All posts tagged Pluto

Ulysses by James Joyce: Cast list

One obvious way of thinking about a book is not the plot, narrative or style, but slicing it up by characters and actions. This is especially handy for ‘Ulysses’ in which a cast of over 200 named characters weave in and out of the narrative as they weave their way around Dublin. You could get cute and say that many phrases and individual key words recur like characters, weaving in and out of the text to create complicated resonances and motifs, which is true, but listing them would take a book. Just creating this cast list deepened my own understanding of the characters and their significance.

The list is in order of first appearance – I wasn’t sure whether to put it into alphabetical order but Wikipedia already has an alphabetical list, if you want one:

I omitted chapter 15, ‘Circe’, because it is a beast unto itself, with over 100 characters with some of them of questionable nature (for example the various inanimate objects who have active or speaking parts) and would make this list unmanageably long. You can read my Circe review with its cast list, separately.

Chapter numbers and names

Here’s a reminder of the 18 chapters and their Homeric titles i.e. the episodes from Homer’s Odyssey which they are based on or reference. (Always worth emphasising that these titles don’t actually appear in any edition of ‘Ulysses’ where the chapters are just given as plain numbers; they are the names given by Joyce to early promoters of his book and which have been used by scholars and fans ever since they became known in the 1930s.)

Part 1. Telemachiad

  1. Telemachus
  2. Nestor
  3. Proteus

Part 2. Odyssey

  1. Calypso
  2. Lotus Eaters
  3. Hades
  4. Aeolus
  5. Lestrygonians
  6. Scylla and Charybdis
  7. Wandering Rocks
  8. Sirens
  9. Cyclops
  10. Nausicaa
  11. Oxen of the Sun
  12. Circe

Part 3. Nostos

  1. Eumaeus
  2. Ithaca
  3. Penelope

Cast

Numbers in brackets refer to chapters the characters appear in. They’re as complete as I could make them but probably not definitive.

1. Telemachus: at the Martello Tower

Stephen Dedalus (1, 2, 3, 9, 14, 15, 16, 17) aged 22, hyper-intelligent, extremely well-read, bookish young man with literary ambitions – described as ‘a lithe young man, clad in mourning, a wide hat’, mourning his recently dead mother. Called back from a brief sojourn in Paris by his father’s telegram telling him his mother is dying, Stephen caused scandal by refusing to kneel and pray at her bedside. Earns a bit teaching at Deasy’s school. In the National Library propounds his Shakespeare theory to sceptical traditionalists who aren’t impressed (10). Depressed, he appears to spend the rest of the day drinking, reappearing in the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode, making drunken smart remarks in the gang of drunk medical students when sober Bloom arrives. He is mortified that it is superficial Buck Mulligan who gets invited to the important literary soiree of George Moore and not the much more clever him. When the party in the maternity hospital breaks up, Stephen staggers off to the red light district where he encounters Bloom again, who rescues him from a confrontation with a British soldier and takes him home for cocoa and a chat.

On this reading of ‘Ulysses’ I realised that Stephen, for all his smarts, is a frustrated loser, stymied at every turn. By the time we get to the later chapters, his highfalutin quoting of Aquinas or whoever which felt impressive in the opening chapters, has come to seem a pathetic compensation for his failure.

I don’t feel sorry for Stephen, he’s had plenty of advantages to his start in life; I feel sorry for his impoverished younger brothers and sisters. He encounters one in chapter 10, Wandering Rocks, Dilly (Delia) Dedalus, at a bookseller’s cart, where Dilly has bought a French primer. He feels pity for her pathetic attempts to educate herself and he has his wages in his pocket to help her… but he doesn’t; he prefers to spend all his wages on alcohol and then on prostitutes. So no sympathy for Stephen.

Mary Dedalus – Stephen’s mother, recently dead. Mulligan castigates him for refusing to kneel and pray by her bedside as she was dying, a refusal that leaves him plagued by guilt throughout the novel, climaxing in the Circe chapter where he hallucinates her reproaching him. Her recent death explains why for the whole of Bloomsday Stephen is dressed in mourning. For me the often-overlooked fact is that his poor mother had 13 pregnancies, from which there are nine surviving children.

Malachi ‘Buck’ Mulligan (1, 10, 13) – plump, witty young medical student who has rented a Martello tower to live in and is letting Stephen rent a room. Mockingly dismissive of Stephen’s literary pretensions, he crops up again in the Scylla and Charybdis in the National Library taking the mickey out of Stephen’s Shakespeare theory. Stephen is repelled by his flashy cynicism. Hugh Kenner points out he is given no interior monologue i.e. he has no insides. Yet again he appears mid-way through an episode in the maternity hospital in Oxen of the Sun, yet again upstaging Stephen, before disappearing off to catch the last train out to the tower at Sandymount.

Haines (1) – Englishman temporarily staying at the Martello tower. Prone to nightmares which have kept Stephen up all night and put him in a grumpy mood. Well-meaning but imperceptive upper-class Englishman who typifies the colonial attitudes Stephen resents.

The old milk woman (1) – appears in ‘Telemachus’ when Haines tries to speak Irish to her which she can’t understand, asking if he’s speaking French: so, the comedy of a British Gaelic revivalist trying to use a half-dead language that the genuine locals don’t speak any more. For context, see:

2. Nestor: at Clifton Boys’ School, Dalkey

Cyril Sargent (2) – at Clifton Boys School, Stephen gives a history lesson then keeps this boy, Sargent, back after class to help him with sums, prompting the simple comment ‘Futility’. Stephen reflects that nonetheless his mother loves him, that a mother’s love is the one consistency in life, and then feels racked with guilt at hurting his dying mother.

Garrett Deasy (2) – pompous antisemitic Unionist headmaster of the (unnamed) school in Dalkey where Stephen is teaching in ‘Nestor’. As a ‘West Briton’ (remember, this was the insult levelled at Gabriel Conroy in ‘The Dead’) he represents unionist, Protestant and capitalist views, and so is a foil to Stephen’s nationalist, Catholic, artistic temperament. We see him a) paying Stephen his wages (£3 12s 0d) and b) finishing writing and then handing to Stephen a letter regarding foot-and-mouth disease which he wants him to take to the offices of the Evening Telegraph (and which we see Stephen deliver in chapter 7, Aeolus, and facetiously discussed by the drunken crew in chapter 14, Oxen of the Sun).

4. Calypso: at the home of Leopold and Molly Bloom, 7 Eccles Road

Leopold Bloom (4 and onwards) – aged 38. Used to work for Wisdom Hely’s, where he was a traveller for blottingpaper, now he is a freelancer canvasser for adverts i.e. advises clients about design and then tries to place them in newspapers. In Nosy Flynn’s view ‘He’s not too bad, Nosey Flynn said, snuffling it up. He’s been known to put his hand down too to help a fellow. Give the devil his due. O, Bloom has his good points.’

Crucial to understanding the entire book is that Bloom knows his wife, Molly, is going to have sex with her concert impresario Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boyle, who’s popping round to her house around 4pm. All day long Bloom is haunted by this knowledge and from time to time sees Boyle in the street (signalled in the text by Boyle’s trademark straw hat).

Bloom himself is fleetingly seen in passing by other characters as ‘A darkbacked figure’. According to Lenehan ‘He’s a cultured allroundman, Bloom is, he said seriously. He’s not one of your common or garden… you know… There’s a touch of the artist about old Bloom’. According to the narrator of Cyclops who sees him hesitate about taking a cigar, ‘he’s a prudent member and no mistake’ and, later, as he gets impatient with Bloom’s endless talk, describes him ‘with his dunducketymudcoloured mug on him and his old plumeyes rolling about’. He is similarly cautious in Oxen of the Sun where he accepts a drink from the other roisterers but then quietly pours it into his neighbour’s glass, thus proving the only respectful man among them.

As the book proceeds we come to realise Bloom is quite highly sexed and has numerous sexual fantasies. In the ‘Nausicaa’ chapter he apparently masturbates to the sight of a young childminder displaying her stockinged legs and knickers (although there is apparently scholarly debate about whether this actually happens or is just Bloom’s fantasy). And then in the extended ‘Circe’ chapter, among other transformations, Bloom is humiliated and turned into a woman for the sadistic pleasure of hallucinated prostitutes. This confirms the sense that he is actively conspiring in his own cuckolding (why doesn’t he confront Molly about it? turn up at the house at the appointed time, to prevent it?) because he gets a kick from sexual humiliation (see his correspondence with Martha, below).

Molly Bloom (4 and onwards) – née Marion Tweedy, daughter of Major Brian Tweedy and an unnamed mother from Gibraltar. She is a soprano singer, ‘Dublin’s prime favourite’ and going on a concert tour arranged by the producer Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan who has a date to come round her house that afternoon and have sex with her. Molly is plump. Leopold ‘looked calmly down on her bulk and between her large soft bubs, sloping within her nightdress like a shegoat’s udder’. John Henry Menton says ‘a good armful she was’. Lenehan describes sharing a taxi ride with her and says ‘She has a fine pair, God bless her.’ The lowlife narrator of chapter 12 calls her a ‘fat heap’. In the spoof Celtic Revival style she is described as ‘The chaste spouse of Leopold is she: Marion of the bountiful bosoms.’ Molly reads popular romances and Bloom spends some time at a second-hand stall looking for new ones to buy her. Her first appearance is lazing while Leopold beings her breakfast in bed. The novel famously ends with a long chapter devoted entirely to her freeflowing stream-of-consciousness thoughts as she falls asleep.

Milly Bloom (4) – Leopold and Molly’s 15-year-old daughter, recently left home to work as a photographer’s assistant in Mullingar, where she is seeing a young man named Alec Bannon. This Bannon turns up in Oxen of the Sun.

Rudy Bloom (4 and thereafter) – the infant son of Leopold and Molly Bloom who died at just 11 days old, about a decade before the events of Ulysses. As the couple’s only son, his death haunts Leopold, triggering recurring feelings of loss, guilt and regret at the lack of an heir.

Martha (4) – married woman who Bloom is having an ‘affair’ with via post, under the assumed name of Henry Flower. He’s never actually met her, he just enjoys exchanging risqué correspondence in which she calls him her naughty boy and threatens to spank him, more evidence of Bloom’s wish to be sexually humiliated.

Rudolph Virág (4) – Leopold’s father, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant who converted to Protestantism, which explains why despite being nominally Jewish Bloom has very few thoughts about Jewish history, theology, traditions or practices. What he does ruminate on is the fact that Rudolph committed suicide by taking poison. Rudolph appears as a hallucination in Circe to criticise his son.

Athos (4) – Rudolph’s dog, pined away and died after his owner killed himself.

Dlugacz (4) – Bloom’s local butcher (referred to as the ‘ferreteyed porkbutcher’). He is a Hungarian Jewish immigrant, similar to Bloom’s own background, yet he sells pork. He wraps Bloom’s kidney in a sheet of newspaper that advertises a Zionist land-settlement project named Agendath Netaim (Hebrew for ‘Union of Planters’) which Bloom reads and whose name recurs.

Sweny’s (4) – specifically, F.W. Sweny & Co. Ltd, the chemist’s shop where Bloom goes to order a lotion for his wife, Molly, and buys a bar of lemon-scented soap, promising to come back later and pay, which he doesn’t, despite nagging thoughts.

Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan (mentioned in 4, 10, 11) – flashy, popular concert promoter who’s arranging a concert tour for Bloom’s wife, Molly. In chapter 4, ‘Calypso’, Bloom picks up a letter from his doormat from him to Molly and hands it to her in bed. Somehow he knows that they’ve made a date for today, 4pm, when Boylan is going to come round and have sex with her, and is haunted by the knowledge all day and keeps catching glimpses of him in the street. Boylan is a ‘spruce figure’ wearing ‘a skyblue tie, a widebrimmed straw hat at a rakish angle and a suit of indigo serge’. In ‘Wandering Rocks’ we see him buying fruit as a present for Molly and, characteristically, flirting with the salesgirl. In ‘Sirens’ he flirts with the barmaids and buys drinks for himself and Lenehan.

5. Lotus Eaters: Bloom wanders round central Dublin, from Sir John Rogerson’s Quay through Lime Street toward Westland Row, Lincoln Place (near Sweny’s pharmacy) and ending near Merrion Square

Charlie M’Coy (5, 10, 15) – small-time local conman, swindler and acquaintance of Bloom’s; asks Bloom to add his name to the list of Dignam’s mourners, despite not attending the funeral. Crops up in ‘Wandering Rocks’ accompanying Lenehan.

Bantam Lyons (5, 8) – a shabby gambler. In ‘Lotus Eaters’ (5) while looking for racing tips, Lyons asks to borrow Bloom’s newspaper, Bloom tells him to keep it because he was ‘going to throw it away’ which Lyons interprets as ‘Throwaway’ being the name of a horse to bet on. When Lyons mentions this to others, Bloom acquires a spurious reputation for having ‘inside information’. The joke outcome of this little storyline is that the horse ‘Throwaway’ actually wins the race, much to the vexation of Lenehan and other characters.

6. Hades: Paddy Dignam’s funeral at Glasnevin Cemetery

Paddy Dignam (6) – dead, died a few days before the novel starts, dropped dead of ‘apoplexy’ probably meaning heart attack. We learn that Dignam had mortgaged his life insurance policy to pay off debts, leaving his wife and five orphans penniless. His funeral is a central event in the first half of the narrative, attended by Bloom, Simon Dedalus and others. ‘As decent a little man as ever wore a hat, Mr Dedalus said.’ His young son, Patsy, pops up briefly in Wandering Rocks. He may be an avatar of the Homeric figure of Elpenor in The Odyssey, who dies after he drunkenly falls overboard. After the funeral ‘Wandering Rocks’ shows Bloom visiting the Dignam home on Newbridge Avenue to offer assistance, but he also seems to visit her again. The reason Bloom looks into Barney Kiernan’s pub is he’s looking for Martin Cunningham to jointly pay her another visit; they are going to fiddle Paddy’s insurance policy to get her some of the money Paddy had mortgaged away.

Patrick Aloysius ‘Patsy’ Dignam (6, 10) – young son of Paddy Dignam, appears in ‘Hades’ and again in ‘Wandering rocks’. Represents the pitiful next generation, impoverished by this generation’s fecklessness.

Simon Dedalus (6, 7, 10, 11) – Stephen’s father. According to ‘Portrait’ was affluent enough in his early married years to send Stephen to a fee-paying school, but then went steadily downhill, unable to keep a steady job and continuing to impregnate his wife (who endures 13 pregnancies!). In ‘A Portrait’ Stephen gives a comic resumé of his father’s career:

Stephen began to enumerate glibly his father’s attributes. —A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody’s secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past.

Now he mostly makes money by pawning family possessions. He’s one of the three others with Leopold in the carriage to Paddy Dignam’s funeral. Bloom thinks: ‘Noisy selfwilled man. Full of his son’ but also: ‘Most amusing expressions that man finds’. Wears glasses. Pops up in the newspaper office in Aeolus, in the National Library in Scylla and Charybdis, briefly in Wandering Rocks, and at the Ormond Hotel in Sirens, eating, drinking and then singing along with other characters who play the piano and perform. He sings the aria ‘M’appari tutt’amor’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s opera Martha, a song about lost love that moves Bloom thinking about his own marital situation.

Martin Cunningham (6, 12) – one of the three others with Leopold in the funeral carriage, a kindly sympathetic friend to Leopold Bloom. He organises help for the Dignam family and defends Bloom against antisemitic slurs in ‘Hades’ and ‘Cyclops’. He has a beard and looks a bit like Shakespeare. He has to cope with an alcoholic wife.

Mr Power (6) – one of the three others with Leopold in the funeral carriage – a Dublin official associated with the Royal Irish Constabulary at Dublin Castle – good looking – keeps a mistress – commits a faux pas when (in the funeral carriage with Bloom and two others) he opines that suicide is ‘the greatest disgrace to have in the family’ unaware that Bloom’s father, Rudolph, committed suicide.

Corny Kelleher (6, 10, 15) – an undertaker’s assistant working for H.J. O’Neill’s funeral parlour, a shadowy figure connected to both death and the police, maybe an avatar of Charon the ferryman. He appears in ‘Hades’ (6) and ‘Wandering Rocks’ (10). In ‘Circe’ (15) he helps handle the police but doesn’t offer to take drunken Stephen home, that’s left to Bloom.

Ned Lambert (6, 7) – at the cemetery, a cheerful, well-connected Dubliner, a friend of Simon Dedalus. He is a seed and grain merchant who manages a grain store in St. Mary’s Abbey. He appears at Paddy Dignam’s funeral (6) then the Evening Telegraph offices (7) then showing the reverend Hugh Love around the Abbey in ‘Wandering Rocks’. Known for his wit and boasts about his influential relatives like his uncle, the Vice-Chancellor.

Father Coffey (6) – officiates at Paddy Dignam’s funeral, muscular, and ‘jowly’. Bloom thinks he ‘barks’ the funeral mass. Insofar as he mediates between the world of the living and the dead, maybe an avatar of Cerberus the dog at the entrance to Hades in Greek mythology.

John O’Connell (6) – real-life Superintendent of Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery, a respected local figure known for telling humorous stories e.g the one about the two drunks and Mulcahy’s statue. Insofar as he presides over the cemetery, an avatar of the Greek god of the underworld (Hades in Greek, Pluto in Latin).

Tom Kernan (6, 10) – tea salesman, agent for Pulbrook Robertson & Co. tea merchants. He was the central figure, the heavy drinking alcoholic who his friends set out to reform in the Dubliners short story ‘Grace’. Here we learn that Kernan is a Protestant, a detail that surfaces when he is part of the funeral party in ‘Hades’ and critically comments on the ‘rushed Catholic services’. In ‘Wandering Rocks’ he discusses a recent shipping disaster with Bloom and then in ‘Sirens’, encourages the baritone Ben Dollard to sing ‘The Croppy Boy’. His friends mock him for his use of pretentious phrases.

Joe Hynes (6, 7, 12) – unreliable, small-time reporter for the Freeman’s Journal who covers Paddy Dignam’s funeral; in his subsequent report he misspells Bloom as ‘Boom’, an error which rings through the rest of the story. Similarly, he asks for the name of a mystery man at the funeral and mishears the reply that he’s wearing a mackintosh for the man’s name, which he reports incorrectly as ‘M’intosh’, another joke error which recurs. Known for his financial unreliability, he borrows three shillings from Leopold and doesn’t repay it. Previously appeared in the Dubliners story ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’.

John Henry Menton (6, 15) – a petty, arrogant solicitor and commissioner of affidavits who we meet in the ‘Hades’ chapter. He holds a long-standing grudge against Bloom who beat him in a game of bowls and so coldly rebuffs Bloom’s attempt to fix his dented hat after the funeral. Insofar as he spurns the hero (Bloom/Ulysses) he is maybe an avatar of Ajax, a Greek hero spurned by Odysseus, who ignores him when Odysseus visits the underworld. He appears in the hallucinated jury of the ‘Circe’ chapter.

Reuben J. Dodd (6) – a real-life Dublin solicitor and moneylender, portrayed by other characters as an avaricious Jew. At the cemetery other characters discuss rumours of his son’s suicide attempt in the River Liffey.

7. Aeolus: in the newspaper offices of the Freeman’s Journal on Prince’s Street

Red Murray (7) – a minor character in ‘Aeolus’, an employee at the Freeman’s Journal office who helps Bloom arrange for a newspaper paragraph to appear about his client, Alexander Keyes.

Joseph Nannetti (7) – a real-life historical figure, a rising Dublin politician and printer who was working as the foreman at the Freeman’s Journal where Bloom encounters him. The real Nannetti went on to be Mayor of Dublin (1906 to 1908).

Professor McHugh (7) – brilliant but lazy, haphazard academic. Encountered hanging out in the Freeman’s Journal office bantering with other time wasters like Ned Lambert, Simon Dedalus and J.J. O’Molloy. ‘Professor MacHugh’s unshaven blackspectacled face’. His most significant moment is reciting a (real) speech by barrister John F. Taylor which compared the Irish language revival movement to Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land.

For an interesting article about all the characters found in the newspaper office, see:

J. J. O’Molloy (7, 10) – a once-promising but now struggling Dublin lawyer, portrayed as down on his luck and in debt, haunting newspaper offices like the Freeman’s Journal, for loans while maintaining a veneer of respectability and knowledge of oratory. Crops up in ‘Wandering Rocks’.

Myles Crawford (7) – pompous, alcoholic editor of the Evening Telegraph and Freeman’s Journal, dismisses Bloom’s polite approaches but fawns over Stephen when he later appears.

Matthew Lenehan (7) – a parasite, hanger-on, freelance journalist and horse-racing tipster. One of the two characters in the Dubliners story, ‘Two Gallants’ where he leaches on a fancy man who screws money out of his girlfriend. Desperate scrounger. He appears in ‘Aeolus’, ‘Wandering Rocks’, Sirens’ and among the medical students in ‘Oxen of the Sun’. He is obsessed with the Ascot Gold Cup, backs a horse called Sceptre and is infuriated when Bloom’s tip, Throwaway, wins instead.

Mr O’Madden Burke (7) – a smooth, sophisticated music critic and reviewer who we first meet in the Dubliners story ‘A Mother’ and who here appears in the newspaper office in ‘Aeolus’). He reappears in ‘Cyclops’, ‘Ithaca’ and is mentioned in ‘Penelope’. Pretentious and self-interested.

8. Lestrygonians

Bloom wanders central Dublin, walks past the Irish House of Parliament and Trinity College, moving from O’Connell Street toward Grafton Street and Kildare Street, deciding not to have lunch at Burton restaurant but grabbing a gorgonzola sandwich and glass of Burgundy at Davy Byrne’s pub on Duke Street, before walking on and ducking into the National Library to avoid Blazes Boylan.

Mrs Josie Breen (née Powell) (8) – former flame of Leopold Bloom and friend of Molly Bloom, long-suffering wife of the mentally unstable Denis Breen, ‘beauty and the beast’. When Bloom encounters her in ‘Lestrygonians’, he is sad that she looks shabby and haggard-looking.

Denis Breen (8) – Josie’s mentally ill husband – ‘Denis Breen in skimpy frockcoat and blue canvas shoes shuffled out of Harrison’s hugging two heavy tomes to his ribs. Blown in from the bay. Like old times. He suffered her to overtake him without surprise and thrust his dull grey beard towards her, his loose jaw wagging as he spoke earnestly.’ He has recently received an anonymous postcard with ‘U.P.: up’ on it which has made him panic. Scholars interpret it to mean ‘Your time is up’ or ‘You are all washed up’ and more broadly, in the context of the novel, to symbolise failure, paranoia, mockery and modern confusion – recurring themes in the novel.

Little Alf Bergan (8, 12, 15) – a Dublin character and assistant to sub-sheriff Long John Fanning. In ‘Lestrygonians’ he spots Denis Breen and explains the story about the ‘U.P.: up’ postcard. He plays a role in ‘Cyclops’ by bringing to Barney Kiernan’s pub a cache of applications for the job of state hangman which triggers a tipsy discussion about hangings. Crops up (like everyone else) in Circe.

Nosey Flynn (8) – a greasy, gossipy Dublin pub regular, often found at Davy Byrne’s, known for his intrusive questions and snuffling manner. First appeared in the Dubliners story ‘Counterparts’.

Davy Byrne (8) – owner of the eponymous bar where Bloom drops in for a ‘gorgonzola cheese sandwich with mustard and a glass of burgundy’. A careful, moral man who doesn’t gamble. The sandwich and wine give Bloom wind which he passes under cover of a passing tram at the end of ‘Sirens’.

Paddy Leonard (8, 15) – minor character seen around the pubs who crops up in ‘Lestrygonians’ and ‘Circe’.

Tom Rochford (8) – struggling inventor who in ‘Wandering Rocks’ shows off his device, designed for music halls to show which act is on stage, which he hopes to promote to Blazes Boylan.

Sir Frederick Falkiner (8) – a real Dublin magistrate (Recorder of Dublin) known for his antisemitic judgments, appears as a symbol of legal hypocrisy and judicial bias, particularly towards Jews like Bloom. Bloom encounters him in ‘Lestrygonians’ and later hallucinates him sentencing him to prison in ‘Circe’.

Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell (8, 10) – a real-life Dublin eccentric known as ‘Endymion’, appears in ‘Lestrygonians and ‘Wandering Rocks’, recognized by his long name, tight hat, and dangling stick-umbrella-dustcoat.

9. Scylla and Charybdis: in the director’s office of the Irish National Library on Kildare Street

The quaker librarian (9) – unnamed Head Librarian of the National Library, tiptoeing in and out of Stephen’s lecture about Shakespeare in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’.

John Eglinton (9) – fictional name for real-life essayist William Kirkpatrick Magee, a literary figure and librarian, who listens sympathetically to Stephen’s Shakespeare lecture.

Mr Best (9) – another of the auditors of Stephen’s Shakespeare lecture, based on the real-life Irish Celtic scholar and librarian Richard Irvine Best, he is depicted as a refined but shallow young man, signalled by his frequent use of the phrase ‘don’t you know’.

A.E. (9) – pseudonym of the real-life Irish poet, writer and mystic George Russell, who used the pseudonym Æ, a central figure in literary circles and a spiritual advisor. He is the main audience for Stephen’s Shakespeare lecture where he represents the old, spiritual, platonic view of art and so is unsympathetic to Stephen’s aggressively realist and autobiographical reading of Shakespeare.

10. Wandering Rocks: 19 vignettes depicting numerous Dubliners, many of them real-life figures

John Conmee S.J. (10) – ‘The superior, the very reverend John Conmee S. J.’ first figure we meeting in ‘Wandering Rocks’ having a series of encounters with passersby in which he is blandly polite. Real-life figure, rector at Clongowes Wood College who was kind to a young James Joyce and instrumental in securing scholarships for Joyce and his brothers to Belvedere College.

Master Brunny Lynam (10) – boy who Father Conmee gets to post a letter for him at a postbox across the road.

Mr Denis J. Maginni (10) – a real-life Dublin dancing professor – ‘professor of dancing &c, in a silk hat, slate frockcoat with silk facings, white kerchief tie, tight lavender trousers, canary gloves and pointed patent boots’. In ‘Circe’ when Stephen dances with prostitutes in Bella Cohen’s brothel, he imagines Maginni is there coaching him.

Mrs M’Guinness (10) real-life figure who owned a pawn shop, M’Guinness’s, where Stephen’s sisters (Katey and Boody) attempt to pawn some of Stephen’s books to buy food. Mrs M, ‘stately, silverhaired’, is greeted and bows to nice Father Conmee.

Katey, Boody and Maggy Dedalus (10) – boiling clothes, making yellow peasoup, living in poverty, shaming clever Stephen who had all the advantages in life.

Almidano Artifoni (10) – a music teacher and singer who appears briefly in ‘Wandering Rocks’, bumping into Stephen and suggesting he pursue a lucrative professional singing career, which Stephen rejects.

Miss Dunne (10) – typist, secretary to Blazes Boylan, sits in her office daydreaming or reading a romance novel. Types the date ’16 June 1904′, the only confirmation of the date on which Ulysses takes place (Bloomsday). She speaks with Blazes Boylan via telephone, relaying that Lenehan will be at the Ormond Hotel at four o’clock.

The reverend Hugh C. Love (10) – amateur historian being shown round St Mary’s Abbey by Ned Lambert, who’s in charge of the grain store in the abbey’s cellar.

Dilly Dedalus (10) – one of Stephen’s impoverished siblings. He bumps into her in ‘Wandering Rocks’, where she asks if he’s seen their father, then shows him a tatty French primer she’s bought at a second-hand stall, prompting Stephen’s feelings of pity and guilt.

Ben Dollard (10, 11) – large, good-natured and formerly successful Dublin bass singer with a big beard, often called ‘Big Ben’. Friend of Simon Dedalus, appears in ‘Wandering Rocks’, plays the piano and sings the sentimental ballad ‘The Croppy Boy’ in ‘Sirens’.

John Wyse Nolan (10, 12) – a minor nationalist character in ‘Cyclops’ who shares anti-British nationalistic views with the but is more moderate and briefly sympathetic to Bloom.

Long John Fanning (10) – fictional subsheriff of Dublin, first referenced in the Dubliners story ‘Grace’, appears here being discussed in ‘Aeolus’, appears briefly in ‘Wandering Rocks’ then appears in his role as sub-sheriff in Bloom’s masochistic court fantasy in ‘Circe’.

John Howard Parnell (10) – real-life figure, the brother of the superfamous Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell who, at the peak of his power, was ruined by being cited as the co-respondent in a divorce case and died soon after, in disgrace, in 1891. John was a city marshal in Dublin and the registrar of pawnbrokers but his role in the novel is to be a ghostly figure symbolising the haunting memory of Irish political failure. He is spotted by Bloom in ‘Lestrygonians’. In ‘Wandering Rocks’ he is seen in a bar playing chess against himself.  Inward-turning, failed, paralysis, all Joyce’s themes. In the phantasmagoria of ‘Circe’ Bloom imagines him offering a blessing, linking the ordinary, fading John Howard with the immense, mythic status of his dead brother.

11. Sirens: the bar and dining room of the Ormond Hotel on Ormond Quay on the north bank of the River Liffey

Richie Goulding (11) – Stephen’s uncle, brother of Stephen’s dead mother, May, married to Sara hence Aunt Sara. A struggling solicitor’s clerk, depicted as a slightly pathetic figure, with a bad back, often weighed down by a legal bag but enthusiastic about music. In ‘Sirens’ Bloom has dinner with him at the Ormond Hotel.

Miss Mina Kennedy (11) – one of the two barmaids in the Ormond Hotel in the Sirens episode who align with the sirens of the Odyssey. Golden-haired in contrast to Lydia Douce, who is bronze-haired. The pair are like ‘malicious mermaids’ coolly observing the (useless) men in the bar. She is more reserved than the flirtatious Miss Douce.

Miss Lydia Douce (11) – the other of the two barmaids in the Ormond Hotel in the Sirens episode who align with the sirens of the Odyssey. Bronze-haired barmaid in contrast to golden-haired Mina Kennedy. She is the more outgoing, flirtatious of the two: acting in a suggestive behaviour such as reaching up to emphasise her bosom, snapping her garter for Lenehan, suggestively stroking the phallic-shaped beer pull, and flirting with Blazes Boylan who pops in for a drink and who she has a crush on.

Pat (11) – waiter at the Ormond, old, bald and hard of hearing, moving between the dining room (where Bloom has dinner) and the bar. ‘Pat is a waiter who waits while you wait.’

The piano tuner (11) – young, unnamed character known as the ‘blind stripling’. Kindly helped across the road by Bloom in ‘Lestrygonians’; rudely bumped into by Cashel ‘lamppost’ Farrell in ‘Wandering Rocks’; arrives at the Ormond Hotel to retrieve the tuning fork he’d left behind, and where he plays the piano, among others.

George Lidwell (11) – real-life Dublin solicitor and acquaintance of Joyce’s father. Offices nearby on Upper Ormond Quay, Lidwell is a ‘suave solicitor’ flirts with the barmaids. (Joyce consulted Lidwell in 1912 regarding legal issues with the publisher of ‘Dubliners’.)

12. Cyclops: Barney Kiernan’s pub

Narrator (12) – drops into Barney Kiernan’s pub to see the Citizen.

Geraghty (12) – doesn’t appear but is described as a ‘foxy’ (red-haired) plumber and a debtor who has stolen goods from a merchant named Moses Herzog.

The Citizen (12) – dominant figure in chapter 12, Cyclops. Supposedly based on Michael Cusack, the real-life founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association though scholars argue he’s more of a composite of radical nationalists of the era. The Homeric parallel is with the Cyclops Polyphemus because, like the one-eyed giant, the Citizen is depicted as narrow-minded, aggressive and blinded by his own prejudices.

Garryowen (12) – the Citizen’s mangy dog whose constant rumbling and occasional barking put everyone on edge. At the end of the chapter the Citizen sets him on Bloom who only just manages to jump onto a cab and make his escape. Comedically, Garryowen is mentioned by Gerty MacDowell in the ‘Nausicaa’ chapter (13) as actually belonging to her grandpapa Giltrap, and she calls him ‘a lovely dog’, really bringing out her rose-tinted view of everything.

Bob Doran (12) – first appeared a respectable, anxious employee in a wine-merchant’s office in the Dubliners short story ‘The Boarding House’. Since then he’s gone downhill and is now encountered as a drunk, weeping, rambling figure in Barney Kiernan’s pub, getting maudlin about the death of Paddy Dignam, adding to the general atmosphere of degraded chaos.

Terry O’Ryan (12) – bartender in Barney Kiernan’s pub – ‘Same again, Terry’.

Pisser Burke (12) – nickname of Andrew Burke, minor character and associate of the Cyclops narrator, known for spreading gossip around Dublin, tells stories from when he knew the Blooms when they lived at the City Arms Hotel.

13. Nausicaa: Sandymount Strand

Cissy Caffrey (13) – one of the three young women on the beach, looking after her young twin brothers, Jacky and Tommy. A non-nonsense straight-talking contrast with Gerty (see below) for example the way she goes straight over to loitering Bloom to ask him the time. In ‘Circe’ she returns in degraded form, apparently working as a prostitute while interacting with British soldiers.

Edy Boardman (13) – one of the three young women on the beach, the only mother so pushing a pram, she represents reality and maturity in contrast with Gerty’s self-deceiving romanticism. Makes cutting remarks which irritate Gerty. She and Cissy equate to the retinue of fine ladies who accompanied Princess Nausicaa in Homer’s Odyssey.

Tommy and Jacky Caffrey (13) – boisterous twin brothers looked after by their much older sister, Cissy.

Gerty MacDowell (13) – the young woman on the beach who Bloom watches from a distance, provocatively posing for him as he masturbates and while her head overflows with romantic, reality-denying fantasies.

14. Oxen of the Sun: National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street

Dr Horne (14) – a real-life figure, Sir Andrew J. Horne, a prominent Dublin obstetrician and the Joint Master of the National Maternity Hospital.

Nurse Quigley (14) – continually telling the drunken gang off for keeping the pregnant women in the ward above awake with their racket, inn the Homeric parallel, for disrespecting the sacredness of fertility – ‘an ancient and a sad matron of a sedate look and christian walking, in habit dun beseeming her megrims and wrinkled visage’.

Dr Dixon (14) – junior doctor at the hospital. Recognises Bloom and invites him to join the party in the common room. Later goes to attend Mrs Purefoy who’s finally had her baby.

Crotthers (14) – ‘the Scotch student, a little fume of a fellow, blond as tow’ – ‘Crotthers was there at the foot of the table in his striking Highland garb, his face glowing from the briny airs of the Mull of Galloway’.

Madden (14) – ‘the squat form of Madden’ – another drunk medical student.

Frank ‘Punch’ Costello (14) – medical student, the drunkest member of the party, frequently interrupting the quiet of the hospital with ribald drinking songs. Nicknamed ‘Punch’ from his habit of ‘dinging’ any table he’s sitting at with his fist.

Alec Bannon (14) – brought along by Mulligan to the hospital. Boyfriend of Bloom’s 15-year-old daughter, Milly.

Nurse Callan (14) – nurse working at the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street, half-way through the chapter announces the birth of a son to Mina Purefoy.

Bridie Kelly (14, 15, 16) – young working-class woman Bloom lost his virginity to and reminisces about in ‘Oxen of the Sun’ (she also appears in ‘Circe’ and ‘Eumaeus’). One of the chapter’s Gothic paragraphs describes her as ‘the bride of darkness, a daughter of night’.

15. Circe

Too many to be listed. See my standalone review of Circe.

16. Eumaeus

Gumley (16) – nightwatchmen asleep in his ‘sentrybox’ by the docks.

Corley (16) – unemployed, scrounging son of a Dublin police inspector who asks Stephen for money – first appeared in the Dubliners story ‘Two Gallants’, extracting money from a naive girlfriend – nicknamed Lord John Corley because his mother was a servant in the house of an aristocrat

D.B. Murphy (16) – a sailor, teller of tale tales, possessor of impressive tattoos.

Skin-the-Goat (Fitzharris) (16) – owner of the shelter.

Streetwalker (16) – ‘glazed and haggard under a black straw hat’, briefly looks through the door of the shelter and makes Bloom duck behind the newspaper in embarrassment so is she Bridie Kelly who he tells us he lost his virginity to.

17. Ithaca

Stephen and Bloom.

18. Penelope

They don’t actually physically appear, but present in Molly’s thoughts are quite a few final characters:

Mrs Riordan (18) – who we met as Dante, nanny to young Stephen Dedalus in ‘Portrait’.

Mary Driscoll (18) – the Blooms’ scullerymaid.

Bartell DArcy (18) – tenor singer who kissed her in church.

Mrs Hester Stanhope (18) – adult friend when Molly was a girl.

Lieutenant Mulvey (18) – ‘beau’ of the 15-year-old Marion, they kissed.

Mrs Rubio (18) – elderly Spanish housekeeper of the Tweedy family in Gibraltar, Mrs Rubio.

Lunita Laredo (18) – Molly’s mother, a Gibraltarian of Spanish/Jewish descent.

Mrs Fleming (18) – useless cleaner they had, sneezing and farting everywhere and you had to follow her round fixing her work.

Dr Collins (18) – Molly’s gynaecologist, impressed her with his long learnèd words.

Credit

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

Related links

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Posted by Simon on February 25, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/02/25/ulysses-james-joyce-cast-list/

Metamorphoses by Ovid – 1

My design leads me to speak of forms changed into new bodies.
Ye Gods (for you it was who changed them) favour my attempts,
And bring my narrative from the very beginning of the world, even to my own times.
(Opening lines of the Metamorphoses in 1851 translation)

My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of a different kind. You heavenly powers, since you are responsible for those changes, as for all else, look favourably on my attempts, and spin an unbroken thread of verse, from the earliest beginnings of the world, down to my own times.
(First sentence, in Mary M. Inne’s 1955 prose translation)

I want to speak about bodies changed into new forms. You, gods, since you are the ones who alter these, and all other things, inspire my attempt, and spin out a continuous thread of words, from the world’s first origins to my own time.
(A.S. Kline’s 2000 translation)

(This is the first of two summaries and reviews of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.)

Ovid’s other books are good but the Metamorphoses stands head and shoulders above them. It is the length of an epic poem but instead of telling one story is a vast compendium of Greek myths and legends, starting at the creation of the universe and continuing all the way through to the deification of Julius Caesar, and all the stories in between are linked by one underlying theme – the physical change and transformation of their protagonists. It brings together myths and legends which describe the transformation of human beings into all kinds of other forms including animals, trees, rocks, birds, constellations, flowers, springs and so on.

To take a classic example, in book 1 the mischievous god of love, Cupid, shoots Apollo with a golden dart to inflame him with uncontrollable love for the maiden Daphne, who Cupid shoots with one of his arrows tipped with lead, which have the opposite effect, making the victim shun and flee love. Thus Apollo chases Daphne who does everything to evade him and finally, in pity of her distress, the father of the gods Jupiter transforms her into a laurel tree. In a very moving line, Apollo places his hand on the new bark of the tree and feels her human heart still beating through it.

The Metamorphoses consists of 15 books and retells over 250 myths. At 11,995 lines it is significantly longer than the 9,896 lines and twelve books of Virgil’s Aeneid, though not nearly matching the 24 books and 15,693 lines of the Iliad. It is composed in dactylic hexameter, the heroic meter of both the ancient Iliad and Odyssey, and the more contemporary Roman epic, the Aeneid.

The Metamorphoses are important because, as other sources of information were lost in the Dark Ages, it preserved detailed versions of classic myths in one handy repository. It acted as a sort of handbook of myths and was a huge influence on Western culture as a whole, inspiring writers such as Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer and Shakespeare (the story of Venus and Adonis becoming the subject of one of his two long narrative poems, the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe burlesqued in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and thousands of references to other stories littering the plays). Numerous episodes from the poem have been depicted in countless works of sculpture, painting, and music.

The poem itself metamorphoses

The text is not only about gods tormented by love and humans changing into animals or objects, the text itself works by changes and transformations. What I mean is the text isn’t as clear and logical as you might expect but one tale leads on to another in a semi-random way, some tales are suspended while others are completed, many take the shape of tales within tales i.e. one story is part-way through being told when a character embarks on telling a completely different story and you have to wait for this second one to finish before you go back to hearing the end of the first one (for example, the story within a story about the Muses’ competition in book 5).

Although it’s as long as an epic poem, the Metamorphoses not only has no unity of narrative – hopping all over the place from story to story – it also is very uneven in genre and tone. It handles a range of themes which you might expect to find in numerous ancient genres of literature, from descriptions of fighting you would expect in epic to passages of deep lament such as you’d find in elegy; from scenes of profound and searing tragedy to plenty of scenes which start out as idyllic pastoral. Very frequently some character or other gives a lengthy speech, which in its rhetorical argumentation, wouldn’t have been out of place in a Roman court of law.

As if reflecting the ever-changing, transforming narrative, which describes endless transformations, the tone and genre of the poem are themselves continually changing as they move among these different genres and ranges.

Three types of metamorphosis

I’d suggest three types of transformation in what follows, using the two vectors of mortal/immortal and temporary/permanent:

1. A god disguises themself

A god temporarily disguises themselves as someone or something else, remaining essentially the same beneath, male gods generally for the purposes of seduction, female goddesses generally for the purpose of revenge (the story of Philemon and Baucis in book 8 is a rare instance of benevolent, charitable disguising) – it is a temporary change.

2. A god transforms themself

A god transforms themselves into something else completely: Jupiter transforming himself into a bull to abduct Europa or a shower of gold to inseminate Danae, and so on – it is a temporary change. Some lower divinities can also transform themselves, for example Proteus or the river Acheloüs (book 9).

3. A god transforms a mortal

By far the most numerous category, where a god or the fates or some higher power transforms a mortal (or a lower divinity like a nymph or dryad) permanently, unalterably, often tragically.

Contents

Book 1

The Creation of the universe by the orderly transformation of chaotic elements into the world we see around us. The evolution of human society through the four Ages of Mankind, Gold, Silver, Bronze, Iron.

The great flood exterminates most of mankind. Animated beings are produced by heat and moisture out of the resulting mud. Among them is the serpent Python. Phoebus kills the Python and institutes the Pythian games as a memorial.

Survivors of the flood, Deucalion and Pyrrha, throw stones behind them which, to their amazement, turn into humans to repopulate the earth.

Cupid punishes Apollo for mocking him, by making him fall madly in love with Daphne and pursuing her through the woods till Daphne is turned into a laurel tree. Henceforward, laurels are Apollo’s symbol.

Jupiter seduces Io then hides her from his jealous wife, Juno, by changing her into a cow. Juno admires the white heifer so Jupiter finds himself giving her as a present to Juno. Juno entrusts the cow to the care of Argus, who has a hundred eyes and never sleeps. Io wanders pastures as a cow, miserably unhappy, till she is reunited with her father Peneus who laments her fate, till Argus arrives and drives her on. Jupiter takes pity and has Mercury rescue her. First Mercury tells Argus the story about the transformation of the nymph Syrinx into reeds to lull him to sleep; then chops his head off and rescues Io. Juno takes Argus’s eyes and embeds them in the tail feather of her favourite bird, the peacock. Enraged, Juno sends a Fury to torment Io, who adopts the shape of a gadfly, driving her madly through Europe and into Egypt. Here Jupiter begs Juno to forgive her rival, the latter relents, and Io is finally reverted back to a woman.

A long account of how Phaëton, son of Phoebus god of the sun, persuades his father to let him drive the great chariot of the sun, which he proves unable to control, veering the sun all over the sky and causing catastrophic damage on earth.

Book 2

The story of Phaëton continued, ending with him being zapped with a thunderbolt by Jupiter. His four sisters – Phaethusa, Lampetie plus two unnamed ones – mourn him and are turned into trees. Cygnus, a relative of Phaëton’s, mourns him and is turned into a swan.

Jupiter repairs the walls of heaven, spots Callisto, woos her and when she resists, rapes her. Callisto’s ‘shame’ is revealed when she bathes with Diana and her nymphs. She gives birth to a son, Arcas. Juno tracks her down and attacks her but she turns into a bear. Fifteen years later Arcas has grown into a lusty lad who loves hunting and one day encounters his own mother as a bear and is about to kill her when Jupiter stays his hand. Jupiter whirls both son and mother into the sky and makes them constellations.

How the crow was made, namely she was a beautiful maiden, the god of the sea fell in love and pursued her, she threw up her hands in entreaty to heaven and was turned into crow.

The maid Nyctimene is raped by her father, Epopeus, a king of Lesbos. She flees into the woods in shame, refusing to let herself be seen. The goddess of wisdom, Minerva, takes pity on her and turns her into an owl, the bird which famously only comes out at night and becomes Minerva’s companion and symbol.

The raven had been a sleek, silvery bird but when Phoebus fell in love with the maid Coronis of Larissa, the raven spied her being unfaithful to the god with a young Thessalian mortal. In a moment of fury Phoebus shot Coronis dead with an arrow, then immediately repented his folly as she died in his arms: a) he took revenge on the snitching crow by turning it black b) he took their unborn child, Aesculapius, from Coronis’s womb and entrusted him to the care of Chiron the centaur.

Chiron has a daughter named Ocyrhoe. She starts to prophesy Chiron’s terrible death to him but the fates forestall her and turn her into a mare.

Mercury steals the cattle of Apollo but their location is noticed by the cowherd Battus. Mercury makes Battus swear not to reveal their location but then returns in disguise and offers him a reward for the secret and Battus promptly reveals their location, breaking his promise, and so Mercury turns his heart to hard flint, the kind called ‘touchstone’.

Aglauros had crossed the goddess Minerva by revealing secrets about her. Minerva visits the wretched hovel of the slimy goddess Envy and tells her to poison Aglauros’s heart, which she does, making her tormented with envy that her sister, Herse, has caught the heart of Mercury. When Mercury comes to the sister’s house to visit Herse, Aglauros refuses to budge out the doorway so Mercury turns her into a statue.

Jupiter transforms himself into a bull in order to mingle with the herd of cattle which regularly browse near Sidon. He orders Mercury to gently drive the cattle down to the shore where the beautiful maiden, Europa, daughter of king Agenor, daily plays with her attendants. The maidens play with this new bull (i.e. Jupiter in disguise), garland his horns, he lies down, tempts Europa to climb on his back, and then makes off into the sea, carrying her, terrified, away from the shore and her friends and over the sea to Crete.

Book 3

King Agenor commands his son Cadmus to seek his lost sister Europa. In Boeotia Cadmus slays a dragon (‘the serpent of Mars’) and is told to plant its teeth in the soil which he is then astonished to see sprout and grow into warriors. These tooth warriors then fight each other to the death, leaving just five who become Cadmus’s companions in founding the new city of Thebes.

The young mortal, Actaeon, stumbles across the goddess Diana bathing naked with her nymphs and she punishes him by transforming him into a stag which is then torn to shreds by his own hounds.

Juno discovers Jupiter is sleeping with Semele. She disguises herself as Semele’s old nurse, pops down to see her and they get chatting. Juno plants a seed of doubt in the girl’s mind by saying many a man claims to be a god to bed a girl; she (Semele) should insist to Jupiter, the next time she sees him, that he reveal himself in all his glory. So next time Jupiter calls, Semele makes him promise to give her anything she wants and, when he agrees, says she wants to see his true nature. Jupiter is now constrained to keep his word and so sorrowfully gathers his entire might together and, revealing himself to Semele in his blistering glory, incinerates her to ashes. Sad Jupiter takes the child in her womb and sows it in his own calf for 9 months and, when it is born, hands it over to nymphs for safekeeping. This will be Bacchus who is known as ‘the twice-born’.

Jupiter and Juno argue over who enjoys sex most, men or women. They agree to the arbitration of Tiresias who was born a man but lived 7 years as a woman before being restored to maleness i.e. has experienced sex as a man and a woman. Tiresias confirms that women get more pleasure from sex. Juno is so furious at losing the argument that she strikes him blind. Jupiter gives him the gift of prophecy as compensation.

Narcissus and Echo. The river-god Cephisus ‘ravishes’ Liriope, the Naiad, taking her by force under his waves and impregnating her. She gives birth to a beautiful boy, Narcissus. By age 16 he is a beautiful youth but cares nothing for suitors, male or female. One day the nymph Echo saw him, driving frightened deer into his nets. Juno had already punished Echo: for on many occasions when Jupiter was having sex with this or that nymph, Echo kept Juno chatting interminably to cover for him. When Juno realised this she struck her with two afflictions ) reducing her speech to the minimum b) giving her no power over it but making her merely ‘echo’ what others said to her.

So when Echo sees the beautiful Narcissus she is struck with love and adoration and follows him round everywhere, but can never initiate a conversation, having to wait for him to say something and then feebly echoing the last phrases. When she comes forward to face him she can only echo his words of astonishment and then of repulsion, for Narcissus loves no-one and runs off, abandoning her. Since then Echo haunts caves and dells and lonely places and slowly her body wasted away till she became an invisible voice, wanly repeating what anyone who wanders into places like that happen to say.

Meanwhile Narcissus continues to scorn all lovers, male or female and one of them lifts their hands to the gods, asking for him to suffer the same unrequited passion he causes in others. The goddess Nemesis hears and makes it so. Narcissus comes to a pool and rests and looks into it and falls in love with his own reflection. He is struck by fierce unrequitable love and beats his own chest drawing blood, laments, droops and is turned into a flower, the narcissus, with white petals (his ivory skin) surrounding a yellow heart (his blonde hair) with flecks of red (the blood he drew when he struck his own chest in the agony of love).

Pentheus mocks Bacchus and is torn to pieces by the god’s devotees including his own mother.

Book 4

While the festival of Bacchus goes on outside, the daughters of Minyas high-mindedly refuse to join in but sit inside spinning and telling stories. The story of Pyramus and Thisbe whose parents forbade their love so they made a midnight rendezvous at an old tomb but Thisbe, arriving first, saw a lioness fresh from a kill coming to the pool to drink. She safely hid but the lioness found her veil and tore it to shreds before leaving. Pyramus arriving a little later found the blood-stained veil, concluded his beloved had been killed and dragged away and so stabbed himself with his sword. At which point Thisbe came out of hiding to discover her beloved dying and, in turn, fell on his sword. The gods took pity and turned the berries of the mulberry tree under which the lovers took their lives, the colours of their blood.

Venus is unfaithful to her husband, Vulcan, with Mars. Helios the sun god sees this and tells Vulcan. Vulcan makes a new of metal and catches Venus and Mars in the act, then invites all the gods to come and see them, caught in this humiliating position.

As revenge, Venus makes Helios fall in love with Leucothoe and ignore another young woman, Clyties, who is desperately in love with him. Helios disguises himself as Leucothoe’s mother, Eurynome, to gain entrance to her chambers and reveals himself to Leucothoe, seduces and has sex with her.

But Clytie, consumed with jealousy, reports Leucothoe’s affair to her father Orchamus, who punishes his daughter by burying her alive. Helios sees this and comes to her rescue but Leucothoe is dead before he can save her. Helios sprinkles her body with fragrant nectar and turns her into a frankincense tree.

Clytie meanwhile, scorned by Helios for her involvement in Leucothoe’s death, sat pining away, constantly turning her face to the sun until she turns into the heliotrope, whose flowers follow the sun.

Salmacis falls in love with Hermaphroditus and their bodies are combined.

All these stories have been told by the daughters of Minyas as night fell and they worked their looms, ignoring the festival of Bacchus outside. Now Bacchus takes magic revenge, turns their looms into trees and the three daughters are transformed into gibbering bats.

Juno drives Athamas and Ino mad. Athamas dashes out the brains of his son, Ino jumps into the sea clutching her baby daughter, but they are transformed into gods out of pity. Ino’s attendants on the clifftop hold out their hands in lamentation, but are themselves turned to stone.

Cadmus and his wife flee the city where their children have come to such bad ends, and he is transformed into a snake and she entwines with him. Bacchus triumphs everywhere and is worshiped as a god in India

Cut to the adventures of Perseus. Alongside Cadmus and Bellerophon, Perseus was the greatest Greek hero and slayer of monsters before the days of Heracles. He was the son of Jupiter and the mortal woman Danaë who Jupiter came to as a shower of gold (she had been locked up in a tower by her parents).

The Gorgon was a snake-headed monster and anything that looked at her directly was turned into stone. Perseus kills the Gorgon by fighting the reflection of it he sees in his shield. Then he flies back to Europe. As he passes over Libya, drops of blood fall on the desert and change into snakes, which is why Libya is notoriously infested with snakes.

He encounters Atlas, who holds the whole sky on his shoulders, and asks if he can rest for a bit in his gardens. But Atlas is paranoid about his golden tree with golden leaves and golden fruit so he refuses Perseus rest. They get into an argument, then a fight, which Perseus is starting to lose so he pulls out the Gorgon’s head and Atlas is transformed into the huge Atlas mountain.

Perseus rescues Andromeda who has been chained to a rock by the coast, from a sea monster. Before he fights, Perseus places the Gorgon’s head on a bed of leaves and the head’s stone-making influence spreads into the sea where it creates coral.

Book 5

Perseus is attacked by Andromeda’s fiance and his followers, which turns into an epic fight described in the manner of Homer or Virgil. Perseus turns most of the attackers into stone.

The nine daughters of Pierus challenge the Muses to a singing competition. For their impiety they are turned into chattering magpies, ‘the scandalmongers of the woods’. There follows a story within a story within a story; for (level 1) Ovid tells us that (level 2) one of the Muses relates to Ceres how they engaged in a singing competition with the daughters of Pierus, and (level 3) chose Calliope to sing for them: so what follows are the stories which Calliope sang in that competition:

“In Sicily, the abduction of Proserpina by Pluto, who takes her to his kingdom in the Underworld and makes her his queen. (Her mother, Ceres, searches the earth for her; when a boy taunts her, she changes him into a ladybird.) Ceres goes up to heaven to plead with Jupiter (who is both her father, and had sex with her – incest – to sire Proserpina). Jupiter says Proserpina can return to earth so long as she hasn’t eaten anything. Alas she had eaten seven seeds from a pomegranate, an act witnessed by Ascalaphus who tells Pluto, thus sealing Proserpina’s fate. For this treachery Ceres transforms him into a screech owl.

“The daughters of Achelous, Proserpina’s companions, wanted to search the earth for her, so the gods turn them into birds, but with human faces so they can continue singing sweetly.

“Arethusa was in the retinue of Diana, goddess of the hunt. She stripped off to bathe in a poo, and was promptly assaulted by the river god Alpheus who pursues her over hill and dale till she is changed into a spring which plunges into the earth to resurface on Orygia.

(I wonder if someone somewhere has created a map of where all the incidents in the Metamorphoses took place, all around the Mediterranean and North Africa.)

“Ceres hands her chariot and seeds to Triptolemus, telling him to fly across the land and sow them. He seeks accommodation with king Lyncus of Scythia, who treacherously attacks him in the night but is turned into a lynx.”

Only at this point does the narrative of the Muse to Ceres end.

Book 6

Arachne unwisely takes on Minerva in a weaving competition. The idea of tapestries gives Ovid yet another opportunity to show off his inventiveness and showcase the many different ways he can frame a narrative; in that each of the tapestries the two women weaves themselves display classical stories. Minerva’s tapestry shows permanent transformations of mortals:

  • Haemon and Rhodope transformed into snowy mountains
  • the queen of the Pygmies transformed into a crane
  • Antigone changes into a shining white stork
  • Cinyras’s daughter turned into a temple

For a summary of the incidents depicted on Arachne’s tapestry, see the section on ‘Rape culture’, below.

Furious, Minerva tears Arachne’s tapestry to shreds, the miserable woman tries to hang herself, at which pint Minerva condemns her to permanently dangling and changes her into a spider.

Niobe boasts to everyone in her city how blessed and happy she is, perfect husband, huge palace, 14 perfect children and calls on her people to worship her and not these ‘gods’ who nobody’s ever seen, specifically to drop the foolish worship of the god they all call Leto. She says the most foolish thing anyone can say in the ancient world: ‘ I am beyond the reach of Fortune’s blows’. Leto complains to her twin children, Phoebus Apollo and Diana, and Apollo promptly kills all seven of the sons by bow and arrow. Niobe still boats she has more children than Leto, so Apollo proceeds to kill all seven of her daughters. Niobe’s husband hangs himself form grief and she is turned to stone but which still weeps ceaselessly.

Then the people of Thebes tell among themselves other stories of similar transformations. For example, the peasants of Lycia who refused a drink from their lake for Leto when she was wandering thirsty carrying Phoebus and Diana as suckling babes. As punishment for refusing her water, Leto turned them into bickering, croaking animals condemned to live in their wretched lake i.e. frogs.

A very truncated version of the story of Marsyas who challenged Apollo to a competition playing the reed pipes. For his presumption, Apollo flays the poor man, stripping him of his skin but leaving him alive.

The harrowing story of Tereus king of Thrace, who marries fair Procne and takes her back to his kingdom. After a few years she asks if she can see her sister, Philomela, so Tereus sails back to her kingdom, greets her father, and makes the case for Philomela coming with him to visit Procne. Unfortunately Philomela is stunningly beautiful and the second Tereus sees her, he begins to lust after her. He makes pious promises to her father, Pandion, that he’ll look after the girl and Pandion waves her farewell at the harbour amid many tears. Once the ship docks back in Thrace, Tereus abducts a horrified Philomela and locks her up in a remote keep. Here he rapes her. When she reproaches him, he ties her up and cuts out her tongue. He then goes home and tells Procris her sister died on the trip back and pretends grief. Procris erects an empty tomb to her sister.

Tereus frequently returns to rape Philomela over a one-year period. Finally Philomela makes a tapestry depicting the events, folds it and gets a servant to deliver it to Procris. Reading it Procris is consumed with rage. The festival of Bacchus comes and Procris uses it as a pretext to find out the keep where Philomela is hidden, break into it along with a drunken mob, disguise her sister in reveller’s costume and bring her safe back to the castle.

When she sees her sister’s state and that her tongue has been cut out her rage knows no limits and she and Philomela murder her little son, Itys, cook him and serve him to Tereus at a grand feast. At the climax, after he’s eaten his fill of his own son, Procris tells Tereus what they’ve done and brings in mute Philomela holding Itys’s head. Tereus pushes the table away and goes to attack the women but all three are magically transformed into birds, Tereus became a hoopoe, Procne became the swallow who sings a mourning song for her child and Philomela became the nightingale.

The story of Boreas, the cold north wind, carrying off Orithyia against her will, to become his wife.

Book 7

A tenuous link carries us into the heart of the Jason and the Argonauts story, specifically when they arrive at the court of King Aeëtes of Colchis, and the king’s daughter, Medea, falls passionately in love with Jason. There follows a two-page soliloquy in which Medea argues with herself whether she should betray her father and homeland in order to aid Jason. Does love justify filial betrayal? This is very reminiscent of the closely-argued reasoning which fills Ovid’s early work, the verse letters from legendary figures, known as the Heroides.

It’s an unusually extended passage, for Ovid, which describes her seduction of Jason, then great detail about the magic medicine she creates to restore Jason’s father, Aeson, to youthfulness. Then she tricks the daughters of Jason’s father’s rival, Pelias, into cutting their own father’s throat, the idea being you drain the old blood from the person you intend to rejuvenate and replace it with magic potion: it worked for Aeson because Medea infused his veins with potion, but once his daughters have mercilessly slashed and drained Pelias of his lifeblood, Medea simply leaves them with the father they’ve murdered, flying off in a chariot pulled by dragons (she is a powerful witch).

Her flight over Greece allows Ovid to make quick passing references to half a dozen other stories about strange legendary transformations – Cerambus given wings, the woman of Coa growing horns, Cygnus hanging into a swan, the lamenting of his mother Hyrie who is turned into a pool, the transformation of the king and queen of Calaurea into birds, Cephisus’s grandson changed by Apollo into a seal, the transformation of Eumelus’s son into a bird, Alcyone changed into a bird.

Her arrival in Corinth allows Ovid the brief aside about an ancient legend that mortals were first created from fungi. But the super-striking thing about the Medea passage is that Ovid only refers in a sentence, in quite a cryptic and obscure throwaway, to the central fact about Medea that, after Jason abandoned her for a new bride she a) murdered her own children by Jason b) cast a curse on the new bride. This is thrown away in just half a sentence.

Was this because Ovid had already written one of the Heroides about Medea? Or because she was the subject of his only full-length play (widely praised by ancient critics but now, unhappily, lost)?

Anyway, on to Theseus. The people of Athens sing him a song of praise which allows Ovid to cram in all the hero’s great achievements. The narrative focuses in on King Minos of Crete’s aim to wage war against Athens. Minos sails to Oenopia to recruit the young men of king Aeacus, who refuses, saying he has ancient ties of alliance with Athens.

Then a deputation from Athens arrives and the king tells them about the plague which has devastated his land. Juno sent it because the island was named after one of Jupiter’s many lovers. (She is an awesome agent of destruction, Juno; the entire narrative of the Aeneid is driven by her venomous hatred of the Trojans.)

Ovid describes this at surprising length, evoking memories of the description of the plague in Thucydides, which was copied by Lucretius to end his long poem, De Rerum Natura, and also echoes Virgil’s description of the great cattle plague in Noricum, in the finale to the third Eclogue (3.478–566).

‘Wherever I turned my eyes, bodies lay strewn on the ground, like overripe apples that fall from the trees when the boughs are shaken, or like acorns beneath a storm-tossed oak. (7.580, page 171)

So king Aeacus tells his guests at length about the devastation of the plague but then goes on to describe a strange dream in which he saw a file of ants heading for an old oak said to date from Jupiter’s time, and how they transformed into big strong, dogged men and then he woke and his people came running into his bedchamber to tell him it was true: and this is the origin of the race of men he named Myrmidons. This is a so-called ‘etiological myth’ based on an (incorrect) interpretation of the name, because the name Myrmidon is close to the ancient Greek for ant, murmekes.

One of the envoys from Athens, Cephalus, bears a wooden javelin. He tells its story: Cephalus married Procris, daughter of Erechtheus but is then abducted by Aurora goddess of the dawn. He complains so much that Aurora lets him return to his wife. But he is soured, adopts a disguise, returns to his home in disguise and tries to woo and seduce his sad wife. When she finally hesitates in face of his barrage of offers, he throws his clothes and bitterly accuses her of betrayal. Distraught at his trick, Procris runs off into the hills and becomes a devotee of the huntress god Diana. He pleaded and begged and eventually she returned, bearing a special magic gift, a javelin which never misses its mark.

Part two of the story is Cephalus loved to go a-hunting every day, throwing the javelin which never missed its prey. As the day got hot he’d lie under a tree and ask for a light breeze to refresh him, addressing ‘zephyr’ as the generic name for refreshing breezes. Someone overheard him and snitched back to his wife, accusing him of having taken a nymph or suchlike as a lover. So next day he goes hunting, Procris tailed him. He killed a load of wild animals then lay in the shade, as was his wont, idly calling on a zephyr to cool his brow, but Procris, hidden nearby, overheard, groaned a little and tremored some bushes. Thinking it a wild animal, Cephalus lets fly with the magic javelin which never misses its mark and pierces Procris through. He runs over and cradles her in his arms as she dies, explaining her mistake i.e. there was no nymph Zephyr, it was all a misunderstanding. Too late.

By the time he has finished telling his tale, Cephalus and his listeners are in tears. No transformation, just reinforcement of the ancient Greek tragic view of life.

The psychology of metamorphoses

In two senses:

1. It is a fundamental fact of human nature that we anthropomorphise everything; we attribute agency and intent to all aspects of the world around us, starting, of course, with other people, but often extending it to animals and other life forms (trees and plants and crops), to the weather, to everything. Our language reflects the way our minds place us at the centre of a world of meaning and intention. People routinely think their pets are saying this or that to them, that the weather is against them, that their car won’t start on purpose, that their pen won’t work in order to irritate them, and so on. It takes a high degree of intelligent scepticism to fully, emotionally accept the fact that the universe and all it contains is sublimely indifferent to our lives and moods and opinions. Stuff happens all the time and humans have evolved to attribute it a wild array of meanings when, in fact, it has none.

These marvellous transformation stories in a sense give in to the instinct to humanise nature, dramatises and takes to the max this inborn tendency in all of us. I’ve always felt that trees are people. In an earlier, more poetic iteration, I developed the notion that the trees are talking to us but are speaking veeeeeery veeeeeeeeery slowly, so slowly that we can’t perceive what they are saying. It is terribly important, the message of the trees, but, alas, we are all in too much of a hurry, zooming round in thrall to our petty human concerns, to hear it.

2. Ovid’s sources in ancient literature, and his later, medieval and Renaissance imitators, tend to allegorise the myths they inherited and give them moralising meaning, but Ovid is more sophisticated than that. Rather than draw neat moral lessons from the fates of his protagonists, Ovid is far more interested in putting us directly in the shoes (or claws or hooves) of his poor unfortunate mortals. Again and again, he vividly conveys the distress of people as they are being changed into something else, or the terror or anger which drives them towards the change. Forget moralising or allegory: what makes the poem so memorable is the power with which Ovid makes you feel the experience of changing into a tree or a bird.

‘We took the cup offered by Circe’s sacred hand. As soon as we had drained it, thirstily, with parched lips, the dread goddess touched the top of our hair with her wand, and then (I am ashamed, but I will tell you) I began to bristle with hair, unable to speak now, giving out hoarse grunts instead of words, and to fall forward, completely facing the ground. I felt my mouth stiffening into a long snout, my neck swelling with brawn, and I made tracks on the ground, with the parts that had just now lifted the cup to my mouth.’
(Macareus describing what it feels like to be turned into a pig, book 14)

Storytelling skill

The Metamorphoses are, above all, an awesome feat of storytelling. Some passages of the Penguin prose translation by Mary M. Innes read like a modern children’s book, a modern retelling of these stories; you have to keep reminding yourself that this is not some modern retelling by Alan Garner or Michael Morpurgo but the original version from two thousand years ago. Again and again Ovid comes to a new story and sets the scene with the swift skill of a seasoned storyteller:

There was a valley thickly overgrown with pitchpine and with sharp-needled cypress trees. It was called Gargaphie and was sacred to Diana, the goddess of the hunt. Far in its depths lay a woodland cave which no hand of man had wrought… (Book 3, page 78)

God, I’m hooked! Tell me more! Where Ovid notably differs from a modern storyteller is in (maybe) three distinctive features of ancient literature, namely the length of the speeches, the lists of names, and the epic similes.

1. Length of the speeches

I won’t quote one because, by definition, they’re long but the ancients liked to hear people speak and were educated about and so savoured the art of oratory in a way nobody nowadays is capable of. Schools of oratory divided the subject into the ability to find the right topic and then the ability to deploy any number of carefully named and defined rhetorical techniques. This applied to poetry – which in the ancient world was often performed and read aloud to appreciative audiences – as much as to speeches in law courts or political speeches in the Senate or at electoral hustings.

We enjoy the descriptive passages in the poem and the psychological description of the characters’ emotions but we’ve lost the taste for extended speeches showing off rhetorical skills, which were an important part of the literary experience for its original author and audience.

2. Lists of names

In Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne says: ‘There is nothing so lovely as a list’. We have largely lost this taste for lists of exotic names, especially place-names, but the ancients obviously loved them.

As he hesitated his hounds caught sight of him. Melampus and the wise Ichnobates were the first to give tongue, Ichnobates of the Cretan breed and Melampus of the Spartan. Then fhe others rushed to the chase, swifter than the wind, Pamphagus and Dorceus and Oribasus, all Arcadians, and strong Nebrophonus, fierce Theron and Laelaps too. Pteralas, the swift runner, was there, and keen-scented Agre, Hylaeus who had lately been gored by a wild boar, Nape, offspring of a wolf, Poemenis, the shepherd dog, Harpyia with her two pups, Ladon from Sicyon, slender-flanked, and Dromas and Canace, Sticte and Tigris, Alce, white-coated Leucon, and black-haired Asbolus; with them was Lacon, a dog of outstanding strength, Aello the stout runner, Thous and swift Lycisce with her brother Cyprius, Harpalus, who had a white spot in the middle of his black forehead, and Melaneus and shaggy Lachne, Lebros and Agriodus, both cross-bred of a Cretan mother and a Spartan father, shrill-barking Hylactor, and others whom it would take long to name… (p.79)

I suppose the length of this list indicates the wealth or status of Actaeon, but it also indicates a society which has a strong interest in hunting dogs and their pedigree which none of us moderns share. There is something relentless or excessive about these lists, which go on for a reasonable length of time, then a bit too much, then a lot too much, but just keep on going. It adds lustre to any story but in a way alien to our sensibilities. Take this list of the heroes involved in the Great Calydonian Boar Hunt:

At last Meleager and a handpicked group of men gather, longing for glory: Castor and Polydeuces, the Dioscuri, twin sons of Tyndareus and Leda, one son famous for boxing, the other for horsemanship: Jason who built the first ship: Theseus and Pirithoüs, fortunate in friendship: Plexippus and Toxeus, the two sons of Thestius, uncles of Meleager: Lynceus and swift Idas, sons of Aphareus: Caeneus, once a woman: warlike Leucippus: Acastus, famed for his javelin: Hippothoüs: Dryas: Phoenix, Amyntor’s son: Eurytus and Cleatus, the sons of Actor: and Phyleus, sent by Elis. Telamon was there, and Peleus, father of the great Achilles: with Admetus, the son of Pheres, and Iolaüs from Boeotia were Eurytion, energetic in action, and Echion unbeaten at running: and Lelex from Locria, Panopeus, Hyleus, and daring Hippasus: Nestor, still in the prime of life: and those that Hippocoön sent, with Enaesimus, from ancient Amyclae: Laërtes, Penelope’s father-in-law with Ancaeus of Arcady: Mopsus, the shrewd son of Ampyx: and Amphiaraüs, son of Oecleus, not yet betrayed by his wife, Eriphyle. (Book 8)

More than that, maybe this fondness for very long lists indicates a kind of earlier stage of writing when just naming something – a person or place, heroes or hounds – was a kind of magical act which conjured them into existence. First there is nothing, then I say a name and lo! I have conjured up an image and a memory; that the act of naming something evoked a far more powerful psychological effect in the minds of people 2,000 years ago than it possibly can in our over-media-saturated modern minds, an incantatory effect more akin to reciting a religious liturgy or spell.

3. Epic similes

Ovid’s similes are not as long as Homer’s similes, but it’s part of the epic style to use extended similes and Ovid frequently does. Thus the figures of warriors sprouting from the soil where Cadmus sowed them.

Then Pallas…told [Cadmus] to plough up the earth and to sow the serpent’s teeth, as seeds from which his people would spring. He obeyed and, after opening up the furrows with his deep-cutting plough, scattered the teeth on the ground as he had been bidden, seeds to produce men. What followed was beyond belief: the sods began to stir; then, first of all a crop of spearheads pushed up from the furrows, and after them came helmets with plumes nodding on their painted crests. Then shoulders and breasts and arms appeared, weighed down with weapons, and the crop of armoured heroes rose into the air. Even so, when the curtains are pulled up at the end of a show in the theatre, the figures embroidered on them rise into view, drawn smoothly upwards to reveal first their faces, and then the rest of their bodies, bit by bit, till finally they are seen complete and stand with their feet resting on the bottom hem. (3.110, p.77)

Or the insatiable hunger of Erysichthon’:

As the sea receives the rivers from all over the earth and yet has always room for more and drinks up the waters from distant lands, or as greedy flames never refuse nourishment but burn up countless faggots, made hungrier by the very abundance of supplies and requiring more, the more they are given, so the jaws of the scoundrel Erysichthon welcomed all the provisions that were offered and at the same time asked for more. (8.840, page 201)

Love and sex

Ovid is often depicted as mocking the earnest attempts to reform and rebuild Roman society carried out by the first emperor, Augustus – indeed, the immoral tendency of his handbook of seduction, The Art of Love, was cited by Augustus as one reason for the poet’s abrupt exile in 8 AD to the remotest borders of the Roman Empire.

And it’s true that many of the Greek myths turn out to be overwhelmingly about love and sex and Ovid tells them in the same swashbuckling, full-on style we became familiar with in the Amores and Art of Love. The king of the gods, Jupiter, in particular, is portrayed as a shameless philanderer, to the eternal fury of his exasperated wife, Juno, who is destined to endlessly discover more mortal women her husband has had an affair or one-night stand with, condemned to endless acts of furious vengeance.

But Ovid can’t be blamed for any of this; it’s in his source material, it’s intrinsic to the source material. The Greeks were obsessed with the terrible, mad behaviour which love and lust led both gods and mortals into.

Sex is central. Men chase women and want to have sex with them; women resist and don’t want to have sex. Men pursue women, trap them, have sex with them, then dump them, abandoning them to their fates. Human nature doesn’t change, at least not in the blink of an evolutionary eye which is 2,000 years.

Sex is made to mirror, reflect, rhyme or match the metaphor of the hunt. Hunting was a peculiarly aristocratic activity (as it has been through most of history right up to modern fox hunting) and it seemed natural to Ovid, as for generations afterwards, to compare chasing reluctant women for sex with hunting animals. Again and again the same set of hunting similes is deployed.

On the male side, Jupiter is portrayed as an insatiable pursuer of women, a fantastically susceptible male who falls in love with every pretty woman he sees and will go to any lengths to have sex with them, prepared to transform himself into the most outlandish animals or shapes to get his end away – triggering the wrath of his long-suffering wife, Juno, again and again.

However, in story after story it is the relatively innocent mortal woman who falls victim to Jupiter’s attentions who ends up being punished. A classic early example is poor Io who Jupiter transforms into a cow in order to hide her from Juno, but the latter sees through the disguise and relentlessly pursues Io, sending a gadfly to torment her half way across Europe and on into Africa.

In other words, in myth after myth, it’s the victim who gets blamed.

Jupiter’s narrative function

To some extent I realised the ‘character’ of Jupiter is a kind of functional product. Reading about Perseus and the generation of heroes, and how they were followed by Hercules, I realised that if your aim is to maximise the glory of a hero, giving him maximum kudos, then you will, of course, want him to have been fathered by the king of the gods.

If you have a large number of heroes fathered by Jupiter then, by definition, you must have a large number of mortal women who Jupiter inseminated. So the ‘character’ of Jupiter as sex machine is really more of a kind of narrative function of the fact that the Greeks had so many Great Heroes and they all needed to have been fathered by the top god. QED.

Juno’s narrative function

In the same way, reading this narrative led me to think of Juno (queen of the gods, long-suffering wife of Jupiter) as a kind of principle of opposition.

At a narrative or manifest level, she is a kind of spirit of revenge, seeking out and punishing the many women who’ve had sex with her husband. But at a deeper, structural level, she is a principle of blockage and opposition which, in a sense, enables the narratives.

I’d forgotten that Juno had a lifelong enmity against Hercules. It was Juno who induced a madness in him that made him kill his wife and children, for which he was ordered to serve Eurystheus, king of Mycenae, for ten years. It was during this time that he performed the famous 12 labours. So no opposition from Juno, no labours, no myth.

Ditto Aeneas. At a basic level the Aeneid only exists because of Juno’s endless implacable opposition to Aeneas which, as far as I could tell, stemmed purely from anger at the way Paris, prince of Troy, rejected her in favour of Venus during the famous Judgement of the three goddesses to see which was most beautiful. It was nothing that Aeneas himself ever did, it was simply coming from the same city as the ingrate Paris who didn’t give her the prize.

But the motive doesn’t really matter, what matters for the narrative structure of the Aeneid is that every time Aeneas gets close to fulfilling his destiny, Juno throws a spanner in the works. In fact the entire second half of the Aeneid only exists because Juno sends a Fury to stir up Turnus’s anger at the way King Latinus takes his fiancée, Lavinia, away from him and gives her to the newcomer, Aeneas, and to enrage Lavinia’s mother for the same reason – and it is their allied anger which triggers the war which fill the last six books of the poem. No furiously resentful Juno, no Aeneid.

Rape culture

Apparently the term ‘rape culture’ was coined as long ago as 1975. My impression is that it’s only become reasonably common usage in the last five years or so, especially since the #metoo movement of 2017. Looking it up online, I find this definition:

Rape culture is a culture where sexual violence and abuse is normalised and played down. Where it is accepted, excused, laughed off or not challenged enough by society as a whole. (Rape Crisis)

Ovid’s Metamorphoses without a shadow of a doubt portrays a rape culture, a culture in which the forcible rape of women is a) widespread and b) accepted as the norm. It does not go unremarked; the narrator occasionally laments and disapproves of this or that act of rape, as do the relatives of the woman who’s been raped. Rape is judged by most mortals in the poem to be a crime. But there is no denying its widespread presence as the central event in scores of these stories. All you have to do is translate the weasel word ‘ravish’ into ‘rape’ to get a sense of its ubiquity.

One of the Muses, the daughters of Mnemosyne, makes this theme completely explicit:

‘There is no limit to what wicked men may do, and so unprotected women have all manner of cause for fear.’ (5.270, page 123)

Here are some of the stories where aggressive men force sex on unwilling women, or try to:

  • Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne
  • Jupiter rapes Callisto
  • Jupiter’s abduction of Europa
  • Nyctimene is raped by her father, Epopeus,
  • Pluto’s abduction of Proserpina
  • Alpheus’s pursuit of Arethusa
  • Dryope is raped by Apollo (book 9)
  • Priapus pursues the nymph Lotis who is changed into a flower (book 9)

In book 6 Arachne weaves a tapestry depicting a staggering list of the lengths male gods have gone to in order to abduct and ‘ravish’ mortal women:

  • Jupiter turned into a bull to seduce Europa
  • Jupiter turned into an eagle to abduct Asterie
  • Jupiter turned into a swan in order to seduce Leda
  • Jupiter turned into a satyr to impregnate Antiope
  • Jupiter impersonating Amphitryon in order to have sex with his wife
  • Jupiter turned into a shower of gold to impregnate Danae
  • Jupiter turned into flame in order to seduce Asopus’s daughter
  • Neptune turned into a bull to seduce Aeolus’ daughter
  • Neptune deceiving Bisaltis as a ram
  • Neptune becoming a stallion to seduce Ceres
  • Neptune becoming a dolphin to seduce Melantho
  • Phoebus disguised as a shepherd to seduce Isse
  • Bacchus tricking Erigone in the guise of a bunch of grapes
  • Saturn in the shape of a horse fathering the centaur Chiron on Philyra

Quite a stunning list. You’d be forgiven for concluding that using every trick in the book to finagle women into sex was the main activity of the male Greek gods, leaving the female ones to actually get on with running things, like agriculture, justice, childbirth and rearing, and wisdom.

Rape culture might have been ‘normative’ in the world of the legends themselves, but is not entirely so in the narrative. It’s worth noting that Ovid rounds off this Arachne passage by describing all of these ‘seductions’ as ‘crimes’ (bottom of p.137).

‘Crimes’. Ovid is perfectly clear that this is not good or acceptable behaviour and can be criticised. If it is ‘accepted’ it is because it is the way of these myths and legends, it is the often brutal tragic way of the world; but it is not quite ‘normalised’ i.e. passing uncriticised.

Possibly, purely in terms of categorising events and attitudes within the poem, a distinction can be made between a mortal and an immortal rapist: mortal men tend to be criticised for rape, whereas when it comes to gods, the narrator shrugs his shoulders and says, ‘What can you do?’ It is accepted as a fact of life, along with all the other violent injustices that mortal life is prey to.

‘The gods have their own laws: what is the use of trying to relate human conduct to the ways of heaven, when they are governed by different rules?’
(Byblis, book 9)

Tragic worldview

The gross unfairness of the rape culture aspect of the stories merges into the general unfairness of life which runs through the poem. You might start out by criticising or judging some of the characters’ behaviour, but after a while trying to regard the stories from a ‘moral’ point of view comes to feel hopelessly inadequate. It’s more accurate to say that all of its protagonists are caught in a tragic world. Terrible, inhuman suffering is described on every page.

Ovid goes out of his way to say it wasn’t Actaeon’s fault that curiosity led him to stumble across the cave where Diana was bathing naked with her attendant nymphs. When she splashes pond water into his face and transforms him into a deer it’s not clear she does this to prompt his terrible fate, but more to silence his human ability to tell tales, to tell anyone else what Diana naked looks like. But this sequence of events then has the horrible outcome that Actaeon is torn to shreds by his own hunting hounds.

It is as if humans, with their petty system of morality, are continually blundering into the higher moral order of the gods which is (paradoxically) dominated by gross injustice and horrifying violence, a place where there’s no point complaining about Juno or Apollo or Diana’s horrifying violence; that’s just the gods for you.

The healing power of stories

There’s not very much of conventional ‘morality’ about the Actaeon story or most of the other tales but it obviously says a lot about the terror of the world – that our lives are prey, at any moment, to powerful forces way beyond our control which lead to terrible violence and howling injustice. Like a family in Kiev who have led worthy, blameless lives until one of Vladimir Putin’s missiles lands on their house and tears them to shreds. There is no justice. The world is prey to random acts of unspeakable violence. And the purpose of these myths is to shape that anxious apprehension into narratives we can accept and assimilate and which, in the act of being shaped, acquire a terrible kind of beauty and grim consolation. Just about…

This is why the stories, weird and wonderful though they almost all are, at the same time seem to be telling us something important about the world and human existence. To describe a beautiful girl turning into a tree with a beating heart may seem fantastically irrelevant to modern citizens of the UK in 2022. But modern people have strokes, car accidents, catastrophic injuries which put them into comas, render them paraplegic, incapable of movement, wired up to life support. But if you put your hand against their chest, just as Apollo puts his hand against Daphne’s bark, you can still feel the human heart beating within, despite the terrible transformation they’ve undergone.

After the extreme suffering, terror or anguish of the humans caught in terrible events, the metamorphoses offer a weird kind of redemption or consolation. Nothing redeems Philomela’s terrible ordeal (being kidnapped, having her tongue cut out, and repeatedly raped); but her transformation into a nightingale suggests the remote possibility that in some unfathomable, surreal, barely graspable kind of way, such experiences and, by extension, the miserable human condition, may, just about, possibly, be capable of some kind of redemption – giving rise to a terrible kind of wonder.

Mary Innes’s translation

Innes’s prose translation is clear and plain, eschewing fancy effects and, dating as it does from the 1950s, avoids slang or any modern locutions. It feels clear and effective. However, comparing it to the online translation by A.S. Kline, one very important fact comes out.

Ovid employs circumlocution. Very, very often Ovid does not directly name a character but indicates who they are via their family relationships, most often via their parents. Thus we read about ‘the son of Mars’, ‘Ixion’s son’, ‘the son of great Peleus’ and so on. Or characters, especially the gods, are referred to by alternative names: for example, I had no idea that Juno could be referred to as ‘Saturnia’. Or they’re referred to by the place of their birth, for example ‘the Idalian god’.

Often an entire story goes by in a welter of periphrases, without the character ever being directly named and this makes it pretty difficult for the modern reader to know what’s going on or who’s being talked about.

Innes reproduces this periphrasis with complete fidelity with the result that it is often very difficult to make out who is being talked about, and this is the one big flaw with her translation. By contrast, Kline does the sensible thing and names names. Instead of saying ‘Ixion’s son’ he comes right out and says ‘Pirithous’. I cannot over-emphasise how helpful this is.

In addition, Kline’s version has a super-useful online glossary, with precisely these kinds of periphrases, secondary names and so on, all boldened in the main text and hyperlinked to the glossary. So even where he retains a periphrastic phrase, you only have to click the link to get to a clear and useful explanation of who’s who. Absolutely invaluable.

Innes’s translation is readable and definitive but her fidelity to the original on this one point is a big flaw and meant that, to begin with, I kept having to look the stories up on Wikipedia to be completely clear who was who. All it needed was to insert the names of the people so often referred to as ‘son of…’, as Kline does, and the reading experience would have been immeasurably improved. About half way through I abandoned Innes and switched over to reading Kline solely for this reason.

(For a summary and notes on the second half of the Metamorphoses, see my next blog post.)

Credit

Mary M. Innes’ prose translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses was published by Penguin books in 1955.

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by Simon on November 16, 2022  •  Permalink
Posted in Ancient history, Literature, Mythology, Poetry, Translation
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Posted by Simon on November 16, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/11/16/metamorphoses-ovid-1/

This is Manga: The Art of Urasawi Naoki @ Japan House

This weekend is your last chance to see a comprehensive and FREE exhibition of work by the leading contemporary Japanese manga artist, Urasawa Naoki.

A montage of Urasawa Naoki’s manga characters which he created specially for this exhibition © URASAWA Naoki / Studio Nuts. Featuring: ‘Pineapple ARMY’ KUDO Kazuya ‘PLUTO’ NAGASAKI Takashi, Tezuka Productions, ‘MASTER KEATON’ KATSUSHIKA Hokusei, NAGASAKI Takashi, ‘MASTER KEATON ReMASTER’ NAGASAKI Takashi, ‘BILLY BAT’ NAGASAKI Takashi

The Japan House

Come out of High Street Kensington tube station, turn right, walk a hundred yards and you are at the entrance to the Japan House. Opened just last year, it is funded by Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Inside it feels like a very classy boutique and most of the ground floor is, in fact, a shop, selling exquisite and carefully chosen specimens of Japanese fabrics, jewellery, books and so on, each one an example of the Japanese passion for monozukuri, meaning craftsmanship. Kitchenware, art accessories – brushes and paper and lots more, all chosen with exquisite taste and ranged in clean, precise displays.

Interior of the Japan House. Photo by the author

There is a stand-up coffee and tea bar. At the back of the shop (at the top left of this photo) is an area devoted to tourism, which features all kinds of maps of Japan, its cities and regions. As well as the ground floor boutique, there’s a stylish Japanese restaurant – AKIRA – on the first floor.

Taking the lift down to the basement, the visitor discovers there are three spaces here:

  • a lecture theatre which also doubles as a movie house and can host a range of events
  • a library display (basically a smallish room with carefully chosen books about all aspects of Japanese culture)
  • and the main exhibition space

The Art of Urasawi Naoki

It’s a surprisingly big room and contains a surprisingly large amount of material.

What comes over immediately is that URASAWA Naoki is a kind of rock start among mangaka. Born in 1960, he is considered a direct heir of Tezuka Osamu, the founder of modern manga. He has been hugely successful with over 100 million books sold in more than 20 countries. He made his debut in 1983 with BETA! and has gone on to create and/or draw a host of hugely successful manga characters.

There are about ten big stands in the exhibition, each of which introduces one of the lead characters which has made Urasawa’s name. Each one gives a longish explanation of the lead character and their main storylines and then display 20 or so pages taken from one of the episodes which shows the character in action.

This is Manga – The Art of Urasawa Naoki @ Japan House. Photo by the author

This display gives you a complete biography of Master Keaton, full name Taichi Hiraga-Keaton, son of a Japanese father and a British mother, an Oxford graduate and former Special Air Services officer. The various plotlines have followed Keaton across Europe as he ‘solves difficult cases, fighting criminal organisations and touching people’s lives’.

The same detailed treatment, with a full biography of the character, and then a sequence of characteristic strips, is given to all his other creations:

  • YAWARA!
  • MONSTER
  • 20th Century Boys
  • MASTER KEATON ReMASTER (Story by Takashi Nagasaki)
  • PLUTO (Story by Osamu Tezuka, co-authored by Takashi Nagasaki, Supervised by Macoto Tezka, with the cooperation of Tezuka Productions)
  • BILLY BAT (Story Co-creator : Takashi Nagasaki)
  • MUJIRUSHI (‘The Sign of Dreams’, with the cooperation of Fujio Productions)

In addition there are some massive full-colour blow-ups of various characters and scenes, dominating the walls. Some of these are deliberately designed for visitors to pose in front of and take selfies against.

Installation view of This is Manga – The Art of Urasawa Naoki @ Japan House. Photo by the author

Behind the art of Urasawi Naoki

In the photo above you can see, over on the right, that there are flat display cases in front of some of the colour blow-ups. These display Urasawa’s early sketches and ideas for characters and scenes, and offer a real insight into the creative process. You can see sketches evolving into almost complete pages, then with words and dialogue bubbles positioned over the drawings – and then the final, finished pages as printed. One of the display cases shows the very earliest sketches and cartoons Urasawa made at school. In fact there are over 400 original drawings and storyboards on display! If you’ve heard of him, and like his style, this really is a fabulous opportunity to immerse yourself in the great man’s work.

Why is Urasawa so famous, why is his manga so distinctive? I must confess, I couldn’t really see why. Having recently visited the big, noisy manga exhibition at the British Museum, I feel overwhelmed with the sheer amount of manga there is in the world. I have no idea where to start, and no idea how to make sense of the tens of thousands of stories produced by the thousands of artists for the scores of publishers, which keep on expanding in number every week.

Rather than make any attempt to explain Urasawa’s appeal I’ll copy out how the curators describe it.

Urasawa Naoki is considered a modern master in dynamic storytelling, with a unique approach to panel layout and cinematic sense of framing and rhythm. But even more so, he is considered a true master of character design. Each of his worlds hosts a wide variety of distinct, fully-rendered personas. His instantly recognisable faces come to life on the page with a wide range of expression. This talent can be witnessed on his storyboards, referred to as nēmu (‘name’) in Japanese, which reveal characters with expressions more precise and detailed than most manga artists. In this way, Urasawa defies convention to depict the diversity and sensitivity of the human race through his two-dimensional drawings.

Maybe I’m stupid, maybe I’m obtuse and imperceptive, maybe I just haven’t properly entered into the world of manga and its conventions, but I just couldn’t see this. Most of the faces, figures and characters I saw, particularly in the large blown-up images, looked very very similar to all the other manga characters I saw at the British Museum.

Here’s a typical display case of sketches with a blown-up figure behind it. I just couldn’t see that this image had a ‘cinematic’ sense of framing or a ‘distinct, fully-rendered persona’. I liked the detail of her hat and jacket and t-shirt, but I had the overwhelming sense that I’ve seen thousands of other images like this one, big-eyed, small-nosed, fresh-faced teens.

Installation view of This is Manga – The Art of Urasawa Naoki @ Japan House. Photo by the author

The most novel feature of the exhibition was a kind of tent Urasawa has made from fabric strips running from the floor up to a central spine to create a ‘tent’ which visitors can walk through, getting very up close to a range of his characters.

Installation view of This is Manga – The Art of Urasawa Naoki @ Japan House. Photo by the author

There was some variety of characterisation. In fact, the variety of faces reminded me of the panels you get inside the hardback editions of Tintin books, where you’re presented with a gallery of all the characters from all the Tintin stories. When I was a boy I used to love trying to identify them all.

But still. There were a lot of faces on the tent which seemed, to me, to be elementary, basic, entry level, manga faces. Wide-eyed children with tiny noses, mouths agape at some wonder.

Installation view of This is Manga – The Art of Urasawa Naoki @ Japan House. Photo by the author

Probably I’m missing the point. Looking at some of the specific storylines, you could see how Urasawi had in fact created distinctive-looking individuals to be Master Keaton or the 20th Century Boys or the hero of PLUTO, and that there is a range of, especially older characters who are drawn with the individuality I associate with Tintin or Lucky Luke.

And when I looked at the display frames explaining the strip MONSTER these brought out the importance of Urasawi’s clever / innovative / imaginative use of screentones, the layering of shades or stippling or dots to create depth and atmosphere in the backgrounds.

Unfortunately, MONSTER – despite its enormous success (the first fully-fledged mystery story in manga, it sold over 21 million copies and became an anime TV series) – is about a serial killer and the pages the curators had chosen to display showed a series of people just shooting each other in the head, and I was so repelled that I turned away, without paying much attention to the backgrounds.

Installation view of This is Manga – The Art of Urasawa Naoki @ Japan House, showing the protagonist of MONSTER, highlighting his modern ‘street’ styling (a bit Keanu Reeves), and the use of screentones to give cinematic depth to the image

As I strolled between recognisable, almost clichéd images of fresh-faced kids, and the altogether grittier style of something like MONSTER, I admit I was confused. Maybe I’m just putting into the words the difficulty I, a non-Japanese, who didn’t grow up on manga, have in really understanding the finer points and distinctions which seem to be extremely obvious to aficionados and fans.

More study required!!

A broader history of manga

Talking of study, alongside all the panels and display cases devoted to Urasawi Naoki, his biography, achievements, style and characters, and the detailed looks at the visual worlds he has created for individual strips – was another series of information panels about the broader history of manga, which I found in many ways easier to process, because they were dealing with straightforward facts, figures, dates and names.

Thus, in addition to what I had already picked up at the British Museum, I learned that:

  • Manga evolved from picture book styles developed in the post Edo period of the late 19th century
  • the modern form of manga was pioneered after World War Two by Tezuka Osamu, who is sometimes referred to as the god of manga
  • Tezuka introduced modern narrative techniques, complex characters and themes, and a visual language derived from cinema
  • His 1947 manga The New Treasure Island sold a huge number of copies and helped to crystallise the style and content of the new genre

But probably the biggest impression these information panels made on me was in conveying the scale and the speed of manga production, and the combination of extreme skill, with inventiveness, and prolific production rates, accompanied by a consistent style and level of quality, which is required for this high-pressure, high-profile and very demanding profession.

  • manga artists (mangaka) need to produce approximately twenty pages of strips every few days for magazines published on a monthly or weekly basis
  • typical mangaka work in a small studio with a few assistants under the supervision of a creative editor
  • if the series is successful it may be republished in a trade paperback named a tankōbon
  • it might also be turned into a TV series, a live action or animated movie

Further information panels gave good explanations of the visual codes which have evolved to convey emotion and meaning, the role of framing and the way the selection and framing of images creates a rhythm, the social context of manga immediately after the war and how successive generations of artists have added layers of sophistication, characterisation and, above all, an ever-expanding range of subjects to the empire of manga.

Summary

It’s FREE. It offers an in-depth understanding of the work and practice of one of the leading contemporary manga artists at work today. And the Japan House itself is a place of beauty to admire and wander round. And it closes at the end of tomorrow.

Get your skates on!

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by Simon on July 26, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 26, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/26/this-is-manga-urasawi-naoki-japan-house/

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke (1968)

Origins

It all started with a short story Clarke wrote for a BBC competition in 1948 when he was just 21, and titled The Sentinel. It was eventually published in 1951 under the title Sentinel of Eternity.

13 years later, after completing Dr. Strangelove in 1964, American movie director Stanley Kubrick turned his thoughts to making a film with a science fiction subject. Someone suggested Clarke as a source and collaborator, and when they met, later in 1964, they got on well and formed a good working relationship.

Neither of them could have predicted that it would take them four long years of brainstorming, viewing and reading hundreds of sci-fi movies and stories, and then honing and refining the narrative, to develop the screenplay which became the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968 and one of the most influential movies of all time.

The original plan had been to develop the story as a novel first, then turn it into a screenplay, then into the film, but the process ended up being more complex than that. The novel ended up being written mostly by Clarke, while Kubrick’s screenplay departed from it in significant ways.

The most obvious difference is that the book is full of Clarke’s sensible, down-to-earth, practical explanations of all or most of the science involved. It explains things. From the kick-start given to human evolution by the mysterious monolith through to Bowman’s journey through the Star Gate, Clarke explains and contextualises.

This is all in stark contrast with the film which Kubrick made as cryptic as possible by reducing dialogue to an absolute minimum, and eliminating all explanation. Kubrick is quoted as saying that the film was ‘basically a visual, nonverbal experience’, something which a novel, by definition, can not be.

The novel

The novel is divided into 47 short snappy chapters, themselves grouped into six sections.

1. Primeval Night

The basic storyline is reasonably clear. A million years ago an alien artefact appears on earth, materialising in Africa, in the territory of a small group of proto-human man-apes. Clarke describes their wretched condition in the hot parched Africa of the time, permanently bordering on starvation, watered only by a muddy streamlet, dying of malnutrition and weakness or of old age at 30, completely at the mercy of predators like a local leopard.

The object – 15 feet high and a yard wide – appears from nowhere. When the ape-men lumber past it on the way to their foraging ground, it becomes active and literally puts ideas into their heads. It takes possession of members of the group in turn and forces them to tie knots in grass, to touch their fingers together, to perform basic physical IQ tests. Then, crucially, it patiently shows them how to use stones and the bones of dead animals as tools.

The result is that they a) kill and eat a wild pig, the first meat ever eaten by the ape-men b) surround and kill the leopard that’s been menacing the tribe c) use these skills to bludgeon the leader of ‘the Others’, a smaller weaker tribe on the other side of the stream. In other words, the alien artefact has intervened decisively in the course of evolution to set man on his course to becoming a planet-wide animal killer and tool maker.

In the kind of fast-forward review section which books can do and movies can’t, Clarke then skates over the hundreds of thousands of years of evolution which follow, during which human’s teeth became smaller, their snouts less prominent, giving them the ability to make more precise sounds through their vocal cords – the beginnings of speech – how ice ages swept over the world killing most human species but leaving the survivors tougher, more flexible, more intelligent, and then the discovery of fire, of cooking, a widening of diet and survival strategies. And then to the recent past, to the Stone, Iron and Bronze ages, and sweeping right past the present to the near future and the age of space travel.

Compare and contrast the movie where all this is conveyed by the famous cut from a bone thrown into the air by an ape-man which is half way through its parabola when it turns into a space ship in orbit round earth. Prose describes, film dazzles.

2. T.M.A.-1

It is 2001. Humanity has built space stations in orbit around the earth, and a sizeable base on the moon. Dr Heywood Floyd, retired astrophysicist, is taking the journey from the American launch base in Florida, to dock with the orbiting space station, and then on to the moon base.

Clarke in his thorough, some might say pedantic, way, leaves no aspect of the trip undescribed and unexplained. How the rocket launcher works, how to prepare for blast-off, how the space station maintains a sort of gravity by rotating slowly, the precise workings of its space toilets (yes), the transfer to the shuttle down to the moon: Clarke loses no opportunity to mansplain every element of the journey, including some favourite facts familiar from the other stories I’ve read: the difference between weight and mass; how centrifugal spin creates increased gravity the further you are from the axis of spin; ‘the moon’s strangely close horizon’ (p.74); how damaging an alien artifact would be the work of a ‘barbarian’ (a thought repeated several times in Rama).

Two other features emerge. Clarke’s protagonists are always men, and they are almost always married men, keen to keep in touch with their wives, using videophones. In other words they’re not valiant young bucks as per space operas. It’s another element in the practical, level-headed approach of Clarke’s worldview.

Secondly, Clarke is a great one for meetings: Childhood’s End‘s middle sections rotate around the Secretary General of the United Nations who has a busy schedule of meetings, from his weekly conference with the Overlords to his meetings with the head of the Freedom league, and his discussion of issues arising with his number two.

A Fall of Moondust features hurried conferences between the top officials on the moon. The narrative of Rendezvous with Rama is punctuated all the way through by meetings of the committee made up of with representatives from the inhabited planets, who discuss the issues arising but also get on each other’s nerves, bicker and argue, grandstand, storm out and so on. His fondness for the set meeting, with a secretary taking notes and a chairman struggling to bring everyone into line, is another of the features which makes Clarke’s narratives seem so reassuringly mundane and rooted in reality.

Same here. Floyd is flying to the moon to take part in a top secret, high-level meeting of moon officials. He opens the meeting by conveying the President’s greetings and thanks (as people so often do in sci-fi thrillers like this).

In brief: a routine survey of the moon has turned up a magnetic anomaly in the huge crater named Tycho. (The anomaly has been prosaically named Tycho Magnetic Anomaly One – hence the section title T.M.A.-1.) When the surveyors dug down they revealed an object, perfectly smooth and perfectly black, eleven foot high, five foot wide and one and a quarter foot deep. Elementary geology has shown that the object was buried there three million years ago.

After a briefing with the moon team Floyd goes out by lunar tractor to the excavation site where digging has now fully revealed the artifact. Floyd and some others go down into the excavation and walk round the strange object which seems to absorb light. The sun is rising (the moon turns on its axis once in fourteen days) and as its light falls onto the artifact – for probably the first time in millions of years – Floyd and the others are almost deafened by five intense burst of screeching sound which cut through their radio communications.

Millions of miles away in space, deep space monitors, orbiters round Mars, a probe launched to Pluto – all record and measure an unusual burst of energy streaking across the solar system… Cut to:

3. Between Planets

David Bowman is captain of the spaceship Discovery. It was built to transport two live passengers (himself and Frank Poole) and three others in suspended animation, to Jupiter. But two years into the project the TMA-1 discovery was made and plans were changed. Now the ship is intending to use the gravity of Jupiter as a sling to propel it on towards Saturn. When they enter Saturn’s orbit the three sleeping crew members (nicknamed ‘hibernauts’) will be woken and the full team of five will have 100 days to study the super-massive gas giant, before all the crew re-enter hibernation, and wait to be picked up by Discovery II, still under construction.

Clarke is characteristically thorough in describing just about every aspect of deep space travel you could imagine, the weightlessness, the scientific reality of hibernation, the food, what the earth looks like seen from several million miles away. He gives an hour by hour rundown of Bowman and Poole’s 24-hour schedule, which is every bit as boring as the thing itself. He describes in minute astronomical detail the experience of flying through the asteroid belt and on among the moons of Jupiter, watching the sun ‘set’ behind it and other strange and haunting astronomical phenomena which no one has seen.

Then there’s a sequence in which he imagines the pictures sent back by a probe which Bowman and Poole send down into Jupiter’s atmosphere: fantastic but completely plausible imaginings. After reporting what they see from the ship, and the images relayed by the probe, the couple have done with Jupiter and set their faces to Saturn, some three months and four hundred million miles away.

The awesomeness doesn’t come from the special effects and canny use of classical music, as per the movie, but from straightforward statement of the scientific and technical facts – such as that they are now 700 million miles from earth (p.131), travelling at a speed of over one hundred thousand miles an hour (p.114).

4. Abyss

All activities on the Discovery are run or monitored by the ship’s onboard computer, HAL 9000, ‘the brain and nervous system of the ship’ (p.97). HAL stands for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer. It is the most advanced form of the self-teaching neural network which, Clarke predicts, will have been discovered in the 1980s.

HAL has a nervous breakdown. He predicts the failure of the unit which keeps the radio antenna pointed at earth. Poole goes out in one of the nine-foot space pods, anchors to the side of the ship, then does a short space walk in a space suit, unbolts the failing unit and replaces it.

But back inside the ship the automatic testing devices find nothing wrong with the unit. When a puzzled Bowman and Poole report all this back to earth, Mission Control come back with the possibility that the HAL 9000 unit might have made a mistake.

Poole and Bowman ponder the terrifying possibility that the computer which is running the whole mission might be failing. Mission Control send a further message saying the two HAL 9000 units they are using to replicate all aspects of the mission back home both now recommend disconnecting the HAL computer aboard the Discovery. Earth is just in the middle of starting to give details about how to disconnect HAL when the radio antenna unit really does fail and contact with earth is broken. Coincidence? Bear in mind that HAL has been monitoring all of these conversations…

After discussing the possibility that HAL was right all along about the unit and that they are being paranoid  about him, Poole goes out for another space walk and repair. He’s in the middle of installing the new unit when he sees something out the corner of his eye, looks up and sees the pod suddenly shooting straight at him. With no time to take evasive action Poole is crushed by the ten-ton pod, his space suit ruptured, he is dead in seconds. Through an observation window Bowman sees first the pod and then Bowman’s body fly past and away from the ship.

Bowman confronts Hal, who calmly regrets that there has been accident. Mission orders demand that Bowman now revive one of the three hibernators since there must always be two people active on the ship. HAL argues with Bowman, saying this won’t be necessary, by which stage Bowman realises there is something seriously wrong. He threatens to disconnect HAL at which point the computer abruptly relents. Bowman makes his way to the three hibernator pods and has just started to revive the next in line of command, Whitehead when… HAL opens both doors of the ship’s airlock and all the air starts to flood out into space. In the seconds before the ship becomes a vacuum, Bowman manages to make it to an emergency alcove, seal himself in, jets it up with oxygen and climb into the spacesuit kept there for just such emergencies.

Having calmed down from the shock, Bowman secures his suit then climbs out, makes his way through the empty, freezing, lifeless ship to the sealed room where HAL’s circuits are stored and powered and… systematically removes all the ‘higher’ functions which permit HAL to ‘think’, leaving only the circuits which control the ship’s core functions. HAL asks him not to and, exactly as in the film, reverts to his ‘childhood’, his earliest learning session, finally singing the song ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.’

Hours later Bowman makes a journey in the remaining pod to fix the radio antenna, then returns, closes the airlock doors and slowly restores atmosphere to the ship. Then contacts earth. And it is only now that Dr Floyd, summoned by Mission Control, tells him the true reason for the mission. Tells him about the artifact in Tycho crater. Tells him that it emitted some form of energy which all our monitors indicate was targeted at Saturn, specifically at one of its many moon, Japetus. That is what the Discovery has been sent to investigate.

And it is only in the book that Clarke is able to tell us why HAL went mad. It was the conflict between a) the demand to be at all times totally honest, open and supportive of his human crew and b) the command to keep the true purpose of the mission secret, which led HAL to have a nervous breakdown, and decide to remove one half of the conflict i.e. the human passengers, which would allow him to complete the second half, the mission to Saturn, in perfect peace of ‘mind’.

5. The Moons of Saturn

So now Bowman properly understands the mission, goes about fixing the Discovery, is in constant contact with earth and Clarke gives us an interesting chapter pondering the meaning of the sentinel and what it could have been saying. Was it a warning to its makers, or a message to invade? Where was the message sent? To beings which had evolved on or near Saturn (impossible, according to all the astrophysicists)? Or to somewhere beyond the solar system itself? In which case how could anything have travelled that far, if Einstein is correct and nothing can travel faster than light?

These last two chapters have vastly more factual information in than the movie. What the movie does without any dialogue, with stunning images and eerie music, Clarke does with his clear authoritative factual explanations. He gives us detailed descriptions of the rings of Saturn from close up, along with meticulously calculated information about perihelions and aphelions and the challenges of getting into orbit around Saturn.

But amid all this factuality is the stunning imaginative notion that the moon of Saturn, Japetus, bears on its surface a vast white eye shape at the centre of which stands an enormous copy of the TMA artifact, a huge jet black monolith maybe a mile high.

Which leads into a chapter describing the race which placed it there, which had evolved enough to develop planet travel, then space travel, then moved their minds into artificial machines and then into lattices of light which could spread across space and so, finally, into what humans would call spirit, free from time and space, at one with the universe.

It is this enormous artifact which Bowman now radios Mission Control he is about to go down to in the pod and explore.

6. Through the Star Gate

In the movie this section becomes a non-verbal experience of amazing visual effects. A book can’t do that. It has to describe and, being Clarke, can’t help also explaining, at length, what is going on.

Thus the book is much clearer and more comprehensible about what happens in this final section. Bowman guides his pod down towards the enormous artifact and is planning to land on its broad ‘top’ when, abruptly it turns from being an object sticking out towards him into a gate or cave or tunnel leading directly through the moon it’s situated on. He has just time to make one last comment to Mission Control before the pod is sucked through into the star gate and his adventure begins.

He travels along some faster-than-light portal, watching space bend around him and time slow down to a halt. He emerges into a place where the stars are more static and, looking back, sees a planet with a flat face pockmarked by black holes like the one he’s just come through, and what, when he looks closely, seems to be the wreck of a metal spaceship. He realises this must be a kind of terminal for spaceships between voyages, then the pod slowly is sucked back into one of the holes.

More faster than light travelling, then he emerges into a completely unknown configuration of stars, red dwarfs, sun clusters, the pod slows to a halt and comes to rest in… a hotel room.

Terrified, Bowman makes all the necessary checks, discovers it has earth gravity and atmosphere, gets out of the pod, takes off his spacesuit, has a shower and shave, dresses in one of the suits of clothes provided in a wardrobe, checks out the food in the fridge, or in tins or boxes of cereal.

But he discovers that the books on the coffee table have no insides, the food inside the containers is all the same blue sludge. When he lies on the bed flicking through the channels on the TV he stumbles across a soap opera which is set in this very same hotel room he is lying in. Suddenly he understands. The sentinel, after being unearthed, monitored all radio and TV signals from earth and signalled them to the Japetus relay station and on here – wherever ‘here’ is – and used them as a basis to create a ‘friendly’ environment for their human visitor.

Bowman falls asleep on the bed and while he sleeps goes back in time, recapitulating his whole life. And part of him is aware that all the information of his entire life is being stripped from his mind and transferred to a lattice of light, the same mechanism which Clarke explained earlier in the novel, was the invention of the race which created the sentinel. Back, back, back his life reels until – in a miraculous moment – the room contains a baby, which opens its mouth to utter its first cry.

The crystal monolith appears, white lights flashing and fleering within its surface, as we saw them do when it first taught the man-apes how to use tools and eat meat, all those hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Now it is probing and instructing the consciousness of Bowman, guiding him towards the next phase. The monolith disappears. The being that was Bowman understands, understands its meaning, understands how to travel through space far faster than the primitive star gate he came here by. All he needs is to focus his ‘mind’ and he is there.

For a moment he is terrified by the immensity of space and the infinity of the future, but then realises he is not alone, becomes aware of some force supporting and sustaining him, the guiders.

Using thought alone he becomes present back in the solar system he came from. Looking down he becomes aware of alarm bells ringing and flotillas of intercontinental missiles hurtling across continents to destroy each other. He has arrived just as a nuclear war was beginning. Preferring an uncluttered sky, he abolishes all the missiles with his will.

Then he waited, marshalling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next.

But he would think of something.

And those are the final sentences of the book.

Thoughts

Like Childhood’s End the book proceeds from fairly understandable beginnings to a mind-boggling, universe-wide ending, carrying the reader step by step through what feels almost – if you let it take control of your imagination – like a religious experience.

Eliot Fremont-Smith reviewing the book in the New York Times, commented that it was ‘a fantasy by a master who is as deft at generating accelerating, almost painful suspense as he is knowledgeable and accurate (and fascinating) about the technical and human details of space flight and exploration.’

That strikes me as being a perfect summation of Clarke’s appeal – the combination of strict technical accuracy, with surprisingly effective levels of suspense and revelation.

His concern for imagining the impact of tiny details reminds me of H.G. Wells. In the Asimov and Blish stories I’ve been reading, if there’s a detail or the protagonist notices something, it will almost certainly turn out to be important to the plot. Clarke is the direct opposite. Like Wells his stories are full of little details whose sole purpose is to give the narrative a terrific sense of verisimilitude.

To pick one from hundreds, I was struck by the way that Dr Floyd finds wearing a spacesuit on the surface of the moon reassuring. Why? Because its extra weight and stiffness counter the one sixth gravity of the moon, and so subconsciously remind him of the gravity on earth. Knowing that fact, and then deploying it in order to describe the slight but detectable impact it has on one of his characters’ moods,strikes me as typical Clarke.

Hundreds of other tiny but careful thinkings-though of the situations which his characters find themselves in, bring them home and make them real.

And as to suspense, Clarke is a great fan of the simple but straightforward technique of ending chapters with a threat of disaster. E.g. after his first space walk Poole returns to the ship confident that he has fixed the problem.

In this, however, he was sadly mistaken. (p.140)

Although this is pretty cheesy, it still works. He is a master of suspense. The three other novels I’ve read by him are all thrilling, and even though I’ve seen the movie umpteen times and so totally know the plot, reading Clarke’s book I was still scared when HAL started malfunctioning, and found Bowman’s struggle to disconnect him thrilling and moving.

As to the final section, when Bowman travels through the star gate and is transformed into a new form of life, of celestial consciousness, if you surrender to the story the experience is quite mind-boggling.

It also explains a lot – and makes much more comprehensible – what is left to implication and special effects in the movie.

Forlorn predictions

Clarke expects that by 2001:

  • there will be a permanent colony on the moon, where couples will be having and bringing up children destined never to visit the earth
  • there will also be a colony on Mars
  • there will be a ‘plasma drive’ which allows for super-fast spaceship travel to other planets

I predict there will never be a colony on the moon, let alone Mars, and no ‘plasma drive’.

On the plus side, Clarke predicts that by 2001 there will be a catastrophic six billion people on earth, which will result in starvation, and food preservation policies even in the rich West. In the event there were some 6.2 billion people alive in 2001, but although there were the usual areas of famine in the world, there wasn’t the really widespread food shortages Clarke predicted.

The future has turned out to be much more human, mundane, troubled and earth-bound than Clarke and his generation expected.

Trailer

Credit

All references are to the 2011 reprint of the 1998 Orbit paperback edition of 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke, first published by Hutchinson in 1968.

Related links

Arthur C. Clarke reviews

  • Childhood’s End (1953) a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
  • A Fall of Moondust (1961) a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into galactic consciousness
  • Rendezvous With Rama (1973) it is 2031 and when an alien object, a cylinder 15 k wide by 50 k long, enters the solar system, and Commander Norton and the crew of Endeavour are sent to explore it

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same London of the future described in the Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love, then descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1932 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces down attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke – a thrilling tale of the Overlords who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention – in the near future – of the anti-death drugs and the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish’s Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe

1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard New York

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic

1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – in an England of the future which has been invaded and conquered by the Russians, a hopeless attempt to overthrow the occupiers is easily crushed
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s

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The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Gustave Flaubert (1874)

These images appear suddenly, as in flashes – outlined against the background of the night, like scarlet paintings executed upon ebony.

Saint Anthony

Saint Anthony also known as Anthony the Great (c. 251 to 356) was a Christian monk and visionary who reacted against the increasing acceptance and normalisation of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire by becoming, first an ascetic, and then rejecting social life altogether by going to live in the Egyptian desert, to fast and pray by himself, relying only on gifts of food from pilgrims and local villagers.

Rumours and legends spread about his simple life and holiness, and soon he gained a following. He is known to posterity because his contemporary, Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, wrote a long biography of him. For many years Anthony was credited as the founded of monasticism i.e. the idea that holy men should go and live in isolation from society, ideally in remote locations, to live simple lives and praise God – though modern scholars now know he was part of a widespread movement of religious puritans away from urban centres, which predated and accompanied him.

Athanasius’s biography describes how Anthony was tempted by the devil and by demons who appeared in numerous disguises, trying to seduce him with food and the pleasures of the flesh or, more subtly, trying to lure him into some of the heretical beliefs with which his age abounded.

Continually elaborated in the retelling, embellished with demons, naked women and weird monsters, the legend of the ‘Temptation of St Anthony’ went on to become a familiar subject in western art, inspiring lovingly grotesque depictions by the likes of Hieronymus Bosch and Mathias Grünewald.

The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Hieronymus Bosch

The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Hieronymus Bosch (1501)

In more modern times the Temptation was painted by Max Ernst and Salvador Dali, and was the subject of a symphony by the German composer Paul Hindemith (1934).

And it inspired this prose fantasia by Gustave Flaubert, published in 1874.

The mundane and the fantastic in Flaubert

As I’ve read through Flaubert I’ve realised his output can be very simply divided into two categories: the contemporary realist works (Madame Bovary, The Sentimental Education) and the exuberant historical fantasias (Salammbô, The Temptation of Saint Anthony).

In other words, alongside his painstaking attention to the detail of contemporary life, Flaubert was also fascinated and inspired by a wide range of historical and fantastical subjects. He had a long-running interest in the ancient world of the Mediterranean (an interest fuelled by his visits to Tunisia and Egypt) and a lifelong fascination with religion, all religions, ranging as far afield as Buddhism and Hinduism.

It is as if all the uncontrolled sexual, sadistic, fantastical and philosophical fantasies which Flaubert kept completely bottled up when creating the painstaking ‘realist’ novels, just had to erupt somewhere else – in the sustained cruelty of Salammbô and into the extended philosophical and psychological fantasia of Saint Anthony.

The problem of ‘evil’ in 19th century literature (i.e. it is boring)

Flaubert wrote three completely different versions of the Temptation (1849, 1856 and this one).

The long introduction to the Penguin paperback edition by Kitty Mrosovsky compares how the images and ideas changed in the three versions. She then goes on to quote the opinions of later French writers and critics, from Baudelaire through Valéry, from Sartre to Michel Foucault.

What becomes clear is that if you write about God and the devil, heaven and hell, being and nothingness, sex and sin, any number of critics will be able to impose their own critical schemas and obsessions on your text, and it can be turned into a Symbolist, Freudian, Modernist, Existentialist or Structuralist masterpiece, depending on which critic you’re reading.

In other words, modern texts on this kind of subject often turn out to be strangely empty.

Inner right wing of the Isenheim Altarpiece depicting the Temptation of St. Anthony by Matthias Grünewald (1512-1516)

Inner right wing of the Isenheim Altarpiece depicting the Temptation of St. Anthony by Matthias Grünewald (1512 to 1516)

Personally, I find the history of the late Roman Empire, the rise of Christianity and the efflorescence of its countless heresies, absolutely riveting. By contrast I often find the way secular ‘modern’ writers use this era and these ideas to spool out endless ruminations about the meaning of life, unutterably boring. Why?

I think the reason I like the history of the actual heresies – all those gnostics and Arians, the Adamites, Marcionians, Nicolaitans, Paternians, Archonites and so on – is that they are interesting in themselves, and they really mattered. There were riots, insurrections, people fought to the death about these beliefs and – arguably – the weakness of the Church in North Africa after centuries of bitter sectarian fighting made it easy for militant Islam to sweep across the region in the 7th century. This was of world-historical importance.

And the arcane Christological heresies of the 3rd or 4th centuries AD are interesting in themselves as thought-provoking explorations of the potential of Christian theology – was Christ a man? or a God? or half-man and half-God? Which half was which? Did God speak through him or were his words his own? Has the Son existed for all time, like God, or was he created at some later date i.e. is he equal to, or inferior to, God the Father? How can they be part of the same Substance when Jesus continually refers to ‘his Father’ as a distinct entity? And how does the Holy Spirit fit into each of these scenarios?

1. The long line of 19th century non-believing poets and writers who tackled issues of ‘sin’ and ‘damnation’ and ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ – from Byron via Baudelaire to Rimbaud and beyond – were just playing at being ‘damned poets’. There is no sense of risk in their work. The absolutely worst thing they could conceive of in their fictions, was suicide (which, when all is said and done, is just a personal psychological disorder), or murdering someone (just the one person) the subject of Dostoyevsky’s 500-page-long Crime and Punishment. Even the primevally wicked Mr Hyde only in fact murders one person. The worst thing most of these writers did, in practice, was sleep around and get drunk a lot.

In a sense the twentieth century made much 19th century literature redundant. The First World War went a long way towards (and then the Second World War, the Holocaust and the atom bomb, completed the work of) redefining forever the meaning of evil, despair, horror.

Agonising over one person’s soul seems, well, rather paltry in the light of the world we live in. (This is the reason I find the novels of Graham Greene, and their enormous obsession with the sinfulness or damnation of just one person, rather ludicrous.)

2. Also, no-one believes in Christianity any more. Not in a literal hell and damnation, not like they used to. In the Middle Ages the idea of damnation really mattered, psychologically: in Chaucer and Dante it is a real place, with real fire, and real demons skewering your tortured body. By the nineteenth century, in the hands of a dilettante like Byron, it is a fashion accessory, part of the pose of tormented genius.

The Temptation of Saint Anthony

The Temptation is divided into seven parts. It is written as if a play, with prose instructions describing the setting and goings-on (Opening words: ‘The setting is Thebaid, high on a mountain…’) while the dialogue of the ‘characters’ is given in dramatic format – the name, a colon, the speech.

It starts with Anthony outside his primitive hut in the desert at nightfall, and he proceeds to have a bewildering series of visions, some of which transport him to cities and palaces, where he encounters emperors and queens, and all manner of famous individuals such as the Queen of Sheba, Helen of Troy, the Buddha, the Greek gods and so on.

Right from the start Anthony – surprisingly – bemoans his lot, hates being alone, wonders whether he shouldn’t have followed another vocation, grumbles and complains in what, to be honest, is Flaubert’s awful, stagey dialogue.

Another day! another day gone!… What solitude! what weariness!… Ah! woe, woe is me! will this never end? Surely death were preferable! I can endure it no more! Enough! enough!… Assuredly there is no human being in a condition of such unutterable misery!… What shame for me! Alas! poor Anthony!… It is my own fault! I allow myself to be caught in every snare! No man could be more imbecile, more infamous!…

Since he doesn’t really do anything, we only know Anthony through his speech and his speech is hammy Victorian melodrama. As with the dialogue in Salammbô, every sentence seems to end in an exclamation mark but, paradoxically, the more exclamation marks he uses, the less dramatic (or interesting) the speech becomes, the more tiresome and simple-minded.

I found it impossible to take Anthony seriously as a character.

He stamps his foot upon the ground, and rushes frantically to and fro among the rocks; then pauses, out of breath, bursts into tears, and lies down upon the ground, on his side.

In fact, given the extravagant cast of characters, there is also surprisingly little drama, hardly any sense of conflict or threat, in the whole work. Anthony remains the same miserable moaner all the way through. There is no change or development, no sense of critical encounters or turning points or sudden revelations.

As I’ve read through Flaubert’s works I’ve become increasingly aware of the importance of Set Piece Scenes in his fiction. In a sense the Temptation is a reductio ad absurdam of this approach: it consists of nothing but an apparently endless series of set-piece encounters and scenes. This accounts for the highly static impression it makes on the reader.

One critic compares the entire book to the panoramas created by magic lanterns in the mid-nineteenth century. These enchanted their simpler audiences by projecting a series of images onto a flat wall. You can envisage the entire book as just such a series of slides.

The Temptation Of St Anthony by Joos van Craesbeeck

The Temptation of St Anthony by Joos van Craesbeeck (1650)

Part 1. Human frailty

We find Saint Anthony in front of his hut in the desert as the sun sets. The entire book takes place in the space of this one night, from dusk to dawn.

Anthony is moaning about his lot in life and wonders why he didn’t do almost anything else, become a soldier or a teacher. Almost continually his thoughts are interrupted by wolves prowling just outside the light of his torch, or by birds, by strange noises.

Personally, I found almost all the scenes involving Anthony off-putting because he comes across as so wet and feeble. As in Salammbô and the realist novels, I often found the quiet, descriptive passages the most enjoyable, the ones where Flaubert uses his extensive background reading in the period to depict ordinary life of the time. Here he is imagining the life of your ordinary Alexandrian merchant.

The merchants of Alexandria sail upon the river Canopus on holidays, and drink wine in the chalices of lotus-flowers, to a music of tambourines which makes the taverns along the shore tremble! Beyond, trees, made cone-shaped by pruning, protect the quiet farms against the wind of the south. The roof of the lofty house leans upon thin colonettes placed as closely together as the laths of a lattice; and through their interspaces the master, reclining upon his long couch, beholds his plains stretching about him – the hunter among the wheat-fields – the winepress where the vintage is being converted into wine, the oxen treading out the wheat. His children play upon the floor around him; his wife bends down to kiss him.

Anthony sees this vision because he himself is lonely and hungry. The local villagers used to come and give him food, now they’ve stopped. Anthony reminisces about his days back in the city, as a trainee monk, when he was invited by Athanasius to join a set piece debate against the Arians (a very popular type of Christian heresy). Then he sees visions –-‘ a stretch of water; then the figure of a prostitute; the corner of a temple, a soldier; a chariot with two white horses, prancing’, then he faints.

Part 2. The Seven Deadly Sins

Out of the darkness comes the Devil, like a huge vampire bat, and under its wings are suckling the Seven Deadly Sins. It is a disappointment, then, that this ominous creature doesn’t speak. Instead Anthony hallucinates that his mat is a boat, rocking on a river, floating past the temple of Serapis.

Papyrus-leaves and the red flowers of the nymphæa, larger than the body of a man, bend over him. He is lying at the bottom of the boat; one oar at the stem, drags in the water. From time to time, a lukewarm wind blows; and the slender reeds rub one against the other, and rustle. Then the sobbing of the wavelets becomes indistinct. A heavy drowsiness falls upon him. He dreams that he is a Solitary of Egypt.

I like passages like this, clips or little scenelets of vivid description. When Anthony wakes the Devil has, apparently, disappeared – very disappointing. Anthony finds a husk of bread and his jug empty and this prompts a vivid hallucination of a great banqueting table set for a feast, replete with intoxicating sights and smells.

Then many things appear which he has never seen before – black hashes, jellies, the colour of gold, ragouts in which mushrooms float like nenuphars upon ponds, dishes of whipped cream light as clouds.

It was only the notes which explained to me that what now follows is a sequence in which Anthony hallucinates each of the Seven Deadly Sins in turn. This one represented the Sin of Gluttony. As in a hallucination the food morphs into lips and then into one loaf on a table which now stretches to right in front of his face. He pushes it away and it vanishes.

Then Anthony stumbles over something underfoot, which turns into money, lots of money, a crown, precious jewels.

As water streams overflowing from the basin of a fountain, so diamonds, carbuncles, and sapphires, all mingled with broad pieces of gold bearing the effigies of Kings, overflow from the cup in never ceasing streams, to form a glittering hillock upon the sand…

It is the Sin of Avarice. As he throws himself upon the pile it vanishes. He trembles in the knowledge that, had he died in the middle of succumbing to any of these temptations, he would have gone to hell.

Now the scene completely changes and Anthony thinks he sees a panoramic overview of the city of Alexandria. In style this is identical to the numerous panoramic overviews of Carthage which Flaubert gave us in Salammbô. He sees crowds of vengeful monks pouring through the streets, seeking out their heretical opponents, the Arians, and then Anthony suddenly sees himself to be one of them, bursting into the houses of the heretics, burning their books, torturing and eviscerating them, wading up to his knees in the heretics’ blood!

And the blood gushes to the ceilings, falls back upon the walls like sheets of rain, streams from the trunks of decapitated corpses, fills the aqueducts, forms huge red pools upon the ground. Anthony is up to his knees in it. He wades in it; he sucks up the blood-spray on his lips; he is thrilled with joy as he feels it upon his limbs, under his hair-tunic which is soaked through with it.

This is the Sin of Wrath.

Next the scene morphs to a Roman city (which I deduce is the newish capital of the Roman Empire, Constantinople) and Anthony finds himself ushered through countless rooms in a grand palace, past armed guards to arrive in the presence of the Emperor. This painted, dazzling personage treats him as an equal, discusses politics and religion with him and places his imperial diadem on Anthony’s brow. He is taken out into the balcony overlooking the Hippodrome where the great chariot races are held, walking past prison cells in which are imprisoned his theological enemies, the Arians, grovelling and begging hur hur hur. The Sin of Pride.

Then the scene morphs into the throne room of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon 600 BC, a long banqueting table, and crawling in the dirt all the kings Nebuchadnezzar has defeated, whose hands and feet have been cut off. A little way off sit the king’s brothers, all of whom have been blinded. As in Salammbô the reader becomes aware of Flaubert’s oppressive interest in sadism and cruelty. Anthony enters the mind of the king of kings and is immediately drenched in feelings of lust and cruelty. He climbs on the table and bellows like a bull and then…

Comes to himself. He is alone in front of his hut. He picks up his whip and flagellates himself, enjoying the pain, the tearing of his rebellious flesh, whereupon…

He sees men riding on onagers (a kind of Asiatic wild ass) and then a procession of camels and horses and then a white elephant with a golden net and waving peacock feathers, which bears the Queen of Sheba. The elephant kneels, the queen slides down its trunk onto a precious carpet laid out by her slaves and she greets Anthony. As with Salammbô, there is in these scenes an excess of description over psychology or character.

Her robe of gold brocade, regularly divided by furbelows of pearls, of jet, and of sapphires, sheaths her figure closely with its tight-fitting bodice, set off by coloured designs representing the twelve signs of the Zodiac.

She wears very high pattens – one of which is black, and sprinkled with silver stars, with a moon crescent; the other, which is white, is sprinkled with a spray of gold, with a golden sun in the middle. Her wide sleeves, decorated with emeralds and bird-plumes, leave exposed her little round bare arms, clasped at the wrist by ebony bracelets; and her hands, loaded with precious rings, are terminated by nails so sharply pointed that the ends of her fingers seem almost like needles.

A chain of dead gold, passing under her chin, is caught up on either side of her face, and spirally coiled about her coiffure, whence, redescending, it grazes her shoulders and is attached upon her bosom to a diamond scorpion, which protrudes a jewelled tongue between her breasts. Two immense blond pearls depend heavily from her ears. The borders of her eyelids are painted black.

And she claims they have been searching the wilderness for him and, now they have found him, she will marry him and worship him and anoint him and caress him. There is a great deal of Miltonic description of the riches and luxuries from far-flung exotic places which she can offer him, but then it focuses down to the pleasure of her body, which sums up a whole world of desire. The Sin of Lust.

I am not a woman: I am a world!

But Anthony stands firm and after flirting with him some more, she turns on her heel, remounts her elephant and departs along with all her servants, laughing, mocking him.

Part 3. Hilarion (11 pages)

A small child appears. Going up to him Anthony recognises the face of his one-time disciple, Hilarion, long since departed for Palestine. This phantasmal Hilarion sets about systematically undermining Anthony’s faith:

  • he criticises Anthony’s teacher, Athanasius, pointing out his theological errors
  • he says Anthony’s mortification is pointless since many heretics do just the same
  • Jesus went cheerfully about his ministry, mixing with people, talking, teaching, unlike misanthropic Anthony
  • when Anthony points to the Scriptures as the basis of faith, Hilarion immediately rattles off a list of the inconsistencies in the Gospel accounts of Jesus
The Temptation of St. Anthony by David Teniers the Younger (1647)

The Temptation of St. Anthony by David Teniers the Younger (1647)

Part 4. The Heresiarchs and the circus victims (60 pages)

The heresiarchs

Hilarion ushers Anthony into a vast basilica full of people who turn out to be a collection of all the founders of heresies, all the rival theologians and preachers and mystic, the Gnostics and neo-Platonics and religious thinkers, of his time. This is quite a long list and, as most of them only get a sentence or so designed to baffle and demoralise Anthony, it is very difficult from Flaubert’s text alone to properly understand their deviant beliefs.

After all these years I still recommend Paul Johnson’s excellent History of Christianity (1977), whose long second chapter is devoted to a detailed exposition of the Christian heresies which exploded around the Mediterranean and caused outrage, riots and even wars (when different candidates for emperor adopted opposing theologies) until well into the 8th century.

Thus Anthony meets in quick succession the heresiarchs Mani, Saturninus, Cerdo, St Clement of Alexandria, Bardesanes, the Herbians, the Priscillianists, Valentine, Origen, the Elkhasaites, the Carpocratians, the Nicolaitans, the Marcosians, the Helvidians, the Messalians, the Paternians, Aetius, Tertullian, Priscilla, Maximilla, Montanus, the Archontics, the Tatianians, the Valesians, the Cainites, the Circumcellions, Arius. Pandemonium breaks out:

The Audians shoot arrows against the Devil; the Collyridians throw blue cloths toward the roof; the Ascites prostrate themselves before a waterskin; the Marcionites baptise a dead man with oil. A woman, standing near Appelles, exhibits a round loaf within a bottle, in order the better to explain her idea. Another, standing in the midst of an assembly of Sampseans distributes, as a sacrament, the dust of her own sandals. Upon the rose-strewn bed of the Marcosians, two lovers embrace. The Circumcellionites slaughter one another; the Valesians utter the death-rattle; Bardesanes sings; Carpocras dances; Maximilla and Priscilla moan; and the false prophetess of Cappadocia, completely naked, leaning upon a lion, and brandishing three torches, shrieks the Terrible Invocation.

As you can see, this glorified list is more a goldmine for editors and annotators than any kind of pleasure for readers. Indeed, the Penguin edition has 47 pages of notes giving you fascinating facts on almost every one of the characters and places mentioned in the text. But if you read it as text alone, all these names quickly blur.

This long section about heretics makes clearer than ever the fact that Flaubert has the mentality of an encyclopedist, a compiler of dictionaries. He boasted to friends about the hundreds of history books he read as research for both Salammbô and Anthony and boy does it show.

Flaubert cuts and pastes together the results to produce scenes packed with exotic names, but almost always without any life or psychology and, as here, disappointingly uninformative. The controversies about the precise meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion which racked the early church are riveting because there was so much to play for; they were political as well as theological arguments, because different sects seized control of entire Roman provinces, Roman emperors disinherited their own children or fought opponents because they espoused divergent beliefs.

Flaubert manages to drain this exciting and complex historical and theological subject of all interest and turn it into a procession of cardboard mouthpieces, who all sound the same.

Following Arius, the chapter continues with a paragraph or so from: Sabellius, the Valentinians, the Sethians, the Theodotians, the Merinthians, the Apollinarists, Marcellus of Ancyra, Pope Calixtus, Methodius, Cerinthus, Paul of Samosata, Hermogenes, the Cerinthians, the Marcosians, the Encratites, the Cainites, the Old Ebionites, Eusebius of Caesarea, Marcellina…

The ceremony of the Orphites

Anthony is then taken through a door into a dark shrine where he witnesses a ceremony of the Orphites, who worshipped the snake, the serpent in the Eden story, believing it to be the true saviour. Their chanting awakens a monstrously huge python which they handle and twine around themselves as they hold a blasphemous eucharist.

Christians being thrown to the lions

Exhausted with horror at the sheer number of heresies, Anthony falls to the floor and is immediately back in the dust in front of his humble hut. Time passes and a new hallucination begins. He is in a dark room, a prison cell, among other wretches. Outside it is sunny, he hears the roar of a crowd, the sound of lions and has a vision of the arena, tier after tier of seats. He is among Christians about to be thrown to the lions.

Various characters explain why they’re there (interrupting pagan rites, burning down temples, refusing to worship pagan gods) and explore their plight: an Old Man lamenting he didn’t escape, a Young Man bewailing the lost years, a Consoler saying a miracle might happen. The idea (apparently) is to disillusion Anthony by showing him the mean motives, the backsliding and lack of faith of the so-called ‘martyrs’. The portcullis on the other side of the arena opens and out lope lazy lions, panthers, leopards, and then the martyrs’ door opens and the gaoler whips the weeping Christians out into the sand…

In the cemetery

And Anthony awakes, dazed, looks around him, then.. falls into another dream. He is in a cemetery where he meets veiled women lamenting the deaths of their husbands, sons or how they themselves were condemned as Christians and persecuted, and then… as they bow and pray together, eat together, their robes slip open and their mouths join and.. I think they have an orgy – presumably the Devil’s intention is to show him the lack of faith and the easy lasciviousness of the widows of the faithful. This scene fades out and…

The Hindu sage

Anthony is at the edge of a tropical forest, with parrots and lizards. On a pyre squats a shrivelled man wearing a necklace of shells and with a bird’s nest built in his long matted hair. He is ‘the Gymnosophist’, a Hindu sage. This wizened figure repeats basic Hindu teachings about reincarnation, about striving to reach purity so as not to fall into corruption. Then his pyre bursts into flames and he is burnt alive without a sound.

Simon Magus and Helen of Troy

Anthony tramples out the flames and it is dark again. Then through a cleft in the rocks comes a voice followed by a white-haired old man leading a young girl with bite marks on her face and bruises on her arm. It emerges that he is Simon Magus, a magician of the first century mentioned in the Gospels. He claims to be the reincarnation of God and that the woman with him is his ‘First Thought’ or Ennoia, who has been reincarnated through the ages, at one point in the body of the legendary Helen of Troy, before he rescued from her work in a brothel in Tyre. Simon shakes the pot he’s carrying which has a live flame at the top, but the flame shivers and goes out and a great smoke or fog fills the stage.

Apollonius of Tyana

Anthony stumbles though the fog to discover Simon and Helen are gone. Now through the fog come a pair of men, one tall and lordly like Christ, the other a short servant. It is Apollonius of Tyana, the sage or thaumaturge, and his servant Dimas. Apollonius declaims grandly. As so often with Flaubert, the reader gets the sense that the author is more interested, intoxicated even, by lists of grand, exotic-sounding and remote peoples and places – than by any kind of sense or logic. Thus Apollonius:

I have conversed with the Samaneans of the Ganges, with the astrologers of Chaldea, with the magi of Babylon, with the Gaulish Druids, with the priests of the negroes! I have ascended the fourteen Olympii; I have sounded the Scythian lakes; I have measured the breadth of the Desert!…

But first I had visited the Hyrcanian Sea; I made the tour of it; and descending by way of the country of the Baraomati, where Bucephalus is buried, I approached the city of Nineveh….

At Taxilla, the capital of five thousand fortresses, Phraortes, King of the Ganges, showed us his guard of black men, whose stature was five cubits, and under a pavilion of green brocade in his gardens, an enormous elephant, which the queens amused themselves by perfuming. It was the elephant of Porus which had taken flight after the death of Alexander….

Upon the shores of the sea we met with the milk-gorged Cynocephali, who were returning from their expedition to the Island Taprobana…

So we returned through the Region of Aromatics, by way of the country of the Gangarides, the promontory of Comaria, the country of the Sachalites, of the Adramites and of the Homerites; then, across the Cassanian mountains, the Red Sea, and the Island Topazos, we penetrated into Ethiopia through the country of the Pygmies…

I have penetrated into the cave of Trophonius, son of Apollo! I have kneaded for Syracusan women the cakes which they carry to the mountains. I have endured the eighty tests of Mithra! I have pressed to my heart the serpent of Sabasius! I have received the scarf of Kabiri! I have laved Cybele in the waters of the Campanian gulfs! and I have passed three moons in the caverns of Samothracia!

And so on. There is not a trace of drama, character, psychology, theology or philosophy in sight. This is quite transparently just a litany of resonant names. Apollonius and Dimas step backwards off a cliff and remain suspended in the air, like Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons, before ascending slowly into the black night sky.

The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Félicien Rops (1878)

The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Félicien Rops (1878)

Part 5. The pagan gods and goddesses (42 pages)

Another long chapter in which Anthony meets what amounts to a list of all the pagan gods and goddesses, each of them given – as we’ve become used to – a few sentences or a paragraph in which to show off Flaubert’s erudition and wide reading, before handing on to the next one.

In fact it starts off with a parade of pre-pagan gods, the blocks of wood or stone which original humans worshipped. Anthony and Hilarion mock the stupidity of the men who worshiped these clods. Then detours (unexpectedly) to a quick review of the original Hindu gods and of the Buddha, who tells the story of his life. The purpose of this temptation is that, as each of these entities tells its story, Hilarion (like a mini-devil) chips in to point out that this or that aspect of their worship is really no different from Christian belief or practice; it is designed to erode Christianity’s claims to uniqueness.

We have appearances from the Buddha, Oanna (of the Chaldeans), the gods of ancient Babylon and their temple prostitutes, Ormuz god of the Persians, the Great Diana of Ephesus with her three rows of breasts.

Cybele’s priests sacrifice a sheep and spatter Anthony and Hilarion with the blood, Atys who in a frenzy castrates himself as do his priests, we see the funeral of Adonis, killed by the boar, and the lamentation of Persephone, Isis suckling her babe and lamenting the death and dismemberment of Osiris.

Anthony is racked with sadness that so many souls have been lost worshiping these false gods; but sly Hilarion points out that so many aspects of the gods or their worship echo the True Religion, seeking to undermine Anthony’s belief.

Now he and Anthony see a vast mountain with Olympus on its height and witness the pantheon of Greek gods, one by one lamenting their decline and fall: Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Hercules, Pluto, Neptune, Mars, Vulcan, one by one they lament the loss of their powers and the end of their worship, before going tumbling down into a black abyss.

The lament of Osiris for her lost lover, and the sorrow of the Greek gods are the only pages in the book which I found moving enough to reread and savour. In it we can hear the voice of Flaubert, who from his schooldays believed he lived in a fallen world of stupidity and vulgarity. Hence the words he puts into dying Jupiter’s mouth:

‘Eagle of apotheoses, what wind from Erebus has wafted thee to me? or, fleeing from the Campus Martins, dost thou bear me the soul of the last of the Emperors? – I no longer desire to receive those of men. Let the Earth keep them; and let them move upon the level of its baseness. Their hearts are now the hearts of slaves; – they forget injuries, forget their ancestors, forget their oaths – and everywhere the mob’s imbecility, the mediocrity of individuals, the hideousness of every race, hold sway!

Latterly go the household gods, those minor deities who gave grace and dignity to all aspects of daily life in ancient Rome, who laid the bride in her bed, tended at childbirth, at sickness, at feasts, during illness. All scorned, ignored and gone. Finally – surprisingly – a page is devoted to Jehovah, the god of the Old Testament, himself rejected and abused, his followers – the Jews – scorned and scattered over the earth.

It was a struggle to read the previous chapters, but these long laments of the dying pagan gods and the imaginative grace and nobility they brought to everyday life is, I think, genuinely moving. For the first time the text stirred, for me, as actual literature instead of a list of gaudy names.

Part 6. The Devil (8 pages)

Hilarion gives way to the Devil himself who chucks Anthony onto his horns and carries him up, up and away, through the sky, into space, up to the moon, beyond the solar system, into the realm of the stars, all the time explaining that: a) that the universe is infinite, nothing like the earth-centred structure of the ancient Greeks or Jews, b) while giving him a compelling lecture on theology (the only theology in the text), explaining in a dry logical, professorial manner the unbounded infinitude and one substance of God.

God has no imperfections, God has no passions, God doesn’t worry or fret about his creatures, he is vastly beyond the momentary whims of man, his is as extended, infinite and integral as the universe. BUT the corollary of this is that He doesn’t listen to prayers and hear the sobs and hopes of his countless creations. He is infinitely remote, completely Perfect, utterly indifferent. (According to the notes, this is a summary of the philosophical pantheism of Spinoza.)

The point is that the Devil’s fluent and vast philosophising leads up to the terrifyingly logical conclusion:

Adore me, then! – and curse the phantom thou callest God!

On some instinct Anthony, despite being overwhelmed by this vision of the universe and the Devil’s compelling logic, lifts his eyes as if to pray. The Devil drops him in disgust.

Part 7 (20 pages)

Anthony regains consciousness by the cliff edge. It crosses his mind to end it all by simply rolling over it and falling to his death. This final chapter is in three parts:

1. He is approached by a wizened old woman and a nubile young woman. One argues the case for suicide, the other urges him to embrace life. Slowly it becomes clear they are Death and Lust, respectively. He dismisses them and is confronted by:

2. The Chimera and the Sphinx. The former attracts men towards pointless delusions, the latter devours seekers after God. They squabble and argue until the Sphinx sinks into the sand and the Chimaera goes swooping off in pointless circles.

3. Their argument morphs into the most genuinely surreal and hallucinatory section in the text, where Flaubert creates a parade of the strangest creatures or human-beasts he has come across in all his reading of myths and legends. These include:

  • the Astomi, humans who are completely transparent
  • the Nisnas, who have only one eye, one cheek, one hand, one leg, half a body, half a heart
  • the Blemmyes who have no head at all
  • the Pygmies
  • the Sciapods, who live with their heads and bodies in the earth, only the soles of their feet and legs showing
  • the Cynocephali, men with the heads of dogs who fly through trees in great forests,
  • the Sadhuzag, who has seventy-four antlers which the wind blows through to make beautiful sounds
  • the Martichoras, a gigantic red lion, with human face, and three rows of teeth
  • the Catoblepas, a black buffalo with a pig’s head, falling to the ground, and attached to his shoulders by a neck long, thin, and flaccid as an empty gut
  • the Basilisk, a great violet serpent, with trilobate crest, and two fangs, one above, one below
  • the Griffin, a lion with a vulture’s beak, and white wings, red paws and blue neck

And then there is a terrifying outpouring of Life in a profusion of forms:

And all manner of frightful creatures arise: – The Tragelaphus, half deer, half ox; the Myrmecoles, lion before and ant behind, whose genitals are set reversely; the python Askar, sixty cubits long, that terrified Moses; the huge weasel Pastinaca, that kills the trees with her odour; the Presteros, that makes those who touch it imbecile; the Mirag, a horned hare, that dwells in the islands of the sea. The leopard Phalmant bursts his belly by roaring; the triple-headed bear Senad tears her young by licking them with her tongue; the dog Cepus pours out the blue milk of her teats upon the rocks.

Mosquitoes begin to hum, toads commence to leap; serpents hiss. Lightnings flicker. Hail falls.
Then come gusts, bearing with them marvellous anatomies: – Heads of alligators with hoofs of deer; owls with serpent tails; swine with tiger-muzzles; goats with the crupper of an ass; frogs hairy as bears; chameleons huge as hippopotami; calves with two heads, one bellowing, the other weeping; winged bellies flitting hither and thither like gnats.

They rain from the sky, they rise from the earth, they pour from the rocks; everywhere eyes flame, mouths roar, breasts bulge, claws are extended, teeth gnash, flesh clacks against flesh. Some crouch; some devour each other at a mouthful.

Suffocating under their own numbers, multiplying by their own contact, they climb over one another; and move about Anthony with a surging motion as though the ground were the deck of a ship. He feels the trail of snails upon the calves of his legs, the chilliness of vipers upon his hands: – and spiders spinning about him enclose him within their network.

Finally, in this endless chain of evolutions and transformations, animals turn into insects, flowers turn into rocks, beasts turn to crystal, ice pullulates with life, it is a wild hallucination of the pantheistic vision of life in all things

And now the vegetables are no longer distinguishable from the animals. Polyparies that seem like trees, have arms upon their branches. Anthony thinks he sees a caterpillar between two leaves: it is a butterfly that takes flight. He is about to step on a pebble: a grey locust leaps away. One shrub is bedecked with insects that look like petals of roses; fragments of ephemerides form a snowy layer upon the soil.

And then the plants become confounded with the stones. Flints assume the likeness of brains; stalactites of breasts; the flower of iron resembles a figured tapestry.

He sees efflorescences in fragments of ice, imprints of shrubs and shells—yet so that one cannot detect whether they be imprints only, or the things themselves. Diamonds gleam like eyes; metals palpitate.

His vision narrows right down onto ants, onto the tiniest creatures, onto organisms no bigger than pinheads, furred with cilia and quivering with primordial life. Anthony has seen the origins of life and evolution in reverse, and he bursts out:

‘O joy! O bliss! I have beheld the birth of life! I have seen the beginning of motion! My pulses throb even to the point of bursting! I long to fly, to swim, to bark, to bellow, to howl! Would that I had wings, a carapace, a shell – that I could breathe out smoke, wield a trunk – make my body writhe – divide myself everywhere – be in everything – emanate with odours – develop myself like the plants – flow like water – vibrate like sound – shine like light, squatting upon all forms – penetrate each atom – descend to the very bottom of matter – be matter itself!

And then:

Day at last appears, and, like the raised curtains of a tabernacle, golden clouds furling into larger scrolls unveil the sky.

There in the middle, inside the very disk of the sun, radiates the face of Jesus Christ.

Anthony makes the sign of the cross and returns to his prayers.

Conclusion

Now, either Anthony has learned something definitive in the course of this long, busy night, and Flaubert intends this final outcry, apparently in praise of a kind of pantheistic materialism, as the climax and ‘message’ of the piece (which is very much how it feels when you read it)…

Or the ending has a more pessimistic meaning: namely that the return to his prayers signals a return to the same rut, the same wheel, and that the next night the whole thing will repeat itself all over again. I.e. he is caught like a Beckett character in an endless, pointless cycle of torment and fake wisdom.

I could see that both of these are possibilities but I am happy to leave my reading of the ending completely open because I was just so relieved to get to the end of this long, dense, almost unreadable fantasia of cuttings and notes transmuted into a bizarre sequence of sometimes unbearably tedious scenes.

The only moving part of the whole book is the Lament of the Pagan Gods – where the scenario of each of the gods in turn lamenting the decline of their worship and the end of their influence for once was adequate to the feeling of world sadness Flaubert is obviously aiming at.

Also, the final few pages, the almost hysterical hallucination of the very origins of life, are also head-spinningly delirious. But most if it felt like I was at the dentist having a filling.

The Temptation of St. Anthony by Salvador Dali (1946)

The Temptation of St. Anthony by Salvador Dali (1946)

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by Simon on March 6, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in Christianity, France, French literature, Novel, Translation
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Posted by Simon on March 6, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/03/06/the-temptation-of-saint-anthony-gustave-flaubert/