Steve Evans's Blog: The written world , page 4
September 30, 2014
The devil didn't make me do it, but s/he might have
If it’s not William, it’s Ted…yes, since my last post I’ve been beavering away on a novel and the literary face in my mind has been not the Bard of Avon but Mr Fyodor Dostoevsky, Fyodor being Russian’s version of Theodore.
Dostoevsky is apparently not for everybody, though I don’t know why this might be so, just as I don’t know why it might be that Shakespeare isn’t for everybody, as I reckon people missing out on either of these amazing writers, thinkers and human beings really are missing out!
And for me, Dostoevsky is an endless prompt – inspiring, provocative, puzzling, informative, awesome…truly amazing, so amazing that he can be amazing even if one does not agree with almost everything he believed.
The book I am writing now was partly inspired by a short story Doestoevsky wrote and published in his Writer’s Diary between the completion of Demons and the beginning of Brothers Karamazov. This diary was a sort of pot-pourri – there were stories, but also comments and analysis on issues of the day. “Bobok” was a story, and I went to some trouble to discover that it was not based on some folk legends or myths but sprang out of the writer’s imagination.
Something in Karamazov has also kept me thinking as I’ve been writing. Dostoevsky “as any fule no” was a serious Christian, and in his final novel he brings the devil into the picture. Now, what you might think about this in the book as it is translated by any of the many people who have turned Dostoevsky’s Russian into English may very well depend on the translation and edition you are using, as the notes are either quite explicit or only implicit or not really informative at all. Even one of his best-known literary biographies, which features what appears to be exhaustive exegesis of his work, does not see fit to mention His Eviltude in its account of Dostoevsky’s last and perhaps most famous novel.
The edition I like is by a Scot, David McDuff* and one of the reasons I like it is for the notes, which are extensive. McDuff is very explicit about the role the devil plays in the story – a role played in the flesh, yet without a pitchfork, strange body or even evil grin. The point of the devil to Dostoevsky is far more subtle. Readers familiar with the writer will know that his theology is easily misunderstood and that like many another human being, he sought refuge behind his own complexity and obscurity when it suited. He is nowadays more appreciated as a Christian socialist than he has been in the past, when he was considered highly conservative, but the dinners he had with the Russian royal family – whose subject matter he never wrote anything about – perhaps did not include much table talk even skirting this kind of religious politics.
Anyway Dostoevsky’s ways of treating subjects like death and the devil himself have helped me a lot as I’ve worked out and written this new book. It’s still in process and I don’t want to spoil anything as I reach the end of the first draft now, but the inspiration for this as yet untitled masterpiece I’ve drawn from the great man really is continuous, as it is in my life. In my novel The Russian Idea I tried to give readers some idea of the importance of Dostoevsky to Russian intellectual culture and beyond including but well outside literature, and in this one he may never even get a mention. It’s not that kind of book. So I just want to say, all over again, “Thanks Ted. You’re a peach.”
Thanks for reading.
*A translation I have bought but not yet read calls the book The Karamazov Brothers on the grounds that we don’t say “the Brothers Marx” etc. While this is true, it is also true that books and plays acquire their own reputations and titles even though the original title is different, usually as a short form, but in other ways too. The full title of Troilus and Cressida for example, is a bit of a mouthful.
Dostoevsky is apparently not for everybody, though I don’t know why this might be so, just as I don’t know why it might be that Shakespeare isn’t for everybody, as I reckon people missing out on either of these amazing writers, thinkers and human beings really are missing out!
And for me, Dostoevsky is an endless prompt – inspiring, provocative, puzzling, informative, awesome…truly amazing, so amazing that he can be amazing even if one does not agree with almost everything he believed.
The book I am writing now was partly inspired by a short story Doestoevsky wrote and published in his Writer’s Diary between the completion of Demons and the beginning of Brothers Karamazov. This diary was a sort of pot-pourri – there were stories, but also comments and analysis on issues of the day. “Bobok” was a story, and I went to some trouble to discover that it was not based on some folk legends or myths but sprang out of the writer’s imagination.
Something in Karamazov has also kept me thinking as I’ve been writing. Dostoevsky “as any fule no” was a serious Christian, and in his final novel he brings the devil into the picture. Now, what you might think about this in the book as it is translated by any of the many people who have turned Dostoevsky’s Russian into English may very well depend on the translation and edition you are using, as the notes are either quite explicit or only implicit or not really informative at all. Even one of his best-known literary biographies, which features what appears to be exhaustive exegesis of his work, does not see fit to mention His Eviltude in its account of Dostoevsky’s last and perhaps most famous novel.
The edition I like is by a Scot, David McDuff* and one of the reasons I like it is for the notes, which are extensive. McDuff is very explicit about the role the devil plays in the story – a role played in the flesh, yet without a pitchfork, strange body or even evil grin. The point of the devil to Dostoevsky is far more subtle. Readers familiar with the writer will know that his theology is easily misunderstood and that like many another human being, he sought refuge behind his own complexity and obscurity when it suited. He is nowadays more appreciated as a Christian socialist than he has been in the past, when he was considered highly conservative, but the dinners he had with the Russian royal family – whose subject matter he never wrote anything about – perhaps did not include much table talk even skirting this kind of religious politics.
Anyway Dostoevsky’s ways of treating subjects like death and the devil himself have helped me a lot as I’ve worked out and written this new book. It’s still in process and I don’t want to spoil anything as I reach the end of the first draft now, but the inspiration for this as yet untitled masterpiece I’ve drawn from the great man really is continuous, as it is in my life. In my novel The Russian Idea I tried to give readers some idea of the importance of Dostoevsky to Russian intellectual culture and beyond including but well outside literature, and in this one he may never even get a mention. It’s not that kind of book. So I just want to say, all over again, “Thanks Ted. You’re a peach.”
Thanks for reading.
*A translation I have bought but not yet read calls the book The Karamazov Brothers on the grounds that we don’t say “the Brothers Marx” etc. While this is true, it is also true that books and plays acquire their own reputations and titles even though the original title is different, usually as a short form, but in other ways too. The full title of Troilus and Cressida for example, is a bit of a mouthful.
August 18, 2014
Storm splashes out of teacup, washes over saucer, stains tablecloth, trousers and reputation
Yes, The Tempest…Shakespeare’s one.
Because relatively little is known about him, it is easy to pour imagined realities into Shakespeare's work and breathlessly assure all and sundry that they really are true. The controversy about “who really wrote” the plays and sonnets and other poems springs from this and those who follow this blog will know my opinion on that. Just to save any new readers some time if not fun, I am not among those – Shakespeare, often with collaborators, wrote the plays and the rest.#
Inside the plays though, in the area of “what is this about?”, there are plenty of opportunities to wax lyrical with fantasies, or as journalists often say, “interview your typewriter”. It is one of the things that makes Shakespeare fun. Chasing down various angles of interpretation and other aspects is a bit like a detective story. Indeed a detective story writer, Josephine Tey, arguably rescued the reputation of Richard III, the one whose bones were recently discovered under a carpark in Leicester.##
One of my fantasies is about the “real life” model for Prospero in The Tempest, Shakespeare’s next to last work. I’ve used some of this in Savonarola’s Bones, a light novel I wrote as an experiment in some other things. But I left a lot out, and not wanting it to go to waste, here is the argument rendered much more full.
Most scholars think Prospero was based on one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, John Dee and it would diminish Shakespeare’s creative imagination to think that Prospero wasn’t at least partly modeled on this magus who was an amazing character.*
Dee however was influenced by another school – the so-called Hermetic tradition associated with the Florentine renaissance and two figures there: Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.
I reckon Shakespeare modeled Prospero at least partly on Pico. This is my little “discovery” and so far as I know no one else has ever suggested it.
Is it piffle?
Maybe.
Here are my reasons.
Pico’s family ruled the tiny principality, Mirandola and had connections with the rulers of Milan (the Sforzas) as well as other ruling families. Giovanni was much younger than his two brothers and while not the ruler as sometimes supposed, he was among the few of the emerging aristocracy of the time to get totally sold on philosophy. He studied in Ferrara and elsewhere and fetched up in Florence, where he immersed himself in Hermetic philosophy at the “court” of Plato as funded by the ruling Medici family and organised by the priest Marsilio Ficino. He was also a friend of the renegade reformist monk Girolamo Savonarola..
During the renaissance Pico was famous. Nowadays he is still remembered for his Oration on the Dignity of Man. But he’s not known today for the magus stuff, The Heptaplus and other Cabalistic writings that were later to influence Dee. Even so, his devotion to “philosophy” as it was then understood was widely admired.
The connection with Shakespeare comes via Sir (Saint) Thomas More. More was a figure in the Henry VI plays as a sheriff of London who quelled riots of 1517. In real life he also resisted the break with Rome under Henry VIII, was tried for treason and beheaded.
Despite the fact that More was on the outs with the Tudors and hence Elizabeth there were several attempts to make a play out of his career. Perhaps hoping to escape censure a group of writers including Shakespeare shared responsibility for a revision of a script previously knocked back by the censor or Master of the Revels. There is no evidence it was ever produced and in retrospect it seems a naive indeed pious hope that even a non-Tudor monarch (James I) would allow production..
The revised manuscript survives. While some disagree it is usually accepted that it contains the only example of Shakespeare’s dramatic work in his own hand(“Hand D”).
We can take from this that Shakespeare was more than vestigially familiar with the martyred More.
Today More’s Utopia is the only one of his works to be at all familiar, even to educated people. But his collected works begin not with one of his own books, but with a translation of Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola’s biography of his uncle Giovanni.
Ah.
So there are reasonable grounds for supposing that Shakespeare knew of Pico, and was familiar with his life as recounted through More.**
There is more! Like Dee, Pico acquired a large library and his nephew was grateful that he inherited the books on Pico’s death. Tellingly, Prospero’s daughter in The Tempest is named Miranda, and it is a coinage of Shakespeare’s, like Imogen***
So there is more to Pico than Dee, really, in “Prospero-speak”: Like Prospero he was of a ruling house, with connections to Milan; and he was so struck by philosophy he abandoned all other pursuits. He had the secret books. He wrote extensively about white magic, the stuff of the magus. And Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, has an obvious “Mirandolic” connotation, given that this was a name Shakespeare created for his character and as we know a number of Shakespearean names have reasons behind them.
Yeah, but so what?
Pico died, apparently poisoned, in 1494, a little more than a century before The Tempest was written, but the Hermetic tradition he followed was still current. Dee studied and wrote in Hermeticism, for example. So did the Italian monk Giordano Bruno.
Bruno was another of those renaissance characters whose lives today seem rather odd. He grew up in what is now southern Italy and made a name for himself with memory systems, which were popular in an age when books were relatively rare. He could recite vast slabs of texts. But he also wrote philosophical tracts as he traveled throughout Europe.
His real interest was in the Cabala and other Hermetic notions, and he pursued these to the point of death, since he was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600, fervently believing that if he could only talk to the Pope all would be smoothed over.
Bruno lived in London for a while, staying at the home of the French ambassador. It is possible that he knew Shakespeare, and certainly was a part of the many secret circles then fizzing about the city discussing religious, philosophical and scientific ideas. The character Berowne in Love’s Labour Lost is commonly taken as modeled on Bruno (which means Brown in Italian). Some think Berowne is a mocking portrait, others a sympathetic one.
Bruno’s crime was to believe in the writings of one Hermes Trismegistus.(this last meaning thrice great) a philosophical guru who was alleged to have lived at the time of Moses and who was believed to have predicted the coming of Jesus. The evil in this was to attach Christianity to other religions. It seems Bruno hoped to resolve the schisms that had taken place in 16th century Europe between Rome and various stripes of breakaway churches by placing all of them under the umbrella of Hermes.
From the point of view of Rome, this was and could only be heresy. Bruno has never been absolved and when on the four hundredth anniversary of his death half a million people demonstrated in the Eternal City at the site where he was burned at the stake demanding he be pardoned, the Church was unrepentant.
In England, the perspective could be a bit different. Hermeticism could be regarded as a means of peaceful resolution of the schism between the Church of England and Rome, as Bruno meant it. And at a time when being a Catholic in England was risky that was no bad thing.
There is some evidence that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic. A Catholic tract signed by his father John was found hidden in the roof of John’s house in Stratford in the 18th century. Many scholars have joined dots of various sorts to show Shakespeare to be a “recusant”.
One of these, Richard Wilson^, argues that while a Catholic, Shakespeare nonetheless was a faithful servant of the English and then British Crown and that the secret message of his works was actually one of tolerance and acceptance.
If this be true – frankly, I have no idea – when Prospero abandons his books at the end of The Tempest, he is not just leaving his power behind as he returns home to Milan. Shakespeare can be taken to signify to his fellow closet Catholics that the Church of England is there to stay and they should give up their dreams of restoring “the one true faith” in the sceptred isle.
The Tempest is dated at 1609, and its first publication was in the Folio of 1623, where it is the first entry. By the end of the 17th century Hermeticism and with it white magic had been dealt heavy blows: Newton may have spent decades studying alchemy, but the scientific method had really won out by 1700. And for poor Bruno and Dee, and Pico, and Ficino and all their fellows, possibly including Shakespeare, the Hermetic manuscripts, so prized evidence of a grander faith uniting the peoples, had been shown a post-Christian forgery.^^
After all this, was it worth it? Possibly not. I am not a Shakespeare scholar but a Shakespeare lover, and I have used this somewhat tortuous argument in abbreviated form in my novel Savonarola’s Bones, as I used Troilus and Cressida and an argument that is less tenuous in Kaos. Even so, it is a long way from the posturings of those who think someone else wrote Shakespeare.
There is much more to The Tempest than this, which is a bit like a footnote but with some more important implications. Colonialism, imperialism, classical learning and “classicism”, the “tabula rasa”, racism, and more get amazing airings from the scented literary breath of the greatest of all writers at the height of his powers. It is true as I have written elsewhere that Shakespeare was published in his lifetime and shortly after because plays are not only to be seen, but to be read, and were thought of in that way then.
Still, when seeing a good production of this one, the play really is the thing.
Thanks for reading.
#See my post “Charles’ secret spell on the throne”.
##Tey’s novel is Daughter of time. For more Shakespeare detective work that turns a text into a marvel, try the Arden editions. Among my favourites are Frank Kermode’s edition of The Tempest, Harold Jenkins of Hamlet, and David Bevington’s of Troilus and Cressida. Each is a masterpiece in its own right.
*See Wikipedia
**More’s translation, the first item in his complete works as if he was the author, is available online. It seems that when Pico was born a flame appeared on the wall above the bed.
***From the online site “Behind the Name”: Meaning, Origin and History of the Name Miranda. Derived from Latin mirandus meaning “admirable, wonderful”. The name was created by Shakespeare for the heroine in his play ‘The Tempest’ (1611). It did not become a common English given name until the 20th century. Imogen by the way is thought to be a mistake for the existing Innogen..
^Secret Shakespeare (2004).
^^For Bruno see Frances Yates Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic tradition. A lot of, by and on Pico can be found there also. Yates has also written on memory systems and other aspects of Shakespearian interest. Ted Hughes’ Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being is also interesting. Some people still believe in Hermes.
Because relatively little is known about him, it is easy to pour imagined realities into Shakespeare's work and breathlessly assure all and sundry that they really are true. The controversy about “who really wrote” the plays and sonnets and other poems springs from this and those who follow this blog will know my opinion on that. Just to save any new readers some time if not fun, I am not among those – Shakespeare, often with collaborators, wrote the plays and the rest.#
Inside the plays though, in the area of “what is this about?”, there are plenty of opportunities to wax lyrical with fantasies, or as journalists often say, “interview your typewriter”. It is one of the things that makes Shakespeare fun. Chasing down various angles of interpretation and other aspects is a bit like a detective story. Indeed a detective story writer, Josephine Tey, arguably rescued the reputation of Richard III, the one whose bones were recently discovered under a carpark in Leicester.##
One of my fantasies is about the “real life” model for Prospero in The Tempest, Shakespeare’s next to last work. I’ve used some of this in Savonarola’s Bones, a light novel I wrote as an experiment in some other things. But I left a lot out, and not wanting it to go to waste, here is the argument rendered much more full.
Most scholars think Prospero was based on one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, John Dee and it would diminish Shakespeare’s creative imagination to think that Prospero wasn’t at least partly modeled on this magus who was an amazing character.*
Dee however was influenced by another school – the so-called Hermetic tradition associated with the Florentine renaissance and two figures there: Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.
I reckon Shakespeare modeled Prospero at least partly on Pico. This is my little “discovery” and so far as I know no one else has ever suggested it.
Is it piffle?
Maybe.
Here are my reasons.
Pico’s family ruled the tiny principality, Mirandola and had connections with the rulers of Milan (the Sforzas) as well as other ruling families. Giovanni was much younger than his two brothers and while not the ruler as sometimes supposed, he was among the few of the emerging aristocracy of the time to get totally sold on philosophy. He studied in Ferrara and elsewhere and fetched up in Florence, where he immersed himself in Hermetic philosophy at the “court” of Plato as funded by the ruling Medici family and organised by the priest Marsilio Ficino. He was also a friend of the renegade reformist monk Girolamo Savonarola..
During the renaissance Pico was famous. Nowadays he is still remembered for his Oration on the Dignity of Man. But he’s not known today for the magus stuff, The Heptaplus and other Cabalistic writings that were later to influence Dee. Even so, his devotion to “philosophy” as it was then understood was widely admired.
The connection with Shakespeare comes via Sir (Saint) Thomas More. More was a figure in the Henry VI plays as a sheriff of London who quelled riots of 1517. In real life he also resisted the break with Rome under Henry VIII, was tried for treason and beheaded.
Despite the fact that More was on the outs with the Tudors and hence Elizabeth there were several attempts to make a play out of his career. Perhaps hoping to escape censure a group of writers including Shakespeare shared responsibility for a revision of a script previously knocked back by the censor or Master of the Revels. There is no evidence it was ever produced and in retrospect it seems a naive indeed pious hope that even a non-Tudor monarch (James I) would allow production..
The revised manuscript survives. While some disagree it is usually accepted that it contains the only example of Shakespeare’s dramatic work in his own hand(“Hand D”).
We can take from this that Shakespeare was more than vestigially familiar with the martyred More.
Today More’s Utopia is the only one of his works to be at all familiar, even to educated people. But his collected works begin not with one of his own books, but with a translation of Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola’s biography of his uncle Giovanni.
Ah.
So there are reasonable grounds for supposing that Shakespeare knew of Pico, and was familiar with his life as recounted through More.**
There is more! Like Dee, Pico acquired a large library and his nephew was grateful that he inherited the books on Pico’s death. Tellingly, Prospero’s daughter in The Tempest is named Miranda, and it is a coinage of Shakespeare’s, like Imogen***
So there is more to Pico than Dee, really, in “Prospero-speak”: Like Prospero he was of a ruling house, with connections to Milan; and he was so struck by philosophy he abandoned all other pursuits. He had the secret books. He wrote extensively about white magic, the stuff of the magus. And Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, has an obvious “Mirandolic” connotation, given that this was a name Shakespeare created for his character and as we know a number of Shakespearean names have reasons behind them.
Yeah, but so what?
Pico died, apparently poisoned, in 1494, a little more than a century before The Tempest was written, but the Hermetic tradition he followed was still current. Dee studied and wrote in Hermeticism, for example. So did the Italian monk Giordano Bruno.
Bruno was another of those renaissance characters whose lives today seem rather odd. He grew up in what is now southern Italy and made a name for himself with memory systems, which were popular in an age when books were relatively rare. He could recite vast slabs of texts. But he also wrote philosophical tracts as he traveled throughout Europe.
His real interest was in the Cabala and other Hermetic notions, and he pursued these to the point of death, since he was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600, fervently believing that if he could only talk to the Pope all would be smoothed over.
Bruno lived in London for a while, staying at the home of the French ambassador. It is possible that he knew Shakespeare, and certainly was a part of the many secret circles then fizzing about the city discussing religious, philosophical and scientific ideas. The character Berowne in Love’s Labour Lost is commonly taken as modeled on Bruno (which means Brown in Italian). Some think Berowne is a mocking portrait, others a sympathetic one.
Bruno’s crime was to believe in the writings of one Hermes Trismegistus.(this last meaning thrice great) a philosophical guru who was alleged to have lived at the time of Moses and who was believed to have predicted the coming of Jesus. The evil in this was to attach Christianity to other religions. It seems Bruno hoped to resolve the schisms that had taken place in 16th century Europe between Rome and various stripes of breakaway churches by placing all of them under the umbrella of Hermes.
From the point of view of Rome, this was and could only be heresy. Bruno has never been absolved and when on the four hundredth anniversary of his death half a million people demonstrated in the Eternal City at the site where he was burned at the stake demanding he be pardoned, the Church was unrepentant.
In England, the perspective could be a bit different. Hermeticism could be regarded as a means of peaceful resolution of the schism between the Church of England and Rome, as Bruno meant it. And at a time when being a Catholic in England was risky that was no bad thing.
There is some evidence that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic. A Catholic tract signed by his father John was found hidden in the roof of John’s house in Stratford in the 18th century. Many scholars have joined dots of various sorts to show Shakespeare to be a “recusant”.
One of these, Richard Wilson^, argues that while a Catholic, Shakespeare nonetheless was a faithful servant of the English and then British Crown and that the secret message of his works was actually one of tolerance and acceptance.
If this be true – frankly, I have no idea – when Prospero abandons his books at the end of The Tempest, he is not just leaving his power behind as he returns home to Milan. Shakespeare can be taken to signify to his fellow closet Catholics that the Church of England is there to stay and they should give up their dreams of restoring “the one true faith” in the sceptred isle.
The Tempest is dated at 1609, and its first publication was in the Folio of 1623, where it is the first entry. By the end of the 17th century Hermeticism and with it white magic had been dealt heavy blows: Newton may have spent decades studying alchemy, but the scientific method had really won out by 1700. And for poor Bruno and Dee, and Pico, and Ficino and all their fellows, possibly including Shakespeare, the Hermetic manuscripts, so prized evidence of a grander faith uniting the peoples, had been shown a post-Christian forgery.^^
After all this, was it worth it? Possibly not. I am not a Shakespeare scholar but a Shakespeare lover, and I have used this somewhat tortuous argument in abbreviated form in my novel Savonarola’s Bones, as I used Troilus and Cressida and an argument that is less tenuous in Kaos. Even so, it is a long way from the posturings of those who think someone else wrote Shakespeare.
There is much more to The Tempest than this, which is a bit like a footnote but with some more important implications. Colonialism, imperialism, classical learning and “classicism”, the “tabula rasa”, racism, and more get amazing airings from the scented literary breath of the greatest of all writers at the height of his powers. It is true as I have written elsewhere that Shakespeare was published in his lifetime and shortly after because plays are not only to be seen, but to be read, and were thought of in that way then.
Still, when seeing a good production of this one, the play really is the thing.
Thanks for reading.
#See my post “Charles’ secret spell on the throne”.
##Tey’s novel is Daughter of time. For more Shakespeare detective work that turns a text into a marvel, try the Arden editions. Among my favourites are Frank Kermode’s edition of The Tempest, Harold Jenkins of Hamlet, and David Bevington’s of Troilus and Cressida. Each is a masterpiece in its own right.
*See Wikipedia
**More’s translation, the first item in his complete works as if he was the author, is available online. It seems that when Pico was born a flame appeared on the wall above the bed.
***From the online site “Behind the Name”: Meaning, Origin and History of the Name Miranda. Derived from Latin mirandus meaning “admirable, wonderful”. The name was created by Shakespeare for the heroine in his play ‘The Tempest’ (1611). It did not become a common English given name until the 20th century. Imogen by the way is thought to be a mistake for the existing Innogen..
^Secret Shakespeare (2004).
^^For Bruno see Frances Yates Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic tradition. A lot of, by and on Pico can be found there also. Yates has also written on memory systems and other aspects of Shakespearian interest. Ted Hughes’ Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being is also interesting. Some people still believe in Hermes.
Back into it
A few posts back I was writhing with writer’s cramp – unable to work out what I was doing wrong, and so not doing anything. Now I am more than 50,000 words along in the novel I had been trying to get my head around for months, and just for today thinking it is not tooooooo bad.
Probably not surprisingly, while I am writing I go on and off the book I am working on. Some of the time I think it is terrible. Other times I think it is ok. When I finally get it out there, I think it is pretty good actually. By then I’ll have pored over it quite a number of times, tinkering, massaging, cutting, adding, rewriting, hating myself, loving same, jumping up and down in front of the PC, rolling about on the floor moaning, smiling at my cleverness, laughing at my incompetence…the usual things a writer does in other words.
Anyway this one is both a departure for me and treading some old ground. The departure part is terrifying because it’s new to me and I am very unsure about it. The other part is terrifying because I don’t want to put readers off and for them to think that this is just all I can do. It’s not, and it just happened this way. It’s a challenge too – to do something that is not entirely unlike a book I’ve written in the past that is nonetheless fresh and absorbing.
Writers are meant to “write what they know”. It’s good advice, and most of my books have come out of my interests – people, ideas, and events I already knew about or would have found out about anyway. This is slightly different in that I did research in a few areas precisely because I wanted to put things from them into this book. It is time-consuming to do this and requires a kind of self-discipline that is different from writing or reading for pleasure: reading for knowledge is not always for pleasure and can involve wading through seemingly endless swamps composed of the most appalling sludge, fantasising desperately about dry ground. Sometimes of course it is fun.
Well, I am not at all sure that all that was really as useful as I was telling myself while enjoying the cold wet muck running into my gumboots. But I have done it, and there will be things I will do more yet. I would like, if it is at all possible, to get Bela Lugosi into my new book with the Queen and her eldest son, along with the rest of them.
Back into it.
Thanks for reading.
Probably not surprisingly, while I am writing I go on and off the book I am working on. Some of the time I think it is terrible. Other times I think it is ok. When I finally get it out there, I think it is pretty good actually. By then I’ll have pored over it quite a number of times, tinkering, massaging, cutting, adding, rewriting, hating myself, loving same, jumping up and down in front of the PC, rolling about on the floor moaning, smiling at my cleverness, laughing at my incompetence…the usual things a writer does in other words.
Anyway this one is both a departure for me and treading some old ground. The departure part is terrifying because it’s new to me and I am very unsure about it. The other part is terrifying because I don’t want to put readers off and for them to think that this is just all I can do. It’s not, and it just happened this way. It’s a challenge too – to do something that is not entirely unlike a book I’ve written in the past that is nonetheless fresh and absorbing.
Writers are meant to “write what they know”. It’s good advice, and most of my books have come out of my interests – people, ideas, and events I already knew about or would have found out about anyway. This is slightly different in that I did research in a few areas precisely because I wanted to put things from them into this book. It is time-consuming to do this and requires a kind of self-discipline that is different from writing or reading for pleasure: reading for knowledge is not always for pleasure and can involve wading through seemingly endless swamps composed of the most appalling sludge, fantasising desperately about dry ground. Sometimes of course it is fun.
Well, I am not at all sure that all that was really as useful as I was telling myself while enjoying the cold wet muck running into my gumboots. But I have done it, and there will be things I will do more yet. I would like, if it is at all possible, to get Bela Lugosi into my new book with the Queen and her eldest son, along with the rest of them.
Back into it.
Thanks for reading.
June 24, 2014
Should cats keep writers?
A cat has come into my life – Zoe, an 8 year-old female, black with white markings, who arrived courtesy of a family needing to downsize cat-wise. Zoe is a nice cat, and is now pretty used to having this man around, who feeds her and cleans up after her, strokes her, opens and closes the door so she may stalk the surrounding country or retreat at leisure and is, as men tend to be, madly in love with her.
Yet owning a writer is a dangerous profession for a cat. Generally speaking, cats agree to live with humans, and if the circumstances are not to their liking, they bugger off and either find another slave or house full of slaves more agreeable, or try to make it out in the wide world on their own. In the country I live in, that’s possible and the greatest danger for a wild cat is the human being who regards the cat as an enemy to the bird population, with many species rare or endangered. Humans trap, poison, and shoot wild cats. There are plenty of rats, stoats, ferrets, and mice to keep the cats – and birds – occupied, but humans are not always rational in these matters. Behind the wheel of a motor vehicle they can be even less rational.
Zoe knows how to handle a man, and I am now putty in her paws. She is definitely wise.. But she may also be foolish, for having a writer as a slave exposes a cat to dangers not found with other humans: publicity being the most significant. Who knows what a writer will write, and broadcast to the world, about the cats in her or his midst? Don Marquis, for example, cast a great deal of doubt on the moral qualities of his cat Mehitabel, who claimed to have once been Cleopatra and who said she had since been many distinguished personalities, whose lives she enjoyed, shall we say, to the full.. T S Eliot excepted, it is not at all clear that cats have been well-served by writers who have claimed to know them and their ways.
Just now Zoe is lying on a chair that was once mine, just behind me. She is a gentle and quiet cat, and her loudest sound to date has been a kind of half-volley squeak, as if a mouse is stuck in her throat and would be pleased to make an exit, but can’t. In the night, when she is most active, Zoe rumbles up and down the carpeted hallway in pursuit, I suspect, of pure, unadulterated joy. This is a queen who knows how to rule.
Come morning she has to deal with me. It’s a tough job at the easiest of times. Just now her approach is to sneak up close to my ears and purr loudly. When I do not respond, she comes closer and purrs extra loudly. When I finally rise she races me to the food delivery area – so far she has always won – and supervises delivery of the nuts, the treat-nuts, the pet milk, the “wet meat” and the fresh water that aims to justify my presence in her life.
While she munches, or sleeps as now, or prowls the district seeking…seeking whatever she fancies, I am writing…so far, there is nothing for her to complain about, or so say I.. My mistress evokes at worst the querulous whimper of a man bewitched, this being not nearly as unpleasant as the mournful howl, or even bellow, of a man scorned.
On the other hand, a central character in my new novel has had a name change. Zoe!
Yet owning a writer is a dangerous profession for a cat. Generally speaking, cats agree to live with humans, and if the circumstances are not to their liking, they bugger off and either find another slave or house full of slaves more agreeable, or try to make it out in the wide world on their own. In the country I live in, that’s possible and the greatest danger for a wild cat is the human being who regards the cat as an enemy to the bird population, with many species rare or endangered. Humans trap, poison, and shoot wild cats. There are plenty of rats, stoats, ferrets, and mice to keep the cats – and birds – occupied, but humans are not always rational in these matters. Behind the wheel of a motor vehicle they can be even less rational.
Zoe knows how to handle a man, and I am now putty in her paws. She is definitely wise.. But she may also be foolish, for having a writer as a slave exposes a cat to dangers not found with other humans: publicity being the most significant. Who knows what a writer will write, and broadcast to the world, about the cats in her or his midst? Don Marquis, for example, cast a great deal of doubt on the moral qualities of his cat Mehitabel, who claimed to have once been Cleopatra and who said she had since been many distinguished personalities, whose lives she enjoyed, shall we say, to the full.. T S Eliot excepted, it is not at all clear that cats have been well-served by writers who have claimed to know them and their ways.
Just now Zoe is lying on a chair that was once mine, just behind me. She is a gentle and quiet cat, and her loudest sound to date has been a kind of half-volley squeak, as if a mouse is stuck in her throat and would be pleased to make an exit, but can’t. In the night, when she is most active, Zoe rumbles up and down the carpeted hallway in pursuit, I suspect, of pure, unadulterated joy. This is a queen who knows how to rule.
Come morning she has to deal with me. It’s a tough job at the easiest of times. Just now her approach is to sneak up close to my ears and purr loudly. When I do not respond, she comes closer and purrs extra loudly. When I finally rise she races me to the food delivery area – so far she has always won – and supervises delivery of the nuts, the treat-nuts, the pet milk, the “wet meat” and the fresh water that aims to justify my presence in her life.
While she munches, or sleeps as now, or prowls the district seeking…seeking whatever she fancies, I am writing…so far, there is nothing for her to complain about, or so say I.. My mistress evokes at worst the querulous whimper of a man bewitched, this being not nearly as unpleasant as the mournful howl, or even bellow, of a man scorned.
On the other hand, a central character in my new novel has had a name change. Zoe!
Hop it!
There is, dear reader, something called a “blog hop”. It is designed to attract new readers to blogs by linking them to other blogs, so that the readers of those blogs discover wonders on offer they had never known or perhaps even conceived possible.
The talented artist who does the covers of my books, Joleene Naylor, is also an author and has invited me to take part in one of these. This is my all too feeble contribution. Joleene’s blog is at joleenenaylor.com. If you go to this website, hit books, and then blog, you will find her contribution.
The Written World is about writing, and the topic of the “hop” is too, with four questions. Here we go…
Question 1: What am I working on?
A novel about cruelty. I don’t really want to go into this as it would be a “spoiler’.
Question 2: How does my work differ to others of its genre?
My novels are meant to be novels of ideas garbed in the cloth of thrillers. In my opinion, as the person who wrote them, this doesn’t always work. But it kind of does, in different ways. My books have traversed Shakespeare, Giordano Bruno, Girolamo Savonarola, Celine, Nikolai Berdyaev, Marx, Dostoevsky, and others. This isn’t your usual thriller fare, and the ideas bound up in these people aren’t either.
Question 3: Why do I write/create what I do?
Joleene wrote: “I write what I like. Hopefully other people like it too.” Amen. Beyond that, I want people to share, if they wish, my interests and excitement and to consider the issues that seem to me to matter about the world, about life – what’s important and what’s not. I’m not arrogant enough to think I have all the answers or that everybody – even anybody! – should think as I do. But I do think I have something to say worth listening to, and have considered writing as the principal outlet for that since I was very young.
Question 4: How does your writing/creating process work?
At the moment, it doesn’t. I’ve started this novel three times, and have dropped it for now, while I think about why it just doesn’t feel right.
Writing can be very frustrating. Generally, I work out a plot around a “premise”, people that with main characters, surround them with minor characters, shade in some detail, and then go for it. For me, it is important to leave some things undecided till it’s time to write about them. Otherwise it gets too boring to do. Once I wrote 45,000 words of a novel that I’d worked out in great detail and then stopped. I just couldn’t be bothered anymore. That was a great lesson.
To give an example of this, in one of my books I had two of the characters go on a day trip and have a fight while they were away. this was planned. But I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen when they fought, or what the outcome beyond bruises and blood was going to be. That made it exciting to write, and I think the excitement came out in the prose.
A lot of the pleasure of writing for me comes from the crafting of the actual expression. Most of fiction is not actually like that: it can’t be or readers will tire of it, get bogged down “enjoying” the fine phrases, and drift off. But these wee sparkles of art have to be there too, at the right place and the right pace, for a novel to please reader and writer. So say I.
Thanks for reading.
Here are some blogs by writers and readers about writing. They’re not part in this blog hop but you might enjoy what they are up to.
https://wordpress.com/read/blog/id/66...
https://wordpress.com/read/blog/id/43...
The talented artist who does the covers of my books, Joleene Naylor, is also an author and has invited me to take part in one of these. This is my all too feeble contribution. Joleene’s blog is at joleenenaylor.com. If you go to this website, hit books, and then blog, you will find her contribution.
The Written World is about writing, and the topic of the “hop” is too, with four questions. Here we go…
Question 1: What am I working on?
A novel about cruelty. I don’t really want to go into this as it would be a “spoiler’.
Question 2: How does my work differ to others of its genre?
My novels are meant to be novels of ideas garbed in the cloth of thrillers. In my opinion, as the person who wrote them, this doesn’t always work. But it kind of does, in different ways. My books have traversed Shakespeare, Giordano Bruno, Girolamo Savonarola, Celine, Nikolai Berdyaev, Marx, Dostoevsky, and others. This isn’t your usual thriller fare, and the ideas bound up in these people aren’t either.
Question 3: Why do I write/create what I do?
Joleene wrote: “I write what I like. Hopefully other people like it too.” Amen. Beyond that, I want people to share, if they wish, my interests and excitement and to consider the issues that seem to me to matter about the world, about life – what’s important and what’s not. I’m not arrogant enough to think I have all the answers or that everybody – even anybody! – should think as I do. But I do think I have something to say worth listening to, and have considered writing as the principal outlet for that since I was very young.
Question 4: How does your writing/creating process work?
At the moment, it doesn’t. I’ve started this novel three times, and have dropped it for now, while I think about why it just doesn’t feel right.
Writing can be very frustrating. Generally, I work out a plot around a “premise”, people that with main characters, surround them with minor characters, shade in some detail, and then go for it. For me, it is important to leave some things undecided till it’s time to write about them. Otherwise it gets too boring to do. Once I wrote 45,000 words of a novel that I’d worked out in great detail and then stopped. I just couldn’t be bothered anymore. That was a great lesson.
To give an example of this, in one of my books I had two of the characters go on a day trip and have a fight while they were away. this was planned. But I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen when they fought, or what the outcome beyond bruises and blood was going to be. That made it exciting to write, and I think the excitement came out in the prose.
A lot of the pleasure of writing for me comes from the crafting of the actual expression. Most of fiction is not actually like that: it can’t be or readers will tire of it, get bogged down “enjoying” the fine phrases, and drift off. But these wee sparkles of art have to be there too, at the right place and the right pace, for a novel to please reader and writer. So say I.
Thanks for reading.
Here are some blogs by writers and readers about writing. They’re not part in this blog hop but you might enjoy what they are up to.
https://wordpress.com/read/blog/id/66...
https://wordpress.com/read/blog/id/43...
June 7, 2014
Grand Larssony
To treat myself when I moved to a new city late last year, I bought something most people in the country I live in have had for years* – a big flat screen television and DVD player. Television watching is not my forte and I do it very seldom – but films via DVD, yes indeedy-roony.
DVDs have the virtues of being watchable at home, anytime you like, and being able to be watched as many times as you like. Despite having around 100 DVDs, most of them lie idle in their cases…watched once and then cast aside, or (so far) not at all, waiting for the moment I am in the mood for, say, Crash, or Secret LIfe of Bees. I have a problem with American films similar but not identical to my problem with television.
Some films, however, I watch repeatedly and recently two of these have grabbed my attention despite their (to me) obvious weaknesses: Parts 2 and 3 of The Millennium Trilogy based on the novels by Stieg Larsson,
Millennium swept the world as a sequence of novels** and the films managed to get Swedish cinema into Hollywood-style multiscreen chains. The first and most famous, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is very well made but lack of realism at the centre of the plot spoils it for me even more than the outlandishness of the plots in the second and third, so that’s saying something.
Ironically, the first was the only one originally made for the big screen. The other two, with another director but the same two leads, were headed for Swedish television as a series when Dragon Tattoo was a surprise global smash. The sequels were edited for the cinema release and joined in the fun.
The second and third are really one story, while the first was more or less a story in itself. All suffer from plot fever – really unbelievable storylines – heated badly, using coincidence to drive things along. Sometimes coincidence is vital for a plot to really work in a novel or film. But it is well overcooked here.
In “filmic” terms the trilogy is well made and the last two, despite extremely patchy editing and far from accurate subtitles, are better than the first. What draws me back to them, however, are the strong performances and characters ot the two leads, the journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the punk genius hacker and martial arts expert Lisbeth Salander, played respectively by Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace. Though in the first they interact a great deal, in the second and third they rarely see each other, and the dramatic tension that results is part of what makes the films so watchable.
The novels and the films have spawned cults. Websites are devoted to them – to the plots, the characters, the author…one I looked at proudly calls itself “the greatest Stieg Larsson fan site”.
A large part of the attraction of Millennium lies in the character of Lisbeth Salander, though why this should be so is not entirely clear – the punk tech geek martial arts supremo is far from the first kick-ass genius heroine in film, though her bisexuality may add something to the genre type.
What seems to me to have made for the success of the films is fine acting along with the graphic depiction of the rape of Lisbeth by her guardian, a rape that is gone over again and again – via her recording and in her mind.
Yet there is more. The relationship of Mikael Blomkvist and LIsbeth Salander is underlined repeatedly throughout the last two parts: “you really care about her, don’t you?” asks his sister Annika, a lawyer about to agree to take her case. Blomkvist looks away, then down, then mumbles, “Yes.”, just as he mumbled “yes” to police detective Bublanski in part two. Yes it is love – over and above or past his relationship with fellow journalist Erika Berger, who frequently asks probing questions of him about the relationship. But yes also it is guilt, and debt: Salander saved his life in the first part, and then his career…he owes her.
How much this is clear to the rest of the world is not made clear in the films, and when after Lisbeth’s release Annika says getting her off was all Mikael’s doing, Lisbeth answers, “Yeah, but…” since a hacker buddy provided the key evidence, and since Mikael is also in her debt. When they finally meet again, right at the end, the ambiguous tension between them is not resolved and a viewer could take their future relationship in any of a number of ways, starting from none.
Larsson apparently planned a ten-part series before his death, and I don’t know if he had it all worked out or not.
In any case it seems to me that the films succeed because of the principals’ relationship, in spite of the increasing silliness of the plot, but that the portrayal of the relationship is vital: that the actors do such a fine job. There are many occasions when they could have spoiled things by overacting but the restrained and often monosyllabic low key of the approach makes it work.
We love them because they are outsiders, battling against the world, and it is perhaps no surprise that the two are outsiders in real life, as a probe of Wiki will show.
The outsider as hero has a long tradition in western culture and indeed in the culture of the Western as given to us by Hollywood, and latterly of superheros as given to us (apparently) via vulnerable camouflaged nerds like Spiderman.
While the plot sees Blomkvist the driving force in freeing Salander, in the relationship it is Salander who is dominant, and, like a Western hero as played often by John Wayne, ultimately unreachable. It is she who gets Blomkvist off the hook after a prison sentence, she who saves his life as he is about to be murdered by a serial killer, she who does not flinch watching same go up in flames. It turns out to be she who tries to rescue her mother from an abusive father, she who provides the information to Blomkvist to enable him to destroy her persecutors: it is her connection with the hacker “Plague”, her ability at internet use and hacking, her tough-woman martial arts and electronic gizmo skills that turn up the basic information needed…Finally it is Lisbeth who is responsible for the death of her murderous half-brother and arranges the capture of the bikie gang complicit in her father’s sex trafficking and drug-running.
When Mikael turns up to tell her this latest news (of what she has done), their awkward meeting drags out words of thanks from Lisbeth, but an unspoken expression of puppy love from Mikael Blomkvist. Woman has come to rule.***
It is not that the good men in the trilogy are incompetent. They are not – within their scope, they are very able. It is that with one significant exception, without the guiding lights of the women concerned – Lisbeth Salander, Monika Figueroa, Annika Gianini – the men are lost. They are second fiddles, and they are good precisely because they are willing second fiddles.
That exception is Erika Berger, Mikael Blonkvist’s partner in love and in profession. She shows herself a woman of the old school, an era taking an unfortunately all too extended leave from even the most progressive of our societies. She is the one targeted by conspirators, who chooses to back down, who calls Blomkvist selfish for persisting and who “realises her error” when everything works out. It is a contrast that is made plain elsewhere – the policewoman murdered by Salander’s half-brother Niedermann looks to her male partner instead of focusing on her enemy, and is killed for her concern.
Lisbeth Salander knew how to do it.
Larsson’s thematic weakness, it seems to me, is that none of his women is evil. Others may consider it a weakness of my books that women – and sometimes gay men – are not seldom the “bad girls” or guys in opposition to (typically) heroic women. This is deliberate on my part – heroes who cannot be villains are diminished in their humanity, and thereby their heroics. Evil is a choice for anyone, and in literature as in life, to be fully human means to have the possibility of evil and reject it.
Thanks for reading.
* It seems I am one of the last people in New Zealand to get these, which I have seen in beneficiaries’ homes. A friend saw my screen and laughed at its mere 32 inch size. **I have compared the synopses with the film to write this post. ***Larsson can be credited with feeling the zeitgeist and portraying successfully the kind of thriller I write, obviously better than I have managed so far. See my post Toiling with Troilus. I have deliberately chosen not to read Larsson’s books but have now watched the second and third parts many times, trying to discover their dynamic secrets. Recently I watched Noomi Rapace’s next film, Beyond: it is not actually. She has since moved on from her past life and springboarded from the Lisbeth Salander role into Hollywood style action thrillers that have apparently been well-received, an outsider who has become an insider: the future as now.
DVDs have the virtues of being watchable at home, anytime you like, and being able to be watched as many times as you like. Despite having around 100 DVDs, most of them lie idle in their cases…watched once and then cast aside, or (so far) not at all, waiting for the moment I am in the mood for, say, Crash, or Secret LIfe of Bees. I have a problem with American films similar but not identical to my problem with television.
Some films, however, I watch repeatedly and recently two of these have grabbed my attention despite their (to me) obvious weaknesses: Parts 2 and 3 of The Millennium Trilogy based on the novels by Stieg Larsson,
Millennium swept the world as a sequence of novels** and the films managed to get Swedish cinema into Hollywood-style multiscreen chains. The first and most famous, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is very well made but lack of realism at the centre of the plot spoils it for me even more than the outlandishness of the plots in the second and third, so that’s saying something.
Ironically, the first was the only one originally made for the big screen. The other two, with another director but the same two leads, were headed for Swedish television as a series when Dragon Tattoo was a surprise global smash. The sequels were edited for the cinema release and joined in the fun.
The second and third are really one story, while the first was more or less a story in itself. All suffer from plot fever – really unbelievable storylines – heated badly, using coincidence to drive things along. Sometimes coincidence is vital for a plot to really work in a novel or film. But it is well overcooked here.
In “filmic” terms the trilogy is well made and the last two, despite extremely patchy editing and far from accurate subtitles, are better than the first. What draws me back to them, however, are the strong performances and characters ot the two leads, the journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the punk genius hacker and martial arts expert Lisbeth Salander, played respectively by Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace. Though in the first they interact a great deal, in the second and third they rarely see each other, and the dramatic tension that results is part of what makes the films so watchable.
The novels and the films have spawned cults. Websites are devoted to them – to the plots, the characters, the author…one I looked at proudly calls itself “the greatest Stieg Larsson fan site”.
A large part of the attraction of Millennium lies in the character of Lisbeth Salander, though why this should be so is not entirely clear – the punk tech geek martial arts supremo is far from the first kick-ass genius heroine in film, though her bisexuality may add something to the genre type.
What seems to me to have made for the success of the films is fine acting along with the graphic depiction of the rape of Lisbeth by her guardian, a rape that is gone over again and again – via her recording and in her mind.
Yet there is more. The relationship of Mikael Blomkvist and LIsbeth Salander is underlined repeatedly throughout the last two parts: “you really care about her, don’t you?” asks his sister Annika, a lawyer about to agree to take her case. Blomkvist looks away, then down, then mumbles, “Yes.”, just as he mumbled “yes” to police detective Bublanski in part two. Yes it is love – over and above or past his relationship with fellow journalist Erika Berger, who frequently asks probing questions of him about the relationship. But yes also it is guilt, and debt: Salander saved his life in the first part, and then his career…he owes her.
How much this is clear to the rest of the world is not made clear in the films, and when after Lisbeth’s release Annika says getting her off was all Mikael’s doing, Lisbeth answers, “Yeah, but…” since a hacker buddy provided the key evidence, and since Mikael is also in her debt. When they finally meet again, right at the end, the ambiguous tension between them is not resolved and a viewer could take their future relationship in any of a number of ways, starting from none.
Larsson apparently planned a ten-part series before his death, and I don’t know if he had it all worked out or not.
In any case it seems to me that the films succeed because of the principals’ relationship, in spite of the increasing silliness of the plot, but that the portrayal of the relationship is vital: that the actors do such a fine job. There are many occasions when they could have spoiled things by overacting but the restrained and often monosyllabic low key of the approach makes it work.
We love them because they are outsiders, battling against the world, and it is perhaps no surprise that the two are outsiders in real life, as a probe of Wiki will show.
The outsider as hero has a long tradition in western culture and indeed in the culture of the Western as given to us by Hollywood, and latterly of superheros as given to us (apparently) via vulnerable camouflaged nerds like Spiderman.
While the plot sees Blomkvist the driving force in freeing Salander, in the relationship it is Salander who is dominant, and, like a Western hero as played often by John Wayne, ultimately unreachable. It is she who gets Blomkvist off the hook after a prison sentence, she who saves his life as he is about to be murdered by a serial killer, she who does not flinch watching same go up in flames. It turns out to be she who tries to rescue her mother from an abusive father, she who provides the information to Blomkvist to enable him to destroy her persecutors: it is her connection with the hacker “Plague”, her ability at internet use and hacking, her tough-woman martial arts and electronic gizmo skills that turn up the basic information needed…Finally it is Lisbeth who is responsible for the death of her murderous half-brother and arranges the capture of the bikie gang complicit in her father’s sex trafficking and drug-running.
When Mikael turns up to tell her this latest news (of what she has done), their awkward meeting drags out words of thanks from Lisbeth, but an unspoken expression of puppy love from Mikael Blomkvist. Woman has come to rule.***
It is not that the good men in the trilogy are incompetent. They are not – within their scope, they are very able. It is that with one significant exception, without the guiding lights of the women concerned – Lisbeth Salander, Monika Figueroa, Annika Gianini – the men are lost. They are second fiddles, and they are good precisely because they are willing second fiddles.
That exception is Erika Berger, Mikael Blonkvist’s partner in love and in profession. She shows herself a woman of the old school, an era taking an unfortunately all too extended leave from even the most progressive of our societies. She is the one targeted by conspirators, who chooses to back down, who calls Blomkvist selfish for persisting and who “realises her error” when everything works out. It is a contrast that is made plain elsewhere – the policewoman murdered by Salander’s half-brother Niedermann looks to her male partner instead of focusing on her enemy, and is killed for her concern.
Lisbeth Salander knew how to do it.
Larsson’s thematic weakness, it seems to me, is that none of his women is evil. Others may consider it a weakness of my books that women – and sometimes gay men – are not seldom the “bad girls” or guys in opposition to (typically) heroic women. This is deliberate on my part – heroes who cannot be villains are diminished in their humanity, and thereby their heroics. Evil is a choice for anyone, and in literature as in life, to be fully human means to have the possibility of evil and reject it.
Thanks for reading.
* It seems I am one of the last people in New Zealand to get these, which I have seen in beneficiaries’ homes. A friend saw my screen and laughed at its mere 32 inch size. **I have compared the synopses with the film to write this post. ***Larsson can be credited with feeling the zeitgeist and portraying successfully the kind of thriller I write, obviously better than I have managed so far. See my post Toiling with Troilus. I have deliberately chosen not to read Larsson’s books but have now watched the second and third parts many times, trying to discover their dynamic secrets. Recently I watched Noomi Rapace’s next film, Beyond: it is not actually. She has since moved on from her past life and springboarded from the Lisbeth Salander role into Hollywood style action thrillers that have apparently been well-received, an outsider who has become an insider: the future as now.
May 11, 2014
First they came for the potty-mouthed...
Actually, they didn’t. If we take “potty-mouthed” as a marker for art and in particular avant-garde art, “they” came after they had dealt with many of their other perceived enemies. The Soviet style of repression left artists and writers pretty much alone till well into the 1920s. The change can be gauged by the life of the writer and artist Vladimir Mayakovsky, who was an enthusiastic supporter of the revolution at first, but who shot himself in 1930.
Now Vladimir Putin’s Russia is at it again with a new law against swearing in literature and the arts alongside a “swearingbot” computer programme to intercept online profanity before it reaches the delicate, so easily wounded eyes of Russian citizens. Of course any programme that can intercept four-letter words can intercept longer ones, for example “freedom”, or “corruption”.
A few years ago I wrote a thriller, The Russian Idea, set in Moscow and Berlin. Its main purpose was to draw attention to the work of Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev. So far as I am aware, after being forgotten for a while, Berdyaev has enjoyed posthumous popularity of a sort, with all his books in print in English and a large number of articles by him available free online. Even so, most people have never heard of him, or if they have, read his work.
The book I wrote concerns an oligarch’s plan to set up a global network of Russian cultural centres – like the Alliance Francaise and the Goethe Institut – independent of the Russian government. The oligarch’s professed aim was to bring the pressure of enlightened Russian culture as typified and symbolised by Berdyaev to bear on the all too unenlightened power brokers inside Russia itself.*
I am not entirely happy with my book and wish it was better than it is. It is not terrible – just not great. I wish more people would read it, and go on to read and find out about Berdyaev and his own inspiration, Fyodor Dostoevsky.**
But what is happening in Russia now also makes me wish some one with pots of dosh would decide to take up the idea of “Berdyaevian” non-governmental Russian cultural centres that could show that Russian culture is not simply the property of those who believe in censorship, in thought control and its many correlatives, especially propaganda, who intimidate as they expropriate their fellow citizens and others, and who harass, imprison, exile and murder their opponents. It would be, after all, very easy to conclude from what is happening now, that not much has changed from the Tsarism that seemed to flow so naturally into Sovietism, and that has gone on to corrupt and all but end the democratic transformation of Russian society that began so hopefully with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Berdyaev’s book The Russian Idea, whose title I “borrowed”, was a history of Russian religious thought from the early 19th century to the Bolshevik Revolution. It is a serious and striking book. Berdyaev believed strongly in a Russian concept that is untranslatable as a word, “sobornost”, but which might be rendered, “unity in diversity”: that differences can strengthen rather than enfeeble society. As a Christian, he was suspicious of the organised Christian church anywhere but especially in Russia, and pointed out that few if any serious religious thinkers in Russia were functionaries – for example priests – in the Russian Orthodox church. For a religious philosophical tradition as remarkable as the one charted by Berdyaev, this can hardly be an accident.
Of course, it takes moral fibre to stand up for “sobornost” and the open society it is about. Some artists and writers and thinkers can go out of their way to insult those who disagree with them, and to express themselves vulgarly out of rage or frustration or ignorant silliness. Yet the famous dictum attributed to Voltaire of disagreeing with a view someone may hold but defending (to the death!) their right to hold and express it, is an important plank of humane culture that when missing self-evidently leads to awful crimes, and Russia’s history has shown just how horrible these can be.
One can never quite tell for certain what the aims and motivations of Russia’s leaders really are. In Soviet times the Machiavellian manoeuvrings of Stalin and his henchmen (always men) were astonishingly opaque. The worst “excesses”, costing the lives of millions of people, could be put down to “mistakes”. The henchmen themselves could find themselves in front of a firing squad (one, according to Anne Applebaum, swearing to die with Stalin’s name on his lips).*** The line between “mere” censorship and more severe punishment today similarly weaves and wavers according to the whim of some autocrat or other.
The title of this post comes from a famous saying by German theologian Martin Niemoller and relates to the Nazis’ means of repression, not the Soviets’, much less today’s Russian techniques. These last are however more sophisticated than those of the 20th century’s most notorious monsters. Bizarrely, Putin instructed Russia’s regional governors to read a work by Berdyaev, The philosophy of inequality, as if the ideas of this great exponent of freedom and creativity could somehow be reconciled with the twisted rationales of the present regime. They can’t.
*Non-spoiler alert. **Berdyaev called himself a “sprout” of Dostoevsky and wrote a book about his relationship to his hero. For those who consider Dostoevsky as a novelist only, see the treatment of him as one of Three Russian prophets by Nicolas Zernov. ***See her Gulag, a history.
Now Vladimir Putin’s Russia is at it again with a new law against swearing in literature and the arts alongside a “swearingbot” computer programme to intercept online profanity before it reaches the delicate, so easily wounded eyes of Russian citizens. Of course any programme that can intercept four-letter words can intercept longer ones, for example “freedom”, or “corruption”.
A few years ago I wrote a thriller, The Russian Idea, set in Moscow and Berlin. Its main purpose was to draw attention to the work of Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev. So far as I am aware, after being forgotten for a while, Berdyaev has enjoyed posthumous popularity of a sort, with all his books in print in English and a large number of articles by him available free online. Even so, most people have never heard of him, or if they have, read his work.
The book I wrote concerns an oligarch’s plan to set up a global network of Russian cultural centres – like the Alliance Francaise and the Goethe Institut – independent of the Russian government. The oligarch’s professed aim was to bring the pressure of enlightened Russian culture as typified and symbolised by Berdyaev to bear on the all too unenlightened power brokers inside Russia itself.*
I am not entirely happy with my book and wish it was better than it is. It is not terrible – just not great. I wish more people would read it, and go on to read and find out about Berdyaev and his own inspiration, Fyodor Dostoevsky.**
But what is happening in Russia now also makes me wish some one with pots of dosh would decide to take up the idea of “Berdyaevian” non-governmental Russian cultural centres that could show that Russian culture is not simply the property of those who believe in censorship, in thought control and its many correlatives, especially propaganda, who intimidate as they expropriate their fellow citizens and others, and who harass, imprison, exile and murder their opponents. It would be, after all, very easy to conclude from what is happening now, that not much has changed from the Tsarism that seemed to flow so naturally into Sovietism, and that has gone on to corrupt and all but end the democratic transformation of Russian society that began so hopefully with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Berdyaev’s book The Russian Idea, whose title I “borrowed”, was a history of Russian religious thought from the early 19th century to the Bolshevik Revolution. It is a serious and striking book. Berdyaev believed strongly in a Russian concept that is untranslatable as a word, “sobornost”, but which might be rendered, “unity in diversity”: that differences can strengthen rather than enfeeble society. As a Christian, he was suspicious of the organised Christian church anywhere but especially in Russia, and pointed out that few if any serious religious thinkers in Russia were functionaries – for example priests – in the Russian Orthodox church. For a religious philosophical tradition as remarkable as the one charted by Berdyaev, this can hardly be an accident.
Of course, it takes moral fibre to stand up for “sobornost” and the open society it is about. Some artists and writers and thinkers can go out of their way to insult those who disagree with them, and to express themselves vulgarly out of rage or frustration or ignorant silliness. Yet the famous dictum attributed to Voltaire of disagreeing with a view someone may hold but defending (to the death!) their right to hold and express it, is an important plank of humane culture that when missing self-evidently leads to awful crimes, and Russia’s history has shown just how horrible these can be.
One can never quite tell for certain what the aims and motivations of Russia’s leaders really are. In Soviet times the Machiavellian manoeuvrings of Stalin and his henchmen (always men) were astonishingly opaque. The worst “excesses”, costing the lives of millions of people, could be put down to “mistakes”. The henchmen themselves could find themselves in front of a firing squad (one, according to Anne Applebaum, swearing to die with Stalin’s name on his lips).*** The line between “mere” censorship and more severe punishment today similarly weaves and wavers according to the whim of some autocrat or other.
The title of this post comes from a famous saying by German theologian Martin Niemoller and relates to the Nazis’ means of repression, not the Soviets’, much less today’s Russian techniques. These last are however more sophisticated than those of the 20th century’s most notorious monsters. Bizarrely, Putin instructed Russia’s regional governors to read a work by Berdyaev, The philosophy of inequality, as if the ideas of this great exponent of freedom and creativity could somehow be reconciled with the twisted rationales of the present regime. They can’t.
*Non-spoiler alert. **Berdyaev called himself a “sprout” of Dostoevsky and wrote a book about his relationship to his hero. For those who consider Dostoevsky as a novelist only, see the treatment of him as one of Three Russian prophets by Nicolas Zernov. ***See her Gulag, a history.
April 24, 2014
Hungry for love
The number of side-trips I have taken courtesy of the 18th century marvel known as “Gibbon” or History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is beginning to overwhelm the work itself. For months now I have been pursuing, on and off, the elusive Huns – Attila’s lot. There are reasons for this I’ll not go into as they would spoil the plot of the novel I’m trying to write. But readers may find the results of this detour interesting (or not. Just go off and read something else if you’re bored – one of my books, for example).
After doing a heap of wiki-ing and other online hooning about on Attila and his people, I broke down in the end and ordered a hard copy of Otto J Maenchen-Helfen’s World of the Huns. This had been reviewed as the best account of this mysterious people, and on and off since receiving it I've been getting through it. It’s a dense read, a kind of combination nachlass – he’d finished only part of it when he died – and festschrift, given that it was published despite numerous lacunae by admirers of his painstaking scholarship.
A name like Maenchen-Helfen sticks in the mind, and I had read something else associated with him, many years ago: he had translated a Russian account of the life of world-class bogeyman Karl Marx sub-titled Man and Fighter, published in Penguin. As it dealt with Marx’s political life rather than his writing and ideas, I gave it a read.
Maenchen-Helfen was Austrian and after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia went to that country to work, getting permission to do anthropological studies that included a visit to the very, very far east and a district called Tuva, where it seems no European had been for a very long time, if ever. Despairing for some reason of Stalin’s regime, he managed to get out of Soviet clutches and went to Berlin. With the coming of Nazism he did a runner from there too and after some more wandering ended up in the US, where he taught the history of art in California. His mind, however, was on the Huns, and he brought a great range of talents to the subject; archaeology, linguistics, history, art…
The World of the Huns sums up his life’s work..
Anyone wishing for the definitive line on Attila and the Huns he led to an empire should not read this book.
Anyone wishing for guidance on what the Huns did when they weren’t murdering, pillaging and raping their way through Europe should also look elsewhere.
Where they came from, what language they spoke, what religion they practised – give over! Carefully, item by item, thought by thought, rumour by rumour, tradition and legend not left out, Maenchen-Helfen demolishes them all. He takes issue with it seems all specialists in the field - including himself! Never one to avoid casting a doubt where a doubt could be flung, he turns Hun scholarship into nonsense.
Here is a vigorous sample. The Ural River in Russia had another name and its ancient rendering in Greek began with a delta (“d” to us) though it was said “Yayiq”. What this name might mean is not clear: “Turkologists and Altaists cannot agree,” Maenchen-Helfen tells us. “Marquart assumed that the delta renders palatised d; Pritsak thinks it stands for the fricative voiced dental; Menges takes it for the plosive voiced dental, and Poppe for the sibilant z; even the possibility that the delta transcribed y has been considered.”*
I had a good laugh. For this tiny corner of scholarship, think the whole of Hunnic lore.
Maenchen-Helfen suggests, without being definitive about it, that far from being “Asiatic” that at least some of the skulls unearthed in various grave sites that might be Hunnic were “Europoid”, and that they were also “multi-ethnic”, made up of members of various peoples. (He says Genghiz Khan was part European too). He reckons they might have spoken some sort of Turkish tongue, but he’s not sure. Examining the names of warriors – many who served in Roman armies – shows them to be derived from a range of cultures including Gothic, Armenian and Iranian. Their artwork is very primitive and as for their standards of utilitarian workmanship – please.
What they were good at was fighting, and what they made well were bows and arrows. They knew, he says, a lot about shooting arrows on horseback, and it gave them their superiority over nearly all comers. Of course once a skill like that is obvious to one’s enemies, they are likely to acquire it too, so perhaps it is not too surprising that their empire was short-lived, unravelling spectacularly after Attila’s death.
From that superiority we do know that Attila fashioned an impressively large empire. He terrorised and subjugated other so-called barbarian peoples and amassed a fabulous fortune for himself and his people through booty, extorting tribute from victims, including the Romans, and from ransoming or on-selling captives into fulltime slavery. Attila acted the part of an emperor, hiring literate secretaries to conduct negotiations through correspondence and formal treaty, and entertained ambassadors from Rome and elsewhere. One of these, a civil servant and diplomat named Priscus, wrote down his impressions, so we know at least that he was real.
World of the Huns is meant to be for those really interested, so-called specialists, and there is a postscript for dummies such as myself who don’t really care all that much whether the y in yayiq was plosive or explosive. Yet the author of the postscript faithfully recounted the story of Attila’s “engagement” with the sister of a Roman emperor: Maenchen-Helfen sniffily dismisses it as “Byzantine court gossip”.
Of course, for a novelist, who makes things up and who only doesn’t want to be embarrassed by alleging a fact that turns out not to be a fact, Maenchen-Helfen’s demolition job is a gift from the gods. Almost anything anyone might say about Attila and about the Huns might be true. Conceivably they could even be Erich von Daniken’s spacemen. There are so many good stories! A writer might agree with them, discount them, make up her or his own…and it’s all fine.
Thanks Otto.
*It turns out that none of these experts was right. See pages 454-455.
After doing a heap of wiki-ing and other online hooning about on Attila and his people, I broke down in the end and ordered a hard copy of Otto J Maenchen-Helfen’s World of the Huns. This had been reviewed as the best account of this mysterious people, and on and off since receiving it I've been getting through it. It’s a dense read, a kind of combination nachlass – he’d finished only part of it when he died – and festschrift, given that it was published despite numerous lacunae by admirers of his painstaking scholarship.
A name like Maenchen-Helfen sticks in the mind, and I had read something else associated with him, many years ago: he had translated a Russian account of the life of world-class bogeyman Karl Marx sub-titled Man and Fighter, published in Penguin. As it dealt with Marx’s political life rather than his writing and ideas, I gave it a read.
Maenchen-Helfen was Austrian and after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia went to that country to work, getting permission to do anthropological studies that included a visit to the very, very far east and a district called Tuva, where it seems no European had been for a very long time, if ever. Despairing for some reason of Stalin’s regime, he managed to get out of Soviet clutches and went to Berlin. With the coming of Nazism he did a runner from there too and after some more wandering ended up in the US, where he taught the history of art in California. His mind, however, was on the Huns, and he brought a great range of talents to the subject; archaeology, linguistics, history, art…
The World of the Huns sums up his life’s work..
Anyone wishing for the definitive line on Attila and the Huns he led to an empire should not read this book.
Anyone wishing for guidance on what the Huns did when they weren’t murdering, pillaging and raping their way through Europe should also look elsewhere.
Where they came from, what language they spoke, what religion they practised – give over! Carefully, item by item, thought by thought, rumour by rumour, tradition and legend not left out, Maenchen-Helfen demolishes them all. He takes issue with it seems all specialists in the field - including himself! Never one to avoid casting a doubt where a doubt could be flung, he turns Hun scholarship into nonsense.
Here is a vigorous sample. The Ural River in Russia had another name and its ancient rendering in Greek began with a delta (“d” to us) though it was said “Yayiq”. What this name might mean is not clear: “Turkologists and Altaists cannot agree,” Maenchen-Helfen tells us. “Marquart assumed that the delta renders palatised d; Pritsak thinks it stands for the fricative voiced dental; Menges takes it for the plosive voiced dental, and Poppe for the sibilant z; even the possibility that the delta transcribed y has been considered.”*
I had a good laugh. For this tiny corner of scholarship, think the whole of Hunnic lore.
Maenchen-Helfen suggests, without being definitive about it, that far from being “Asiatic” that at least some of the skulls unearthed in various grave sites that might be Hunnic were “Europoid”, and that they were also “multi-ethnic”, made up of members of various peoples. (He says Genghiz Khan was part European too). He reckons they might have spoken some sort of Turkish tongue, but he’s not sure. Examining the names of warriors – many who served in Roman armies – shows them to be derived from a range of cultures including Gothic, Armenian and Iranian. Their artwork is very primitive and as for their standards of utilitarian workmanship – please.
What they were good at was fighting, and what they made well were bows and arrows. They knew, he says, a lot about shooting arrows on horseback, and it gave them their superiority over nearly all comers. Of course once a skill like that is obvious to one’s enemies, they are likely to acquire it too, so perhaps it is not too surprising that their empire was short-lived, unravelling spectacularly after Attila’s death.
From that superiority we do know that Attila fashioned an impressively large empire. He terrorised and subjugated other so-called barbarian peoples and amassed a fabulous fortune for himself and his people through booty, extorting tribute from victims, including the Romans, and from ransoming or on-selling captives into fulltime slavery. Attila acted the part of an emperor, hiring literate secretaries to conduct negotiations through correspondence and formal treaty, and entertained ambassadors from Rome and elsewhere. One of these, a civil servant and diplomat named Priscus, wrote down his impressions, so we know at least that he was real.
World of the Huns is meant to be for those really interested, so-called specialists, and there is a postscript for dummies such as myself who don’t really care all that much whether the y in yayiq was plosive or explosive. Yet the author of the postscript faithfully recounted the story of Attila’s “engagement” with the sister of a Roman emperor: Maenchen-Helfen sniffily dismisses it as “Byzantine court gossip”.
Of course, for a novelist, who makes things up and who only doesn’t want to be embarrassed by alleging a fact that turns out not to be a fact, Maenchen-Helfen’s demolition job is a gift from the gods. Almost anything anyone might say about Attila and about the Huns might be true. Conceivably they could even be Erich von Daniken’s spacemen. There are so many good stories! A writer might agree with them, discount them, make up her or his own…and it’s all fine.
Thanks Otto.
*It turns out that none of these experts was right. See pages 454-455.
April 12, 2014
The moving finger is thrusting in the air in contempt. Omar, help me out please!
Writing is a big deal so far as I’m concerned. Nearly all my life – that is, since I could talk! – I’ve enjoyed playing with words in one way or another, and when things come out in a satisfying way the pleasure can be physical as well as emotional or, if you like – I do – spiritual. But when they don’t come out right, and I know it, it can be maddening.
The most recent post in this blog, “Toiling with Troilus”, was in the hard basket for a long time and I thought it might even be too hard. Quite a number of drafts were ripped into shreds and then torn into tiny pieces before being dumped down my literary loo, a new low in “bog standard”. When I finally stuck it up on the net, I was relieved as well as pleased.
Now I can get on with what I am meaning to do, which is write another novel. I’ve been doing quite a lot of research for this one, which in a way is unusual for me: most of my novels have sprung out of things I was already interested in, and had found out about in the ordinary course of being curious. There are always things to find out, facts to check and so on, but the background bits, on Shakespeare or Berdyaev, or Giordano Bruno or Nazism or Celine or what- or whoever were already sitting in my feverish imagination before I thought of writing at all.
This one is a bit different. After Kaos I felt I had ploughed a certain furrow just about as wide and deep as it was going to get and that it was time to till somewhere new. Partly that involves the kind of book I mean to write, and partly it is what I mean to write about. Casting around for new material and new approaches has often been quite a lot of fun as I’ve let my interests find their own paths and have learned a great deal about things and people I knew little or nothing about. Hopefully the sense of wonder will translate onto the page and give readers some thrills.
But I want to get onto it, start writing, and I feel I’m not ready to do that yet, and I am beginning to find this quite annoying. Every day feels closer, but I go to bed without having put a word onto e-paper. Blagh! Once I get started it will be hard to think about anything else, so the best idea would be to stop worrying about it and enjoy the down time. But I’m not like that.
Do I have a title? Yes…maybe even more than one title. Do I have a premise? Yes…several to choose from but think I’ve settled on one. Characters? Yo…some interesting people too. Plot…welllllll, not entirely. A beginning and an end and lots of the middle but there are some wrinkles there that just won’t iron out. Double blagh!
Thanks for reading.
The most recent post in this blog, “Toiling with Troilus”, was in the hard basket for a long time and I thought it might even be too hard. Quite a number of drafts were ripped into shreds and then torn into tiny pieces before being dumped down my literary loo, a new low in “bog standard”. When I finally stuck it up on the net, I was relieved as well as pleased.
Now I can get on with what I am meaning to do, which is write another novel. I’ve been doing quite a lot of research for this one, which in a way is unusual for me: most of my novels have sprung out of things I was already interested in, and had found out about in the ordinary course of being curious. There are always things to find out, facts to check and so on, but the background bits, on Shakespeare or Berdyaev, or Giordano Bruno or Nazism or Celine or what- or whoever were already sitting in my feverish imagination before I thought of writing at all.
This one is a bit different. After Kaos I felt I had ploughed a certain furrow just about as wide and deep as it was going to get and that it was time to till somewhere new. Partly that involves the kind of book I mean to write, and partly it is what I mean to write about. Casting around for new material and new approaches has often been quite a lot of fun as I’ve let my interests find their own paths and have learned a great deal about things and people I knew little or nothing about. Hopefully the sense of wonder will translate onto the page and give readers some thrills.
But I want to get onto it, start writing, and I feel I’m not ready to do that yet, and I am beginning to find this quite annoying. Every day feels closer, but I go to bed without having put a word onto e-paper. Blagh! Once I get started it will be hard to think about anything else, so the best idea would be to stop worrying about it and enjoy the down time. But I’m not like that.
Do I have a title? Yes…maybe even more than one title. Do I have a premise? Yes…several to choose from but think I’ve settled on one. Characters? Yo…some interesting people too. Plot…welllllll, not entirely. A beginning and an end and lots of the middle but there are some wrinkles there that just won’t iron out. Double blagh!
Thanks for reading.
March 31, 2014
Toiling with Troilus
Troilus and Cressida* is my nominee for the most amazing of all Shakespeare’s plays, and that’s saying a lot. In text and in performance, Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice, All’s Well that Ends Well, Twelfth Night and many more would spring to educated people’s minds before this strange Trojan War epic.
Yet Troilus and Cressida outpaces them all in the race to be most puzzling. So far as I know, no other play apart from Titus Andronicus** – not only by Shakespeare but by anybody – has been claimed to be both a tragedy and a comedy, as well as spots in between. There are even more puzzles about the play, perhaps more than about any other of Shakespeare’s works, and they raise issues that go far beyond what we may style as literary criticism.
Many of these uncertainties are the sort that bedevil Shakespeare scholarship generally – and that help make burrowing into the works of the master so exciting. It is not clear when the play was originally written, though it is generally accepted to have been around 1600. There are two and a half versions – two almost identical quartos published in 1609, and the 1623 Folio text, all with wee posers for the excitable, such as myself. Whether the quarto(s) or the Folio is the “authoritative” version is moot.
There is more. Many words in the English language are found first in Shakespeare. Troilus and Cressida has a number he used only in this play, and there are others that have never been used by anyone else, ever.***
All these and more factors may help to explain why the play is not better known.
The quartos are a good place to start. They were published in quick succession in 1609, the same year Shakespeare’s sonnets were first printed. The theatres were closed in that year due to the plague and Shakespeare may have been trying to make some money from his writing.
The first quarto claimed the play had been performed by his company, the King’s Men, but it was quickly replaced by a new edition, alike in every respect but for the title page and a preface, from “a never writer” to the “ever reader”.
The preface is a source of endless fascination. It contradicts the earlier version by saying it has never been performed – “never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar”, and then goes on to say that what had been a “history” was now a comedy, “passing full of the palm comical”. Shakespeare is compared to the Roman comic playwrights Plautus and Terence.
Moreover as addressed to the “ever reader” it may be that Shakespeare rejigged an earlier version of the play (and that may have been performed) to make it more suitable for reading. In any case, as with other plays published at the time, it was sold as something to be read, not as a script to be performed.
I think this matters for a number of reasons, perhaps the most important being that the presumed difficulties of the play may very well stem from its form as a dramatic script but infused with complexities and nuance that can only be appreciated at leisure, by an “ever reader”, or even, an “eternal reader”. Even when staged in “intimate” settings like Blackfriars theatre instead of the larger Globe playhouse, Troilus and Cressida is so full of subtle innuendo, complex philosophising, and sexual and other multiple entendres that no viewer could hope to gain a full appreciation at a sitting or reading. Certainly I have seen it three times and have read it at least half a dozen times, three in the most recent Arden edition, and think there is more there yet.
Never Writer’s big point, that the play is a comedy, is major. After all, this is a play set in a war, whose outcome is known to everyone. Lovers torn apart jostle for prominence with the death of the Trojans’ most famous warrior, with the weeping sores of venereal disease seeping through the lines to infect the whole. Get a rib-tickler out of that and you’d have to be – Shakespeare.
It is a tall order without doubt. But it is doable, and I am not alone in thinking it.^
What makes it doable is the underlying intent, what Shakespeare was trying to achieve – according, of course, to me. Ultimately that is what draws me to the play, as ultimately I am drawn to Shakespeare’s work in “the whole of all its parts”.
It seems to me Shakespeare was attacking the courtly ethos associated with the late Elizabethan monarchy, peeling away the layers of false gentility to reveal the ugly inside of what were, once seen the right way, self-evidently hypocritical values. Unless it is the venomous fool Thersites, no one among the major characters emerges unscathed.
There is external evidence that Shakespeare took a dim view of these values at the time. In sonnet 130, he contrasts the romantic view of love with his own realistic one:
“I grant I never saw a goddess go/My mistress when she walks treads on the ground./And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare/As any she belied with false compare”. This is loving not despite a lover’s “blemishes” but in their fullness. Troilus’ love-sick puppy does not stand up well to this grown man’s emotions.
Troilus and Cressida extends this suspicion of the standards of chivalric, “courtly” behaviour to encompass its most extreme practice: warfare. There is really nothing else at stake in the war than “honour”: the Greeks could go home empty-handed, and the Trojans could turn Helen over to them, and the loss for either would be face, and nothing else. To stand on the rightness of their cause has already, when the play begins, cost untold lives on both sides, with the Trojans risking everything: their city, their culture, the lives of everyone there, men, women, children, the old and frail. For the Greeks, the risks are less in that “just” the lives of those on the field of battle are at risk, but as the play opens the battlefield is strewn with the ghosts of warriors fallen in the pursuit of a woman who is happy where she is, thank you very much.
The conclusion, made plain in both camps during the play, is that they fight not because they have to, but because they want to. The element of tragedy is self-evident in this, given that no audience would be unaware of the final outcome.
Yet it is also laughable. These are not men, but children at play with deadly consequences. Critical scenes in the play that might be thought to be hard to raise a laugh, really could: Hector’s death, for example, after he pursued and killed a Greek for his armour, dragging the unnamed victim home and stopping for a rest, surrounded by Achilles’ warriors known as Myrmidons – descended if you will from ants! – to be slain by Achilles as a sadistic child might pull wings off flies. Tragic from one view, but losing one’s life for soldier bling…an audience in Shakespeare’s day could have found this funny, and so in ours.
Mounting or reading this play as a comedy exposes these values to trenchant ridicule underscored in the character of Thersites, whose all but endless trashing of the pretensions of both camps, and shrewd perceptions of the underlying macho and sexual motivations involved, is a slap in the face not just to Greeks and Trojans, but to men who share their values.
And there are plenty of those around.
This year is the centenary of the beginning of what is variously called the First World War, World War I and the Great War. The parallels with the Trojan War are not exact, by any means. Nonetheless, for all its outrage and political undertones, the assassination of an Austrian archduke by Serbian radicals need not have begun a conflagration that would go on to consume the lives of millions upon millions, and did even worse as I hope to show.
The archduke’s murder unleashed the same passions that made peace impossible between the Trojans and the Greeks: men’s passions, or if you prefer, boys’ stuff, ruled on both occasions. They are not the only passions in men. But they ruled then, and can rule again.
To see these at work in the Great War Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel is widely regarded as the truest reflection of that conflict. It is also an honest account by a man who relished the fighting. The male urges laid bare in Troilus and Cressida bare their teeth in Storm of Steel.
Of course not all males allow themselves to be swept up in madness. Thersites in Troilus and Cressida was frank in his cowardice. In the Great War New Zealander Archibald Baxter’s refusal to serve led him to the front lines in France as authorities sought to break him and his comrades through beatings and torture. His account, We Will Not Cease, shows heroism of another sort.
Baxter’s beliefs can only be said to be a guide to the future in a general way: that men need not give way to the urges that lead individuals to violence and societies to wholesale slaughter. Resistance to aggression can be the only option. The Second World War was just like that: Hitler was determined on war from shortly after the end of the Great War, when few if any even knew he existed, and no amount of persuasion or acquiescence would have avoided it, as events proved. Not only the passions of men, but the sway of policy made “Hitler’s war” unique among the wars of so-called civilised states. While we solemnly intone the futility of the Great War in the near future, remembering what came after won’t hurt.
All of this, right down to our world today, relates to men, to their attitudes, passions and power. Women only feature as symbols and objects, or as victims. The world of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is in that sense the same as the world of 1914, and nearly the same as the world of today.
But just nearly the same. Those who read this blog regularly, and those who read my fiction, will know that my work is meant partly to chart what I feel is an epochal shift in western society, and by extension eventually all society. That sees women moving to replace men as decision-makers in all aspects of social life: business, services, politics. What some might see as a rise to equality I see as a necessary victory over the passions that have ruled us for too long. What is important is not women “coming to be equals” but men losing their place on top.
This is not about “gender”, but about values, however much they may be bound up with gender, and Archibald Baxter and men like him have shown it. Men generally have been able to indulge their violent inclinations for a very long time because of the reality of their physical strength^^; the industrial revolution and the many implements of destruction spawned by it have undermined and will finally destroy that advantage. The strength of “womanhood” and the values implied by it are now being ushered into the forefront of social life.
Real, physical women are not the same as these values. It is not surprising that many if not all of the women to arrive in positions of political power clawed their way to the top by being more male than men. It was not Margaret Thatcher’s handbag that was relevant but her willingness to swing it.
Yet this process and the broad outlines of its outcome are unmistakeable. Woman is coming to rule, politically and socially. “Equality” really means “supremacy”, and negation is the reason: male values are too dangerous. The sabre-rattling that led to the Great War cost millions of lives; the same attitudes today threaten global catastrophe, and even when this is avoided can cause needless distress and harm to hundreds of millions of people.
All this may seem a long way from Troilus and Cressida and in a sense it is. Shakespeare in his day could only mock male values. The women in this play are not agents of their own destiny but are victims of the whims of their male rulers. Cressida has long been portrayed as a “slut” but it seems to me shows intelligence and wit in adapting – and quickly – to her circumstances after being totally betrayed by the man she loved. The parallel with Helen is ironic. Cressida must go to the Greeks as a matter of principle while Helen must stay for the same reason. Both are no more than tokens, symbols, not fully human.
At any rate Shakespeare could hardly have foreseen a time when women’s estate would change. The single example of his age, Elizabeth, was taken – as she was – to be a great exception, all the more as she was hailed as a virgin. John Knox, the Scottish reformer, railed against her and the notion that women should rule men as he regarded it as anti-Biblical and anti-Christian.
What Shakespeare could do was to expose the sexual basis of much male behaviour, not just that directed at women. The amount of sexual innuendo in Troilus and Cressida is astonishing for a work peopled mostly by men, and suggests that sexual prowess and sexual competitiveness are significant factors in male behaviour not only toward women but toward other men. It is a commonplace that women in our time dress for other women at least as much as for men, but a recent study into dancing suggests men dance in the same way – parading themselves in front of other men as well as women, to dominate or ward off competition, not merely to seduce their opposites.
Pandarus, deathly ill with “Neapolitan bone ache” (syphilis) farewells the audience at the very end of the play promising to “bequeath you my diseases”. What Shakespeare meant by this parting shot is not entirely clear. Some think he himself had syphilis and not surprisingly wasn’t happy about it. Whether that is true or not, it seems to me to be more an indictment not of the rutting but the strutting style of masculinity so ridiculed by Thersites in the play, as men view sex as a form of power, and their conquests as chaff. Early in the play, as Cressida contemplates yielding to Troilus, she articulates her weakness: her only strength is in withholding her favours; once she has granted them, she is totally captive to her seducer – and so it proves. Sex as power is a sickness in keeping with and an element in the notion of war as a blood sport. Though he is clearly a lover and not a fighter, Pandarus facilitates the ethos and must guiltily succumb.
We no longer live in such times. But the consequences of change in sexual attitudes are far from clearly articulated in decision-making in political life.
The great risk is that “women as men”, as satirised in the dystopian novel Regiment of Women by Thomas Berger, will turn out to be the rule. I don’t think it will, though it is absurd also to say that women as individuals are each and all superior to men. It is about values and there is a change going on among we poor males too. And even so evil will grab hard any purchase it can find, as the ambivalent ending of Kaos acknowledges.
In our time – right now! – we still see politics as a boys’ game in full cry. Stresses and strains on the international stage give macho impulses their head – what should be a last resort is the first, what is a symbol only is a cause, what is a restricted field of disagreement is an invitation for the “nuclear option”. We are not yet out of the shadow of the world mocked by Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida. There is still time to change it from a comedy to a tragedy.
Thanks for getting through this.
*The best edition by far as I’ve noted in previous posts is David Bevington’s third series Arden. There is such a thing as an editorial masterpiece, and this is it. I have not given a precis of the play – readers should consult Wiki or Bevington.
**Titus has been claimed to be a send-up of contemporary revenge tragedies. Jonathan Bate’s Arden edition persuasively argues against farce.
***See Bevington’s note on the text.
^It would be interesting to see the play done in repertory with itself – as a comedy one night, a tragedy or tragicomedy the next. See Bevington p426.
^^See Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex.
Yet Troilus and Cressida outpaces them all in the race to be most puzzling. So far as I know, no other play apart from Titus Andronicus** – not only by Shakespeare but by anybody – has been claimed to be both a tragedy and a comedy, as well as spots in between. There are even more puzzles about the play, perhaps more than about any other of Shakespeare’s works, and they raise issues that go far beyond what we may style as literary criticism.
Many of these uncertainties are the sort that bedevil Shakespeare scholarship generally – and that help make burrowing into the works of the master so exciting. It is not clear when the play was originally written, though it is generally accepted to have been around 1600. There are two and a half versions – two almost identical quartos published in 1609, and the 1623 Folio text, all with wee posers for the excitable, such as myself. Whether the quarto(s) or the Folio is the “authoritative” version is moot.
There is more. Many words in the English language are found first in Shakespeare. Troilus and Cressida has a number he used only in this play, and there are others that have never been used by anyone else, ever.***
All these and more factors may help to explain why the play is not better known.
The quartos are a good place to start. They were published in quick succession in 1609, the same year Shakespeare’s sonnets were first printed. The theatres were closed in that year due to the plague and Shakespeare may have been trying to make some money from his writing.
The first quarto claimed the play had been performed by his company, the King’s Men, but it was quickly replaced by a new edition, alike in every respect but for the title page and a preface, from “a never writer” to the “ever reader”.
The preface is a source of endless fascination. It contradicts the earlier version by saying it has never been performed – “never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar”, and then goes on to say that what had been a “history” was now a comedy, “passing full of the palm comical”. Shakespeare is compared to the Roman comic playwrights Plautus and Terence.
Moreover as addressed to the “ever reader” it may be that Shakespeare rejigged an earlier version of the play (and that may have been performed) to make it more suitable for reading. In any case, as with other plays published at the time, it was sold as something to be read, not as a script to be performed.
I think this matters for a number of reasons, perhaps the most important being that the presumed difficulties of the play may very well stem from its form as a dramatic script but infused with complexities and nuance that can only be appreciated at leisure, by an “ever reader”, or even, an “eternal reader”. Even when staged in “intimate” settings like Blackfriars theatre instead of the larger Globe playhouse, Troilus and Cressida is so full of subtle innuendo, complex philosophising, and sexual and other multiple entendres that no viewer could hope to gain a full appreciation at a sitting or reading. Certainly I have seen it three times and have read it at least half a dozen times, three in the most recent Arden edition, and think there is more there yet.
Never Writer’s big point, that the play is a comedy, is major. After all, this is a play set in a war, whose outcome is known to everyone. Lovers torn apart jostle for prominence with the death of the Trojans’ most famous warrior, with the weeping sores of venereal disease seeping through the lines to infect the whole. Get a rib-tickler out of that and you’d have to be – Shakespeare.
It is a tall order without doubt. But it is doable, and I am not alone in thinking it.^
What makes it doable is the underlying intent, what Shakespeare was trying to achieve – according, of course, to me. Ultimately that is what draws me to the play, as ultimately I am drawn to Shakespeare’s work in “the whole of all its parts”.
It seems to me Shakespeare was attacking the courtly ethos associated with the late Elizabethan monarchy, peeling away the layers of false gentility to reveal the ugly inside of what were, once seen the right way, self-evidently hypocritical values. Unless it is the venomous fool Thersites, no one among the major characters emerges unscathed.
There is external evidence that Shakespeare took a dim view of these values at the time. In sonnet 130, he contrasts the romantic view of love with his own realistic one:
“I grant I never saw a goddess go/My mistress when she walks treads on the ground./And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare/As any she belied with false compare”. This is loving not despite a lover’s “blemishes” but in their fullness. Troilus’ love-sick puppy does not stand up well to this grown man’s emotions.
Troilus and Cressida extends this suspicion of the standards of chivalric, “courtly” behaviour to encompass its most extreme practice: warfare. There is really nothing else at stake in the war than “honour”: the Greeks could go home empty-handed, and the Trojans could turn Helen over to them, and the loss for either would be face, and nothing else. To stand on the rightness of their cause has already, when the play begins, cost untold lives on both sides, with the Trojans risking everything: their city, their culture, the lives of everyone there, men, women, children, the old and frail. For the Greeks, the risks are less in that “just” the lives of those on the field of battle are at risk, but as the play opens the battlefield is strewn with the ghosts of warriors fallen in the pursuit of a woman who is happy where she is, thank you very much.
The conclusion, made plain in both camps during the play, is that they fight not because they have to, but because they want to. The element of tragedy is self-evident in this, given that no audience would be unaware of the final outcome.
Yet it is also laughable. These are not men, but children at play with deadly consequences. Critical scenes in the play that might be thought to be hard to raise a laugh, really could: Hector’s death, for example, after he pursued and killed a Greek for his armour, dragging the unnamed victim home and stopping for a rest, surrounded by Achilles’ warriors known as Myrmidons – descended if you will from ants! – to be slain by Achilles as a sadistic child might pull wings off flies. Tragic from one view, but losing one’s life for soldier bling…an audience in Shakespeare’s day could have found this funny, and so in ours.
Mounting or reading this play as a comedy exposes these values to trenchant ridicule underscored in the character of Thersites, whose all but endless trashing of the pretensions of both camps, and shrewd perceptions of the underlying macho and sexual motivations involved, is a slap in the face not just to Greeks and Trojans, but to men who share their values.
And there are plenty of those around.
This year is the centenary of the beginning of what is variously called the First World War, World War I and the Great War. The parallels with the Trojan War are not exact, by any means. Nonetheless, for all its outrage and political undertones, the assassination of an Austrian archduke by Serbian radicals need not have begun a conflagration that would go on to consume the lives of millions upon millions, and did even worse as I hope to show.
The archduke’s murder unleashed the same passions that made peace impossible between the Trojans and the Greeks: men’s passions, or if you prefer, boys’ stuff, ruled on both occasions. They are not the only passions in men. But they ruled then, and can rule again.
To see these at work in the Great War Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel is widely regarded as the truest reflection of that conflict. It is also an honest account by a man who relished the fighting. The male urges laid bare in Troilus and Cressida bare their teeth in Storm of Steel.
Of course not all males allow themselves to be swept up in madness. Thersites in Troilus and Cressida was frank in his cowardice. In the Great War New Zealander Archibald Baxter’s refusal to serve led him to the front lines in France as authorities sought to break him and his comrades through beatings and torture. His account, We Will Not Cease, shows heroism of another sort.
Baxter’s beliefs can only be said to be a guide to the future in a general way: that men need not give way to the urges that lead individuals to violence and societies to wholesale slaughter. Resistance to aggression can be the only option. The Second World War was just like that: Hitler was determined on war from shortly after the end of the Great War, when few if any even knew he existed, and no amount of persuasion or acquiescence would have avoided it, as events proved. Not only the passions of men, but the sway of policy made “Hitler’s war” unique among the wars of so-called civilised states. While we solemnly intone the futility of the Great War in the near future, remembering what came after won’t hurt.
All of this, right down to our world today, relates to men, to their attitudes, passions and power. Women only feature as symbols and objects, or as victims. The world of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is in that sense the same as the world of 1914, and nearly the same as the world of today.
But just nearly the same. Those who read this blog regularly, and those who read my fiction, will know that my work is meant partly to chart what I feel is an epochal shift in western society, and by extension eventually all society. That sees women moving to replace men as decision-makers in all aspects of social life: business, services, politics. What some might see as a rise to equality I see as a necessary victory over the passions that have ruled us for too long. What is important is not women “coming to be equals” but men losing their place on top.
This is not about “gender”, but about values, however much they may be bound up with gender, and Archibald Baxter and men like him have shown it. Men generally have been able to indulge their violent inclinations for a very long time because of the reality of their physical strength^^; the industrial revolution and the many implements of destruction spawned by it have undermined and will finally destroy that advantage. The strength of “womanhood” and the values implied by it are now being ushered into the forefront of social life.
Real, physical women are not the same as these values. It is not surprising that many if not all of the women to arrive in positions of political power clawed their way to the top by being more male than men. It was not Margaret Thatcher’s handbag that was relevant but her willingness to swing it.
Yet this process and the broad outlines of its outcome are unmistakeable. Woman is coming to rule, politically and socially. “Equality” really means “supremacy”, and negation is the reason: male values are too dangerous. The sabre-rattling that led to the Great War cost millions of lives; the same attitudes today threaten global catastrophe, and even when this is avoided can cause needless distress and harm to hundreds of millions of people.
All this may seem a long way from Troilus and Cressida and in a sense it is. Shakespeare in his day could only mock male values. The women in this play are not agents of their own destiny but are victims of the whims of their male rulers. Cressida has long been portrayed as a “slut” but it seems to me shows intelligence and wit in adapting – and quickly – to her circumstances after being totally betrayed by the man she loved. The parallel with Helen is ironic. Cressida must go to the Greeks as a matter of principle while Helen must stay for the same reason. Both are no more than tokens, symbols, not fully human.
At any rate Shakespeare could hardly have foreseen a time when women’s estate would change. The single example of his age, Elizabeth, was taken – as she was – to be a great exception, all the more as she was hailed as a virgin. John Knox, the Scottish reformer, railed against her and the notion that women should rule men as he regarded it as anti-Biblical and anti-Christian.
What Shakespeare could do was to expose the sexual basis of much male behaviour, not just that directed at women. The amount of sexual innuendo in Troilus and Cressida is astonishing for a work peopled mostly by men, and suggests that sexual prowess and sexual competitiveness are significant factors in male behaviour not only toward women but toward other men. It is a commonplace that women in our time dress for other women at least as much as for men, but a recent study into dancing suggests men dance in the same way – parading themselves in front of other men as well as women, to dominate or ward off competition, not merely to seduce their opposites.
Pandarus, deathly ill with “Neapolitan bone ache” (syphilis) farewells the audience at the very end of the play promising to “bequeath you my diseases”. What Shakespeare meant by this parting shot is not entirely clear. Some think he himself had syphilis and not surprisingly wasn’t happy about it. Whether that is true or not, it seems to me to be more an indictment not of the rutting but the strutting style of masculinity so ridiculed by Thersites in the play, as men view sex as a form of power, and their conquests as chaff. Early in the play, as Cressida contemplates yielding to Troilus, she articulates her weakness: her only strength is in withholding her favours; once she has granted them, she is totally captive to her seducer – and so it proves. Sex as power is a sickness in keeping with and an element in the notion of war as a blood sport. Though he is clearly a lover and not a fighter, Pandarus facilitates the ethos and must guiltily succumb.
We no longer live in such times. But the consequences of change in sexual attitudes are far from clearly articulated in decision-making in political life.
The great risk is that “women as men”, as satirised in the dystopian novel Regiment of Women by Thomas Berger, will turn out to be the rule. I don’t think it will, though it is absurd also to say that women as individuals are each and all superior to men. It is about values and there is a change going on among we poor males too. And even so evil will grab hard any purchase it can find, as the ambivalent ending of Kaos acknowledges.
In our time – right now! – we still see politics as a boys’ game in full cry. Stresses and strains on the international stage give macho impulses their head – what should be a last resort is the first, what is a symbol only is a cause, what is a restricted field of disagreement is an invitation for the “nuclear option”. We are not yet out of the shadow of the world mocked by Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida. There is still time to change it from a comedy to a tragedy.
Thanks for getting through this.
*The best edition by far as I’ve noted in previous posts is David Bevington’s third series Arden. There is such a thing as an editorial masterpiece, and this is it. I have not given a precis of the play – readers should consult Wiki or Bevington.
**Titus has been claimed to be a send-up of contemporary revenge tragedies. Jonathan Bate’s Arden edition persuasively argues against farce.
***See Bevington’s note on the text.
^It would be interesting to see the play done in repertory with itself – as a comedy one night, a tragedy or tragicomedy the next. See Bevington p426.
^^See Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex.
The written world
This blog was originally started "just because" but as I've gone along I've realised how valuable it is to be able to think about writing, about the writers who matter to me, and to help clarify my th
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