Hanold became obsessed with archaeology and, in his pursuit of it, rejected normal social activity, including with the opposite sex. He repressed and forgot his childhood love for Zoe, redirecting his energies, sublimating them, into an abstract love of Science. But, despite the best efforts, the repressed material returned, but in a garbled censored form, as his irrational unaccountable obsession with this carving.

Over the course of their meetings, Zoe slowly pulls him out of what is clearly some kind of nervous breakdown, eliminating all the voodoo and hallucinatory significances which he had accumulated around the relief; makes him realise she is just an ordinary girl, but one he has continued to be in love with.

Through her long and patient conversations, through talking through his odd symptoms and obsessions, he is slowly returned to ‘normality’, ‘reality’, and to a conventional loving relationship with a young woman. And so they get engaged.

This novel could almost have been written expressly to allow Freud to deploy his favourite themes. For a start it contains many of Hanold’s, dreams which Freud elaborately decodes, thus reaffirming the doctrine that dreams are ‘the royal road to the unconscious’. Confirming the theories put forward in The Interpretation of Dreams that during sleep the censorship of feelings and complexes which are rigorously repressed during conscious waking life, is relaxed, allowing deep wishes to enter the mind, albeit displaced and distorted into often fantastical imagery.

It allows Freud to reiterate his theory that the mind is comprised of two equal and opposite forces which are continually in conflict – the Pleasure Principle which wants, wishes and fantasises about our deepest desires coming true, sometimes in dreams, sometimes in daydreams or fantasies, sometimes in neurotic symptoms and mental disturbances – because it is continually struggling to get past the repressing force of the Reality Principle.

Dreams, like the symptoms of the neurotic and obsessive patients Freud had been treating since the 1980s, are compromises between these two forces. Thus the hero of the novel, Norbert Hanold, is a timid man whose profession of archaeologist has cut him off from the flesh and blood world of real men and women.

This division between imagination and intellect destined him to become an artist or a neurotic; he was one of those whose kingdom was not of this world.

But, in Freudian theory, the unconscious wishes often return from the place where they are most repressed, at the point of maximum defence. Hence it was precisely – and only – from the dry-as-dust, academic world of archaeology, where he had fled from the real world, that the repressed feelings could return in the form of a two thousand year-old relief – that Hanold’s real passion for the flesh-and-blood girl who lives across the road, can emerge.

There is a kind of forgetting which is distinguished by the difficulty with which the memory is awakened even by a powerful external summons, as though some internal resistance were struggling against its revival. A forgetting of this type has been given the name of repression in psychopathology.

Norbert seeks for Gradiva in Pompeii, driven there by increasingly delusive fantasies. Freud explains these as the last desperate attempts of the Censor to flee the unconscious wish to sexually possess the girl he has loved since his childhood, but, fearing her sexuality, fearing his own untrammeled sexuality, has blocked, repressed and sublimated into a love for his passionless, ‘scientific’ profession’, archaeology. The repressed always returns. You can run but you can’t hide.

It is an event of daily occurrence for a person – even a healthy person – to deceive himself over the motives for an action and to become conscious of them only after the event…

[Hanold]’s flight to Pompeii was a result of his resistance gathering new strength after the surge forward of his erotic desires in the dreams [Norbert is plagued by obscure passionate dreams which Freud analyses as sex-dreams]. It was an attempt at flight from the physical presence of the girl he loved. In a practical sense, it meant a victory for repression…

Except that it is precisely in Pompeii, with a kind of dreamy, Expressionistic logic, that Hanold runs into the very girl he’s gone all that way to escape, and who initially presents herself as the living incarnation of the 2,000 year-old relief.

Only slowly does the truth dawn on Norbert (and the reader) and his secret desires become revealed to him, even as he slowly realises this is a real flesh-and-blood girl and not some spirit, a girl who reveals her name to be Zoe, Greek for ‘life’.

The entire novel turns, in Freud’s hands, into another one of his case studies: Hanold is an obsessive neurotic suffering from bad dreams and delusions; Zoe is in the unique position of being both his repressed love-object and his psychoanalyst. She practises the ultimate ‘cure through love’ by tenderly returning Hanold to a correct understanding of Reality, of who he is, who she is, and the true nature of his feelings for her.

How was Hanold able to go along in the grip of his powerful delusions for so long?

It is explained by the ease with which our intellect is prepared to accept something absurd provided it satisfies powerful emotional impulses…

After all, Freud writes, in one of the many, many comparisons with religious beliefs and ways of thinking which litter his writings:

It must be remembered too that the belief in spirits and ghosts and the return of the dead which finds so much support in the religions to which we have all been attached, at least in our childhood, is far from having disappeared among educated people, and that many who are sensible in other respects find it possible to combine spiritualism with reason.

The Gradiva story allows Freud to elaborate on the link between but contrast between belief and delusion:

If a patient believes in his delusion so firmly, this is not because his faculty of judgement has been overturned and does not arise from what is false in the delusion. On the contrary there is a grain of truth concealed in every delusion, there is something in it which really deserves belief, and this is the source of the patient’s conviction, which is therefore to this extent justified.

This true element, however, has long been repressed. If eventually it is able to penetrate into consciousness, this time in a distorted form, the sense of conviction attaching to it is overintensified as though by way of compensation and is now attached to the distorted substitute for the repressed truth, and protects it from any critical attacks.

The conviction is displaced, as it were, from the unconscious truth on to the conscious error that is linked to it, and remains fixated there precisely as a result of this displacement.

The method described here whereby conviction arises in the case of a delusion does not differ fundamentally from the method by which a conviction is formed in normal cases. We all attach our conviction to thought-contents in which truth is combined with error and let it extend from the former over into the latter. It becomes diffused, as it were, from the original truth over onto the error associated with it, and protects the latter.

So in Gravida the dry, repressed Norbert is awakened from his dream-delusion of worship for a stone relief he has named Gradiva, into the reality of his long-lost childhood love for the flesh-and-blood woman Zoe:

The process of cure is accomplished in a relapse into love, if we combine all the many components of the sexual instinct under the term ‘love’; and such a relapse is indispensable, for the symptoms on account of which the treatment has been undertaken are nothing other than the precipitates of earlier struggles connected with repression or the return of the repressed, and they can only be resolved and washed away by a fresh high tide of the same passions. Every psychoanalytic treatment is an attempt at liberating repressed love which has found a meagre outlet in the compromise of a symptom.

So influential was Freud’s essay on Gradiva as suggesting and exemplifying a whole new way of reading and thinking about literature, that it became a cult, many of the early psychoanalysts carried round small models of the Gradiva relief and Freud had a full-scale replica hanging in his office (still viewable at the Freud Museum).

2. Psychopathic stage characters (1906)

Art allows for the vicarious participation of the spectator. When we read a poem we feel spiritually richer, subtler, nobler than we are. When we watch a play we escape from the confines of our dull cramped lives into a heroic career, defying the gods and doing great deeds. The work of art allows the spectator an increase, a raising of psychic power.

Lyric poetry serves the purpose of giving vent to intense feelings of many sorts – just as was once the case with dancing. Epic poetry aims chiefly at making it possible to feel the enjoyment of a great heroic character in his hour of triumph. But drama seeks to explore emotional possibilities more deeply and to give an enjoyable shape even to forebodings of misfortune; for this reason it depicts the hero in his struggles and, with masochistic satisfaction, in his defeats.

For Freud, crucially, human nature is based on rebellion:

[Drama] appeases, as it were, a rising rebellion against the divine regulation of the universe, which is responsible for the existence of suffering. Heroes are first and foremost rebels against God or against something divine.

We like to watch the hero rise, as a thrilling personification of the resentment we all feel against the limitations of Fate – and then to fall, after a brief heroic career, because their fall restores order and justifies our own craven supineness in relation to the world.

Freud likes the Greek dramatists because they openly understood and acknowledged the power of this: life is a tragic rebellion against Fate. The Greek view of life, essentially tragic – from Homer to Aeschylus – contrasted with the essentially rounded, optimistic view of the theisms, Judaism and Christianity, in which suffering may be pushed to its limit – Job, Jesus – but brings with its new understanding and even salvation.

Christianity takes an essentially comic, non-tragic view of the world; Jesus came to save us, to fulfil the Law, and in his torture, crucifixion and death we partake of a Divine Comedy of despair and renewal. With his resurrection the circle is complete. But there is no renewal in Greek tragedy. Neither Oedipus nor Thebes are renewed or improved.

The two worldviews deal with the same subject matter, and overlap in the middle, but from fundamentally opposed viewpoints.

Freud likes the Greeks because of their acknowledgment of the tragic fate of man: his later writings are loaded with references to Ananke and Logos, the twin gods of Necessity and Reason by which we must lead our lives.

Freud dislikes Christianity because it sets out to conceal this truth, to offer redemption, eternal life, Heaven, the punishment of the guilty and the salvation of the Good. It offers all the infantile compensations and illusions he associates with the weakest of his patients. It is intellectually and emotionally dishonest. It says the greatest strength is in submission to the Will of God, turning the other cheek, loving your neighbour as yourself.

As a good Darwinian Freud acknowledges that these standards may be morally admirable but, alas, unattainable for most, if not all of us mortals. In his view Christianity forced its adherents into guilt-ridden misery or to blatant hypocrisy. (Interestingly, it was actually Jung who, in their correspondence, called the Church ‘the Misery Institute’.)

Freud moves on to outline an interesting declension in the subject matter of drama:

Greek tragedy must be an event involving conflict and it must include an effort of will together with resistance. This precondition finds its first and grandest fulfilment in the struggle against divinity. A tragedy of this sort is one of rebellion, in which the dramatist and the audience takes the side of the rebel.

The less belief there comes to be in divinity, the more important becomes the human regulation of affairs; and it is this which, with increasing insight, comes to be held responsible for suffering. Thus the hero’s next struggle is against human society and here we have the class of social tragedies.

Yet another fulfilment of the necessary precondition is to be found in a struggle between individual men. Such are tragedies of character which display all the excitement of a conflict and are best played out between outstanding characters who have freed themselves from the bond of human institutions….

After religious drama, social drama and the drama of character we can follow the course of drama into the realm of psychological drama. Here the struggle that causes the suffering is fought out in the hero’s mind itself – a struggle between different impulses which have their end not in the extermination of the hero but in the victory of one of the impulses; it must end, that is to say, in renunciation…

For the progression religious drama, social drama, drama of character and psychological drama comes to a conclusion with psychopathological drama, hence the title of the essay. Psychological drama is where the protagonist struggles in his mind with conflicting goals, desires, often his personal love clashing with social values etc. Psychopathological drama is one step further, where the conflict takes place within the hero’s mind, but one side or aspect or impulse is repressed. It is the drama of the repressed motive, in which the protagonist demonstrates the symptoms Freud had written about in neurotic, namely that they are in the grip of fierce compulsions or anxieties but don’t know why.

The first of these modern dramas is Hamlet in which a man who has hitherto been normal becomes neurotic owing to the peculiar nature of the task by which he is faced, a man, that is, in whom an impulse that has been hitherto successfully repressed endeavours to make its way into action [the Oedipus impulse].

The essay repeats the interpretation Freud first gave of Hamlet in The Interpretation of Dreams, namely that the reason for Hamlet’s long delay in carrying out vengeance against his uncle is because his uncle has acted out Hamlet’s Oedipal dream – he has murdered his (Hamlet’s) father and bedded his (Hamlet’s) mother. This is the deep sexual fantasy which Freud posits at the core of the development of small boys and labelled the Oedipus complex, and Claudius has done it for Hamlet; he has lived out Hamlet’s deeply repressed Oedipal fantasy, and this is why Hamlet can’t bring himself to carry out the revenge on his uncle which his conscious mind knows to be just and demanded by social convention: it’s because his uncle has carried out Hamlet’s repressed Oedipal fantasy so completely as to have become Hamlet, on the voodoo level of the unconscious to be Hamlet. To kill his uncle would be to kill the oldest, most deeply felt, most deeply part of his childhood fantasy. And so he can’t do it.

I studied Hamlet at A-level and so know it well and know that Freud’s interpretation, although it initially sounds cranky and quite a bit too simplistic and glib – still, it’s one of the cleverest and most compelling interpretations ever made of the play.

Anyway, in this theoretical category of psychopathological drama, the appeal to the audience is that they, too, understand, if dimly, the unexpressed, repressed material which the protagonist is battling with. If in the tragic drama of the ancients the hero battles against the gods, at this other end of the spectrum, in modern psychopathological drama, the hero fights against the unexpressed, unexpressible, repressed wishes, urges, desires, buried beyond recall in his own unconscious.

3. Creative writers and daydreams (1907)

In this notorious essay Freud tries to psychoanalyse the foundation of creative writing but he’s notably hesitant. It’s a big subject and easy to look foolish next to professional critics and scholars. Hence Freud emphasises that he is only dealing with the writers of romances and thrillers i.e. anything with a simple hero or heroine or, to put it another way, which are simple enough for his psychoanalytical interpretation to be easily applied.

So: A piece of creative writing is a continuation into adulthood of childhood play. (The English reader may be reminded of Coleridge’s comment that the True Poet, as exemplified by his friend Wordsworth, is one who carries the perceptions of childhood into the strength of maturity.)

A piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.

Children play by recombining elements of the outside world into forms and narratives which suit their needs. As we grow up we stop overtly playing but Freud suggests that we never give up a pleasure once experienced and so we replace physically real playing with a non-physical, purely psychical equivalent, namely fantasising.

Childhood play is public and open but most people fantasise in private, in fact they’re more willing to admit to doing wrong than to confessing their fantasies. The child more often than not wants to be ‘grown up’; whereas many adults’ fantasies are childish in content or expression.

Now Freud steps up a gear and begins to treat fantasies as if they were dreams, in that he insists that ‘every single fantasy is the fulfilment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality’. Each fantasy refers back to a childhood wish, attaches it to images or experiences in the present, and projects it into a future where it is fulfilled.

A work of art gathers its creative strength from the power of childhood recollections, for example Gradiva, centred on dreams and delusions powered by childhood erotic experiences.

At about this point it becomes clear that these ‘fantasies’ have a very similar structure to the dreams which Freud devoted such vast effort to interpreting in his book of the same title. Which is why everyday language in its wisdom also calls fantasies ‘day dreams’. So ‘day’ dreams and ‘night’ dreams are very similar in using imagery provide by the events of the day to ‘front up’ unexpressed, often repressed wishes.

Thoughts

The big flaw in this theory is, How do you deal with the fact that most of the literature of the ancients and of the Middle Ages consists of recycled stories, metaphors, even repeated lines i.e. are not the packaging of anyone’s childhood recollections but traditional narratives?

Freud says:

the artist still makes decisions about how to order his material and these decisions are susceptible to psychoanalysis
folk tales and myths i.e. recurrent stories, may themselves be seen as the wishful fantasies or the distorted childhood reminiscences of entire nations and peoples and be psychoanalysed accordingly

(Regarding the origin of myths, in a letter to his confidant Wilhelm Fliess, in 1897, Freud had written: ‘Can you imagine what endopsychic myths are? They are the offspring of my mental labours. The dim inner perception of one’s own psychical apparatus stimulates illusions of thought, which are naturally projected outwards and characteristically onto the future and the world beyond. Immortality, retribution, life after death, are all reflections of our inner psyche… psychomythology.)

The ‘voyeuristic theory’ outlined by Freud in Psychopathic Stage Characters, and this essay, would say the libidinal satisfaction to be achieved through watching or reading the literary work remains the same – the vested interest of the reader\spectator in vicariously rising above their dull every day lives – regardless of formal considerations. But there’s still a substantial objection which is, Why do we prefer some versions of a traditional story over others?

Freud is forced to concede the existence of a ‘purely formal – that is, aesthetic – yield of pleasure’ about which psychoanalysis can say little in itself.

The writer softens the character of his egoistic daydreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal – that is, aesthetic – yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies. We give the name of fore-pleasure to a yield of pleasure such as this which is offered to us so as to make possible the release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychic sources.

In my opinion all the aesthetic pleasure which a creative writer affords us has the character of a fore-pleasure of this kind, and our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds.

Thus he has divided literary pleasure into two parts:

fore-pleasure ‘of a purely formal kind’, ‘aesthetics’
the deeper pleasure of psychic release, the cathartic release of libidinal energy

This is very similar in structure to his theory of jokes (as laid out in the 1905 work ‘Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious’). In this aesthetic, formal fore-pleasure – the structure of a limerick, the shape of a joke – is a pretext for the joke’s real work – the release of frustration, pent-up pressure, libido.

Critics argue that claiming the core purpose of art to be libidinal release – if the basic point of all art is some kind of psychosexual release – fails to acknowledge that the main thing people talk about when they discuss art or plays or books, the plot and characters and language, are secondary ‘aesthetic’ aspects. It is precisely the artfulness, the creative use the writer makes of traditional material, which is of interest to the critic and to the informed reader, upon which we judge the author, and it is this very artfulness which Freud’s theory leaves untouched. Which is to say that Freudianism has little to do with pure literary criticism.

Freudian defenders would reply that psychoanalysis helps the critic to elucidate and clarify the patterns of symbolism and imagery, the obsessions and ideas, which are crafted into the work of art. This clearly applies most to modern artists who think they have a personal psychopathology to clarify (unlike, say, Chaucer or Shakespeare, who focused on reworking their traditional material).

In practice, literary critics, undergraduates and graduate students by the millions have, since the publication of this essay, gone on to apply Freudian interpretations to every work of art or literature ever created, precisely be applying Freudian decoding to the formal elements of narratives which Freud himself, in his own essays, largely overlooked.

4. Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood (1910)

Leonardo could never finish anything. Freud says this was because he was illegitimate i.e. abandoned by his rich father and left with his peasant mother for years. This prompted two things: a sublime sense of the total possession of his mother without the rivalry of Daddy which is captured in his best art, for example the Mona Lisa; and a restless curiosity about where he came from.

These latter childhood sexual enquiries were sublimated into his scientific work, into his wonderful studies of Nature and its workings. But also explains why ,whenever he tried to do a painting, he ended up trying to solve all the technical problems it raised, and these problems raised others, and so on.

A good example is his trying to devise a way of doing frescoes with oil. It was his botched technical experiments in this medium which means the famous Last Supper has slowly fallen to pieces.

Observation of men’s daily lives shows us that most people succeed in directing very considerable portions of their sexual instinctual forces to their professional activity. The sexual instinct is particularly well-fitted to make contributions of this kind since it is endowed with a capacity for sublimation: that is, it has the power to replace its immediate aim by other aims which may be valued more highly and which are not sexual.

Freud turns Leonardo into a paradigmatic homosexual: a boy abandoned by his father and left too long under the influence of his mother who, in repressing his love for his mother, takes her part, introjects her into his psyche, identifies wholly with her and comes to look upon love-objects as his mother would i.e. looks for young boys whom he can love as his mother loved him. In a sense a return to auto-eroticism or narcissism.

Freud then uses his theory of Leonardo’s homosexuality to interpret the later figures in his paintings (for example, John the Baptist) as triumphs of androgyny, reconciling the male and female principles in a smile of blissful self-satisfaction.

Freud speculates that Mona Lisa re-awakened in Leonardo the memory of his single mother, hence the ineffable mystery of her smile – and Leonardo’s inability to finish the painting, which was never delivered to the patron, Mona’s husband, and so he ended up taking to the French court, where it was bought by King Francis I which is why it ended up hanging in the Louvre.

So Leonardo’s actual artistic technique, the extraordinary skill which produced the Mona Lisa smile, is merely a fore-pleasure, a pretext, a tool to draw us into what Freud sees as the real purpose of art, the libidinal release, in this case drawing us into sharing the same infantile memory of erotic bliss, of total possession of mummy, that Leonardo was expressing.

At the heart of this long essay is a dream Leonardo recorded in a notebook.

Leonardo dreamed that a vulture came into his room when he was a child and stuck its tail into his mouth. Freud says Leonardo would have known that the vulture was the Egyptian hieroglyph for ‘Mother’ and so the dream represents a deep memory of his infantile happiness at the total possession of his Mummy.

The only problem with this, as Peter Gay and the editors of the Freud Library point out, is that the word ‘vulture’ is a mistranslation in the edition of Leonardo’s notebooks which Freud read; the original Italian word means kite, a completely different kind of bird.

So a central plank on which Freud had rested a lot of his argument in this long essay is destroyed in one blow. But Freud never acknowledged the mistake or changed the passage and so it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this is simple charlatanry, that Freud, here as in many other places, could not change mistakes because they were vital means which enabled him to project the powerful personal obsession which he called psychoanalysis out onto the real world. That, somehow, it was all or nothing. No gaps or retractions were possible lest the entire edifice start to crumble.

Leonardo is important to Freud because he was the first natural scientist since the Greeks. If Authority is the Father and Nature the Mother, then his peculiar fatherless upbringing also helps to explain Leonardo’s refusal to rely on ‘authorities’, and his determination to wrest the mysteries of Nature for himself, a rebellion against father and quest for total possession of mother which has clear Oedipal origins.

His later scientific research with all its boldness and independence presupposed the existence of infantile sexual researches uninhibited by the father…

This is an illuminating insight. But when, a few pages later, Freud says dreams of flying are all connected with having good sex, and Leonardo was obsessed with birds and flying machines because scientific enquiry stems from our infantile sexual researches, you begin to feel Freud is twisting the material to suit his ends.

This is even more the case in Freud’s treatment of Leonardo’s father. First we are told that not having a Dad helped Leonardo develop a scientific wish for investigation; then that having a father was vital to his Oedipal ‘overthrowing’ of Authority and received wisdom; then that Leonardo both overcame his father who was absent in his infancy and became like him insofar as he tended to abandon his artistic creations half-finished, just like Ser Piero (his dad) had abandoned him.

Freud is trying to have it all ways at once. A feeling compounded by moments of plain silliness: for example when Freud claims his friend Oskar Pfister found the outline of a vulture in the painting of St Ann with Jesus, or when Freud points out that a sketch of a pregnant woman from the notebook has wrong-way round feet, thus suggesting… homosexuality! In the notes we are told the feet look odd because they were, in fact, added in by a later artist. The net result of all these errors and distortions is that, by now, Freud is looking like a fool and a charlatan. The whole thing is riddled with errors.

Conclusion

Freud is like a novelist who scatters insights around him concerning the tangles, complexities, repressions and repetitions of human life with which we are all familiar – now that Freud has pointed them out to us. But whenever he tries to get more systematic, more ‘scientific’, he gets more improbable.

The insights into Leonardo’s psychology are just that, scattered insights. But when he tries to get systematic about infantile sexual inquiry or the origins of homosexuality, you feel credulity stretched until it snaps. It comes as no surprise to learn that the whole extended vulture-dream argument, which reeks of false scholarship and cardboard schematicism, has been shown to be completely wrong.

All the same, no less an authority than art historian Kenneth Clark said that, despite its scholarly errors, Freud’s essay was useful in highlighting the difference, the weirdness of Leonardo. This is the eerie thing about Freud: even when he’s talking bollocks, even when he’s caught out lying, his insights and his entire angle of vision, carry such power, ring bells or force you to rethink things from new angles, and shed fresh light.

5. The theme of the three caskets (1913)

This is an odd little essay on the three-choices theme found in many folk-tales, myths and legends. Freud concentrates on its manifestation in the Shakespeare plays, The Merchant of Venice and King Lear.

The Prince in Merchant wisely picks lead, rather than silver or gold, and thus wins the hand of Portia. Lear foolishly picks worldly things – Goneril and Regan’s sycophancy – and rejects Cordelia’s true love.

What Freud can now ‘reveal’ is that Cordelia and Lear really symbolise DEATH! By refusing his own death – i.e. his inevitable fate – Lear wreaks havoc on the natural order: a man must accept his death.

For the three caskets are symbols of the fundamental three sisters, the Norns of Norse, and the Fates of Greek mythology. The third Fate is Atropos or Death and so picking the third, the least attractive of three choices, is, in fact, to pick death.

Hang on, though: what about the classical story of the judgement of Paris? Paris gives the apple to Aphrodite, goddess of Love. Freud raises this objection only to smoothly deal with it: it’s because Man’s imagination, in rebellion against Fate, converts, in the Paris-myth, the goddess of Death into the goddess of Love, unconsciously turning the most hateful thing into the most loveful thing: it is one more example of the unconscious reversing polarities and making opposites meet.

The Fates were created as a result of the discovery that warned man that he too is a part of nature and therefore subject to the immutable law of death. Something in man was bound to struggle against this subjection, for it is only with extreme unwillingness that he gives up his claim to an exceptional position.

Man, as we know, makes use of his imaginative activity in order to satisfy the wishes that reality does not satisfy. So his imagination rebelled against the recognition of the truth embodied in the myth of the Fates and constructed instead, the myth derived from it, in which the goddess of Death is replaced by the goddess of Love.

This essay is a brilliant example of the weird, perverse persuasiveness of Freud’s imagination and a deliberate addition to the variety of strategies psychoanalysis has for literature:

to the psychoanalysis of plot: Gradiva
the psychoanalysis of artist’s character: Leonardo (above), Dostoyevsky (below)
the psychoanalysis of myth-symbolism: the three caskets
the psychoanalysis of the act of creation itself, what it does, what it’s for: Creative Writers and Daydreaming
the psychoanalysis of the history of a genre: Psychopathic stage characters (above)

When you list them like this you realise the justice of Freud’s self-description as a conquistador. He deliberately set out to conquer all aspects of all the human sciences – art, literature, anthropology, sociology, history – to which his invention could possibly be applied, and he was successful.

6. The Moses of Michelangelo (1914)

It has traditionally been thought that Michelangelo’s imposing statue of Moses in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli depicts the leader of the Israelites having come down from the mountain with the tablets of the commandments only to see the Israelites dancing round the Golden Calf and to be about to leap up in wrath.

Michelangelo’s statue of Moses in the church of St Peter In Chains in Rome

Freud completely reverses this view. Freud turns this Moses into a model of Freud’s idea of self-overcoming or the Mastery of Instinct:

The giant figure with its tremendous physical power becomes only a concrete expression of the highest mental achievement that is possible in a man, that of struggling successfully against an inward passion for the sake of a cause to which he has devoted himself.

This essay was written in 1914 just after the split with Freud’s disciples, Carl Jung and Alfred Adler, leaving Freud feeling bitter and angry. They thought they were rebelling against a stifling father figure who insisted on blind obedience to his theory and diktats. He thought he had given them a world of new insights, as well as personal help and support, only to watch them distort and pervert his findings for their own ends, to further their own careers.

You don’t have to be a qualified psychiatrist to speculate that there might be a teeny-weeny bit of self-portraiture in Freud’s interpretation of Moses: a heroic passionate man, founder of a whole new way of seeing the world, much-wronged by those he cared for, heroically stifling his justifiable feelings of anger and revenge. There is much in Moses for Freud to identify with.

Overcoming, this is Freud’s perennial theme: civilised man’s continual attempt to master his animal nature. It’s at its clearest here in his interpretation of Moses’ superhuman restraint but it runs like a scarlet thread through his work, eventually blossoming into full view in Civilisation and Its Discontents.

On the way to achieving the heroic self-denial which we call ‘civilisation’ the poor human animal takes many wrong turns and false steps: these are the illnesses, the neuroses, the hysterias and perversions which Freud spent the early part of his career discussing (see in particular, Three Essays On Sexuality 1905).

But even when you have achieved self-mastery, even if your development works out well and you rid yourself of your neuroses and arrive at a mature, adult morality, disenchanted from willful illusions like religious belief and personal superstition, all this heroic self-mastery only brings you face-to-face with a bigger problem: Fate and Death. How can you cope with this final insult to the narcissistic self-love which, despite all your conscious better intentions, nonetheless guides your actions?

Freud suggests a variety of strategies:

falling ill: the ‘flight into illness’ identified as early as 1895 in his book on hysteria
killing yourself: the superego’s rage against the failure of the ego to master reality
rebellion against fate: as epitomised by all the heroes of myth and legend, which Freud identifies the core subject of heroic (Greek) tragedy
sublimating unconscious panic-fear into its opposite, exaggerated submission and masochistic greeting of the blows of Fate (as in some types of submissive religious belief)
outstaring Death with a calm rational stoicism (Freud’s view of himself)

But art, too, has a place among these responses. Art either:

provides parables and models which help us come to terms with illness and death and Fate (as Gradiva is a model of the psychoanalytic cure; the three caskets are fairy tales which help us, unconsciously, to accept the inevitable)
or helps us to rise emotionally above our narrow, cramped lives (as explained in Creative Writers and Psychopathic stage characters)

Or:

is the product of compulsions, obsessions and neuroses on the part of the artist (for example, Leonardo) for whom art acts as therapy and whose purely personal solutions to these problems may appeal to our own situation, and in some way reconcile us to our own fate
or simply evoke pleasant unconscious memories, for example the blissful mood conveyed by the smiles of the Mona Lisa or St John the Baptist

Art may leave us with a tantalising sense of mystery and transcendence; or it may thrill us with the spectacle of an artist grappling with feelings he barely understands, feelings and struggle which the art work makes us feel and sympathise with.

9. A childhood recollection from Dichtung Und Wahrheit (1917)

Dichtung Und Wahrheit was the title of the autobiography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. Goethe was Freud’s lifelong favourite writer and Freud is liable to drop a Goethe quote into any of his essays at the drop of a hat.

One of the first anecdotes in Goethe’s autobiography describes the little poet, aged about three, throwing all the crockery in the house out into the street and chuckling as it smashed.

Freud shows, by citing comparable stories told by his patients, that this was an expression of Goethe’s jealousy and hatred of his new young brother who had just been born and threatened to supplant him in his mother’s affections. The brother later died and Goethe was, unconsciously, happy. So, in Freud’s hands, this inconsequential anecdote turns out to be a vital key to Goethe’s personality:

I raged for sole possession of my mother – and achieved it!

As with Moses, the autobiographical element in Freud is large. As he says in his own autobiography:

A man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success which often induces real success.

Compare with the way the ‘secret’ of Leonardo turned out to be the unquenchable if unconscious bliss he kept all his life of having possessed his mother’s love, undiluted by the absent father. The fact that so many of Freud’s insights turn out so nakedly to be repetitions of key aspects of his own personality prompts the $64,000 question: Are Freud’s insights into human nature the revelation of universal laws? Or a mammoth projection onto all mankind of his own idiosyncratic upbringing and personality?

10. The Uncanny (1919)

This is the first of these essays to be written under the influence of Freud’s second, post-Great War, theory of psychoanalysis. The new improved version was a great deal more complicated than earlier efforts.

This essay is an attempt to apply the symbolic mode of interpretation to the E.T.A Hoffman story of ‘Olympia and the Sandman’ in which several ‘doubles’ appear, creating an ‘uncanny’ effect.

For post-war Freud the human psyche is dominated by a compulsion to repeat: this is the secret of the anxiety dreams of shell-shock victims, or of the child’s repetitive games, discussed at such length in Beyond The Pleasure Principle, 1920.

An aspect of this profound human tendency to repeat is the idea of ‘doubles’. Beginning with the notion of the ‘soul’ – the Christian idea that we are made of two things, a body and a soul – doubles in various forms litter human culture.

Freud speculates that the role of doubles is to:

stave off death: you have a secret double fighting on your behalf, a good fairy, a good angel etc
underpin ideas of free will, of alternative actions which you could, but didn’t take
become, by reversal, objects of aggression and fear, doubles which return as harbingers of doom in fairy stories and in neurotic hallucinations

After this little detour Freud gets to the point: the uncanny is the feeling prompted by the return of the childish belief in the omnipotence of thoughts.

For example, you think of someone and the next minute the phone rings and it’s them on the line. You experience an ‘uncanny’ sensation because, for a moment, you are back in the three year old’s narcissistic belief that the universe runs according to your wishes.

And the eruption into your tamed adult conscious of this primitive, long-repressed idea prompts a feeling of being ‘spooked’, unsettled – the Uncanny.

When someone has an ‘uncanny’ knack of doing something it’s the same: it makes us feel weird because their consistent success reminds us of our infantile fantasies of immediate wish-fulfilment and gratification; the powerful wish to be able to do something effortlessly and easily which possessed us as children but which we had to painfully smother and put behind us in order to cope with the crushingly ungratifying nature of reality.

In the broadest sense the uncanny is the return of the repressed: the Oedipus Complex, the omnipotence of thoughts, the obsession with doubles, even return to the womb feelings: they are strange, disturbing, but ultimately not terrifying because we have felt them before.

11. A seventeenth century demonological neurosis (1923)

Freud’s interest in witchcraft, possession and allied phenomena was of longstanding, possibly stimulated by his trip to the Salpetriere Hospital to study under Charcot in 1885.

Freud’s ‘Report’ on his trip mentions that Charcot paid a great deal of attention to the historical aspects of neuroses i.e. to tales of possession and so on.

The series of lectures of Charcot’s which Freud translated into German includes discussion of the hysterical nature of medieval ‘demono-manias’ and an account of a sixteenth century case of demonic possession.

It is recorded that in 1909 Freud spoke at length to the Vienna Society on the History of the Devil and of the psychological composition of belief in the Devil.

In mentioning ‘the compulsion to repeat’ in The Uncanny (a phenomenon dealt with at length in Beyond The Pleasure Principle and vitally important for understanding Freud’s later theory) Freud says:

It is possible to recognise the dominance in the unconscious mind of a ‘compulsion to repeat’ proceeding from the instinctual impulses and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts – a compulsion powerful enough to overcome the pleasure principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their demonic character, and still very clearly expressed in the impulses of young children, a compulsion too which is responsible for the course taken by the analyses of neurotic patients.’

Here we have the first glimmerings of the set of ideas which were to crystallise around the new concept of the superego, namely that it is the agent of the death drive, the fundamental wish of all organisms to return to an inorganic state of rest.

The superego channels this drive through the introjection (or internalisation) of the infantile image of our demanding parents, who continue to demand impossible standards all our lives and, when we fail to live up to them, harry us, persecute us, make us feel guilty, anxious, or depressed, filled with self-hatred and self-loathing.

One aspect of this is what earlier ages called ‘possession’, when people heard voices or seemed impelled to do what they didn’t want to. This impelling comes from the id, from our dumb, voiceless instincts – but the self-reproaches for having stepped out of line come from the superego, which, in some circumstances, exaggerates the fairly common guilt at our ‘sinfulness’ into florid ideas of demonic possession.

The essay is a psychoanalysis, using these new concepts, of the historical case of one Christopher Haizmann, a painter in the seventeenth century who fell into a melancholy at the death of his father and then claimed to the authorities that he had signed a pact with the Devil. The historical sequence of events is that he eventually renounced his pact and was looked after for a while by the Christian Brothers.

Freud diagnoses Haizmann as Grade A neurotic. Upon his father’s death he was prompted to review his life and realised he was a failure, a good-for-nothing. The pacts he reports himself as making, bizarrely, ask the Devil to take him as His son. Haizmann is transparently looking for a father-substitute who will punish him for his perceived failure.

More subtly, then, Haizmann is inflating the punitive superego (based on infantile memories of his father) into the grand figure of Devil, the bad or punitive father.

Unfortunately, upon re-entering the world, Haizmann suffered a relapse. He claimed to be the victim of an earlier pact he signed with the Devil and, for some reason, forgot about. Once more he renounced it upon being readmitted to life with the Christian Brothers, but this time he renounced the world also and spent the rest of his life with them.

The devil is the bad side of the father i.e. the child’s projection of his ambivalent feelings onto an ego-ideal. Sociologically speaking, in the history of religion, ‘devils’ were old gods who we have overcome and onto whom we then project all our suppressed lust and violence. So Baal was a perfectly decent Canaanite god until the Israelites overthrew the Canaanites in the name of their god, Yahweh, at which point the Israelites projected onto Baal him all the wickedness and lust in their own hearts. Satan, in Christian doctrine, was originally the brightest and best of God’s angels, before a similar process of overthrow and then being scapegoated with all our worst imaginings. So the devil is the father-figure we have overcome in fantasy, but onto whom we then project all the vilest wickedness in our own rotten hearts.

12. Humour (1927)

By the early 1920s Freud had devised a radical new tripartite picture of the psyche as consisting of the ego, id and superego, and had posited the existence in the psyche of a powerful death drive. He had done this in order to explain the compulsion to repeat which he saw enacted in situations as varied as shell-shocked soldiers obsessively repeating their dreams of war and a young child’s game of repeatedly throwing a toy away and reclaiming it.

Freud was in a position to apply his new structure and psychology to various literary and psychological phenomena.

Different from jokes or wit, ‘humour’ is what we call irony and is endemic among the British. When the condemned man is walking towards the gallows and he looks up at the sunshine and remarks, ‘Well, the week’s certainly getting off to a pleasant start’ it is his superego making light of the dire situation his ego finds itself in.

Like neuroses or drugs, humour is a way of dealing with the harsh reality we find ourselves in. It is like our parents reassuring us how silly and inconsequential is the big sports game we’ve just lost is, so it doesn’t matter anyway.

As you might expect if you’ve read this far and have been noticing the key themes which emerge in Freud, it turns out that humour, like tragedy, like so much else in Freud, is an act of rebellion:

Humour is not resigned; it is rebellious.

Once again the image of rebellion, whether it’s in art, or vis-a-vis the authorities, or against the smothering restrictions of religion, or, most fundamentally, against the dictates of fate and death themselves, God-less Man’s fundamental posture is one of rebellion and revolt. This feels to me close if not identical to the position of the secular humanist, Camus.

In this brief, good-humoured essay the superego appears in a good light for once, as an enlightening and ennobling faculty, instead of the punitive father-imago which he elsewhere claims underlies secular guilt and depression.

13. Dostoyevsky and parricide (1928)

Which is how he appears here. Burdened with an unnaturally powerful, bisexual ambivalence towards his sadistic father, Dostoyevsky never recovered from the crushing sense of guilt when his unconscious hatred and death-wishes against his father were fulfilled when his father was murdered in a street when Fyodor was 18.

Dostoyevsky’s fanatical gambling and spiritual masochism were aspects of his need to punish himself for his suppressed parricidal death-wishes…which came true!

Freud claims that another aspect of Dostoyevsky’s self-punishment were his epileptic attacks. When he managed to get sent to a prison-camp in Siberia i.e. was sufficiently punished by the outside world, his attacks stopped. He had managed to make the father-substitute, the Czar, punish him in reality, and therefore the attacks from inside his own mind, the psychosomatic epilepsy, could cease.

In amongst these psychological speculations comes Freud’s final word on the individual work of literature which, above all others, was crucial to his philosophy:

It can scarcely be owing to chance that three of the masterpieces of literature of all time – the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov – should all deal with the same subject, parricide. In all three, moreover, the motive for the deed, sexual rivalry for a woman, is laid bare.

He goes on to say that the essence of this master plot has been attenuated as civilisation has done its repressive work to try and conceal it, i.e. what Oedipus does openly and explicitly (murder his father and sleep with his mother) is later carried out by unconsciously envied representatives (by Claudius in Hamlet). But the continuity is certainly suggestive…

And it is in the course of this essay that Freud makes the key remark that the essence of morality is renunciation, the closest he comes to talk about the content of ‘morality’ in the conventional sense, as opposed to a technical approach to its psychological origins and development.

One conclusion among many

If you’ve read through all of this you’ll maybe agree that Freud’s way of seeing things was so distinctive and powerful that, even though much of his claims and arguments may be factually disproved, even if he can be shown to be actively lying about some things, nonetheless, in a strange, uncanny way, it doesn’t stop you beginning to see the world as he does. It’s a kind of psychological infection; or a process of being moved into an entirely new worldview.

Hence the strong feeling he and his followers generated that the psychoanalytic movement he founded wasn’t just a new branch of psychology but an entirely new way of seeing the world, a worldview which gave rise to ‘disciples’ and ‘followers’ in a sense more associated with a religious movement than a simple scientific ‘school’.

Freud was so obsessed with religions because he was founding a new one, and so obsessed with Moses because he identified with him as a fellow founder of a new belief system.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. The works in this review were translated into English between 1959 and 1961 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. All references in this blog post are to the versions collected into Volume 14 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘Art and Literature’, published in 1985.

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by Simon on June 23, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Essays, Psychoanalysis

Tagged A childhood recollection from Dichtung Und Wahrheit, A seventeenth century demonological neurosis, a sixteenth century case of demonic possession, Aeschylus, aesthetics, Alfred Adler, Ananke, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, anxieties, Archaeology, art, art and literature, Atropos, auto-eroticism, Baal, Berlin, Beyond The Pleasure Principle, bisexuals, Camus, Canaan, cathartic release, Charcot, Christianity, Christopher Haizmann, Claudius, Coleridge, compromise formations, compulsion to repeat, compulsions, Cordelia, Creative Writers and Daydreaming, Creative writers and daydreams, culture, cure through love, Czar, Darwin, day dreams, daydreams, Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s 'Gradiva', demono-manias, Depression, Dichtung Und Wahrheit, Divine Comedy, Dostoyevsky, Dostoyevsky and parricide, drama, drama of character, dream images, dreams, E.T.A Hoffman, ego, epilepsy, Fairy Tales, fantasies, fiction, flight into illness, folk tales, fore-pleasure, Freud, Freud Pelican Library, Freudian interpretation, Freudian theory, gambling, gays, gender stereotyping, Goethe, Goneril and Regan, Gradiva, Greek drama, Greek mythology, Greek tragedy, Hamlet, Homer, homosexuality, human nature, humour, Id, infantile sexual researches, Israelites, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Judaism, Jung, Kenneth Clark, King Francis I, King Lear, Leonardo, Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood, lesbian, libidinal energy, libidinal release, literary criticism, Literature, Logos, masochism, melancholy, Mona Lisa, morality, Moses, myths and legends, narcissism, neurotic symptoms, Norbert Hanold, Oedipus Rex, Olympia and the Sandman, Oskar Pfister, Pelican Freud Library, Peter Gay, Pompeii, possession, prison camp, psychic release, Psychoanalysis, psychoanalytical theory, psychological drama, Psychology, psychomythology, Psychopathic stage characters, psychopathological drama, Reality Principle, religion, repression, Resistance, Salpetriere Hospital, San Pietro in Vincoli, sex, sexism, sexuality, Shakespeare, shell-shock, Siberia, social drama, Sophocles, Stoicism, sublimation, Superego, The Brothers Karamazov, the Christian Brothers, the Devil, the ego, the Fates, The Freud Museum, the Golden Calf, The Interpretation of Dreams, the judgement of Paris, The Last Supper, the Louvre, The Merchant of Venice, the Misery Institute, The Moses of Michelangelo, the Norns, the Oedipus Complex, the royal road to the unconscious, the superego, The theme of the three caskets, the uncanny, the unconscious, Thoughts on War and Death, Three Essays on Sexuality, voyeuristic theory, Wilhelm Fliess, Wilhelm Jensen, Wordsworth, Zoe Bertgang

Posted by Simon on June 23, 2023

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The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance @ the National Gallery

‘The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance’ is a one-room, free display at the National Gallery in London. Go in the main entrance, up the stairs to the mezzanine level, then turn right and up more stairs to room 46.

It’s amazing how much you can cram into one room in a gallery, in this case ten or so paintings, 4 or 5 drawings and several sculptures which, taken together, open up whole imaginative worlds and intellectual vistas. Amazing how much you can extrapolate from one work of art, about an entire era’s attitudes to men and women, ageing, its sense of humour, its fear of the supernatural.

The Ugly Duchess

It all starts by considering one of the best-known faces in the National Gallery: Quinten Massys’s early 16th-century depiction of an old woman, popularly known as ‘The Ugly Duchess’. Made in Antwerp in about 1513, it is an extremely striking image.

Ugly

Quite obviously this is an exaggerated and grotesque caricature. Focusing just on the features, you’d have thought it was the face of an old man, but the closer you look you realise all kinds of things are going on in this picture. The most obvious element is probably the woman’s mannish, ugly face but you quickly move o to notice the very low-cut dress revealing her ample but wrinkled bosom.

It’s obviously a satire or caricature of the stock standard Renaissance portrait, which, of course, showed the sitter to best advantage, flattering them by smoothing out wrinkles and omitting blemishes. Quite obviously this painting is doing the exact opposite, packing in as many unflattering details as possible – big ears, stubby nose, disappeared lips, as many wrinkles as the human neck can cope with, a huge expanse of neck and bosom revealing the mannish solidity of her shoulders and the wrinkled bust.

The ‘philtrum’ is the technical name for the groove which runs between nose and lips, but it’s not only this which is long but the entire space or stretch of face from nose to mouth which is as huge as possible, almost giving her the prognathous appearance of a chimpanzee.

So there’s an implicit contrast with the genre of the standard Renaissance flattering portrait. But there’s another contrast worth mentioning, which is the contrast between the gargoyle grotesqueness of the face and body and the immaculately naturalistic detailing of the headdress and cascading wimple.

Seeing a painting like this in the flesh allows you to go right up to it and marvel at the extreme detailing of the fabric of the headdress – you can virtually see each thread of the fabric, the detail of each one of the embroidered flowers; to marvel at the intricate working of the diadem or broach including the glints of light on the lovingly crafted pearls – which are, when you look really closely, echoed by the pearls studding the ring she’s wearing on her right forefinger.

So, to put it crudely, there’s another contrast at work here, between the deliberate grotesqueness of the face and the breath-taking filigree detail of the setting (headdress, broach, and amazing depiction of light and shade in the folds of the linen wimple).

Talking of her finger, there’s one last relevant detail which is the flower. In her right hand, between finger and thumb, she is delicately holding the flower of a rose which hasn’t yet opened. This is a traditional symbol of budding love i.e. a visual signal appropriate for a very young woman, a teenage virginal girl. Here it works as another element emphasising the grotesqueness of the portrait and satirising the entire genre.

Her husband

Mention of the rose leads us to the next factor, which is her partner. The exhibition has obtained on loan from a private collection in America the painting which originally partnered the duchess, namely Massys’s portrait of an old man.

An Old Man, about 1513 by Quinten Massys. Photo © Evan Read, Department of Paintings Conservation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sexism and unfairness

Now, you don’t have to be an art scholar to notice that, although it isn’t exactly flattering, although he too has a lugubrious nose and plentiful wrinkles, the husband portrait isn’t in the same class of grotesque as the old woman. Feminists interpret this as unfairness: why is the old man acceptable but the old woman grotesque?

One way of answering this is to say, with feminists, that Western society has always been sexist and patriarchal, with continuous misogynist tendencies. That age in women was treated far more harshly, seen as far more negative, than in men, and that an older man’s efforts to dress well and make the most of himself was respected whereas the same behaviour in an older woman was derided.

Artistic licence

But there’s another way of thinking about the issue, regarded as an artistic problem or genre. This is that ‘the old woman’, as subject, afforded Renaissance painters opportunities for invention, play and satire that portraits of more ‘normal’ people didn’t allow. As the curators put it, the ‘unruly bodies’ of older women, no longer smooth and supple as in standardised models of beauty, can be seen as metaphors for social disorder, for the topsy-turvey world which attracted medieval and Renaissance culture as much as its hierarchies of order.

There is undeniable joy in beholding ‘the Ugly Duchess’ trample beauty standards, social conventions and gender expectations.

Flower and fur

Back to the husband, and art scholars debate whether the posture of his right hand is politely rejecting the budding rose which the duchess is offering him.

Away and above these debates about symbolism is a simpler fact about this work which is the amazing depiction of the fur around his neck. Again it isn’t so clear in a reproduction, but in the flesh, standing in front of the actual painting, you can really see the difference between the depiction of the fur lining his coat and what appears to be the black velvet of the coat itself. it’s stunningly sensual and alive.

Contemporary couples

There’s a number of reasons why I strongly prefer the art of the Northern Renaissance to the Italian Renaissance. One is the rocky barrenness of the settings of so many Italian paintings, compared with the lush grass, flowers and verdure of northern paintings. I like the flowers and animals, the little rabbits and whatnot you tend to get in the background of northern Renaissance art.

Portraits like this don’t have animals and pastures in them, but they exemplify two other aspects of northern art I like. One is the extraordinary fine detailing of fabric, embroidery, jewellery and so on. The other is the ugliness of the people. Italian Renaissance paintings capture the handsomeness of Italian people, but I live in grotty northern Europe among people who are, by and large, not fashion models. Therefore I like the frank depiction of non-beautiful people. The exhibition gives an example of an older couple by a contemporary of Massys, Jan Gossaert.

It’s hard to think your way into the mindset of the man on the left who probably paid a lot for this painting and was presumably, happy enough to pay for this pretty unflattering depiction. It bespeaks a mindset different from the Italian Renaissance, one which prioritises honesty at all costs. For me it’s something to do with the northern Protestant, or even Puritan, spirit. Truth over gloss. Epitomised by the arch Puritan Oliver Cromwell telling his portrait painter to depict him ‘warts and all’. It is the humanist tradition, accepting of human weakness, frailty and imperfection.

As to its relevance to the Ugly Duchess, this painting epitomises some of the conventions of double portraits which the Duchess flouts. The older woman is modestly dressed (her clothes covering her up to the neck). Her eyes are modestly cast down. And, crucially, she is standing behind and on the left side of her husband.

Left and right

In double portraits of couples like this, it was the convention to depict the man standing on the right, the hierarchically superior position, our left as we look at it. Therefore the duchess’s position on the right hand side of her husband (in the world of the picture) is another way in which the composition subverts or mocks conventional standards of portraiture.

Leonardo, the source

But talking of the Italian Renaissance links to the rather surprising presence of Leonardo da Vinci in the exhibition. Why? Because among his multifarious other interests, Leonardo had a well-attested interest in ‘the grotesque’. His notebooks contain page after page filled with sketches of a spectrum of non-attractive people, ranging from old and gnarly, through ‘ugly’ people and then beyond the bounds of plausibility to monsters who could have come from the island of Dr Moreau.

Leonardo’s grotesques were surprisingly popular. Many copies were made of his sketches and distributed around art workshops all over Europe. Thus Massys’s image, which I take to be quintessentially north European, turns out to derive almost directly from a sketch by the quintessentially Italian artist, Leonardo.

The debt owed by Massys to Leonardo isn’t trivial. Although the Leonardo original has disappeared, the exhibition includes copies of a Leonardo grotesque woman which, as you can see, are the direct source of Massys’s painting. Hardly anything about the Massys version is original except precisely the aspects I like, the fantastic detailing.

Bust of a grotesque old woman (1510 to 1520) by Francesco Melzi, after Leonardo. Royal Collection Trust © His Majesty King Charles III 2023

May – December couples

Western societies have often found the notion of the old and decrepit vaunting their attractiveness and flirting as if they’re still teenagers worthy of satire. ‘Mutton dressed as lamb’, as the proverbial saying has it. In fact, like everything else, the Middle Ages codified this into a genre, calling it the May-December relationship. To my surprise, a few seconds on Google show me that this term is still widely used to describe:

‘an amorous relationship between two people with a considerable age difference. The months symbolize the seasons, with spring representing youth and winter representing old age.’

In medieval art and literature the unequal relationship of an older man and a younger woman was often mocked (as, maybe, in our day, the marriage between Rupert Murdoch at the age of 85 to former model, Jerry Hall, or the references I keep reading about Leonardo de Caprio’s alleged penchant for much younger girlfriends). Less often described (and mocked) was the pairing of an older woman and a younger man (in our day and age, often referred to as a toy boy’). In medieval literature Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is one such older woman who takes a young male lover for explicitly sexual reasons.

Mention of the theme, as a popular one of the day, allows the curators to include a visual illustration, The Unequal Couple by by Israhel van Meckenem which shows an older woman (left) being cosied up to by a handsome young blade. The way he is reaching out to touch the bag of coins she is jealously guarding very heavily conveys the satirical thrust of the picture, that this kind of relationship is ‘against nature’ and could only exist because the May partner wants to get their hands on December’s money.

The Unequal Couple, about 1490 by Israhel van Meckenem, after the Master of the Housebook © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

Feminist interpretation

You won’t be surprised to learn that there is a revisionist feminist interpretation of the painting. Feminist art scholars agree that it can be read as a cruel joke in which the viewer is invited to laugh at this woman’s pathetic attempts to appear young and sexy, so we are being invited to mock her implied self-delusion.

But there is an alternative way to read the painting, which is as depicting an old woman who refuses to accept either the biological facts of aging or the social conventions which define what a woman, of any age, may or may not wear, and how she may or may not think of herself. If she regards herself as a winsome beauty, shyly offering her man a symbol of her budding love, then…why not?

To echo what I wrote above, a feminist interpretation sees a duchess who is also subversive of standard notions of beauty, defiantly flouting the conventions of her day.

Witches

But old women have been, for much of recorded history, quite ambivalent figures. (In fact, arguably any category of human being can be ambivalent. A young man may be smooth and debonair like Romeo or a thuggish killer like Edmund in King Lear. Humans have many sides, stereotypes, avatars, expectations.)

Anyway, old women have can be mocked for their pretensions (as the duchess appears to be) respected for their wisdom or even feared as uncanny figures. This fear can go to the extreme of thinking they have uncanny supernatural powers, in other words, are witches.

And it’s in order to highlight the similarities and differences in Renaissance iconography of older women – between an old woman satirised and an old woman feared – that the display includes an iconic image of a witch, made by Albrecht Dürer around the same time as Massys was doing his entertaining grotesque.

As with most Dürer this image is packed with symbolism representing the inversion of traditional values and decorum. The woman is naked but not in the sexy manner of Renaissance nudes; the naked body of an older woman is seen as repellent and disgusting. The broom between her legs and her grip on a goat’s horn suggest the uncontrolled and inappropriate nature of lust in an older woman. She is rising the goat backwards but her hair is flowing in the wrong direction, into rather than with the wind. It is an image of reversal and chaos. Whereas the Massys painting was made for comedy and entertainment, the Dürer takes some of the same themes and treats them with horror, repulsion and fear.

Alice

Even this inclusion of witches hasn’t exhausted the ramifications and connections unravelling from this one painting. I think I knew but had forgotten an important fact about it which is that Massys’s portrait directly inspired the figure of the Duchess in ‘Alice in Wonderland’, as portrayed in Sir John Tenniel’s classic illustrations.

Alice, the Duchess, and the Baby by Sir John Tenniel (1865)

Here, in a sense, the Ugly Duchess found her spiritual home. As a painting she was only available for centuries to a handful of viewers. Even hung up in the National Gallery she was only seen by a small number of people. But as published in the Alice books and very widely distributed, she entered a kind of rogues’ gallery of all the other fantastical characters dreamed up by Lewis Carroll. Beyond fear or ridicule she is transformed into an object of pure, delightful entertainment.

Video

In this 10 minute long video National Gallery restorer Britta New discusses the conservation treatment of ‘The Ugly Duchess’, describing discoveries made during the conservation process, and the painting’s connection to sketches by Leonardo da Vinci and John Tenniel’s illustrations.

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by Simon on April 10, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition

Posted by Simon on April 10, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/04/10/the-ugly-duchess-beauty-and-satire-in-the-renaissance-the-national-gallery/

Heath Robinson’s Shakespeare Illustrations @ the Heath Robinson Museum

“Playing on pipes of corn, and versing love to amorous Phillida”. Published in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, London, Constable & Co (1914) The William Heath Robinson Trust

The Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner north-west London is my favourite small gallery in London. It’s only half an hour by tube from Oxford Circus (change at Baker Street onto the Metropolitan line for Pinner). It is a small but beautifully formed exhibition space and always source of delight and enjoyment.

The museum hosts a steady series of fascinating little exhibitions in its one-room gallery which is big enough to hang 50, 60, 70 prints, illustrations and paintings. Sometimes they’re portmanteau exhibitions featuring a number of artists, for example, the fabulous one about neo-Romantic book illustrators, or the one about the Beardsley Generation.

This one is simpler and more focused; it features just one artist, Heath Robinson himself, with a selection of about 70 of his illustrations for luxury editions of Shakespeare’s plays.

Exhibition contents

The exhibition consists of:

1. 30 large prints of individual drawings or watercolours, hung on the walls.

2. About 7 framed collections which each contain up to a dozen smaller, black and white illustrations, each taken from pairs of plays, for example Macbeth and Julius Caesar (see below).

3. The four display cases each contain original copies of the luxury editions of the Shakespeare plays which Heath Robinson (HR) illustrated, alongside examples of similar volumes by contemporaries, being:

case 1: three original copies of the 1908 HR edition of Twelfth Night
case 2:
- a 1914 edition of HR’s Midsummer Night’s Dream
- 1908 edition of Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrated by Arthur Rackham
- 1898 edition of Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrated by Robert Anning Bell
case 3: three old editions of The Tempest open to lovely illustrations
- 1901 version illustrated by Robert Anning Bell
- 1908 version illustrated by Edmund Dulac
- 1908 version illustrated by Paul Woodroffe
case 4: four photocopies of comical illustrations HR made of Jacques’ Seven Ages of Man speech (from As You Like It) for the Bystander magazine in 1905

4. Finally, a slideshow of illustrations for Midsummer Night’s Dream for which the original artwork wasn’t available, projected onto the white gallery wall. There are 37 of these blown-up line drawings and it is quite mesmeric watching the sequence appear on the white wall. It has the effect of really bringing out the compositional clarity of HR’s black and white designs.

As to the 30 or so framed images hung round the walls of the gallery, they are divided into three groups, being selections of the illustrations HR made for:

Twelfth Night
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Cape Shakespeare

1. Twelfth Night (1908)

In 1908 Hodder and Stoughton published Twelfth Night with forty coloured plates by Heath Robinson. It was the first time he had had the opportunity to illustrate a complete volume in colour. He didn’t attempt to provide a literal record of the action but, like a composer writing incidental music for a play, set out to capture the mood.

There are six framed originals. The first one is a wonderfully detailed, naturalistic study of a tall woman swathed in a full dress done in pencil (“Sir, my name is Mary”); the other five are richly coloured, deeply evocative, hugely impressive watercolours.

Duke Orsino: “So full of shapes is fancy.” Published in Twelfth Night by Hodder and Stoughton (1908). The William Heath Robinson Trust

Two things are obviously important about these. One is the architecture. There’s a person and what appears to be a squadron of ghostly cherubs in the picture but the real star is the buildings. The flagstones, the column he’s standing by and then the beautifully detailed colonnade across the square or atrium. It is thrillingly precise and accurate.

Second thing is the gloominess of the image, a night-time vibe which is emphasised when you see the daylight shining on the wall opposite and the top, and realise it is actually daytime. This has all been carefully crafted to capture the melancholy mood of the play’s male protagonist, Duke Orsino, who has plunged himself into a theatrically melancholy love for the aloof Countess Olivia:

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

In the scene as written the duke is, of course, surrounded by courtiers, but this is what Heath Robinson meant by capturing the mood or feel of the play, because in his mind Orsino is a lovesick loner and this beautiful illustration very powerfully conveys that.

These are the darkest of all the works, in fact one of them, “Present mirth hath present laughter”, is so dark it’s difficult to make out what’s going on. In these illustrations Heath Robinson took a very painterly approach to composition, blurring his usually crisp clear lines to create an almost impressionistic effect. His genius for the comic is almost completely absent. Some of the paintings are reminiscent of the Turner at his most misty sunset moments.

You can see what I mean by going to this blog about HR’s Twelfth Night images:

Robinson and Shakespeare: dark humours

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1914)

In 1913 Heath Robinson, at the height of his career, suggested to his publisher, Constable, that he illustrate a luxury edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The end result was a combination of 12 coloured plates and 40 pen and ink illustrations. The pictures fall, like the play, into two groups, the serious business of the aristocrats, among the temples and columned buildings of Athens, and the fantastical goings on among the fairies and ‘rude mechanicals’ in the woods.

Compared to the sombre impressionistic Twelfth Night pictures, the Midsummer Night’s Dream ones could almost be by a different artist. They are all much more clear and crisp, combining a taste for clean outlines with the fantastical element of the many goblins, sprites, elves and pixies and the down-to-earth comedy of the working class characters.

I opened this review with an image which combines the tremendous architectural precision of the temple depicted at the top with a characteristic stream of rather grotesque goblins and whatnot flowing top left to bottom right. The young man tootling his pipes at bottom right evokes the Edwardian fascination with the Greek god Pan, but what I really love about this image is the way he’s resting on a fallen column. At the top is the official world of a complete functioning temple but as your eye follow the trail of flying goblins you descend into a jungle which has overgrown the world of reason and commerce and law till you arrive at a definitive image of the collapse of law and order and reason, the fallen column, leaning on which is the god of mischief and pranks making merry music. It’s an incredibly symbolic, charged image.

Alongside the fantastical ones, are pictures which show the rude mechanicals, the comic working class characters Quince, Snug, Bottom, Flute and Starveling. Here they all are in an ensemble illustration:

Bottom: “I will move storms, I will condole in some measure.” Published in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Constable and company (1914). The William Heath Robinson Trust

The most obvious thing is the space, the completely white top and bottom of the composition, relieved only by the single pot of drink. Amazing how the simple use of space creates drama and energy, makes the humdrum scene of half a dozen village idiots sitting on a bench seem supercharged with life.

This blog seems to have a good selection if not all of the Midsummer illustrations. You can see the clarity of the lines and the importance of architecture, straight columns, and angular steps in picture after picture:

Some of the colour illustrations, done in watercolour, retain the misty impressionism of the Twelfth Night set. I was particularly struck by a picture of a woman standing in the woods and at the top, instead of Heath Robinson’s detailed way with leaves (especially his favourite horse chestnut leaves) the painting dissolves into washes of green sprinkled with magic fairy lights which is impressionist in feel, almost like one of Monet’s lily pond studies.

Helena: “I’ll follow thee and make a heaven of hell, To die upon the and I love so well.” Pen and watercolour. Published in A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Constable and company (1914)

The Cape Shakespeare

The First World War effectively put an end to the market for sumptuous illustrated gift books. But in 1921 Heath Robinson received a commission from the newly established publishing house of Jonathan Cape to provide over 400 drawings to illustrate a new edition of the complete works of Shakespeare. He completed all 400 by June 1922 but, either though lack of fund for this particular project, or the general decline in the market for luxury books, the edition was never published. Amazingly, it was only in 1991 when Cape moved offices that this treasure trove of illustrations came to light and they are included in the exhibition courtesy of Penguin Random House, their present owner.

The colour illustrations

They’re fascinating for several reasons, first the large watercolour illustrations. The figures are bigger and more central than in the Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrations. They are more front and centre and dramatic.

Lear: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!” (King Lear).

Next, the colouring is much clearer and cleaner than in either the Twelfth Night or Midsummer illustrations. Maybe it was the war, maybe it was a natural development, but Heath Robinson has consciously left behind the Turneresque, impressionist vagueness I mentioned about the earlier paintings. Here the backgrounds are plainer and the figures more sharply delineated.

And the faces, they’re much more gargoyly. They have bog bulging eyes under heavy brows. Both Lear and the fool’s eyes look unnaturally enlarged, almost bulging. Compare and contrast with the discreet, almost invisible eyes in all the earlier illustrations. The conscious change in the treatment of eyes is symptomatic of the far wider range of dramatic moods to be found in the Cape illustrations and the need (and ability) to convey this with more than physical posture, but with a lot more detailed facial description.

The black and white illustrations

Because they were never separated to make printing blocks the freestanding black and white illustrations, often relatively small, have been brought together into ‘sheets’ i.e. 7, 8 or 9 of them presented in the same frame. These combine images from different but linked plays, for example, Henry IV part two and the Merry Wives of Windsor, or Julius Caesar and Macbeth.

It was the latter sheet which really grabbed me. Quite obviously the previous two projects had concerned comedies. Here Heath Robinson was called on to illustrate tragedy, violence, horror, fear. He does it in part by really simplifying down his designs. The hundreds of leaves and flowers and cascades of goblins from the Midsummer Night’s Dream period are all eliminated. Instead Heath Robinson develops a new approach which is to eliminate all unnecessary detail, reduce the number of lines, simplify the figures, and use large pools of solid black to give bite and drama.

A sheet of illustrations for Julius Caesar and Macbeth by William Heath Robinson

These images just don’t have the same impact on a small screen as they did to me in the gallery (the top reason for going to any art gallery is that the impact of a work of art is always massively bigger in the flesh). I know some of the images, like the bloke with the shield, may be a little on the cartoon side. But the more I looked at the image of the assassination of Julius Caesar, the more uncanny it felt.

Illustration for Julius Caesar by William Heath Robinson

Heath Robinson using the big white space we saw used to comic effect in the Dream and applied it to an intensely dramatic moment. There is nothing comic or frivolous about the murder of Julius Caesar and so all the figures involved are depicted in the simplest manner with as few lines as possible. But what a stroke of genius to not do it close-up, to not show the agony and the spurting blood. But to depict it far in the background as possible. Somehow it makes it all the more ominous and horrible and distant and detached and gruesome.

And then – who is the bearded man at the bottom right? Is it the soothsayer who said ‘Beware the ides of March’? Why is he so very distant from the action, barely in the picture, is he hastily exiting the terrible scene? But look at his shadow? It’s like a Rorschach blot, it’s like an abstract swirl, it adds to the sense of disorientation.

The more I looked at this, the more spooked I grew. And the more it seemed to capture the terrible world-historical consequences of the deed, namely another thirteen years of civil war which eventually led to the overthrow of the Roman Republic. The weird kissing black aliens in the bottom… I felt more and more spooked.

Something similar with some of the Macbeth illustrations on the same sheet, especially the raddled old figure at the bottom right, almost entirely in ink-black silhouette and shadow. Or the long thin silhouette of the the weird sisters at top right. The more I looked, the more uncanny and powerful they all became.

Obviously they’re to some extent meant to be shadows of the characters but these flowing pools of jet black are done in a style which approaches a Japanese woodcut level of abstraction. The tendency is strikingly evident in a standalone illustration of the dead Cleopatra. For a moment Heath Robinson has travelled back in time 20 years and become Aubrey Beardsley. The simple lines and languid posture are 1890s, but it’s really the liquid shape of the jet black shadows which reveals the influence. Looking at the shadow of her arm and the folds in the bed (?), I wondered whether their serpentine shape was meant to hint at the slinking asps which, according to legend, she killed herself with.

Cleopatra by Heath Robinson

As I mentioned, some of these b&w illustrations are very funny. There are quite a few comic illustrations of Falstaff and the other characters from Henry IV and the Merry Wives. But it was the uncanny images from Caesar and Macbeth which I kept coming back to. In only 15 years his style had travelled a long, way from the brilliantly naturalistic drawing which started the exhibition, “Sir, my name is Mary.” Although he remained, at the exact same time as doing this commission, a brilliant comic illustrator, some of these Shakespeare images seemed to me to break through to a completely new understanding of the stark, brutal forces at large in the world, unlike anything else in his oeuvre.

Illustrations for Henry VI and Richard III by William Heath Robinson, commissioned by Jonathan Cape in 1921. Unpublished. On long-term loan from Penguin Random House archive.

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by Simon on February 20, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Illustration

Posted by Simon on February 20, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/02/20/heath-robinsons-shakespeare-illustrations-the-heath-robinson-museum/

Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes (1997)

Given his reputation for avoiding anything which smacked of ‘the Poetic Tradition’, the fact that he dropped English at Cambridge because he found studying the classics too stifling for his imagination, and his lifelong preference for depicting the harsh realities of a brutal, untamed nature – it might come as quite a surprise that, right at the end of his life, in 1997, Ted Hughes published a full-on translation of the Metamorphoses by the ancient Roman poet, Ovid, the kind of thing you might expect from a far more traditional, decorous, academic poet.

An odd choice?

Having just read the full Ovid poem I can see that Hughes’s decision is less surprising than might at first appear. I had fond memories of reading the Metamorphoses 30 years ago and had completely forgotten that they are consistently brutal, intense and often very cruel indeed. As such, they obviously chime with Hughes’s lifelong obsession with the brutality, intensity, and visionary otherness of the natural world.

Also, it’s easy to overlook the fact that Hughes had, earlier in his career, translated another work by a canonical Roman writer, the Oedipus of Seneca. In fact I was surprised, double checking his bibliography, to discover that after his death a whole suite of translations was published – translations of The Oresteia of Aeschylus, Phèdre by Jean Racine, and Alcestis by Euripides, all published in 1999. What do they have in common? Classic stories from classical antiquity. So the Ovid translations are far from unique. Hughes’s imagination clearly took a classical turn in his last decade.

And then, on rereading his poetry as I just have, I realised there are scattered references to classical mythology throughout – not many, admittedly, but they’re there.

Plus the entire sequence in Moortown named ‘Prometheus on his crag’, and the poem in that volume about Actaeon, and one titled ‘Pan’.

So once you start looking, you find a strong undercurrent of classical references and subject matter throughout his oeuvre.

The Metamorphoses

The Metamorphoses is a long poem in Latin in which the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso, generally referred to as Ovid (43 BC t o18 AD) brought together into one continuous narrative some 250 ancient Greek myths and legends.

these ancient stories all have one thing in common – the protagonist, the figure at the centre of the story, be they man, woman, child, sometimes a minor divinity such as a nymph or nereid – at the climax of the story, each of them is transformed into something else. Sometimes into an animal, like a bird or pig or wolf or dog; sometimes into flora, such as a tree or flower; sometimes into inanimate matter, like stone – various characters are turned into statues or just into stone – or into water – several characters are turned into standing pools or streams.

Hughes’s approach

Ovid’s poem is huge. At just short of 12,000 lines of regular dactylic hexameter it is as long and detailed and complicated as the canonical epic poems of Homer and Virgil. Hughes’s version is nowhere near as long. For a start he restricts himself to just 24 of the longer or more complete tales.

So instead of a continuous narrative describing stories big and small, containing full length treatments with throwaway references in a line or two, as Ovid does, Hughes presents us with what is, in effect, a collection of 24 individual poems.

Second, and a more glaring difference, is Hughes translates Ovid into free verse. Hughes employed free verse and flexible stanza shapes right from the start of his career, so by 1997 he’d had 40 years of practice. The result is a style where every line is its own thing, its own measure, justifying its own length and rhythm by its meaning and poetic force, rather than being compelled to fit into a regular metre.

Tales from Ovid does in fact contain regular stanza structures, though I only slowly realised it. Thus the opening story about Phaethon who fools his father, the god of the sun, into letting him drive his chariot for a day and proves totally inadequate to the task – a kind of ancient Greek Liz Truss – and loses control of the immortal horses and lets the sun chariot swoop low over the earth causing widespread destruction – in Hughes’s hands this narratives begins by being told in 47 5-line stanzas, each line being as flexible as he needed it to be.

When Phaethon bragged about is father, Phoebus
The sun-god,
His friends mocked him. ‘Your mother must be crazy
Or you’re crazy to believe her.
How could the sun be anybody’s father?’

In a rage of humiliation
Phaethon came to his mother, Clymene.
‘They’re all laughing at me,
And I can’t answer. What can I say? It’s horrible.
I have to stand like a dumb fool and be laughed at.’

And so on. However, Hughes has no hesitation in switching format as required so that, for example, when Phaethon enters the palace of his father, the verse switches to long verse paragraphs in order to describe its grandeur.

Fittingly magnificent
Columns underpropped a mass
Of gold strata so bright
The eyes flinched from it.
The whole roof a reflector
Of polished ivory.
The silver doors like sheet flame –
And worked into that flame
Vulcan, the god of fire,
Had set, in relief, a portrait of the creation…

Back to 5-line stanzas for a bit and then, when Phaethon loses control of the horse of the sun so that they fly down, far too close to the surface of the earth, it switches again to verse paragraphs, although the freedom of individual lines remains identical to what it was in the stanzas i.e. there’s no particular rhyme or pattern except the power of the phrases themselves.

Earth began to burn, the summits first.
Baked, the cracks gaped. All fields, all thickets,
All crops were instantly fuel –
The land blazed briefly.
In the one flare noble cities
Were rendered
To black stumps of burnt stone.
Whole nations, in all their variety,
Were clouds of hot ashes, blowing in the wind,.
Forest-covered mountains were bonfires…

Later on the 9-page tale of Pyramus and Thisbe is told in a series of free verse 3-line stanzas so popular with contemporary poets for some reason. (Maybe this is for the simple reason that they’re no couplets which tend to make you expect rhymes, and not quatrains, ditto. Triplets are free of those old traditional expectations.)

Throughout the East men spoke in awe of Thisbe –
A girl who had suddenly bloomed
In Babylon, the mud-brick city.

The house she had grown up in adjoined
The house where Pyramus, so many years a boy,
Brooded bewildered by the moods of manhood.

These two, playmates from the beginning,
Fell in love.
For angry reasons, no part of the story,

The parents of each forbade their child
To marry the other…

In other words, Hughes felt utterly free to pick and choose verse forms, or variations of free verse forms, as they suited his needs.

List of the poems

The Creation of the Universe. The Four Ages (Gold, Silver, Bronze, Iron). the Flood. The story of Lycaon (20 pages)
Phaethon (21 pages)
Callisto and Arcas (7 pages)
The Rape of Proserpina (15 pages)
Arethusa (4 pages)
Tiresias (2 pages)
Echo and Narcissus (11 pages)
Erisychthon (10 pages)
Semele (6 pages)
Peleus and Thetis (4 pages)
Actaeon (8 pages)
Myrrha (15 pages)
Venus and Adonis (16 pages)
Pygmalion (7 pages)
Hercules and Dejanira (13 pages)
The Birth of Hercules (3 pages)
The Death of Cygnus (6 pages)
Arachne (9 pages)
Bacchus and Pentheus (18 pages)
Midas (11 pages)
Niobe (12 pages)
Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (5 pages)
Tereus (17 pages)
Pyramus and Thisbe (9 pages)

The merits of Hughes’s version

Characteristic, trademark phrasing, precise, brisk, no fat on the bone, no extraneous syllables. Hard, precise and clinical.

Hercules, the son of Jupiter,
Was bringing his new bride home
When he came to the river Evenus.

Burst banks, booming torrent,
Where there had been a ford. Hercules
Had no fear for himself, only for his wife.

No namby-pamby, stuff-and-nonsense, decoration or silly sentiment for our Ted. Stick to the facts, son, and tha’ll do alreeght.

The weaknesses of Hughes’s version

1. Verbosity

The weakness of Hughes’s later verse is its verbosity, as I tried to demonstrate in my overview of Hughes’s career. Much of Crow is dazzlingly brilliant, Gaudete is an extraordinarily weird achievement, but by the time of Moortown in 1979, you feel Hughes could churn this stuff out by the yard, by the mile if necessary. Same is true in spades of Tales from Ovid.

There are still flashes of brilliance in his phrasing, and his shaping of lines i.e. deciding how many words and beats to include in each line, and his ability to build up rhythms over successive free verse lines remains very impressive. But his commitment to a diction which is ‘a texture that is concrete, terse, emphatic, economical’ often ends up emptying the lines of colour. His verse feels oddly empty.

2. Functionality

Also, in order to tell stories in verse some of the lines need to be unavoidably functional. Now, if you’re Dryden or Pope, you could use a standard format like the rhyming couplet or blank verse, both of which are utterly predictable in layout, pace and metre and so very suitable for settling down to hear a very long narrative in.

Hughes tries to translate his 24 stories into ad hoc verse shapes and line lengths but, whereas these were justified when they contained a blitz of stunning images in his own poems, this approach works less well for narrative poetry.

Somewhere the critic (and mate of Hughes’s) Al Alvarez commented that Hughes’s poems leap from one dazzling image to the next. That’s fine if that’s all the poems are meant to do – dazzle. But telling a story requires something a bit more predictable, a regular repeatable style which can take a backseat to the narrative.

3. Thin

In stripping his versions back to the bone, Hughes loses a lot of what makes Ovid Ovid, which is the myriad digressions and throwaway references, about genealogy and relationships and attributes of this god or the achievements of that hero; all the peripheral detail which goes to build up a rich imaginative world. These are just some of the aspects which make the original Metamorphoses feel very dense and rich, sumptuous, luxurious. Hughes deliberately chucks all that out in order to hone things down to maximum intensity for each line. But what if the sumptuous detail is the point of Ovid?

4. Scene setting and landscapes

Now I’m really thinking about this, I realise that Ovid, in his best most extended stories, often goes in for slow, lush, storytelling descriptions of scenery and setting.

There was a valley there called Gargaphie, dense with pine trees and sharp cypresses, sacred to Diana of the high-girded tunic, where, in the depths, there is a wooded cave, not fashioned by art. But ingenious nature had imitated art. She had made a natural arch out of native pumice and porous tufa. On the right, a spring of bright clear water murmured into a widening pool, enclosed by grassy banks. Here the woodland goddess, weary from the chase, would bathe her virgin limbs in the crystal liquid. (book 3)

Hughes chucks all this out in order to get to the pith of the action.

A deep cleft at the bottom of the mountain
Dark with matted pine and spiky cypress

Was known as Gargaphie, sacred to Diana,
Goddess of the hunt.
In the depths of this goyle was the mouth of a cavern

That might have been carved out with deliberate art
From the soft volcanic rock.
It half-hid a broad pool, perpetually shaken

By a waterfall inside the mountain,
Noisy but hidden. Often to that grotto,
Aching and burning from her hunting,

Diana came
To cool the naked beauty she hid from the world.

I suppose Hughes’s version is more crisp, factual, minimalist and modern – but, in a poem of Ovid’s type, half the pleasure is in the details, the lushness and the time taken to elaborate and decorate the subject. It’s nice to know that Diana is the goddess ‘of the high-girded tunic’ and a thousand and one other details and spin-off phrases which adorn and enrich the Ovid. All burned away in Hughes. Hughes’s version is like a concrete multi-story car park – admirable in its stark, uncompromising efficiency. But difficult to warm to, let alone love.

5. Blank style

And that brings me round to the lack of sensuality in Hughes’s verse. His is a powerful sensuality of imagery but not of language, as such.

Right from the start Hughes was capable of using simple words in unexpected combinations to convey his otherworldly insights into nature with stunning power, but there was rarely anything special about the words themselves. they are often very ordinary indeed. It was always the novel combinations of words into brilliant, often mind-bending phrases which had so much impact on readers. In fact, paradoxically, Hughes often works with a very limited, plain diction.

Somehow, for me, his translation of the Tales really brings this out. The deliberate blankness of a lot of the style, and the occasional dazzling phraseology, can’t conceal the fact that a lot of the lines are, lexically speaking, rather, well, pedestrian.

The introduction

There’s a case for saying the best part of the book is the introduction. For a start, it’s admirably brief at just four and a half pages. After some fluff about Ovid’s biography, it quickly turns to Hughesian interests. After mentioning the Metamorphoses‘ importance to Chaucer as a source book for all manner of myths and legends, Hughes goes on to cite Shakespeare.

Characteristically, Hughes dismisses Shakespeare finding sweet and beautiful images amidst Ovid’s dense foliage. Instead:

A more crucial connection, maybe, can be found in their common taste for a tortured subjectivity and catastrophic extremes of passion that border on the grotesque.

Now, admittedly these elements are present in Shakespeare’s earliest, goriest plays and remain in moments of the high tragedies, especially King Lear. But roughly speaking who do ‘a tortured subjectivity and catastrophic extremes of passion’ remind you of? Hughes. and his hyperbolic brain-damaged worldview (see my overview of Hughes’s oeuvre for quotes to back this up).

But it’s worth bearing with this over-passionate man for the insights he offers into Ovid:

Above all, Ovid was interested in passion. or rather, in what a passion feels like to the one possessed by it. Not just ordinary passion either, but human passion in extremis – passion where it combusts, or levitates, or mutates into an experience of the supernatural.

Then Hughes says something really interesting and profoundly insightful. I quote it in full to give the rhythm and rise of his argument:

The act of metamorphosis, which at some point, touches each of the tales, operates as the symbolic guarantee that the passion has become mythic, has achieved the unendurable intensity that lifts the whole episode onto the supernatural or divine plane. Sometimes this happens because mortals tangle with the gods, sometimes because mortal passion makes the breakthrough by sheer excess, without divine intervention – as in the tale of Tereus and Philomela. But in every case, to a greater or lesser degree, Ovid locates and captures the particular frisson of that event, where the all-too-human victim stumbles out into the mythic arena and is transformed.

I think the thought behind this, and the phrasing, are wonderfully vivid and evocative. I’m not at all sure what he says is true of the entire Metamorphoses, which feature just as many nymphs and Naiads and whatnot as mortals – and also includes some happy endings, such as Pygmalion, and Baucis and Philemon (the happiest story in the Metamorphoses and so, symptomatically, not included in Hughes’s selection of tales.)

But as a description of what does happen to the poor, stricken mortals among Ovid’s hapless protagonists, this is a wonderfully, energetically perceived and phrased insight.

Conclusion

As Hughes’s last volume of poetry, Tales from Ovid has interest, though it’s not the best place to start if you’ve never read him before.

If you want to find out what Ovid’s Metamorphoses is actually like, then emphatically do not read this translation, try the more traditional versions from Penguin or OUP which give you the full text along with all the wonderful details and grace notes which welcome you into an entirely new world. Every bit as savage and cruel as Hughes’s, but redeemed and enlivened by far more colour and variety.

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by Simon on November 23, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Poetry, Translation

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Posted by Simon on November 23, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/11/23/tales-from-ovid-ted-hughes/

Worstward Ho by Samuel Beckett (1983)

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Worstward Ho is a short piece of prose published by Samuel Beckett towards the end of his life. The title is a parody of the adventure novel Westward Ho! by Victorian novelist, Charles Kingsley, which itself is a reference to the Elizabethan play Westward Ho! by Thomas Dekker and John Webster.

Regarded with a detached eye, the title is almost a parody of Beckett’s notorious miserabilism, but the title doesn’t begin to capture the apocalyptic evisceration of language which characterises the text.

Along with other late prose pieces, Company and Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho was collected in a volume with the equally parody-worthy title, Nohow On, which is actually one of the recurrent phrases in WO, in 1989.

On the first page the text includes what is probably Beckett’s most famous quote:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

By this late stage in his career, Beckett had moved far beyond conventional categories such as novel, novella or short story. In fact he had moved beyond what most people probably think of as literature or even meaningful language.

The piece takes his late prose mannerisms to extremes. The following analysis relies on the excellent summary of the piece given by James Knowlson in his biography of Beckett, Damned To Fame, because Knowlson has read and thought about this difficult piece far more than I will ever have time to.

Shakespearean source

Beckett began writing Worstward Ho on 9 August 1981 (we know all this kind of detail because these notebooks were left, in good condition, to university archives). Beckett wrote out three quotes from King Lear to the effect that, if you can say we’ve reached the worst, you have not reached the worst. It is Edgar who says, in King Lear, Act IV, Scene 1:

And worse I may be yet. The worst is not
So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’

The worst is unsayable, inexpressible. Therefore, the mere fact of being able to speak or write, by definition, means you’re not there yet. The piece therefore approaches the final collapse of language, repeatedly enacting it, but failing to cross the threshold into silence. Language can’t. It can only try and try again. Hence the repetitive nature of the motto: Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Language games

In the attempt to approach the edge of expressibility, Beckett experiments with language’s potential and Knowlson gives a useful little summary of the tactics employed:

Paring away

Most obviously the English language has been pared right back to a handful of words, brought together to create small phrases or lexical units.

A place. Where none. A time when try see. Try say. How small. How vast. How if not boundless bounded. Whence the dim. Not now. Know better now. Unknow better now. Know only no out of. No knowing how know only no out of. Into only. Hence another. Another place where none.

Combinations

These tiny units, the handful of words and short phrases, are then combined, recombined, repeated with variations. The strategy of ‘enumeration’ which had been part of his prose since Watt.

On back to unsay void can go. Void cannot go. Save dim go. Then all go. All not already gone. Till dim back. Then all back. All not still gone. The one can go. The twain can go. Dim can go. Void cannot go. Save dim go. Then all go.

New coinages

Paradoxically, having reduced English to almost the bare minimum, Beckett generates a number of new words, coinages, especially around the core idea of ‘worse’.

unworsenable, unmoreable, unlessenable, evermost, meremost, dimmost, unlestening, unnullable

This much messing about with words is unusual in Beckett. And there’s lots of it, it’s a conspicuous feature of this piece:

invain, unasking, missaid, whosesoever, hindtrunk, astand, nohow, vastatween, inletting, outletting, ununsaid, unreceding, unsay, unsunk, unmoreable

As you can see, most of them are created by adding un- to perfectly normal words to create their opposite. Matter and anti-matter. Inventions in the desert of language. Tinkerings on the verge of the void.

Swapping parts of speech

In the same spirit, words change their usual syntactical function. Thus nouns are used as verbs, verbs as nouns, adverbs as adjectives and so on.

Alliteration

Playing with these last few counters of a mind on the brink of collapse throws up a surprising number of alliterative phrases, which possess a hard, chiselled beauty:

Skull and lidless stare. Where in the narrow vast? Say only vasts apart. In that narrow void vasts of void apart.

Tongue twisters

Knowlson makes the point that Beckett loved crossword puzzles, word games, tongue twisters and there turns out to be surprising capacity for such games even when playing with a handful of dead counters:

Somehow in. Beyondless. Thenceless there. Thitherless there. Thenceless thitherless there.
With leastening words say least best worse. For want of worser worse. Unlessenable least best worse.

The intrusive narrator

Beckett took the tradition of the intrusive narrator, who had been used for comic effect in 18th and 19th century novels, and turns him into an unsmiling director of the action whose presence is indicated by the imperative form of the verb ‘say’. Say this. Say that. The word ‘say’ occurs 100 times in the text. Could be paraphrased as ‘take a…’ or Let’s assume the existence of…’ only pared right back to the shortest possible verbal gesture:

Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none.

Or this longer quotation gives a flavour of how the text creates itself through a series of orders or suggestions:

It stands. What? Yes. Say it stands. Had to up in the end and stand. Say bones. No bones but say bones. Say ground. No ground but say ground. So as to say pain. No mind and pain? Say yes that the bones may pain till no choice but stand. Somehow up and stand. Or better worse remains. Say remains of mind where none to permit of pain.

And what is it all this ‘saying’ is labouring to conjure into words, into reading, into being?

Content

Autobiographical memories

There is no ‘plot’, Good God, what an idea! But quite a few shapes or patterns emerge from this careful series of patterned paragraphs.

Beneath the dense wordplay, and forest of repetitions two images seem to emerge vaguely, as if through a fog, an old man walking hand in hand with a boy:

Bit by bit an old man and child. In the dim void bit by bit an old man and child. Any other would do as ill… Hand in hand with equal plod they go. In the free hands – no. Free empty hands. Backs turned both bowed with equal plod they go. The child hand raised to reach the holding hand. Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede turned. Both bowed. Joined by held joining hands. Plod on as one. One shade. Another shade.

Having read Knowlson’s biography, both of these central images strike me as having direct autobiographical roots. Beckett’s father loved going for walks in the Dublin hills, and took his son as often as possible, hence old man and boy hand in hand. The second recurring image is of an old woman:

Somehow again on back to the bowed back alone. Nothing to show a woman’s and yet a woman’s. Oozed from softening soft the word woman’s. The words old woman’s. The words nothing to show bowed back alone a woman’s and yet a woman’s. So better worse from now that shade a woman’s. An old woman’s.

And after his father died, Knowlson describes the way, on his increasingly infrequent returns to Ireland the family home, Beckett would accompany his mother to lay flowers on his father’s grave.

Nothing and yet a woman. Old and yet old. On unseen knees. Stooped as loving memory some old gravestones stoop. In that old graveyard. Names gone and when to when. Stoop mute over the graves of none.

Physical extremity

As so often, Beckett’s places his characters in extreme physical situations – not atop burning buildings or such, but caught in tight, taut, claustrophobic poses which mimic the tight, taut nature of the psychological conception and are reflected in the tight, taut, claustrophobic prose.

It stands. See in the dim void how at last it stands. In the dim light source unknown. Before the downcast eyes. Clenched eyes. Staring eyes. Clenched staring eyes.
Head sunk on crippled hands. Clenched staring eyes.
Clenched eyes clamped to it alone. Alone? No. Too. To it too. The sunken skull. The crippled hands. Clenched staring eyes.

Cramped, crippled, clenched. No wonder Beckett found it physically exhausting to write texts which require the reader not only to clench his body, but in some respect to clench your mind while reading. Knowlson tells us it took Beckett seven months just to write the first draft of Worstward Ho and that, over the winter of 1981 to 1982 he told friends that writing the piece was making him physically sick. As he wrote to long-time American collaborator, Alan Schneider, in his characteristically clipped and telegraphic style:

Struggling with impossible prose. English. With loathing.

Worstward Ho took Beckett a lot of effort to write and takes us a lot of effort to read, but I think it repays the effort. I think the major mistake that most people make who struggle with Beckett is thinking there is some grand hidden meaning behind it all. I think the truth is the opposite. There is no deep and hidden meaning, no powerful allegory or network of symbols which, if you could only decipher, would suddenly unlock these difficult texts, somehow make them easier to read and process.

They are what they are. The words mean what they say. Any reader or critic is at liberty to read into them any meaning they like, but all such readings looking for hidden meanings take you away from the immediate presence of the actual words themselves and their genuinely strange, haunting, beguiling, rigorously unsentimental, anti-romantic, hard, spare impact. And their difficulty.

First the bones. On back to them. Preying since first said on foresaid remains. The ground. The pain. No bones. No ground. No pain. Why up unknown. At all costs unknown. If ever down. No choice but up if ever down. Or never down. Forever kneeling. Better forever kneeling. Better worse forever kneeling. Say from now forever kneeling. So far from now forever kneeling. So far.

If the words are ‘about’ anything, if there is a ‘plot’ (and there isn’t) it’s to do with the way the text talks to itself, manipulates itself, positions, poses then immediately questions and subverts itself.

The dim. The void. Gone too? Back too? No. Say no. Never gone. Never back. Till yes. Till say yes. Gone too. Back too. The dim. The void. Now the one. Now the other. Now both. Sudden gone. Sudden back. Unchanged? Sudden back unchanged? Yes. Say yes. Each time unchanged. Somehow unchanged. Till no. Till say no. Sudden back changed. Somehow changed. Each time somehow changed.

It is the record of the narrator shaping and unshaping and anti-shaping the words and patterns and whatever they refer to, or unrefer to, as it goes along, or doesn’t go along, says or unsays, changes or unchanges, neverending, nevermoving, until it brings itself to a sudden and abrupt end:

Enough. Sudden enough. Sudden all far. No move and sudden all far. All least. Three pins. One pinhole. In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void. Whence no farther. Best worse no farther. Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on.

If you let go the reflex need to find ‘meaning’, if you recalibrate your mind to just go with the words in front of you and let them in, let them do their work, not strain for meaning and over-read them, but take them at face value, then they take you on an amazing journey to a very strange place, then they do something wierd to your mind. This is one of my favourite Beckett works because one of the purest, like The Unnamable, it is one of the least referential and therefore feels like a difficult, rebarbative, but deeply rewarding adventure in the possibilities of language and strange psychological effects.

Samuel Beckett’s works

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

More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) Short stories
Murphy (1938) Novel

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

Watt (written 1945, pub.1953) Novel
Mercier and Camier (1946) Novel
First Love (1946) Short story
The Expelled (1946) Short story
The Calmative (1946) Short story
The End (1946) Short story
Molloy 1 (1951) Novel
Molloy 2 (1951) Novel
Malone Dies (1951) Novel
The Unnamable (1953) Novel

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

All That Fall (1957) Radio play
*Acts Without Words I & II (1957) Mimes
*Endgame (1958) Stage play
*Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) Stage play
*Rough for Theatre I & II – Stage plays
Embers (1959) – Radio play
The Old Tune (1960) adaptation of a radio play by French writer Robert Pinget
*Happy Days (1961) – Stage play
Rough for Radio I & II (1961) Radio plays
Words and Music (1961) Radio play
Cascando (1961) Radio play
*Play (1963) Stage play
Film (1963) Scenario for a film
All Strange Away (1964) Short prose
Imagination Dead Imagine (1965) Short prose
How it Is (1964) Novel
Enough (1965) Short prose
Ping (1966) Short prose
*Come and Go (1965) Stage play
Eh Joe (1967) Television play
*Breath (1969) Stage play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

Lessness (1970) Short prose
The Lost Ones (1966-70) Short prose
*Not I (1972) Stage play
Fizzles (1973 to 1975) Short prose pieces
Heard in the Dark, One evening and others – Short prose pieces
*That Time (1975) Stage play
*Footfalls (1976) Stage play
Ghost Trio (1976) Television play
…but the clouds… (1977) Television play
Company (1980) Novella
*A Piece of Monologue (1980) Stage play (Beckett on Film production)
*Rockaby (1981) Stage play
Quad I + II (1981) Television play
Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) Short novel
*Ohio Impromptu (1981) Stage play
*Catastrophe (1982) Stage play
Worstward Ho (1983) Prose
Nacht und Träume (1983) Television play
*What Where (1983) Stage play
Stirrings Still (1988) Short prose
Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson (1996) part 1
Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson (1996) part 2
Samuel Beckett timeline

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by Simon on February 15, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Literature

Posted by Simon on February 15, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/02/15/worstward-ho-samuel-beckett/

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All posts tagged King Lear

Theory 1: Aristotle and Aquinas

Theory 2: Shakespeare

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In a dramatic context

Fathers and sons

Performance, first aspect

A clash of worldviews

Performance, second aspect

Scylla and Charybdis

A ghostly answer

Credit

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The Mixture as Before

Bertie struggles to find the right word

Bertie struggles with classic quotes

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The village constable

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Trimmed

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Introduction

1. Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ (1907)

2. Psychopathic stage characters (1906)

3. Creative writers and daydreams (1907)