Steve Evans's Blog: The written world - Posts Tagged "edward-gibbon"

One of the wonderful things about the internet is the global availability of resources that once were the privilege of the few, or when not, for one reason or another hard to find. It is truly amazing what is there for the curious, the hungry, the determined. Just now I am reading, on my e-reader, Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in a 19th century edition. This is a work I have been meaning to read since I was very young, a teenager or not much older. I first saw it somewhere in hard copy, multiple volumes glaring at me off a library shelf. The edition I am reading came with the e-reader, one of a hundred titles obviously out of copyright.

Since then I have found and acquired some really rare titles, got them down onto my adobe digital editions package and from there to my e-reader, which is a Kobo. I’d like to share some of them: the first folio of the works of William Shakespeare. There are not many physical copies of this particular title around, and I don’t even recall ever seeing a facsimile edition. Yet a few flicks through the net, there it is, download and shazam! It’s on my Kobo.

Then there is the quarto* of Troilus and Cressida, a curious play by the Bard. Ditto…hanging in there on my e-reader as it has been digitalised and put up on the net by a helpful soul.

Recently I was gobsmacked to find most of a collected works edition of the writings of Irish/English politician and political philosopher Edmund Burke up there too, for free. Turned out the volume containing the one I wanted, was not there, and I had to find another version. But I did, and it’s there, Kobo-ised.

This is truly a revolution in learning. It may be restricted to older material in terms of being free, but that is not especially important. If it is new and costs and you want it enough, you’ll pay. And a lot of free newer stuff that is non-fiction anyway also seems to appear, whacked up on the net by their authors or authorised people who just want to share whatever the magic is.

Not everything fits on a Kobo, but it can fit on the PC and maybe on a tablet or an iPad. Here is something that has really thrown a spark across my jumper leads, causing my hair to stand on end and goosebumps to cover my body:

There is something called the Voynich Manuscript. It was acquired from Jesuits owning a palace outside Rome in 1912 by an antiquarian styling himself W M Voynich. It is an illustrated manuscript, possibly some kind of herbal, and has been dated around 1400-1500. The thing is, this manuscript is written in a script that is unlike any other known, and despite hard work by people who are really good at codes, it has never been cracked.

I read about this on the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-env...

The Voynich manuscript is now on my PC, in my adobe digital editions package, and there is a long thread of what it is about from those who think they’ve figured it out. It seems “translators” have rendered it as the history of the Czech land, in Macedonian, some other language the first five books of the New Testament, etc…the best, in the quick squiz I had was that it was a herbal by a disciple of or himself, Paracelsus, written in a code to discourage the unworthy (the authorities too!).

But that is not all! The thick plottens!* The Voynich concerned was a Pole whose real name was Michał Habdank-Wojnicz, and who married an Irish woman named Ethel Lilian Boole. As E L Voynich she wrote one of the allegedly great revolutionary novels, The Gadfly. R Bruce Lockhart, a man for whom the truth was ever elastic, reckoned the hero of the novel was based on the early career of Sidney Reilly (“Ace of Spies”) who had an affair with Ethel in Italy and told her his story as a revolutionary would, especially if he was keen to get her into bed.

Before meeting Ethel, W M Voynich was a revolutionary in Poland, then part of the Russian empire. His wealthy family did not prevent his being sent to Siberia for his role in a plot to free two other revolutionaries in 1886. The plot failed, they were executed, and Voynich managed to escape from Siberia and do a runner to safety, washing up in London.

The rest may or may not be history. Voynich ran into Ethel, they got married, she wrote The Gadfly which made pots of dough, and he stopped being a revolutionary and settled down as an antiquarian bookseller with shops in London and New York. The couple apparently moved to New York where he died in 1930 while she carried on till the 1960s, dying at the tender age of 96.

Now, all of that is safely lodged in my PC or easily cribbed from the net, and what I say is that put together, it is pretty amazing. Here I sit, quite a long way from anywhere, and I can not only find all this stuff out, but if I want to, I can have a crack at deciphering this manuscript myself, as anyone else can who cares to have a go.

Or, I can put the whole lot into my literary pipe, smoke it, and see if there is a story, or a novel, or part of one, lurking in there…there may be you know?

Thanks for reading.

* I have seen a quarto of a Shakespeare play, in a display case in a gallery/museum in Edinburgh, Scotland. It looked very much like a rudimentary Penguin paperback.

** I am congratulating Spooner on being who he was.

After celebrating having a blog that lasted an entire year, producing the next post has turned out to be a struggle, so much so that I think I could be a comic book character with a lycra suit I could never quite get into or take off, yet as I pull and twist, hop from one foot to another, wriggle and writhe, somehow save civilisation, only to be landed with a lawsuit for trampling someone’s flower bed…Yes, things are grim.

The troubles I am having! There are several reasons. One is that I somehow have got bogged down in my “reading programme” and that is interfering with my writing. My plan has been for quite some time to write a post about Troilus and Cressida and how I reckon that it just may be that the Shakespeare industry has got this play wrong. Since that is an ambitious undertaking I want to reread the play first, but while doing that I started reading Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on my e-reader and it has suddenly taken over.

Reading is not what it used to be. The internet allows us to be provoked by what we are reading, sit down at the PC, and check something out. Gibbon’s masterwork has sent me scurrying to the keyboard time and again to find out things. And my goodness me! The things there are to find out! Just the great man’s biography is amazing – try it on Wikipedia. Wow!

Moreover, this is not just some tiny wee book that prompts my queries. It is a monster, and a landmark in historiography and literature…six volumes, and none of them, so far as I can tell on my e-reader, is small. I have just moved into volume two, wherein Gibbon is trying to explain why it was that the Romans persecuted the Christians, when they started to do it, and what came after…and in doing this, he casts doubt on much of the received “wisdom” and knowledge of shall we say Christian lore. And of course since Gibbon was writing in the 18th century, that means more roaming the net to see what scholarship since has turned up.

Gibbon’s work was banned in several places, largely it seems because of the chapter I am presently reading – the edition I’ve got from “Project Gutenburg” is a 19th century one done by a minister who can’t help putting in outraged notes of his own and other editors*, so I don’t really want to put it down just yet. But it is obvious that if I want to do the other things I want to do, I should have a break at some stage soon.

But for those who might be interested, it is more than worth the time and effort to get through what has turned out to be one of the great reading experiences of my life. As well as the scholarship involved, it is very well written, the kind of writing that is genuinely a pleasure, yes a physical pleasure, to read. Gibbon’s refined irony is wonderful.

Now, the post I want to write on Troilus and Cressida is a sort of addendum to the novel I have just published, Kaos. In it the play has a role of its own, and the post I would like to write justifies that role for anyone curious enough to want to know about it.

But that’s not all. Kaos is the 7th novel I’ve put up on the net, and I’d like to see it sell a few more copies – say, a quarter of a million or so more, just plucking a number out of the air. While I have been contemplating how to do this, blogs I follow have leapt obligingly into the breach to tell wannabes like myself how to market our stuff. Some have even, for reasons I do not entirely understand, also tried to teach us how to write.

And those blogs have prompted more reflection, on what I reckon are fundamental issues of life and art. I’ve wrestled with a few posts on these issues before deciding to park them and write this one.

There is more too…about writing, the focus of this blog. I’d like to go into some of the things that have occurred to me while I was writing Kaos that if “personal” are also generic, I think, to the craft and art of writing.

So there is a fair swack of posts stored up waiting…to be thought through, researched as and when necessary, and then written and posted.

And while that is happening I just know there will be more things popping into my fevered mind; the queue will lengthen. And yes, outside of this is life! At the mo I am clearing up a large pile of apple tree prunings that need to be chopped up and sawn so they can be stacked and when dry fed lovingly into my wood burner. The trees that were pruned had not been cared for, at all, for many years – one, I think, for more than a century – and some of the branches are huge.

And and and! These are trivial personal concerns. Life is more important than that. The Struggler…he’s got his teeth on the sleeve of the suit and thinks just maybe he’ll be able to make it fit right so he can go out there and save…save…save…save a vulnerable maiden from the clutches of a rank intruder whose many bad qualities begin with his body odour before moving sublimely on to his breath…but wait a minute, Struggler! That’s me you’re wrestling with…get your teeth off my suit!…

*Principally Francois Guizot. We shall meet M Guizot in one of those coming posts.

Niall Ferguson has written an absorbing and disturbing account of warfare in the first half of the 20th century and beyond, War of the world. The title’s self-conscious take on H G Wells’ story of a Martian invasion of our planet suggests all too painfully that the alien element that threatens to destroy us is inside us, not outside, another way of saying we are our own worst enemies.

Whatever the merits of Ferguson’s specific arguments – for example that this period was the most violent in history, that this was caused by instability, with ethnic dimensions brought on by integration and assimilation – the sheer awfulness of the events he describes is breath-taking as it is sobering. Is this our lot, really? “Nasty, brutish and short” taken to a general conclusion? Are we just inherently violent, ready whenever it suits to drop the thin veneer of decency for the snarling monster of real humanity?

It seems to me, as a writer and a human, that as in so much of our natures, the answer is double sided. Yes, that monster is there, though it is not always the horrible fellow we say. But no, it is not necessarily the rule; it just can be. Indeed, it can be argued that peacefulness is the rule, that if the desire to have a peaceful life is not a wellspring of society, it has been a powerful byproduct of the “march of civilisation”. Midway through the mammoth series that is Edward Gibbon’s History of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (I am now three-quarters through the third of six volumes) the repeated failures of the Romans to provide security for their citizens – some of them Romans but many and even most incorporated from other cultures – makes for painful reading. Those who were conquered and then “assimilated” into the Roman state were often willing new subjects, refugees from the instability and horrors of life in the regions outside the empire – they sought a peaceful life. For centuries, they got it. But when things went awry, the former empire sank into chaos. It is no surprise that feudalism rose from the rubble – peasants and others seeking protection from random violence via a local lord and his knights, and willing to shoulder arms to help.

Today most people live quite unviolent lives. It is our norm, and it is because it is our norm that violence so terrifies and outrages and also fascinates us. Those who in our communities step outside the norm and practice routine violence threaten us at least implicitly. When whole societies fall into a violent mode, where normal life is impossible – as in Mexican and other Latin American towns during the drug cartel wars for example – we shiver inside. Well, if you don’t, I do. Breaking this cycle seems to invite the fighting fire with fire response that not surprisingly prompts the spectre of further descent into the maelstrom.

This reality – or perhaps “these realities” – also spawn and justify the attention to violence in our arts and media, but raise troubling issues when they are explicit. It is fair to ask whether graphic violence promotes real violence in the same way that chaotic social violence makes peaceful life so difficult. Even I, as a writer who puts violence in his books that is a focus of the storyline and central to the moral dimensions of my work, find this troubling.

It seems to me that deliberate exploitation of violence in the arts – such as some of Luc Besson’s violent thriller films like Leon the professional or La femme Nikita – is morally indefensible, though that does not mean this work should be banned. It is possible to depict and explore the realities of the most gruesome violence in all their moral dimensions without implying for a moment that because it is real, it is ok to do it. Besson no doubt carefully choreographed the moral dimensions of his graphic depictions in these films just as much as the staging of them, to be able to justify them to critics. The very care he has taken suggests to me that he knows what he is doing is wrong, and cynically goes on doing it. For example, in Leon, a young woman who says she is 18 but who looks much younger, played by Natalie Portman, teams up with a professional killer after her family is horrifically murdered by a drug-crazed corrupt cop. When she kills someone, it is less gruesome than when Leon does, even though both are shown graphically enough, and Leon’s murders are correspondingly less awful than the villains’. I couldn’t bring myself to watch this film to the end, so perhaps Natalie “lifts her game” in the denouement when she confronts the corrupt and nutty cop, and goes from making little specks of blood appear on her victims’ abdomens to blasting away as organs fly around the room, but her first few shootings and killings are deliberately depicted as somehow less terrible than Leon’s, or the villains’.

Besson can also point to the “context” of these killings in that innocent people are the villains’ victims (Portman’s family) and thus qualify for the most gruesome violence while Leon and she kill criminals of one sort or another, where instant death is part of the deal. As crims, they are not fully human…

Yet what seems to me to be the point of Besson’s technique is to desensitise his audience towards violence and its consequences. Portman’s character is as methodlical and businesslike in killing as her mentor; it’s just what one does when one is a “clearner” as Leon describes himself, right?

Critics defend him. One who says he is among the greats calls this approach to violence “a conscientious resistance to human degradation”. That just doesn’t seem right to me; this resistance seems to deliberately wallow in human degradation. And with Leon, a film whose premise is staggeringly ridiculous, there seem to be underlying motives outside the film itself.*

I was watching these films because I had earlier seen another, Angel-A, that I liked a great deal for other reasons, in which violence played a secondary and far less graphic role. So Besson is not uniform in his treatment. He can be funny, and in Angel-A, he raises interesting issues about personality and our ability to change and improve as people.

Whatever Besson’s effect on others – Nikita is apparently considered a classic of the genre – his effect on me has been to make me rethink my attitude towards violence in my own writing. Some of my books** suggest that there are situations where violence is justified and I feel certain that in the real, as opposed to the make-believe moral universe we would all like to inhabit but don’t, that this is so. But when considered as on a slippery slope, maybe this sledge is one a writer only thinks she or he is piloting as it heads towards the abyss.

* It has been suggested (see Wiki) that with Leon, Besson was making a film about a young woman while having a relationship with a 15 year-old, smearing a personal statement all over the screen and into viewers’ faces.

** This may be true of all of them, but The Kleiber Monster, Tobi’s Game, Demented and Kaos all examine this moral dilemma in some way.