Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 11

the author’s views and ours

There’s a very uncomfortable moment in Sayers’s novel Unnatural Death (1927), in a chapter in which Lord Peter receives a field report from his able investigator Miss Climpson. In what follows I’ll add the usual blanks to one word, though Sayers of course does not.

One Miss Timmins, a cook for a local lady, at a tea party that Miss Climpson attends: “You recollect, Mrs. Budge, that I felt obliged to leave after the appearance of that most EXTRAORDINARY person who announced himself as Miss Dawson’s cousin.” Miss Climpson picks up the narration in her usual style:

Naturally, I asked who this might be, not having heard of any other relations! She said that this person, whom she described as a nasty, dirty N—-R(!!!) arrived one morning, dressed up as a CLERGYMAN!!! — and sent her — Miss Timmins — to announce him to Miss Dawson as her COUSIN HALLELUJAH!!! Miss Timmins showed him up, much against her will, she said, into the nice, CLEAN, drawing-room! Miss Dawson, she said, actually came down to see this ‘creature’ instead of sending him about his ‘black business’(!), and as a crowning scandal, asked him to stay to lunch! — ‘with her niece there, too,’ Miss Timmins said, ‘and this horrible blackamoor ROLLING his dreadful eyes at her.’ Miss Timmins said that it ‘regularly turned her stomach’ — that was her phrase, and I trust you will excuse it — I understand that these parts of the body are frequently referred to in polite(!) society nowadays. In fact, it appears she refused to cook the lunch for the poor black man — (after all, even blacks are God’s creatures and we might all be black OURSELVES if He had not in His infinite kindness seen fit to favour us with white skins!!) — and walked straight out of the house!!! So that unfortunately she cannot tell us anything further about this remarkable incident! She is certain, however, that the ‘n—-r’ had a visiting-card, with the name ‘Rev. H. Dawson’ upon it, and an address in foreign parts. It does seem strange, does it not, but I believe many of these native preachers are called to do spendid work among their own people, and no doubt a MINISTER is entitled to have a visiting-card, even when black!!!

This passage is sometimes pointed to as evidence that Sayers herself shared and even celebrated its racism. This seems to be profoundly unlikely, given that

(a) the statement is made by an obviously unpleasant character,

(b) whose language and attitudes are explicitly reprobated by Miss Climpson, a character we are strongly encouraged to like and respect,

(c) and then plainly mocked by the hero of all the novels, Lord Peter: “‘N—-r,’ to a Miss Timmins, may mean anything from a high-caste Brahmin to Sambo and Rastus at the Coliseum [minstrel-show characters] — it may even, at a pinch, be an Argentine or an Esquimaux.” That is, anyone who isn’t northern European.

And when we meet the Rev. H. Dawson we discover that he is a mixed-race man with dark skin — but not so dark that one cannot see him blush — who is also clean, articulate, gentle, polite, and very poor. It is rather difficult to account for this portrayal if we assume that Sayers shared Miss Timmins’s view of things.

But of course matters are not always that straightforward. Miss Climpson may be a positive character, but she is also an old-fashioned lady clearly presented as a relic of an earlier age. It seems to me obvious that Sayers is gently satirizing Miss C’s enthusiastic gratitude that God “in his infinite kindness” has made her white — shades of Flannery O’Connor’s Mrs. Turpin — and the bemusement with which she acknowledges that God can make use of Black ministers, “among their own people” of course.

Miss Climpson is, I think, a useful character for exploring such matters. When she cheers on the independent female “PIONEER” of an earlier generation — in a letter discussed in my previous post — we smile and nod, confident that she’s on the side of both Sayers and the angels. But she says other things about women that today’s readers will question. Of the letter I began this post by quoting, Eric Sandberg — author of an outstandingly useful companion to Sayers’s fiction — says, in a passage responding to critics who think that Sayers’s views are indistinguishable from those of Miss Timmins,

Miss Climpson’s own view, that “we might all be black OURSELVES if He [God] had not in His infinite kindness seen fit to favour us with white skins!!” is rather astoundingly backward — and very much in line with her dated views on sexuality — so much so that it should probably be read as a satirical attack on racist thinking rather than an example of it.

To this I would say that if by “backward” Sandberg means “wrong,” then yes, though I don’t see anything “astounding” about it. But what does he mean by “her dated views on sexuality”? Here’s another passage from Unnatural Death that might shed light on the subject, one in which Miss Climpson is thinking about a young woman named Miss Findlater who has grown attached to a somewhat older woman named Mary Whittaker:

As a matter of fact, Miss Climpson had become genuinely interested in the girl. Silly affectation and gush, and a parrot-repetition of the shibboleths of the modern school were symptoms that the experienced spinster well understood. They indicated, she thought, a real unhappiness, a real dissatisfaction with the narrowness of life in a country town. And besides this, Miss Climpson felt sure that Vera Findlater was being “preyed upon,” as she expressed it to herself, by the handsome Mary Whittaker. “It would be a mercy for the girl,” thought Miss Climpson, “if she could form a genuine attachment to a young man. It is natural for a schoolgirl to be schwärmerisch [enthusiastic] — in a young woman of twenty-two it is thoroughly undesirable. That Whittaker woman encourages it — she would, of course. She likes to have someone to admire her and run her errands. And she prefers it to be a stupid person, who will not compete with her. If Mary Whittaker were to marry, she would marry a rabbit.”

Simply within the context of the novel this is a complicated passage. Let us count the ways:

The woman that Miss Climpson earlier celebrated as a “PIONEER” — a woman who refused to marry and set herself up as a trainer of and dealer in horses — had formed just this kind of relationship with another woman, though she was a dominant rather than a deferential partner.That woman, Clara Whittaker, was the great-aunt of Mary Whittaker, whose selfishness Miss C deplores.Yet the good country people of the area who knew Clara Whittaker seem to have admired her unreservedly, and had no sense that her relationship with her friend was unhealthy or even especially remarkable.It is never said that that relationship, or the relationship between Mary Whittaker and Vera Findlater, is sexual. The distinction between homosexual and homosocial relationships is too often elided; moreover, there are multiple forms of homosociality: for instance, it’s not uncommon to meet women who are sexually attracted to men but prefer the long-term companionship of a woman.Presumably Miss Climpson and the good country people think that lesbianism is sinful and, well, unnatural.Miss Climpson’s disapproval of the Whittaker/Findlater relationship may not be of universal application; that is, she may not reprobate all strong, exclusive homosocial bonds, but ony those in which the power differential is as pronounced as in this case, or (even more specifically) in which the dominant partner is a morally suspect person.That said, Miss C more than once in the novels laments her “woman-ridden life,” and does clearly believe that the ideal permanent relationship is between a man and a woman.

As I say: complicated. Just sorting what Miss Climpson thinks and why she thinks it is difficult, but that difficulty is multiplied greatly if we try to factor in what Sayers thinks about such matters. Even if we agree that Miss Climpson holds “dated views on sexuality,” there is no obvious reason to think that Sayers’s views are substantially different than Miss C’s. After all, the world of the Modern Woman, the Bright Young Things, the Brideshead Generation, is subjected to relentless satire throughout the Wimsey novels. Moreover, Sayers herself was prone in her adolescence to the romantic “pash” for older women — especially one of her teachers at the Godolphin School — but seems to have grown out of that by the time she got to Oxford. And then there’s something noteworthy in the parenthetical continuation of the paragraph I was just quoting:

(Miss Climpson’s active mind quickly conjured up a picture of the rabbit — fair-haired and a little paunchy, with a habit of saying, “I’ll ask the wife.” Miss Climpson wondered why Providence saw fit to create such men. For Miss Climpson, men were intended to be masterful, even though wicked or foolish. She was a spinster made and not born — a perfectly womanly woman.)

All of this up to the final sentence is done within Miss Climpson’s voice-zone (as Bakhtin calls it) — but then comes what looks to me like Sayers’s own commentary. I think that in large part because of the parentheses, which seem to distance the comments from the Climpsoncentric sentences that precede it. But maybe I’m wrong about that; maybe we’re continuing to see Miss C as Miss C sees herself. The whole business of moving in and out of a character’s voice-zone is very complex and requires great skill to manage: the greatest master of it is Dostoevsky, and Bakhtin coined the term “voice-zone” simply to account for this strange thing that Dostoevsky habitually does. (Note to other literary critics: the employment of the voice-zone is related to but distinct from the employment of “free indirect discourse.” Novelists can use the latter without using the former.)

But if this is direct commentary by Sayers … how does the final sentence relate to the one before it? Saying that Miss C is “a spinster made and not born” is simply to say that she is attracted to men and would have been glad to marry if the right opportunity had arisen, but to claim that on this account she is “a perfectly womanly woman” seems a token of approbation. If so, does this mean that Sayers also shares the belief that “men were intended to be masterful”?

I could spend a lot more time exploring that question, but having gone a good ways down this trail I want to stop and ask: Why are we here? Why do these questions matter?

The situation I’ve outlined here is of a kind that makes a great many people nervous these days — these days in which ideological hyperpartisanship demands that we know what people’s politics (including their sexual politics) are before we know whether we are allowed to like or sympathize with them. Thus Richard Brody’s inability to deal with Perfect Days: the movie never tells us what the movie’s protagonist thinks about politics, or indeed, if he thinks about it at all. How, then, do we know whether we need to denounce him? People today seem to prefer their movies and fiction to come with moral warning labels, like the danger alerts on packs of cigarettes.

But here’s the key thing: Often it’s impossible to be sure how Sayers might evaluate the statements of her characters. Maybe she agrees with a given statement; maybe she disagrees; maybe she’s not certain what she believes; and maybe – this is the possibility almost no one considers – she isn’t thinking about that at all, because her purpose in writing is to convey what that particular character would say or believe, not to present her own views. As noted, this could be true even of the “womanly woman” statement.

It never seems to occur to many people that fiction is an unideal vehicle for the direct propositional expression of personal convictions on specific points of public controversy – unless, as in Uncle Tom’s Cabin or The Jungle, the work of fiction is explicitly written to address some matter of public controversy. (I would argue that fiction is rarely the ideal vehicle, but those two novels, among few others, make it work.) When a novel has no such plain purpose, then the attempt to discover through hermeneutical calibration the precise distance between a character’s views and those of the author strikes me as a pointless endeavor, and one utterly irreconcilable with the activity we call reading.

Does Sayers agree with Miss Climpson’s views on sexuality, or on race? Does she agree 91% or 73% or 27%? These I think are bad questions, and it would be good for us to break our habit of asking them. They assume that a discernible relationship between author-belief and character-belief exists, that it’s stable, and that we can measure it. Also that it matters. I would deny, or at least seriously question, all of these assumptions.

On such points of public controversy, I think we would do better to reflect on what we believe and why we believe it — which, after all, are not such simple projects. Readers of fiction have better (and more enjoyable) things to do that to spend all their time squinting at their moral calipers.

Douthat on belief

The central and absolutely essential premise of Ross Douthat’s new book Believe, the point from which the whole argument begins, is this: There is a genus of human belief and practice called “religion,” of which Christianity is one of the species. My problem with regard to Ross’s book is that I have come quite seriously to doubt this premise. My larger problem is that I don’t know quite how to do without this premise, since it is so deeply embedded in almost all discourse on … well, I guess I have to say on religion.

My difficulty was brought home to me when I was writing the Preface to my forthcoming book on Paradise Lost. That book is one of a series called Lives of the Great Religious Books, which meant that in said Preface I needed to explain and justify my claim that Milton’s poem really is a religious book — which, I argue, it is in some ways, though not in others: its relationship to Christianity is radically different than that of, say, the Book of Common Prayer, the subject of my previous book in the PUP series. In order to do this, I had to take the concept of “religion” seriously. Or semi-seriously.

I began thus:

Many years ago I heard it said — I wish I could remember by whom — that the only thing the world’s religions have in common is that they all use candles. Thus Sir James Frazer, in beginning his great The Golden Bough, wrote that “There is probably no subject in the world about which opinions differ so much as the nature of religion, and to frame a definition of it which would satisfy every one must obviously be impossible. All that a writer can do is, first, to say clearly what he means by religion, and afterwards to employ the word consistently in that sense throughout his work.”

But I had to settle on some kind of definition, so here’s the relevant footnote:

Emile Durkheim’s definition is a useful one: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions — beliefs and practices that unite its adherents in single moral community called a church”: Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 [1912]), p. 46; italics in original. Durkheim is using the term church in a very broad sense, though one may doubt whether it can possibly be broad enough to cover all relevant cases. This definition contains both functional and dogmatic elements, but as Durkheim unfolds his conceptual frame the functional strongly dominates.

After that I went on to argue that Paradise Lost is religious in a dogmatic but not a functional sense. I think my argument is correct, given the premises — but, as I say, the premises are what I’ve come to question.

Basically, I’ve come to believe the various things we call “religions” … well, here’s what I wrote in a recent essay:

I often tell my students that whether Christianity is true or not, it is the most unnatural religion in the world. Even a cursory study of the world’s religions will show how obsessed humans are with finding some way to (a) gain the favor of the gods, or transhuman powers of any kind, and/or (b) avert their wrath. Religious seeking is almost always about these two universal desires: to get help and to avert trouble. But in Christianity it is God who comes to seek and save the lost (Lk 19:10); it is God who reckons with His own wrath, himself making propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world (1 Jn 2:2). The standard — or rather the obsessive — practices of homo religiosus have no place here. In Jesus Christ, the Christian gospel says, God has done it all.

I say: This may be true or it may be false, but it is the Christian account of things, and it is very, very weird — so weird that it is easy, indeed natural, for us to fall back on the standard model of religion and turn our prayers into spells. How often do we think, perhaps in some unacknowledged place deep inside our minds and hearts, that when we come to church and say the appointed words and perform the correct actions, we are somehow getting Management to take our side?

The distinction between spells and prayers is Roger Scruton’s — read the post for the context — and it’s a useful one. I think it is the natural human tendency, the natural religious tendency if you must, to look for spells that can influence or even control the Powers That Be. But what use is a spell if the Name above all names — Jesus Christ — has already redeemed the world?

(I am speaking here of the greatest thing a religion might be expected to do. We also ask smaller things, and in those cases we often fall back on the old spell-habit, not realizing how secondary even the things that most concern us really are in the divine economy. Our inability to keep these matters in their proper perspective is a great theme in the letters of the apostle Paul, but that’s a subject for another time.)

Back to Ross’s book, near the end of which he writes this:

Some people’s encounters with religion in childhood aren’t negative or abusive so much as they are just sterile and empty, making the faith of their ancestors feel like a dead letter when it comes time to start on their own journey. That was how it was for the British novelist Paul Kingsnorth. He was raised to experience his isle’s Christianity as a hopeless antiquarianism, a thing that mattered only as a foil for modernity. His own adult spiritual progress grew naturally out of his environmentalism, which led him first into a kind of “pick’n’mix spirituality,” and then into a commitment to Zen Buddhism, which lasted years but felt insufficient, lacking (he felt) a mode of true worship.

He found that worship in actual paganism, a nature-worship that made sense as an expression of his love of the natural world, and he went so far as to become a priest of Wicca, a practitioner of what he took to be white magic. At which point, and only at that point, he began to feel impelled toward Christianity — by coincidence and dreams, by ideas and arguments, and by the kind of stark mystical experiences discussed in an earlier chapter of this book.

In Ross’s account, I think I’m right to say, this is a gradual convergence on the True Religion, and while I do believe that the Christianity Kingsnorth now professes (and professes shrewdly and eloquently) is indeed true, I don’t believe that when he was a Wiccan — saying actual spells! — he was close to that truth than when he was a Buddhist or “spiritual but not religious.” In fact, Buddhism has a better understanding of the uselessness of spells than Wicca. Buddhism, though the very concept of “god” is not intrinsic to it, in its frank acknowledgment of a cosmos wholly beyond our control might be closer to the Christian understanding of the world than any practice committed to the efficacy of spells.

I dunno. I’m still thinking this through. But right now my thoughts are running along these lines:

While I doubt the genus/species premise of Ross’s book, almost everyone else in the world accepts its validity. A point that in intellectual humility I should bear in mind. And because the whole world accepts its validity, maybe Ross is right to structure his book in this way.

But I am not at all convinced that a move from, say, atheism to Wicca is necessarily “a step in the right direction” — i.e., once you’ve entered the genus-town of “religion,” you’re closer to the species-house of Christianity than you were before. Indeed, I wonder whether many people might be less interested in Christianity as a result of such a move, since they might plausibly think that as long as they’re operating within the genus, does it really matter what species they prefer? (The “We all get to God in our own way” line has had a very long run and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.)

It’s common to call people who move from one religion to another “searchers,” and usually Christians think of that as a good thing. But I doubt that many of the people we call searchers are really searching. We Christians don’t seek, we are found by the One who seeks us. And that may be more of a frightening than a consoling thought. I believe that C. S. Lewis, as God approached him, was feeling the right feelings:

I was to be allowed to play at philosophy no longer. It might, as I say, still be true that my “Spirit” differed in some way from “the God of popular religion.” My Adversary waived the point. It sank into utter unimportance. He would not argue about it. He only said, “I am the Lord”; “I am that I am”; “I am.”

People who are naturally religious find difficulty in understanding the horror of such a revelation. Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about “man’s search for God.” To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat.

Finally: Near the end of his book Douthat calls Christianity “the strangest story in the world,” a claim I enthusiastically endorse. But I think that if we take that claim with the seriousness it deserves, we might have to abandon the idea that Christianity is one of the things we call “religion.” Religion — if we must use the word — is a human activity that can be described more-or-less as Durkheim describes it. Christianity is something else altogether, I can’t help thinking. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” is not only stranger than we imagine; it’s stranger than we can imagine.

activism

I’ve pretty much stopped writing about politics, for reasons explained here, but that doesn’t mean I hold no political views and take no political action. Here’s how I think about political activism. 

Premise: Every government does unjust harm to some persons and groups of persons. (One’s general political philosophy will be largely determined by how much harm one thinks that any government does as a matter of course, and one’s voting patterns will be largely determined by that philosophy, but none of that is relevant to this particular post. What I’m about to say is, I think, universally applicable.) 

From this premise I think some questions should arise: 

In the current regime, what persons or groups are most harmed or most likely to be harmed? Where can I find those vulnerable people in my community? What organizations serve and seek to protect those people? How can I (placed as I am, with certain specific gifts and resources) assist those organizations? 

Once I have answered those questions, I have a plan for meaningful political action. Note that this plan will differ according to the political party that happens to be in charge. 

daffy-down-dilly

Three years ago I published an essay, called “Injured Parties,” in which I explore how attitudes towards defamation and verbal “injury” have changed over time. In light of that I was interested to note, in one of Sayers’s novels, Lord Peter Wimsey’s comment that it is a criminal libel to call a lawyer a “daffy-down-dilly.” Now, literally a daffy-down-dilly, or daffadowndilly, is simply a daffodil. So what is Lord Peter talking about? This thread on Stack Exchange explains. A daffy-down-dilly is a lawyer who works both sides of a case. To accuse someone of being a daffy-down-dilly is to accuse them of criminal professional malpractice, and if you can’t prove it, then you may be sued for libel. 

When in 1843 a Defamation and Libel Bill was moving through Parliament, one Lord Campbell, in the House of Lords, got deep into the weeds of the relevant distinctions: 

Their Lordships might expect him, as he was perhaps casting reflections on others, to give them some proof of these actionable offences. If it were said of a barrister, that he was “a daffy down dilly,” that is actionable. If he is said “to be a dunce,” — [The Lord Chancellor: Or a dandy.] — or that he has “no more law in him than a jackanapes,” that is actionable. Nay, it was actionable to say that a barrister “has more law in him than the devil,” for he must have less law, and not more than that personage. Now, with regard to words imputing indictable offences, it was an actionable offence to say that Mr. A. had held up his hand to Mr. B., for that was held to be an inducement to commit an assault. In Comyn’s Digest it was held that to say a man had not repaired a road or a bridge, which he ought to repair, was actionable, because the slander imputed to him an act for which he might be fined as a misdemeanor. For such trifling words as these a man might bring his action, and recover damages under the law of slander; but for words of a most serious nature, which might ruin a man’s character, no action could be maintained if they did not ascribe to him conduct inconsistent with the duties of his profession, or impute to him an indictable offence. To call a lawyer a swindler was not actionable. But if a letter containing those words were sent to a single individual, though not shown to another person, an action would lie. If the words were only spoken, it might be proclaimed in the face of the whole county of Middlesex, that a barrister was a swindler, and no action could be brought. If it were said, “a man is a cheat, and I will prove him a cheat; he is a cheat, and stole two bonds from me,” no action would lie, because the bonds were considered only a security, and in that state, as a security, they were a chose [?] in action. So, to say of a man “he is a thief, and stole my trees,” no action would lie, because they were fixtures on the freehold, and on them a man could not commit a larceny. To say a man “stole corn from my field” is not actionable, because the corn was growing or standing, and therefore no action would lie. To say also that a “man stole iron bars out of my window” is not actionable, because the bars are part of the house, and a man cannot commit larceny with a house. So, to state that a “man stole the shutters” is not actionable, for the same reason…. Neither was it actionable to speak most irreverent words of a parson; that was according to a judgment given, which must be well known to his noble and learned Friend on the Woolsack, though the same words, if spoken of a lawyer, would be actionable. It might be said of a parson and it was so held by a judge, that he was a “bon padre and un grand fou.” An action was brought on these words but it appeared by the decision of the court they were not actionable, for the court said in its Norman French, that the man had not said anything against the parson, for a “bon parson might be a d—d fool.”

Some of these distinctions are too subtle for me, I must admit. But I approve of the theology underlying the argument that a lawyer must have less law in him than the Devil. The Devil has nothing but law on his side; the lawyer may not have grace, but at least he may have prudence and equity. 

Miss Climpson

One of the more interesting secondary characters in the Wimsey novels of Dorothy L. Sayers is Miss Climpson — more fully, Alexandra Katharine Climpson. We first meet her in Unnatural Death (1927), as Lord Peter brings his policeman friend Charles Parker to her apartment — slyly leaving Charles to think that he’s paying a visit to a kept woman of his:

The door was opened by a thin, middle-aged woman, with a sharp, sallow face and very vivacious manner. She wore a neat, dark coat and skirt, a high-necked blouse and a long gold neck-chain with a variety of small ornaments dangling from it at intervals, and her iron-grey hair was dressed under a net, in the style fashionable in the reign of the late King Edward.

Let’s pause for a moment to organize time. The novel’s setting is contemporary: we can be certain of this because it ends with a glimpse of the total solar eclipse of 29 June 1927. We know from other books in the series that Lord Peter was born in 1890, so that makes him 37. The “reign of the late King Edward” was 1901–1910. People who stop updating their style of dress usually do so (in my experience) when they’re around thirty, so while the adjective “middle-aged” is a vague one, I think with this hint about clothing and the presence of the “iron-grey hair” we can safely place Miss Climpson in her mid-fifties. (No younger, I think: in Strong Poison [1930] she’s referred to as “elderly.”)

Let us also add — this information will soon be useful — that when this novel was published Sayers herself was 34, and Harriet Vane — her most important female character, whom we will not meet for a while — is 24, and fairly recently graduated from Oxford University.

Now, back to Miss Climpson. After Lord Peter enjoys his joke on Inspector Parker and they depart, Parker wants a proper explanation and gets one:

“Miss Climpson,” said Lord Peter, “is a manifestation of the wasteful way in which this country is run. Look at electricity. Look at water-power. Look at the tides. Look at the sun. Millions of power units being given off into space every minute. Thousands of old maids, simply bursting with useful energy, forced by our stupid social system into hydros and hotels and communities and hostels and posts as companions, where their magnificent gossip-powers and units of inquisitiveness are allowed to dissipate themselves or even become harmful to the community, while the ratepayers’ money is spent on getting work for which these women are providentially fitted, inefficiently carried out by ill-equipped policemen like you….

“She is my ears and tongue,” said Lord Peter, dramatically, “and especially my nose. She asks questions which a young man could not put without a blush. She is the angel that rushes in where fools get a clump on the head. She can smell a rat in the dark. In fact, she is the cat’s whiskers…. People want questions asked. Whom do they send? A man with large flat feet and a note-book — the sort of man whose private life is conducted in a series of inarticulate grunts. I send a lady with a long, woolly jumper on knitting-needles and jingly things round her neck. Of course she asks questions — everyone expects it. Nobody is surprised. Nobody is alarmed.

Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple — many readers will already have her in mind — makes much the same point in A Murder Is Announced (1951):

“We old women always do snoop. It would be very odd and much more noticeable if I didn’t. Questions about mutual friends in different parts of the world and whether they remember so and so, and do they remember who it was that Lady Somebody’s daughter married? All that helps, doesn’t it?”

“Helps?” said the Inspector, rather stupidly.

“Helps to find out if people are who they say they are,” said Miss Marple.

People have often assumed that Miss Climpson is a Marple knock-off, but she isn’t: Unnatural Death appeared in October 1927, and Miss Marple first appeared in December of that year, in a story called “The Tuesday Night Club.” The first Marple novel is The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930. Neither writer copied the other, I am sure. But I don’t think that the appearance of the two characters at the same time is an accident. The emergence of the Modern Girl in the 1920s (successor to the New Woman) must have set people of Christie’s and Sayers’ generation — Christie was three years older than Sayers — thinking about how dramatically the potential roles for women had changed in their lifetime. They were too old to be Modern Girls, though they had been in some sense New Women, and as such had had opportunities that were unthinkable for women of the generation before them — except in the rare cases of heroic trailblazers like Jane Harrison and Mildred Pope, who simply created opportunities that had previously been nonexistent and thereby changed the world for the generations of women to come after them.

You get the sense that Miss Climpson — who is, generally speaking, of Mildred Pope’s generation — did not have that scholar’s great gifts, including the gift of an almost supernatural determination. Writing about a woman who had been born in the 1850s, around the time of Jane Harrison, Miss Climpson is full of admiration. (I pause here to note that Miss Climpson’s writing style is modeled on that of Queen Victoria, with so many underlinings and other instruments of emphasis that, as Lord Peter says, it looks like musical notation.)

It seems that, until five years ago, Miss Dawson lived in Warwickshire with her cousin, a Miss Clara Whittaker, Mary Whittaker’s great-aunt on the father’s side. This Miss Clara was evidently rather a ’character,’ as my dear father used to call it. In her day she was considered very ‘advanced’ and not quite nice(!) because she refused several good offers, cut her hair SHORT(!!) and set up in business for herself as a HORSE-BREEDER!!! Of course, nowadays, nobody would think anything of it, but then the old lady — or young lady as she was when she embarked on this revolutionary proceeding, was quite a PIONEER.

Miss Clara refuses to marry and instead lives with her closest friend, perhaps because she is a lesbian — “Lesbianism in Sayers” is a topic for another post — but it’s equally possible, I think, that her romantic feelings simply are not as strong as her desire for independence. When Miss Clara (born in 1850) was a young woman the first Married Women’s Property Act had been passed, but that would not have been enough to protect her from a husband who insisted on domination and control. And though Miss Climpson does not share this strong independent streak, and would herself have wanted to marry — Sayers says of her that she is “a spinster made and not born” — she nevertheless clearly admires the willpower and resourcefulness of Miss Clara. 

It seems likely to me that Sayers in creating Miss Climpson and Christie in creating Miss Marple were, among many other things, thinking about what they might have been had they been born fifteen or twenty years earlier. Sayers in particular might not have been a “pioneer,” but was quick to claim the benefits that her academic pioneers had been able to secure for her. Perhaps, though, I shouldn’t say “secure”: because of the pioneers, Sayers was able to attend Somerville College, but Oxford was yet to grant degrees to Somervillians. She finished her studies in 1915 — with a First of course: she was quite a brilliant scholar, something too often forgotten — but could not receive her degree until five years later, when Oxford finally began recognizing the validity of its female students’ academic work. Harriet Vane, Sayers’s second-most-famous fictional creation, ten years younger than the author, would have finished at Shrewsbury College (a thinly fictionalized version of Somerville) around 1925 and taken her B.A. as a matter of course.

She would not, however, have been eligible to vote, nor would Sayers, though Miss Climpson and Mildred Pope would have had that right. Not until 1928 would all of them have had the franchise.

Had Sayers been the age of Miss Climpson, she almost certainly would not have attended university, would not have become a scholar and writer; had she been the age of Harriet Vane, she would have been faced with the opportunity to become a Modern Girl — something Harriet definitely isn’t, by the way. (Lord Peter’s um-friend Marjorie Phelps, whom we also see in multiple novels, is much closer to that type — which I think is why Lord Peter doesn’t marry her.) Decade by decade the status of women in British society was changing, and changing in multiple ways; the experience had to have been dizzying. We can see Sayers constantly reckoning with it in her fiction, and Christie too, though (I think) in less forthright and dramatic ways. Christie usually keeps the social commentary well in the background, except in her Mary Westmacott novels — Sayers firmly plants it front and center. 

here we go again

I’ve had to write this quickly and may be revisiting or expanding it later. Stay tuned.

On my first official day as an employee of Wheaton College, in the summer of 1984, I attended an orientation session for new faculty. We heard from various people who worked for the college in various endeavors; they gave us outlines of what they do and why they do it and how they might be a resource for faculty members. One of them was a man who oversaw a program that sent Wheaton students overseas, primarily to the global South and (in those long-ago days) behind the Iron Curtain, to see how Christians lived there, what they needed, how we could learn from them and how we could help them. It sounded like a wonderful program. During the break after his presentation, we were standing around drinking coffee, and he casually asked me whether I knew whom I would vote for in the upcoming Presidential election. I told him that I supported the reelection of President Reagan. He cocked his head at me and said, “You’re really going to vote for that warmongering racist? I think you should reconsider that decision.”

I was pretty surprised by this because I had assumed that the evangelical Christianity of Wheaton would be accompanied — perhaps not exclusively but dominantly — by political conservatism. It turned out that matters were a little more complicated. Wheaton certainly had far more Republicans (and other kinds of political conservative) than almost any other American college or university campus, but the overall political orientation of the faculty was pretty similar to that of the country as a whole. It wasn’t far from a 50–50 split, and I think that variability of political stances has been consistent throughout the modern history of Wheaton.

And it should, shouldn’t it? The question of how the teachings of Jesus and the more general witness of the Bible translates into political belief and action is a notoriously difficult one. Only for the dim-witted or bigoted (on the Left and the Right) is it utterly obvious. The more we know about the history of Christian faith, practice, and teaching the more cautious we will be, I think, about assuming that we can map our Christian beliefs directly onto the political options available to us in our time and place.

But over the past half-century or more we’ve seen a great many people who think that evangelical Christianity should directly correspond to the policies of the Republican party, whatever they happen to be at any given time. (They are quite different now from what they were in the time of Ronald Reagan.) So some 30 years ago, as a professor who taught a class in literary theory, was the subject of the same kind of hit piece that Daniel Davis has just written for First Things about current Wheaton professors, though in my case the piece appeared in World magazine. It was my view that my students, almost all of whom were English and philosophy majors, needed to understand trends in recent thought about literature and interpretation, and needed to be able to assess those ideas from a theologically informed perspective. But this meant reading controversial figures generously, to try to understand not only what they say but what they are trying to accomplish in saying it, and then to ask ourselves whether, even if in the end we must strongly dissent from their key claims, we might learn something from them.

It was this that my critic found unforgivable: my job, he felt, was to teach students only what I agreed with and thought they should agree with. My failure to hold to this practice made me a kind of Judas, a betrayer of trust.

My reasonably well-informed guess is that my former colleague Keith Johnson – whom I have heard in public conversations making strong defenses of both the uniqueness and the universality of the gospel of Jesus Christ – does the same kind of thing I do. But of course, I certainly wouldn’t be able to know that from this article. Davis writes: “Keith Johnson, assigns (and commends) liberation and feminist theology for reading” — but I’d like to know what liberation and feminist theology he assigns, why he assigns it, and if he does indeed commend it, on what grounds. But Davis isn’t going to tell us that because this isn’t a piece meant to inform us of anything; it’s just a smear. I also might ask Davis whether he thinks that people who study theology at Wheaton need to emerge without knowing what liberation and feminist theologians actually say. Is ignorance bliss? Or is it for Davis, perhaps, merely virtue?

Similarly, I don’t know what Davis thinks “critical race theory” is or what it says — I’ve written about this problem at some length — but the phrase, in his usage, isn’t meant to convey any specific content, it’s just meant to scare the children. Ditto the title the piece bears — meant to echo William F. Buckley’s critique of his alma mater, Yale — which nicely elides the rather significant fact that, whatever their politics might happen to be, everyone employed by Wheaton signs a robust and classically orthodox statement of Christian faith. (But then, perhaps the Christian God isn’t the God Davis feels that Wheaton has betrayed. Hard to say.) 

At this juncture I find myself remembering the many students I advised who participated that program that sent them overseas. I remember one young woman, very conservative theologically, who came to my office on the first day of a new semester, just having returned from six months in Mozambique. She greeted me, sat down — and burst into tears. The abrupt transition from six months among a great many very poor but very joyful Christians to our beautiful, well-appointed, technologically sophisticated, and extremely clean campus was more than she could handle. She would spend the next few months, and probably the next few years, grappling with the implications of an evangelical Christianity that flourished more powerfully in the global South than in the United States, even with almost none of the resources we enjoy.

This kind of experience is a characteristic result not just of that program but more generally of the liberal-arts education on offer at Wheaton, which is always based on the understanding that, if the evangelical movement started in Europe, it has spread throughout the world, and we in the West neither own it nor control it. The job of liberal education, especially in a Christian context, is never simply to confirm us in what we already know, or believe we know, but to challenge and push us to deeper and wider understanding, and to do so with confidence, because we ground our pursuit of learning in the conviction that “in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3).

(I use the first-person plural here not because I still teach at Wheaton — I left eleven years ago — but because I learned at Wheaton how to think in this way, thanks to the tutelage of many wise saints, and I hold today to the convictions I developed there.)

The faculty and administration at Wheaton understand this, and therefore see that the American evangelical movement has not always acknowledged its debts to cultures beyond our own, has not always been willing to learn from Christians whose experiences are very different from ours, and has not always made welcome people from outside a certain and rather narrow cultural context. (Some of the people who have felt unwelcome are Wheaton students, including many who love the place with what seems like an unrequited love.) It is the picture of evangelical Christianity as a truly global phenomenon that has led Wheaton to try to reckon with the blind spots in its own history, and to make amends to what Dostoevsky called “the insulted and the injured” when amends are called for.

In trying to make this reckoning, I think Wheaton has made mistakes. For instance, I think it got on board with a DEI regime that may look superficially like a Christian form of reconciliation but in fact is a very different beast, and the college deserves to be criticized for that. But I’d rather a Christian college make mistakes in trying to follow Christ more closely, more faithfully, than to sit back in the smug confidence that it knows everything and has no one outside its own orbit to learn from.

two quotations on survival

Bryan Johnson’s Quest For Immortality | TIME:

Johnson, 46, is a centimillionaire tech entrepreneur who has spent most of the last three years in pursuit of a singular goal: don’t die. During that time, he’s spent more than $4 million developing a life-extension system called Blueprint, in which he outsources every decision involving his body to a team of doctors, who use data to develop a strict health regimen to reduce what Johnson calls his “biological age.” That system includes downing 111 pills every day, wearing a baseball cap that shoots red light into his scalp, collecting his own stool samples, and sleeping with a tiny jet pack attached to his penis to monitor his nighttime erections. Johnson thinks of any act that accelerates aging — like eating a cookie, or getting less than eight hours of sleep — as an “act of violence.”

Johnson is not the only ultra-rich middle-aged man trying to vanquish the ravages of time. Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel were both early investors in Unity Biotechnology, a company devoted to developing therapeutics to slow or reverse diseases associated with aging. Elite athletes employ therapies to keep their bodies young, from hyperbaric and cryotherapy chambers to  “recovery sleepwear.” But Johnson’s quest is not just about staying rested or maintaining muscle tone. It’s about turning his whole body over to an anti-aging algorithm. He believes death is optional. He plans never to do it. 

 

C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: 

I had recently come to know an old, dirty, gabbling, tragic, Irish parson who had long since lost his faith but retained his living. By the time I met him his only interest was the search for evidence of “human survival.” On this he read and talked incessantly, and, having a highly critical mind, could never satisfy himself. What was especially shocking was that the ravenous desire for personal immortality co-existed in him with (apparently) a total indifference to all that could, on a sane view, make immortality desirable. He was not seeking the Beatific Vision and did not even believe in God. He was not hoping for more time in which to purge and improve his own personality. He was not dreaming of reunion with dead friends or lovers; I never heard him speak with affection of anybody. All he wanted was the assurance that something he could call “himself” would, on almost any terms, last longer than his bodily life. 

true crime

In a recent post, I offered one reason why the detective story exploded into prominence when it did. But there are others.

Let’s set the stage first. In their witty, sardonic, and often insightful history of the years between the wars, The Long Week-End, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge say that when the Great War ended “Sherlock Holmes stood alone,” that is, there were no other prominent detective series — an exaggeration, but a pardonable one. Sexton Blake stories were being cranked out at a fearsome rate; Austin Freeman was making a name for himself; and Chesterton’s Father Brown was loved by a significant subset of readers. (One could add the shockingly prolific Edgar Wallace to this list, but most of his novels were thrillers of one kind or another rather than tales of detection as such.) But no detective commanded the universal public attention like Holmes, and there was no sign of the Boom that was quickly to come.

A decade later, Graves and Hodge note, popular reading was utterly dominated by the detective story. The addictiveness of the genre was widely noted, never more wittily than in Wodehouse’s 1931 story “Strychnine in the Soup,” which introduces us to such famous novels as Gore By the Gallon, Blood on the Banisters, and Severed Throats. Not only did it seem that everyone was reading detective stories, everyone was writing them. Poets like C. Day-Lewis (writing as Nicholas Blake) and academics like J. I. M. Stewart (writing as Michael Innes) got in on the game, and T. S. Eliot regularly reviewed detective stories in the Criterion. When Graves started work on I, Claudius he reflected that the British public loved “reading about murders, so I was careful not to leave out any of the six or seven I could tell about.”

Things moved quickly: Agatha Christie had written The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1916, but it was not published until 1920, the date usually fixed for the beginning of the Boom. In the same year Freeman Wills Crofts published The Cask; then came A. A. Milne’s The Red House (1922), Dorothy L. Sayers’s Whose Body (written in 1921, published in 1923), and an ever-growing host of others.

How, and why, did this happen? In that recent post I described what I thought was one essential precondition, but the precondition was in place long before the boom occurred. It’s impossible to prove this point, but it seems to me likely that in the aftermath of the bloodiest war in human history, it was psychologically useful to make violent death ordinary again: to reduce its scope to the comprehensible. Killing could not be denied, but perhaps it could be to some extent controlled, or anyway retributed, through the workings of a generally honest and occasionally competent system of criminal investigation and punishment.

So we have in place a general social precondition for the rising popularity of the genre of detective fiction, and a widely shared psychological need that it fulfilled. But there was, I think, one more factor. If the British public liked reading about murders, as Graves said, that didn’t necessarily mean fictional murders. And I don’t think that the great Golden Age writers of detective fiction got their inspiration primarily from Conan Doyle or Chesterton, but rather from true crime stories they read about in the newspapers.

In her fine book The Invention of Murder, Judith Flanders writes about how modern police procedures arose in tandem with a series of highly-publicized Victorian murderers: Jack the Ripper of course, but also Dr. Pritchard, Henry Wainwright, and, early in the century but famous throughout it, Burke and Hare. It’s hard to overstate how compelling these criminals and their foul deeds continued to be well into the twentieth century: in Dorothy L. Sayers’s first novel, Whose Body? (1923), there’s a significant mention of the Adolf Beck case, and her third, Unnatural Death (1927), begins with Lord Peter Wimsey offering his opinion on why Pritchard got caught.

And of course these cases continued past the Victorian era: at the time that the Boom began, the most talked-about case for the previous decade had been that of Dr. Crippen. But a new one would come to dominate the news just as the Boom was really getting under way: the Thompson-Bywaters case of 1922 — the execution of Edith Thompson in January 1923 being perhaps the most controversial event in the history of British murders. And as the genre grew, the murders kept coming: in 1931 the murder of Julia Wallace, in 1934 the Brighton Trunk Murders. The Wallace killing alone has prompted dozens of fictional retellings and even more attempts at guessing the identity of the murderer, and there has never been a more brilliantly written true-crime story than Sayers’s essay on the many puzzles surrounding that murder — it should be much more widely read than it is, but it’s not easy to find.

Indeed, as Martin Edwards has pointed out, Sayers is the Golden Age writer most openly influenced by real-life murder cases — but then, she was always one to show her work, that is, to wear her influences proudly on her sleeve. Many other stories of detection, or crime novels more generally, are strongly based on real cases — one of the most famous, and effective, of these being Ernest Raymond’s revisiting of the Crippen case from the perspective of the murderer(s), We, the Accused (1935).

These famous crimes kept getting re-described by novelists quite closely, or more loosely, because people just couldn’t commit interesting and puzzling murders fast enough to sate the public’s appetite for tales of violence; and that, I think, is the single most important cause of the Boom in tales of detection.

N.B. Just after posting this I realized that I have already done a version of it. Duh. But I’m working through these issues now in more detail. 

the integrity of the system

Dorothy L. Sayers, once she had established herself as a writer of detection, was asked to edit an anthology of, roughly, her kind of fiction. In the end she edited several such volumes, but the first, largest, and best of them was published in 1928 as Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. (The following year it was published in the U.S. with the much less accurate title The Omnibus of Crime.)

In her highly illuminating introduction to the anthology, Sayers argues that in one form or another tales of detection and tales of horror are quite ancient. The latter point might seem more obviously true, but Sayers makes a strong case that we see the essential lineaments of the tale of detection in, for example, the addition to the biblical book of Daniel in which the young prophet-to-be conducts a shrewd examination of the old men who have accused beautiful Susannah of illicit sex, revealing that their testimonies are inconsistent with each other and utterly false. (Daniel does what later became standard police procedure: he interviews the two likely conspirators separately, so neither can know what the other says.) Similarly, about Aesop’s fable in which the fox refuses to enter the lion’s cave to pay respects to the King of the Beasts because he sees many hoof-prints going into the cave but none coming back out, Sayers says: “Sherlock Holmes could not have reasoned more lucidly from the premises.”

People often use the terms “detective” story and “mystery” interchangably, but Sayers prefers to distinguish the two; and the kind of story she calls a “mystery” is one that fuses horror and detection. This fusion, she claims, begins with Poe, most obviously in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” She finds especially appealing stories that begin in an atmosphere of supernatural horror but end with that horror dispelled by the light of reason: e.g. Conan Dolye’s “Adventure of the Specked Band” or Chesterton’s “The Hammer of God.” (N.B.: Full enjoyment of the latter story might be available only to those whose ignorance of the laws of physics equals that of GKC.) She herself wrote no novels that fit this description, though The Nine Tailors verges on it: we are left with a completely material, this-worldly solution to the key mystery, but the possibility remains that there were other forces at work. “Bells are like cats and mirrors,” Lord Peter says, “ — they’re always queer, and it doesn’t do to think too much about them.”

Concerning the tale of detection proper, Sayers muses on a curious fact: Why, if there are such ancient examples of such tales, did the genre not really take root and grow expansively until the second half of the nineteenth century? Drawing on the work of what she rightly calls “a brilliant little study” by a scholar rejoicing in the name of E. M. Wrong, she makes a fascinating suggestion: that while stories about crime always have flourished and always will flourish, stories of detection depend on the reader’s confidence in the basic integrity of the forces of law and order. That is, detective stories depend on the reader’s essential sympathy with the Law rather than the criminal — the reader must want the criminal to be caught.

This does not mean that the reader is expected to have any real confidence in the competence of the police — unless, of course, the protagonist is himself or herself a police officer, in which case we typically see an honest and skillful investigator thwarted or at least impeded by corruption or incompetence in the higher ranks. (This is a problem often faced by Maigret and Morse, and sometimes Dalgleish.) When the detective-protagonist is not a police officer, most famously in the case of Sherlock Holmes, we expect that the police will be none too intelligent and, whether they realize it or not, in desperate need of Holmes’s help. But we never for a moment imagine that Lestrade or Athelney Jones is corrupt. The police often make mistakes: they obsess over meaningless clues, overlook essential clues, misinterpret all the clues, grow irrationally stubborn, and arrest the wrong people (Harriet Vane, for instance, in Sayers’s Strong Poison) — but their mistakes are typically honest mistakes and we do not feel that, in Sayers’s words, “the law is arbitrary, oppressive, and brutally administered.” Otherwise we might prefer that a criminal, even a serious criminal, get away with it.

A basic trust in the integrity of the legal system arises, it seems to me, in Great Britain before it arises anywhere else. Again: integrity, not competence. I think George Orwell made a shrewd point when he wrote, in 1941, during the Blitz,

In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the castor oil? The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays there corruption cannot go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become completely corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard. The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.

There are many powerful critiques to be made of the British political and legal system, and at one time or another Orwell makes most of them, but his own scrupulous honesty prevents him from making the cheapest ones. (The process by which those cheapest critiques could eventually prove to be correct is, of course, the great theme of both Animal Farm and 1984.)

This point leads us back to Sayers, who writes: “The detective-story had to wait for its full development for the establishment of an effective police organisation in the Anglo-Saxon countries.” This is generally true, but American detective fiction does not always fit the bill: the melancholy mood that often dominates Raymond Chandler’s stories — Farewell, My Lovely is perhaps the best example — arises from Philip Marlowe’s determination to be an honest private investigator when the police are commonly, if not universally, corrupt. (And the ones who are honest have to turn a blind eye to their colleagues’ behavior if they want to keep their jobs. In Farewell, My Lovely we see two cops who go along to get along and one who confronts corruption and gets himself fired. Chandler probably thought that the actual proportion was closer to ten-to-one than two-to-one, but you can only introduce so many characters in one novel.) This is a theme in Ross Macdonald’s novels as well, and we all know the sentence that best encapsulates the defeated acknowledgement of How Things Are: “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

So if the detective story depended on the readers’ confidence in the integrity of the System, what happens when that confidence evaporates? Obviously a return to crime fiction: from the uprightness of Poirot and Lord Peter and even Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, we move to the morally sloppy, thoroughly compromised, just barely more-slimed-than-sliming porotagonists of Elmore Leonard’s novels; or Danny Ocean and his crew. Perhaps that’s why the most popular detective stories are those of the Golden Age, which provide an opportunity for us to enter a more innocent time than ours, more innocent in multiple respects, one in which we’re not openly rooting for thieves and murderers. 

happening

A few months ago, when Criterion was running a sale, I got this boxed set. It’s beautifully done, like all of Criterion’s editions, and the films come accompanied with informative essays, images, and videos. 

But the interest here (while pretty intense, for me anyway) is almost purely historical and sociological, because the music … well, it’s largely really bad. Otis Redding is fantastic, and the pop acts — though they often seem out of place in this environment, Simon & Garfunkel especially — tend to sing on-pitch and play with some semblance of rhythm; but the rock acts are almost uniformly inept. Even Jimi Hendrix appeals largely as a showman rather than a musician. The group that sounds the best is probably the Byrds, and they’re more of a pop group than a rock band. 

This shouldn’t have surprised me, because my friend John Wilson, who was living in California in this period and saw almost every famous performer, said that they often weren’t very good. Too many drugs, too much alcohol. Still, because the festival is such a famous one, I was a bit surprised by just how poorly almost everyone played and sang. 

But: I don’t believe many of them were trying very hard, and if they had been, no one would have noticed. This was a classic Happening, an event conjured from vibes, pheromones, and bong hits. You had to be there, as the saying goes, and being there was the whole and the only point. The music was barely relevant: even when you see people swaying and dancing they’re almost never on the beat. They’re dancing to their own inner festival. 

Otis kills, though.