+
Selected essays of an Epicurean
Reactions to the written word can be extraordinarily diverse and startling. I have been taken aback by replies to e-mails I have sent, for instance. Critical evaluations of literature often tell you more about the critic than the text. Judgements about irony, sarcasm, sentimentality and so forth are quite subjective. I find that one’s reactions to a piece can alter, according to time, place and mood, or, even more intriguing, one can hold two different feelings about a writer simultaneously.
I was interested to note in Anthony Head’s excellent introduction that the poet John Wain judged one of L. Powys’s books to be the ‘corniest’ book he had ever read. I can empathise with that reaction, and had a streak of that judgement as I read some of the essays collected in the book. L. Powys tries hard to tug the heart strings, and waxes eloquent in a florid, almost Euphuistic style at times. One could easily parody and satirise his writing.
However, more strongly, I felt a personal closeness to the experiences of the author and the views he expresses. For one, he lived in Africa for five years, somewhat paralleling my own decade or so living in Zambia in my childhood. He also has an abiding love of the culture and nature of the English countryside, which I share, though bowing to his much greater knowledge and experience. His reverse Pilgrim’s progress away from what he sees as the syrupy delusions of conventional Christianity, has many points of contact with my own philosophical journey. The debilitating and serious disease he suffered from finds a kinship in my heart, given my own medical problems. Lastly, his love of Laurence Sterne’s ‘Tristram Shandy’ and of the beauty of the stars are big recommendations for me too.
Head has made a judicious selection, covering many topics and the broad sweep of his life, in Dorset, the USA, East Africa and Switzerland; only one of which I have read before – ‘Bat’s Head’. The first essay ‘A struggle for life’ introduces us to the central tragedy of his life, his contraction of pulmonary tuberculosis, diagnosed when he was only 25 years old. This damaged the rest of his life, eventually killing him, but did not hold him back from enjoying his time on earth to the full. This essay is written in an unsentimental and un-self-pitying way, that is admirable.
The four essays on aspects of his life in Africa are vivid, but reveal a colonial callousness. He shoots leopard and hippo without any compunction, all the more surprising given his otherwise tender nature, and the later essays ‘Christian Fingers’ and ‘Barbarians’, in which he criticises hunting and cruelty to animals.
His time in America seemed to have sparked little creative writing, though he mentions a striking image of him sleeping on the roof of buildings in New York, looking up at the night sky, and waking covered with light snow.
The philosophical essays appealed particularly, though I find his attitude to religion inconsistent and unstable. He often refers to God, admires aspects of Christian culture and expresses sentiments close to conventional religious opinions, yet he professes himself an atheist at other points. In the essay ‘The Epicurean Vision’, he declares his adherence to a joyful, sturdy enjoyment of the simple physical pleasures of life. He criticises ‘Christians at prayer’ as ‘obsequious’, ‘sycophantic’ and ‘craven, unhealthy, neurotic’. Strong words! He dislikes the creed of the church in trying to discredit life upon earth, with all its talk of absurd Trinities, fables about ascensions, dead men rising from the grave and a focus on a mythical heaven. Powys follows the teachings of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, wanting us to look at the world we live in now, to make the best of it, with unfaltering loyalty to our senses. He urges us to “enjoy our hour of sunshine”.
Powys’s philosophy of life is expressed even more eloquently in ‘The Aebi Wood’. He stared at this green wood for many hours from the balcony of his sanatorium in Switzerland, and is came to symbolise the immediacy of the physical life and world we inhabit. He writes “Make no doubt of it, it is matter that matters. In all else there is mirage, man himself, for all his vaunts, being but a cheap and accidental phantom of cleaver clay. There may well be other dimensions, but in so far as we allow the suspicion of their existence to dim our worship of what is, we suffer ourselves to be entangled in a cloud-net of folly. Our paradise, our hells, are here and now, we shall see no other.”
His most powerful chapter is ‘Reflections of a Dying Man’. Somebody suffering from worsening Tuberculosis, with no cure in sight, has a right to record such reflections, I don’t find this passage ‘corny’. It is unblinking and objective, rejecting easy solutions, recognising mankind is blessed with self-knowledge “on a rainbow planet that is tumbling through a physical universe of inconceivable dimensions”. He preaches joy in what we have, and an admirable stoicism: “It is by the rarest chance that we have ever lived, and does it then become us to grudge when the hour arrives for us to walk the way of all nature? Surely to look at the sunlight for the last time should rather be an occasion for the trembling of our marrow bones with gratitude.”
Sunday, 30 January 2011
So lovely a country will never perish, by Donald Keene
+
Japanese wartime diaries
It is often not felicitous when you are given books by friends, but this was an exception. Once I started reading these extracts and commentaries on diaries of Japanese writers during the Second World War, I was rapidly drawn in. It may have had extra resonance for me, due to my close personal connections with Japan, but I think it would widen and deepen anyone’s understanding of history.
Donald Keene, a renowned scholar of Japan, has read, edited and selected from the diaries of prominent Japanese writers, who recorded their thoughts and events during and immediately after the war. This is history as experienced first-hand by individuals, not from tendentious text books. The diaries reveal the raw thoughts and emotions of our (former) enemies – though admittedly not those who fought in the front line. But these men (mainly men) had experiences being bombed and working in some overseas territories. It occurred to me that all school children should read history written by our enemies, not those written by our own side, especially those blessed by our own governments.
The diarists from which Keene quotes were all novelists, poets or literary figures of some fame. They naturally experience the war differently and interpret events differently. They are swept along by the euphoria of success in 1941-42, and are scorched by the defeats and humiliations of 1943-47. It is sobering to see how the zeitgeist, public opinion, rumours, military lies and government propaganda have a large influence on their thinking. It is even more sobering to reflect that such large-scale influences impinged and still impinge on all of us – such as the way the USA and Britain were swept into war with Iraq.
I have to confess that there were not sufficient markers for me to distinguish between the different writers. Unfortunately they blended into one self-contradictory voice for me. Maybe symbols in the margins would help, as Pullman uses in ‘The subtle knife’?
We peep into the minds of these diarists through the choices that Donald Keene has made for us. So one may pause to wonder how representative they are. It is a question of trust, and I give him that trust. By inserting some personal information about his own war experiences, such as his interviewing of Japanese prisoners of war, and his landing on Okinawa, we can perceive that he is a sympathetic and balanced commentator. Anyway, his distillation of these various diaries are something I have read and enjoyed, whereas it is unlikely that I would ever have had the chance or inclination to read the whole of each of the diaries. Even with diaries, we often have to encounter them at one remove.
Japanese wartime diaries
It is often not felicitous when you are given books by friends, but this was an exception. Once I started reading these extracts and commentaries on diaries of Japanese writers during the Second World War, I was rapidly drawn in. It may have had extra resonance for me, due to my close personal connections with Japan, but I think it would widen and deepen anyone’s understanding of history.
Donald Keene, a renowned scholar of Japan, has read, edited and selected from the diaries of prominent Japanese writers, who recorded their thoughts and events during and immediately after the war. This is history as experienced first-hand by individuals, not from tendentious text books. The diaries reveal the raw thoughts and emotions of our (former) enemies – though admittedly not those who fought in the front line. But these men (mainly men) had experiences being bombed and working in some overseas territories. It occurred to me that all school children should read history written by our enemies, not those written by our own side, especially those blessed by our own governments.
The diarists from which Keene quotes were all novelists, poets or literary figures of some fame. They naturally experience the war differently and interpret events differently. They are swept along by the euphoria of success in 1941-42, and are scorched by the defeats and humiliations of 1943-47. It is sobering to see how the zeitgeist, public opinion, rumours, military lies and government propaganda have a large influence on their thinking. It is even more sobering to reflect that such large-scale influences impinged and still impinge on all of us – such as the way the USA and Britain were swept into war with Iraq.
I have to confess that there were not sufficient markers for me to distinguish between the different writers. Unfortunately they blended into one self-contradictory voice for me. Maybe symbols in the margins would help, as Pullman uses in ‘The subtle knife’?
We peep into the minds of these diarists through the choices that Donald Keene has made for us. So one may pause to wonder how representative they are. It is a question of trust, and I give him that trust. By inserting some personal information about his own war experiences, such as his interviewing of Japanese prisoners of war, and his landing on Okinawa, we can perceive that he is a sympathetic and balanced commentator. Anyway, his distillation of these various diaries are something I have read and enjoyed, whereas it is unlikely that I would ever have had the chance or inclination to read the whole of each of the diaries. Even with diaries, we often have to encounter them at one remove.
The bed of Procrustes, by Nassim Taleb
+
Philosophical and practical aphorisms
This elegant little hardback is Taleb’s latest publication (2010). It contains thoughts that carry straight on from his arguments in ‘Fooled by randomness’ and ‘The Black Swan’. Instead of a narrative and argument in a full book, he presents us with his private almost-poetry. We are given a series of aphorisms, well spaced out, only four or five to a page. This slows us down and persuades us to pause to think about each cluster of words.
The aphorisms are generally witty and designed to provoke a fresh perspective. They do not have the frivolity of Oscar Wilde, and do not achieve his level of charming, mischievous humour. They are certainly often wise and counter-intuitive, shaking us out of a conventional, shallow view of our modern world. Some structure is given by clustering them in chapters, revealing the preoccupations with which his readers will already be familiar. For instance, there is a chapter called ‘Fooled by Randomness’, one on ‘The scandal of prediction’ and one on ‘Robustness and fragility’.
Taleb is a wise man, and well worth listening to. His erudition and originality are on full display. Here are samples to give you a flavour:
“The calamity of the information age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits.”
“Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way round.”
“You can only convince people who think they can benefit from being convinced.”
“English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence towards the temporarily powerful) and arrogant down (directed at the small guy).”
“To understand the liberating effect of asceticism, consider that losing all your fortune is much less painful than losing only half of it.”
“Suckers think that you can cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists and debt crises with debt spending.”
You may notice that he blends a wide vocabulary with American idioms such as ‘Guy’ and ‘Sucker’, which lends a disconcerting instability to his voice. But he generally achieves the balance of an epigrammatic style, and there is an immediate impact for most of his aphorisms, plus an added sequence of afterthoughts, akin to the sensation of a perfume.
I remain a fan of Mr Taleb, and would urge others to read this book too. However I have a complaint that must be articulated. This may sound like an ‘ad hominem’ attack. I agree that the ‘ad hominem’ riposte of questioning a man’s motives or qualifications for saying something is inadmissible in civilised argument. His book is not an argued case, but much closer to a literary work, hence I believe this complaint is valid.
The author has made a lot of money trading options, and more recently from the sales of his books. Fine, and the best of luck to him. Possibly he is the beneficiary of randomness, as he may admit. Now he sets himself up as a philosopher and part poet. He has valuable things to say, but (and here is my complaint) he adopts a sneering tone against the majority of humanity, believing himself as someone much superior in understanding and heroism. I find it hard to stomach his long stream of aphorisms despising those having to work – which is the majority of us. Hence he shows a lack of respect for the readers.
“Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working.”
“There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment.”
“Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave better by convincing him that he is an employee.”
And so on. Mr Taleb has revealed too much of his nasty side, diminishing himself. While he sits on his millions in Treasury Bills, I can do without the sound of him snickering as I trudge off to earn an honest penny. Where is his heroism in this attitude?
Philosophical and practical aphorisms
This elegant little hardback is Taleb’s latest publication (2010). It contains thoughts that carry straight on from his arguments in ‘Fooled by randomness’ and ‘The Black Swan’. Instead of a narrative and argument in a full book, he presents us with his private almost-poetry. We are given a series of aphorisms, well spaced out, only four or five to a page. This slows us down and persuades us to pause to think about each cluster of words.
The aphorisms are generally witty and designed to provoke a fresh perspective. They do not have the frivolity of Oscar Wilde, and do not achieve his level of charming, mischievous humour. They are certainly often wise and counter-intuitive, shaking us out of a conventional, shallow view of our modern world. Some structure is given by clustering them in chapters, revealing the preoccupations with which his readers will already be familiar. For instance, there is a chapter called ‘Fooled by Randomness’, one on ‘The scandal of prediction’ and one on ‘Robustness and fragility’.
Taleb is a wise man, and well worth listening to. His erudition and originality are on full display. Here are samples to give you a flavour:
“The calamity of the information age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits.”
“Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way round.”
“You can only convince people who think they can benefit from being convinced.”
“English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence towards the temporarily powerful) and arrogant down (directed at the small guy).”
“To understand the liberating effect of asceticism, consider that losing all your fortune is much less painful than losing only half of it.”
“Suckers think that you can cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists and debt crises with debt spending.”
You may notice that he blends a wide vocabulary with American idioms such as ‘Guy’ and ‘Sucker’, which lends a disconcerting instability to his voice. But he generally achieves the balance of an epigrammatic style, and there is an immediate impact for most of his aphorisms, plus an added sequence of afterthoughts, akin to the sensation of a perfume.
I remain a fan of Mr Taleb, and would urge others to read this book too. However I have a complaint that must be articulated. This may sound like an ‘ad hominem’ attack. I agree that the ‘ad hominem’ riposte of questioning a man’s motives or qualifications for saying something is inadmissible in civilised argument. His book is not an argued case, but much closer to a literary work, hence I believe this complaint is valid.
The author has made a lot of money trading options, and more recently from the sales of his books. Fine, and the best of luck to him. Possibly he is the beneficiary of randomness, as he may admit. Now he sets himself up as a philosopher and part poet. He has valuable things to say, but (and here is my complaint) he adopts a sneering tone against the majority of humanity, believing himself as someone much superior in understanding and heroism. I find it hard to stomach his long stream of aphorisms despising those having to work – which is the majority of us. Hence he shows a lack of respect for the readers.
“Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working.”
“There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment.”
“Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave better by convincing him that he is an employee.”
And so on. Mr Taleb has revealed too much of his nasty side, diminishing himself. While he sits on his millions in Treasury Bills, I can do without the sound of him snickering as I trudge off to earn an honest penny. Where is his heroism in this attitude?
Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Taleb
+
The hidden role of chance
There is more chance in the universe than we acknowledge. Mr Taleb has meditated deeply and acted wisely on the implications of chance. In this book he shares with us the fruits of his eloquence and meditations and readings and experiences. A quotation from ‘Fortune’ on the front cover of my Penguin paperback describes this as “one of the smartest books of all time”. I agree – or at least within the limited universe of books I have chanced to read.
I read and reviewed this book in 2008, and the financial crisis was unfolding. Now, over two years later, with the financial crisis still burning in some underground patches and the forest fire of the sovereign debt crisis gathering force, I have felt impelled to read it again, and write on it more extensively. It strikes me a even more smart on a second reading. The author is smart in several senses: a high pure intelligence quotient; a stunningly wide knowledge of literature; the deployment of remorseless logic; creative lateral leaps between seemingly unrelated but truly interconnected topics; an ability to out-fence and de-throne revered figures or ideas; a wonderfully wide vocabulary; elegant writing style; a sharp street-wise roughness; an engaging sense of humour; the deft speed of a card sharp.
This man clearly is lucky enough to be endowed with the right genes of intelligence, as he would admit, and not hide with false modesty. This may strike some people as arrogance, but we need his forthright intelligence in some many dumbed-down fields. I defer to his intelligence and hope to pick up a few scraps of wisdom from his books. He has read widely books of classical civilisation, psychology, medicine, history, mathematics and many other categories of knowledge. Maybe his voracious reading efficiency is partly down to his self-discipline in avoiding the time-wasting ‘noise’ that pours from 24-hour TV ‘News’ and Economics. I plod slowly in his footsteps, and feel that he pats me on the head when I can claim some passing acquaintance with some of his reading, such as Montaigne.
He drops vocabulary for me to pick up. For instance: ‘Péché mignon’ – a guilty pleasure. He mentions this is describing his own and our universal humanity. We are not pure rational calculating machines, as assumed by many economic theories. We all have and need our guilty pleasures, whether they are chocolate or cigarettes or something far worse. He has flashes of wry humour, and more moments of self-depreciation that I had previously noticed. His outspoken attacks on stupid thinking had made a stronger impression when I first read this book. That is what I mean by a street-wise toughness; as well as the fact that he has been through the refining fire of a dealing room, where he succeeded, whereas I failed (though still benefited from the experience in the long run).
When I say he is a ‘card sharp’, I do not mean he is literally dishonest or even intellectually dishonest. He is quick –way ahead of most of us. I would not engage in a trading contest against him, for he would probably take money off most of us – in the long run.
In the short-run, as he explains, many things in life are dominated by chance. What we are seeing is randomness in action, and we are often fooled by it. The daily ticks up or down of the stock market reported on the news constitute pure noise. The variations of daily weather (even seemingly extreme snow or wind) cannot be said to constitute a climate pattern until many many years of data come in. The performance of football teams on a game by game basis has a high variability. Why sack a manager after a run of 10 bad games? The performance of a fund manager cannot be ascribed to any genius over the short run. It is frightening to consider how long that ‘short-run’ really is. Can you be sure that you have a genius fund manager after even 5 years (20 quarters) of performance data? Taleb would be very sceptical.
One of the most challenging aspects of the book is what he calls ‘The problem of induction’. Induction is the process of arriving at a general hypothesis from particular data. One can gather as much data as one likes, but it never proves anything with 100% certainty. He gives an amusing absurd example: “I have just completed a thorough statistical examination of the life of President Bush. For fifty eight years, close to 21,000 observations, he did not die once. I can hence pronounce him as immortal, with a high degree of statistical inference.”
We laugh, but we can observe versions of this fallacy all around us. “The market has never gone down 20% in a given three-month period”. We also attach too much importance to the immediate past, and what is in front of us: “It has been snowing for the past five days, so global warming is obviously a fallacy.” Also the opposite: “We have observed 10 of the hottest years in the past 20 of our records, so global warming is a certainty”. And so on.
Taleb explains succinctly the answer propounded by the great philosopher Karl Popper. He expresses it completely baldly as follows:
“There are only two types of theories: 1) Theories that are known to be wrong, as they were tested and adequately rejected; 2) Theories that have not yet been known to be wrong, not falsified yet, but are exposed to be proved wrong.”
By shifting the burden from verification to falsification, Popper gives us a whole new and adequate solution to the problem of knowledge. It is also deeply uncomfortable, and goes against our natural propensity to write stories about things, or to find causal links between things. Taleb recognises how difficult it is for all of us to keep rational amidst a cacophony of random noise and genetic instincts endowed to us by evolution, which is itself not concerned with rationality but survival of genes.
Having stripped away many of our illusions, one of the best things of the book is that he gives us some practical ‘tricks’ to overcome our human weaknesses, and made randomness work to our advantage. Want to know what those tricks are? Read the book! Actually, I find his prescriptions at the end the weakest part of the book: preaching stoicism in the face of fickle fortune may be wise, but some more practical suggestions might be useful. Maybe I am expecting too much.
Nassim Taleb is exhibit ‘A’ for advocating the virtues of a wide liberal education, fighting back the tide of stupid pseudo-scientists who increasingly dominate our world, unfortunately. I am sure many of you will agree that this is one of the smartest books of our time.
NOTE: THIS IS THE SECOND REVIEW OF THIS BOOK I HAVE PUBLISHED
The hidden role of chance
There is more chance in the universe than we acknowledge. Mr Taleb has meditated deeply and acted wisely on the implications of chance. In this book he shares with us the fruits of his eloquence and meditations and readings and experiences. A quotation from ‘Fortune’ on the front cover of my Penguin paperback describes this as “one of the smartest books of all time”. I agree – or at least within the limited universe of books I have chanced to read.
I read and reviewed this book in 2008, and the financial crisis was unfolding. Now, over two years later, with the financial crisis still burning in some underground patches and the forest fire of the sovereign debt crisis gathering force, I have felt impelled to read it again, and write on it more extensively. It strikes me a even more smart on a second reading. The author is smart in several senses: a high pure intelligence quotient; a stunningly wide knowledge of literature; the deployment of remorseless logic; creative lateral leaps between seemingly unrelated but truly interconnected topics; an ability to out-fence and de-throne revered figures or ideas; a wonderfully wide vocabulary; elegant writing style; a sharp street-wise roughness; an engaging sense of humour; the deft speed of a card sharp.
This man clearly is lucky enough to be endowed with the right genes of intelligence, as he would admit, and not hide with false modesty. This may strike some people as arrogance, but we need his forthright intelligence in some many dumbed-down fields. I defer to his intelligence and hope to pick up a few scraps of wisdom from his books. He has read widely books of classical civilisation, psychology, medicine, history, mathematics and many other categories of knowledge. Maybe his voracious reading efficiency is partly down to his self-discipline in avoiding the time-wasting ‘noise’ that pours from 24-hour TV ‘News’ and Economics. I plod slowly in his footsteps, and feel that he pats me on the head when I can claim some passing acquaintance with some of his reading, such as Montaigne.
He drops vocabulary for me to pick up. For instance: ‘Péché mignon’ – a guilty pleasure. He mentions this is describing his own and our universal humanity. We are not pure rational calculating machines, as assumed by many economic theories. We all have and need our guilty pleasures, whether they are chocolate or cigarettes or something far worse. He has flashes of wry humour, and more moments of self-depreciation that I had previously noticed. His outspoken attacks on stupid thinking had made a stronger impression when I first read this book. That is what I mean by a street-wise toughness; as well as the fact that he has been through the refining fire of a dealing room, where he succeeded, whereas I failed (though still benefited from the experience in the long run).
When I say he is a ‘card sharp’, I do not mean he is literally dishonest or even intellectually dishonest. He is quick –way ahead of most of us. I would not engage in a trading contest against him, for he would probably take money off most of us – in the long run.
In the short-run, as he explains, many things in life are dominated by chance. What we are seeing is randomness in action, and we are often fooled by it. The daily ticks up or down of the stock market reported on the news constitute pure noise. The variations of daily weather (even seemingly extreme snow or wind) cannot be said to constitute a climate pattern until many many years of data come in. The performance of football teams on a game by game basis has a high variability. Why sack a manager after a run of 10 bad games? The performance of a fund manager cannot be ascribed to any genius over the short run. It is frightening to consider how long that ‘short-run’ really is. Can you be sure that you have a genius fund manager after even 5 years (20 quarters) of performance data? Taleb would be very sceptical.
One of the most challenging aspects of the book is what he calls ‘The problem of induction’. Induction is the process of arriving at a general hypothesis from particular data. One can gather as much data as one likes, but it never proves anything with 100% certainty. He gives an amusing absurd example: “I have just completed a thorough statistical examination of the life of President Bush. For fifty eight years, close to 21,000 observations, he did not die once. I can hence pronounce him as immortal, with a high degree of statistical inference.”
We laugh, but we can observe versions of this fallacy all around us. “The market has never gone down 20% in a given three-month period”. We also attach too much importance to the immediate past, and what is in front of us: “It has been snowing for the past five days, so global warming is obviously a fallacy.” Also the opposite: “We have observed 10 of the hottest years in the past 20 of our records, so global warming is a certainty”. And so on.
Taleb explains succinctly the answer propounded by the great philosopher Karl Popper. He expresses it completely baldly as follows:
“There are only two types of theories: 1) Theories that are known to be wrong, as they were tested and adequately rejected; 2) Theories that have not yet been known to be wrong, not falsified yet, but are exposed to be proved wrong.”
By shifting the burden from verification to falsification, Popper gives us a whole new and adequate solution to the problem of knowledge. It is also deeply uncomfortable, and goes against our natural propensity to write stories about things, or to find causal links between things. Taleb recognises how difficult it is for all of us to keep rational amidst a cacophony of random noise and genetic instincts endowed to us by evolution, which is itself not concerned with rationality but survival of genes.
Having stripped away many of our illusions, one of the best things of the book is that he gives us some practical ‘tricks’ to overcome our human weaknesses, and made randomness work to our advantage. Want to know what those tricks are? Read the book! Actually, I find his prescriptions at the end the weakest part of the book: preaching stoicism in the face of fickle fortune may be wise, but some more practical suggestions might be useful. Maybe I am expecting too much.
Nassim Taleb is exhibit ‘A’ for advocating the virtues of a wide liberal education, fighting back the tide of stupid pseudo-scientists who increasingly dominate our world, unfortunately. I am sure many of you will agree that this is one of the smartest books of our time.
NOTE: THIS IS THE SECOND REVIEW OF THIS BOOK I HAVE PUBLISHED
Shakespeare's Philosophy, by Colin McGinn
+
More meaning behind the plays
Colin McGinn is a professor of philosophy. He has turned his hand to interpreting Shakespeare’s greatest plays, using his philosophical tools. The result is not deeply original, but I found it provided valuable insights into the world’s greatest writer. Shakespeare’s text are a mine of endless wealth. McGinn emerges into the sunlight clutching some new nuggets.
By reading this book, one can learn more about Shakespeare’s plays, and can enjoy gentle instruction in philosophy. For instance, it tightened up my understanding of words such as ‘Epistemology’ and ‘Teleology’, and quoted a good deal of Montaigne’s works. None of this is ‘hard’ philosophy, so do not be put off. Much can be described as existentialist philosophy, an angle which I personally found quite useful in writing some of my own essays of literary criticism at Oxford many years ago.
I always feel uncomfortable about books that tell us what Shakespeare thought. We can never know what Shakespeare thought, since all his written works are explicitly works of fiction. One cannot ever ascribe a particular phrase in a play to Shakespeare’s point of view. Everything is spoken by a character in a play, put in the mouth of an actor to portray that character. Very little is known about Shakespeare’s life, and almost nothing certain is known of what he read, beyond the texts from which he derived his plots (such as Holinshed). I am not aware of any unequivocal evidence that Shakespeare read Montaigne’s works, even when some of the phrases have much in common. However, McGinn’s frequent parallels drawn between the two authors are striking. There is often a zeitgeist that affects various creative people who may never know each other’s works directly.
To give an example of how my understanding has been advanced by this book, I would cite his chapter on ‘Macbeth’. He demonstrates how this play is much more than an action-packed bloodthirsty thriller, spiced with the supernatural. He draws out the philosophical themes about 1) the relationship between character and action, 2) the power of imagination, 3) the ambiguity of appearance and reality, 4) the nature of time. I had not consciously noted how the play is packed with references to time, even from the very first line “WHEN shall we three meet again?”. The chapter moved me to quickly re-read ‘Macbeth’, and I was thrilled to gain new perspectives on this familiar work, thanks to McGinn.
He also gave me insights into other major plays. For instance, I had previously thought of ‘A Midsummer night’s dream’ as a charming but flimsy work. McGinn has helped me see more of how the play is about the difficulty of distinguishing dreaming from wakefulness, illusion from reality, what is merely imagined from what is veridically perceived. (‘Veridical’ means ‘coinciding with reality’; another little lesson from Professor McGinn.)
In the latter part of the book, he explores themes, such as Gender and Psychology. Sometimes he is knocking down theories that I don’t think anyone seriously believes in (at least anymore). For instance he ridicules the idea that Shakespeare is exploring notions such as Freud’s ‘Oedipus complex’ in the play Hamlet.
More meaning behind the plays
Colin McGinn is a professor of philosophy. He has turned his hand to interpreting Shakespeare’s greatest plays, using his philosophical tools. The result is not deeply original, but I found it provided valuable insights into the world’s greatest writer. Shakespeare’s text are a mine of endless wealth. McGinn emerges into the sunlight clutching some new nuggets.
By reading this book, one can learn more about Shakespeare’s plays, and can enjoy gentle instruction in philosophy. For instance, it tightened up my understanding of words such as ‘Epistemology’ and ‘Teleology’, and quoted a good deal of Montaigne’s works. None of this is ‘hard’ philosophy, so do not be put off. Much can be described as existentialist philosophy, an angle which I personally found quite useful in writing some of my own essays of literary criticism at Oxford many years ago.
I always feel uncomfortable about books that tell us what Shakespeare thought. We can never know what Shakespeare thought, since all his written works are explicitly works of fiction. One cannot ever ascribe a particular phrase in a play to Shakespeare’s point of view. Everything is spoken by a character in a play, put in the mouth of an actor to portray that character. Very little is known about Shakespeare’s life, and almost nothing certain is known of what he read, beyond the texts from which he derived his plots (such as Holinshed). I am not aware of any unequivocal evidence that Shakespeare read Montaigne’s works, even when some of the phrases have much in common. However, McGinn’s frequent parallels drawn between the two authors are striking. There is often a zeitgeist that affects various creative people who may never know each other’s works directly.
To give an example of how my understanding has been advanced by this book, I would cite his chapter on ‘Macbeth’. He demonstrates how this play is much more than an action-packed bloodthirsty thriller, spiced with the supernatural. He draws out the philosophical themes about 1) the relationship between character and action, 2) the power of imagination, 3) the ambiguity of appearance and reality, 4) the nature of time. I had not consciously noted how the play is packed with references to time, even from the very first line “WHEN shall we three meet again?”. The chapter moved me to quickly re-read ‘Macbeth’, and I was thrilled to gain new perspectives on this familiar work, thanks to McGinn.
He also gave me insights into other major plays. For instance, I had previously thought of ‘A Midsummer night’s dream’ as a charming but flimsy work. McGinn has helped me see more of how the play is about the difficulty of distinguishing dreaming from wakefulness, illusion from reality, what is merely imagined from what is veridically perceived. (‘Veridical’ means ‘coinciding with reality’; another little lesson from Professor McGinn.)
In the latter part of the book, he explores themes, such as Gender and Psychology. Sometimes he is knocking down theories that I don’t think anyone seriously believes in (at least anymore). For instance he ridicules the idea that Shakespeare is exploring notions such as Freud’s ‘Oedipus complex’ in the play Hamlet.
A week in December, by Sebastian Faulks
+
Fiction or reality?
Sebastian Faulks has written a novel covering one week in December 2007, set in London. It following the intertwining lives of a handful of characters, and aims to be a state of the nation novel, in the tradition of Disraeli, Gaskell and Dickens. It is up-to-date, with descriptions of second worlds on the internet, ‘reality’ TV programmes and sickeningly rich financiers (though what’s new there?).
The story opens with a hostess drawing up her guest list, which introduces us to some of the main characters. The bombardment of names and details is hard for the reader to digest. I had to turn back and reread the first eight pages to absorb who was who, and what they did. The novel is almost ends with the actual dinner party, which neatly brings some of the characters together in conflict, lust and other interactions. I noticed that one person on the guest list, a schoolteacher called Radley Graves, was not mentioned at the dinner, which may be an error and a missed opportunity on the part of the author.
The final pages are devoted to the climax of one drama: a Muslim boy who jettisons his backpack of bomb fuses in the Thames, and visits his girlfriend instead. The final scene is of the evil hedge fund manager, John Veals, who stands at the window of his office, on the verge of his scheme’s success, and laughs.
The parallel is clear for the reader to draw: Veals does ignite his bomb; his financial bomb. He has obtained insider information about a bank, and set up a series of massive positions for his hedge fund, with the aim of making much money, and helping to topple the bank in the process. Since the book was published in 2010, the reader knows about the fall of RBS, HBOS etcetera in the financial crisis, and so the conclusion to the story does not need to be told explicitly.
One part of my brain was saying that Faulks is naïve and does not know how things work, or at least paints too unrealistic a black-and-white picture of hedge funds. Yet just after reading this book, I have had occasion to study some examples of ‘rogue traders’ and ‘rogue fund managers’, and have been reading about insider trading cases at hedge funds such as Galleon and Moore Capital, and dubious actions at Gartmore and Henderson Asset Management. Suddenly I did a mental flip, and perceived Faulk’s portrait of John Veals in the novel as deadly accurate.
Veals, the hedge fund manager, lacks an emotional centre and a moral compass. His family is a train wreck, with his wife lonely and semi-alcoholic, while his son gets hooked on drugs in his bedroom upstairs. Hassan, the would-be bomber is a parallel life, whose parents are also unaware of how far their son has slipped down a dangerous slope – though they talk and debate with their son far more.
The withering satire on many other types in British society is accurate and wincingly painful, whether it is a cynical literary critic, or a foreign footballer, or his girlfriend earning money from pornography on the side, or an aspiring politician’s wife. The layers of the satire become somewhat painful to read and depressing. It is a bitter book.
There are some redeeming features, though they curiously point to the redeeming power of literature. A modest girl, who drives Circle Line trains, likes to read books. An underemployed Barrister is similarly a sympathetic character with a wide knowledge of books. He has the intellectual curiosity to read the Koran, and criticises it as being simply full of assertions. This appears to me to be Faulks’ own voice attacking Islam, together with the story of the corruption of the young Hassan. As far as I know, Faulks has avoided a Fatwa.
Fiction or reality?
Sebastian Faulks has written a novel covering one week in December 2007, set in London. It following the intertwining lives of a handful of characters, and aims to be a state of the nation novel, in the tradition of Disraeli, Gaskell and Dickens. It is up-to-date, with descriptions of second worlds on the internet, ‘reality’ TV programmes and sickeningly rich financiers (though what’s new there?).
The story opens with a hostess drawing up her guest list, which introduces us to some of the main characters. The bombardment of names and details is hard for the reader to digest. I had to turn back and reread the first eight pages to absorb who was who, and what they did. The novel is almost ends with the actual dinner party, which neatly brings some of the characters together in conflict, lust and other interactions. I noticed that one person on the guest list, a schoolteacher called Radley Graves, was not mentioned at the dinner, which may be an error and a missed opportunity on the part of the author.
The final pages are devoted to the climax of one drama: a Muslim boy who jettisons his backpack of bomb fuses in the Thames, and visits his girlfriend instead. The final scene is of the evil hedge fund manager, John Veals, who stands at the window of his office, on the verge of his scheme’s success, and laughs.
The parallel is clear for the reader to draw: Veals does ignite his bomb; his financial bomb. He has obtained insider information about a bank, and set up a series of massive positions for his hedge fund, with the aim of making much money, and helping to topple the bank in the process. Since the book was published in 2010, the reader knows about the fall of RBS, HBOS etcetera in the financial crisis, and so the conclusion to the story does not need to be told explicitly.
One part of my brain was saying that Faulks is naïve and does not know how things work, or at least paints too unrealistic a black-and-white picture of hedge funds. Yet just after reading this book, I have had occasion to study some examples of ‘rogue traders’ and ‘rogue fund managers’, and have been reading about insider trading cases at hedge funds such as Galleon and Moore Capital, and dubious actions at Gartmore and Henderson Asset Management. Suddenly I did a mental flip, and perceived Faulk’s portrait of John Veals in the novel as deadly accurate.
Veals, the hedge fund manager, lacks an emotional centre and a moral compass. His family is a train wreck, with his wife lonely and semi-alcoholic, while his son gets hooked on drugs in his bedroom upstairs. Hassan, the would-be bomber is a parallel life, whose parents are also unaware of how far their son has slipped down a dangerous slope – though they talk and debate with their son far more.
The withering satire on many other types in British society is accurate and wincingly painful, whether it is a cynical literary critic, or a foreign footballer, or his girlfriend earning money from pornography on the side, or an aspiring politician’s wife. The layers of the satire become somewhat painful to read and depressing. It is a bitter book.
There are some redeeming features, though they curiously point to the redeeming power of literature. A modest girl, who drives Circle Line trains, likes to read books. An underemployed Barrister is similarly a sympathetic character with a wide knowledge of books. He has the intellectual curiosity to read the Koran, and criticises it as being simply full of assertions. This appears to me to be Faulks’ own voice attacking Islam, together with the story of the corruption of the young Hassan. As far as I know, Faulks has avoided a Fatwa.
A Glastonbury Romance, by John Cowper Powys
+
A book like this gives rise to divergent opinions, with each individual drawing their own unique meaning from it. ‘A Glastonbury Romance’ is large (1120 in my Overlook Press edition) that it provides an astonishing richness of character and event. It is a treasure-trove of language, myth, legend, place, philosophy, literary allusion, conflict, humour and much more.
Powys was an erudite man, who often lectured on English literature for his living. He wrote this novel in what one could call the Nineteenth Century tradition, emulating models such as Dickens, Hardy and George Eliot in England, and Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in Russia, to cite but a few influences. He explicitly refers back to deep legend from Welsh, French and English sources, by using the nexus of stories concerning King Arthur and Merlin. He also employs the many stories invented in Glastonbury about Joseph of Arimathea, the thorn tree, the holy grail, the chalice well and so forth. Yet he is also a modern Twentieth Century novelist, dealing openly with sexual matters, communism and new technology, such as aeroplanes.
The story centres for most of the book on the small town of Glastonbury, a cradle of English national identity (however fraudulent). At one level he is exploring the nature of Britishness (I say that advisedly, since he is also concerned with nearby Wales). He does this by presenting the lives of many characters in the town, creating a complex web of concurrent, intertwining stories, just as George Eliot did for the fictional town of Middlemarch. I cannot think of a novel that explores a single town with such loving detail, as Powys does of Glastonbury.
Powys spent much time researching the town, and is extraordinarily detailed and faithful in his presentation. There are minor errors of fact, such as Mat Dekker looking West over the Bridgwater bay at the purported rising sun. There are deliberate liberties taken, for the sake of the dramatic action. He has a tin mine dug at Wookey Hole, and a road constructed across the Somerset Flats. He puts an upper floor in St Michael’s tower on the Tor. He imagines that an aeroplane could land on the constricted space of Wirral Hill. This is easily allowable to the omnipotent narrator.
Some commentators think Powys is an obscurantist, seduced by the silly legends of the town, yearning for a non-existent romantic past, after the horrors of the First World War. I think that is a false judgement. Powys is his own man, and he frequently pokes fun at the myths and legends, while being fascinated by their literary and cultural power. His whole outlook on life is dualist. He loves to conjoin and contrast the quotidian and the cosmic, the material and the spiritual, the ancient and the modern, the good and the bad.
For example he has Sam Dekker experience religious ecstasy in a coal barge: “He had ceased to be a man sitting on a coal sack at the stern of a barge. He had become a bleeding mass of darkness. His consciousness was a dark surface of water; and up through this water, tearing it, rending it, dividing it, turning it into blood, shivered this crashing stroke, this stroke that was delivered from abysses of the earth, far deeper than the bottom of the Brue”.
This leads us to his metaphysics, which some people find irritating and objectionable. Certainly his frequent reference to ‘The First Cause’ is startling and idiosyncratic. He boldly rejects the conventional Christian view of the moral universe, but paints a picture of a cosmic force that is simultaneously evil and good – in other words dualistic. This insistence on spiritual forces and even angels influencing and intervening in the lives of men is hard to reconcile with the modern, sceptical parts of the book. It seems to reflect an almost Medieval view of the world, and it impossible to tell if Powys is being ironic or tongue-in-cheek in these passages. They are certainly challenging – and I can imagine him in a pub or at a dinner table stirring up debate for the sheer love of intellectual stimulation and the exploration of points of view.
The challenge starts with the long first sentence of the novel, which has probably deterred many browsers in bookshops from buying the book! “At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe.” Personally I was intrigued by this sentence and felt a need to walk a journey with the author, although I knew it would be a long, hard road.
The author assumes a very God-like status in the book, looking down on “this microscopic biped” from a great height, and then zooming in, much further than a Google Earth map into the hearts and thoughts of his characters. He vouchsafes them visions of Excalibur and the Holy Grail, and finally washes them in a mighty flood, like the old testament God.
The challenge and excitement of Powy’s idiosyncratic genius hit me when he starts conveying the point of view of plants: “The now darkened conservatory listened to the placid sub-human breathings of heliotrope and lemon verbena, the latter with a faint catch in its drowsy susurration…” Then he talks about the house as if it had its own consciousness too: “Silent and alone the broad staircase fell into that trance of romantic melancholy which was its invariable mood when the hall lamp was first lit”.
So in this novel we live in a universe of multiple consciousnesses, at many levels: cosmic, natural, human, cultural and more. I think he wants to jolt us out of our dullness into a more vivid plane of thinking and feeling, and he succeeds. However, there are some aspects of Powy’s authorial point of view that are difficult to swallow. His pronouncements on how women feel and think (eg. “in a trance of mindless passivity”) seem objectionable at times, though delicate at others. His obscure references to the erotic sadism that preys on the mind of Mr Evans (purportedly a self-portrait) seem frustratingly obscure and helpful to me, though they play an important part in the plot.
Different people in the book want to turn the town into something new to fit their personal views of the world. Philip Crow, a businessman, want to modernise and enrich the town and “beat down this pious Glastonbury legend, this piece of monkish mummery.” The evangelical preacher Geard, wants to utilise the legends to further his own power, and express his enigmatic faith. Sam Dekker wants to explore sensual erotic passion, but later converts to a mystical asceticism. Red Robinson, Paul Trent and others want to overturn the current order of society and bring in a communist/socialist heaven on earth. John Crow, Edward Athling and others want to express themselves in pageants and poetry. There are many other currents that reflect on the overall development of British society in the 1920s. In that respect it is a deeply interesting reflection of society, culture and politics of the age, just as ‘Middlemarch’ reflects the society of the 1840s.
If one persists with the book (and frankly it took me many months), one becomes drawn into the characters and wants to discover how the many currents of their aims develop. The book starts in too leisurely a fashion, but rises to a fast-paced climax in the latter pages that is exciting, vivid and rewarding. On reaching the end, I felt an urge to start reading it again. I resisted this temptation, having other objectives in my life than reading books, but dipping into the earlier chapters again revealed a richer texture in the tapestry than I had first appreciated.
One may receive the impression from what I have said and quoted so far that the book is all portentous and high-flown. Far from it. ‘Glastonbury’ is lightened by many fine passages of conversation, delightful Somerset dialect, humourous touches, comic moments and light poetic perceptions. There is much to entertain the reader along the way. I find the light and the dark, the heavy and the light entwining in Powys’ fertile, dualistic brain. This is a characteristic he shares with his brother Theodore Powys, who wrote the novel ‘Unclay’ – a parallel work to this, set in a Dorset village.
Of the all the influences on Powys, apart from his own talented family, I think Thomas Hardy is the most prominent. I believe the brothers met the great man in person, and they certainly read many of his famous novels. They follow in his footsteps of creating a great native body of fiction rooted in the ‘West Country’ of England. Hardy created tragedies in the backwaters of Wessex, and the Powys family succeed in doing the same. However ‘Glastonbury’ cannot be simplistically labelled a tragedy. The word ‘Romance’ is wholly appropriate in the title of the novel.
‘Romance’ is a tricky word, since it is used in many different senses. The sense in which Powys used it, and which I say is appropriate, it chivalric romance, drawing on the tradition of High Medieval stories about heroic knights. This links directly with the most popular cycle of romances about King Arthur and the knights of the round table. Powys weaves in many references to the Arthurian legends, and he sets out to portray struggles and spiritual journeys, and several love stories. There are no crude references to damsels in distress or dragons, though you might identify Nell Zoyland and the aeroplane as such, if you choose.
The book is enriched by drawing on folklore, sagas, ghost stories and even satirical takes on the romance genre, such as ‘Don Quixote’ or ‘Sir Hudibras’. In this manner Powys aims to absorb, without judgemental condemnation, the many contradictory strands of human life. J.C. Powys was one of the earliest readers of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, and he succeeded in creating a work of comparable resonance and many layers.
A book like this gives rise to divergent opinions, with each individual drawing their own unique meaning from it. ‘A Glastonbury Romance’ is large (1120 in my Overlook Press edition) that it provides an astonishing richness of character and event. It is a treasure-trove of language, myth, legend, place, philosophy, literary allusion, conflict, humour and much more.
Powys was an erudite man, who often lectured on English literature for his living. He wrote this novel in what one could call the Nineteenth Century tradition, emulating models such as Dickens, Hardy and George Eliot in England, and Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in Russia, to cite but a few influences. He explicitly refers back to deep legend from Welsh, French and English sources, by using the nexus of stories concerning King Arthur and Merlin. He also employs the many stories invented in Glastonbury about Joseph of Arimathea, the thorn tree, the holy grail, the chalice well and so forth. Yet he is also a modern Twentieth Century novelist, dealing openly with sexual matters, communism and new technology, such as aeroplanes.
The story centres for most of the book on the small town of Glastonbury, a cradle of English national identity (however fraudulent). At one level he is exploring the nature of Britishness (I say that advisedly, since he is also concerned with nearby Wales). He does this by presenting the lives of many characters in the town, creating a complex web of concurrent, intertwining stories, just as George Eliot did for the fictional town of Middlemarch. I cannot think of a novel that explores a single town with such loving detail, as Powys does of Glastonbury.
Powys spent much time researching the town, and is extraordinarily detailed and faithful in his presentation. There are minor errors of fact, such as Mat Dekker looking West over the Bridgwater bay at the purported rising sun. There are deliberate liberties taken, for the sake of the dramatic action. He has a tin mine dug at Wookey Hole, and a road constructed across the Somerset Flats. He puts an upper floor in St Michael’s tower on the Tor. He imagines that an aeroplane could land on the constricted space of Wirral Hill. This is easily allowable to the omnipotent narrator.
Some commentators think Powys is an obscurantist, seduced by the silly legends of the town, yearning for a non-existent romantic past, after the horrors of the First World War. I think that is a false judgement. Powys is his own man, and he frequently pokes fun at the myths and legends, while being fascinated by their literary and cultural power. His whole outlook on life is dualist. He loves to conjoin and contrast the quotidian and the cosmic, the material and the spiritual, the ancient and the modern, the good and the bad.
For example he has Sam Dekker experience religious ecstasy in a coal barge: “He had ceased to be a man sitting on a coal sack at the stern of a barge. He had become a bleeding mass of darkness. His consciousness was a dark surface of water; and up through this water, tearing it, rending it, dividing it, turning it into blood, shivered this crashing stroke, this stroke that was delivered from abysses of the earth, far deeper than the bottom of the Brue”.
This leads us to his metaphysics, which some people find irritating and objectionable. Certainly his frequent reference to ‘The First Cause’ is startling and idiosyncratic. He boldly rejects the conventional Christian view of the moral universe, but paints a picture of a cosmic force that is simultaneously evil and good – in other words dualistic. This insistence on spiritual forces and even angels influencing and intervening in the lives of men is hard to reconcile with the modern, sceptical parts of the book. It seems to reflect an almost Medieval view of the world, and it impossible to tell if Powys is being ironic or tongue-in-cheek in these passages. They are certainly challenging – and I can imagine him in a pub or at a dinner table stirring up debate for the sheer love of intellectual stimulation and the exploration of points of view.
The challenge starts with the long first sentence of the novel, which has probably deterred many browsers in bookshops from buying the book! “At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe.” Personally I was intrigued by this sentence and felt a need to walk a journey with the author, although I knew it would be a long, hard road.
The author assumes a very God-like status in the book, looking down on “this microscopic biped” from a great height, and then zooming in, much further than a Google Earth map into the hearts and thoughts of his characters. He vouchsafes them visions of Excalibur and the Holy Grail, and finally washes them in a mighty flood, like the old testament God.
The challenge and excitement of Powy’s idiosyncratic genius hit me when he starts conveying the point of view of plants: “The now darkened conservatory listened to the placid sub-human breathings of heliotrope and lemon verbena, the latter with a faint catch in its drowsy susurration…” Then he talks about the house as if it had its own consciousness too: “Silent and alone the broad staircase fell into that trance of romantic melancholy which was its invariable mood when the hall lamp was first lit”.
So in this novel we live in a universe of multiple consciousnesses, at many levels: cosmic, natural, human, cultural and more. I think he wants to jolt us out of our dullness into a more vivid plane of thinking and feeling, and he succeeds. However, there are some aspects of Powy’s authorial point of view that are difficult to swallow. His pronouncements on how women feel and think (eg. “in a trance of mindless passivity”) seem objectionable at times, though delicate at others. His obscure references to the erotic sadism that preys on the mind of Mr Evans (purportedly a self-portrait) seem frustratingly obscure and helpful to me, though they play an important part in the plot.
Different people in the book want to turn the town into something new to fit their personal views of the world. Philip Crow, a businessman, want to modernise and enrich the town and “beat down this pious Glastonbury legend, this piece of monkish mummery.” The evangelical preacher Geard, wants to utilise the legends to further his own power, and express his enigmatic faith. Sam Dekker wants to explore sensual erotic passion, but later converts to a mystical asceticism. Red Robinson, Paul Trent and others want to overturn the current order of society and bring in a communist/socialist heaven on earth. John Crow, Edward Athling and others want to express themselves in pageants and poetry. There are many other currents that reflect on the overall development of British society in the 1920s. In that respect it is a deeply interesting reflection of society, culture and politics of the age, just as ‘Middlemarch’ reflects the society of the 1840s.
If one persists with the book (and frankly it took me many months), one becomes drawn into the characters and wants to discover how the many currents of their aims develop. The book starts in too leisurely a fashion, but rises to a fast-paced climax in the latter pages that is exciting, vivid and rewarding. On reaching the end, I felt an urge to start reading it again. I resisted this temptation, having other objectives in my life than reading books, but dipping into the earlier chapters again revealed a richer texture in the tapestry than I had first appreciated.
One may receive the impression from what I have said and quoted so far that the book is all portentous and high-flown. Far from it. ‘Glastonbury’ is lightened by many fine passages of conversation, delightful Somerset dialect, humourous touches, comic moments and light poetic perceptions. There is much to entertain the reader along the way. I find the light and the dark, the heavy and the light entwining in Powys’ fertile, dualistic brain. This is a characteristic he shares with his brother Theodore Powys, who wrote the novel ‘Unclay’ – a parallel work to this, set in a Dorset village.
Of the all the influences on Powys, apart from his own talented family, I think Thomas Hardy is the most prominent. I believe the brothers met the great man in person, and they certainly read many of his famous novels. They follow in his footsteps of creating a great native body of fiction rooted in the ‘West Country’ of England. Hardy created tragedies in the backwaters of Wessex, and the Powys family succeed in doing the same. However ‘Glastonbury’ cannot be simplistically labelled a tragedy. The word ‘Romance’ is wholly appropriate in the title of the novel.
‘Romance’ is a tricky word, since it is used in many different senses. The sense in which Powys used it, and which I say is appropriate, it chivalric romance, drawing on the tradition of High Medieval stories about heroic knights. This links directly with the most popular cycle of romances about King Arthur and the knights of the round table. Powys weaves in many references to the Arthurian legends, and he sets out to portray struggles and spiritual journeys, and several love stories. There are no crude references to damsels in distress or dragons, though you might identify Nell Zoyland and the aeroplane as such, if you choose.
The book is enriched by drawing on folklore, sagas, ghost stories and even satirical takes on the romance genre, such as ‘Don Quixote’ or ‘Sir Hudibras’. In this manner Powys aims to absorb, without judgemental condemnation, the many contradictory strands of human life. J.C. Powys was one of the earliest readers of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, and he succeeded in creating a work of comparable resonance and many layers.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)