Comparing Norris and Tolstoy

Just as in War and Peace history has its own dynamism and logic, pushing people forward in a relentless fashion, so too in Frank Norris' The Octopus rancher and railroader alike must serve the impersonal forces of supply and demand. Remember Shelgrim's words to Presley? -"Men have little to do with the whole business. Can anyone stop the wheat? Well, then, no more can I stop the road." All Presley’s radical convictions are shattered by this encounter. The next time we see him is at a railroad executive's dinner party.

If one looks for a key to Norris' thought, to understand why the great conflict ends in resolution, fatalism and acceptance, then one needs to realise just how important the work of Joseph Leconte was on his thinking. In was Leconte's view, expressed in books like Religion and Science and Evolution, Its Nature, Its Evidences and Its Relations to Religious Thought, that Divine Will was operating in nature through evolution. Science offered one perspective, religion another, but both science and religion merely sought to comprehend the will of God in the natural universe. Evil can never be considered an isolated phenomenon. Nature might break some, but only in pursuit of the greater good. So it is that Norris, Leconte's former student, is able to write at the end of "The Octopus":

...the individual suffers, but the race goes on. Annixer dies, but in a far distant corner of the world a thousand lives are saved. The larger view always comes through all shams, all wicked-nesses, discovers the Truth that will, in the end, prevail, and all things, surely, inevitably, resistlessly work together for that good.

So it is with Norris as it is with Tolstoy; people are carried forward by History, by Destiny, by God, by Fate by Nature or by what you will.

Brave New Futures

Strictly speaking, Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are not really comparable as novels, beyond the bare fact that they are both dystopian. Orwell and Huxley had quite different points of departure. For Orwell, the imagined future was built on a totalitarian present, with the examples of Fascism and, above all, Stalinism before his mind. It was a brutal vision, based on the manipulation of memory, constant warfare and the deliberate creation of shortages.

Huxley, in contrast, was less interested in the deleterious effects of contemporary ideologies, and much more in the soulless nature of mass consumerism, based on the creation and control of artificial desires. It is a vision of a future based on contrived happiness, without depth or real moral purpose, a one-dimensional future of the kind later explored in the theoretical work of Herbert Marcuse.

Of the two visions, Huxley's is far closer to our truth, the 'future' at this particular point in history. To judge them purely as works of literature I would say, in expressing a personal opinion, they are both of considerable value; but as a craftsman Huxley had a far better command of literary technique, a greater understanding of character and language than Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-Four at some points breaks down as a novel, especially in the long and undigested extracts from Emmanuel Goldstein's 'Book.' There is another dystopian novel which is often overlooked, though in some ways it is better than either Huxley or Orwell-We by the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, which combines elements of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Faust Emerging From Hell

I first came across the story of Faust when we studied Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus when I was at school. I was attracted to the supernatural elements, the idea that it was possible to obtain earthly power by a form of demonic pact; attracted and repelled at one and the same time.

Being as I am I could not leave it at that, so I started to root around, eventually reading Goethe’s version of the legend in his two part masterpiece. I can’t say I fully understood it at the time-I was only fourteen years old-but I was immediately aware, especially after reading part two, that this was an infinitely more complicated and interesting Faust than that of Marlowe. More than that, I could see that the story itself had undergone a deep transformation; that the fable of good and evil, a fable based on the dangers of seeking hidden powers, had been stripped away. In Goethe’s play Faust is redeemed, but the redemption, true redemption, is in the attainment of the higher forms of freedom and self-understanding. It was an end of both Medieval imagination and the simpler forms of Christian morality.

The original Faust-indeed if there ever was an original Faust-is thought to be one Georg or Johannes Faust, an alchemist who once attended the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Widely known for his skill in magic, he died under mysterious circumstances in about 1540. This was a time when belief in the diabolical pact was at its height; witches were regularly accused of entering into such arrangements.

The elements of Faust’s story, both fact and fancy, were finally set down in the Historia von Dr Johan Fausten, a chapbook published in Frankfurt in 1587. In this he is depicted as an amoral rogue who enjoyed twenty-four years of perversion and excess as well as becoming the most notable astrologer of his day, one whose predictions were never wrong.

Unlike witchcraft, whose practitioners suffered repeated persecution, alchemists stood on the frontier of what was and what was not permissible, sometimes stepping over in their thirst for knowledge. Knowledge, the limits of inquiry, better said, had long been determined by the church. Those who have read Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose will recall the figure of Venerable Jorge, who insisted that there was no progress in Knowledge, only endless and divine recapitulation. Faust, if you like, represents the rebellious and the restless, a figure who was determined to escape from the limitations of recapitulation, divine or otherwise. He had to start as a villain, a monster of pride; he had to end as a hero, a harbinger of a new age.

Racism in Conrad

A modern view on the subject of racism in the novels and stories of Joseph Conrad is given in the writing of Chinua Achebe and Edward Said. The key texts here are Achebe's 1975 lecture An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness and Said's Orientalism.

Yes, Conrad's work, not just Heart of Darkness, shows signs of both racism and sexism. But does it matter? It seems altogether too trite to say that Conrad was a man of his times, reflecting the views of his times. Achebe expects a perfect penetration, a complete and translucent understanding, which is not within the scope either of the novel or of Conrad's comprehension.

It was not for Conrad to fill this space, this gap in the European imagination, which, in any case, proponents of the post-colonial thesis would no doubt judge as presumptuous, or patronising, or both. It was for Conrad to write The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', Youth, The End of the Tether and all of his other wonderful racist and sexist stories, just as it was for Mark Twain to write Huckleberry Finn, and Harper Lee to write To Kill a Mockingbird.

I'm as sensitive as most to issues of racism and sexism, but I would always seek to judge the past in its own terms, to see things through different eyes. More to the point, I would rather have great literature that a barrel-load of political correctness, delivered by the likes of Achebe and Said. I hope this does not come across as too bad-tempered, but I simply loath attempts to rewrite the past or to sanitise art. :-)

Fateless

I think I was, oh, about fourteen when I first saw Schindler’s List, a movie that made such an impact on me that I followed it up by reading as much Holocaust literature as I could find, including the novel upon which the movie is based. To date I’ve read- aside from Keneally-Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Primo Levis’ If This is a Man, Elie Wiesel’s Night, and Wielsaw Kielar’s Anus Mundi. The work that made the greatest impact on me, in simple emotional terms, was Andre Schwarz-Bart’s The Last of the Just, though the subject matter of this is more wide ranging than the Holocaust as such.

Now I have just finished Fateless, a novel by Imre Kertész, the Hungarian Nobel laureate.

It tells the story of fourteen-year-old Gyuri, a Hungarian Jew, who was arrested one day, in a sudden and Kafkaesque fashion, before being transported, first to Auschwitz, where he survives a selection, and then on to Buchenwald and Zeitz, a sub-camp of Buchenwald. Essentially it follows Kertész’s own experience, his own path. It follows by steps, small steps, the process of bewilderment, incomprehension, degradation and-oddly enough-acceptance. Gyuri’s destiny has been determined in part by fate and in part by freedom, if that makes any sense at all, freedom in the sense that things happen more by accident than design.

In the end Gyuri survives. He cannot forget the past and begin anew, as he is urged by the few fiends he has left in Budapest, because, as he puts it, he cannot give orders to his memory. People, those who have never experienced the camps, are keen to talk about the ‘hell’ and the ‘horror’. But Gyuri, what does Gyuri feel? Why, a certain nostalgia;

It was that particular hour, I recognised even now, even here-my favourite hour in the camp, and I was seized by a sharp, painful, futile longing for it: nostalgia and homesickness. Suddenly it sprang to life, it was all here and bubbling inside me, all its strange moods surprised me, its fragmentary memories set me trembling. Yes, in a certain sense, life there had been clearer and simpler.

I suppose that it is possible to argue that most literature dealing with the experience of the camps is too translucent, in that the horror is perceived not by degrees but all at once in prefect apprehension. Not so with Fateless. It proceeds by slow, almost pedantic degrees and-apart from the gradual dehumanisation suffered by Gyuri and his compatriots-the horror is never that horrible. Indeed, rather surprisingly, the Germans hardly figure at all in the narrative, in a system that seems almost to be run by the inmates themselves.

The book, and the movie upon which it is based, have been very well received. One only has to read the customer reviews on Amazon UK to get a small flavour. One even says that it ‘takes your breath away.’

What did I think? Did it take my breath away? Well, no, it did not. In the end I remained as detached and as unengaged as Gyuri himself. The prose is generally good, if a little opaque at points, though, of course, I can only comment on the English translation, not the original Hungarian. The piecemeal perspective is good, close to the fashion, I imagine, that most people, most individuals, would have experienced the whole process or, better said, the way of being processed. Kertész was there; he knows more about these things than I ever will. I can only comment of Fateless as a work of literature, and as a work of literature it left me cold.

Our Father, Which Art in Hell-the Brilliance of Borges

Ah, Labyrinths, do you know Labyrinths, that sublime compilation by the Argentinean master, Jorge Luis Borges? It’s difficult to find words to describe Borges’ oeuvre in any sufficient way; he wrote so much, poems, essays and fiction. But, honestly, there is more to it than that: he crosses the frontiers between the essay and the story, between fact and fiction: he gives fiction, better said, the appearance of fact.

I’m looking at Labyrinths, his collection of ‘fictions.’ It is quite superb. He writes with a clear, polished and highly precise style. His texts, always brief, perhaps even terse at some points, are rich with all sorts of ‘references’, both real and imagined. In Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis, Terteris he discovers, by a process of textual investigation, a totally idealist world, as might have been imagined by Bishop Berkley, where external objects are whatever one imagines them to be. But the story or fiction I want to focus on here is Three Versions of Judas.

This concerns a Swedish theologian by the name of Nils Runeberg, who makes a unique discovery in the course of his textual and philological investigations, a discovery others find absurd or blasphemous: God incarnate is not Christ-he is Judas Iscariot.

Runeberg’s major work published in German in 1912 as Der heimliche Heiland, Borges tells us-and let me say once again that this is fiction-that this work begins by stressing the superfluity of Judas’ act of betrayal. Why would such a thing have been necessary? Jesus was a public figure, known to thousands. The elements combine to make Judas’ crime, treason, all the more vile: the kiss, the thirty-pieces of silver, the suicide. The act was not passing, it contains nothing of the moment: it was preordained and thus has a “…place in the economy of redemption.”

You see the Word, so is supposed, has become Flesh in the person of Christ, but the Burden, the burden of carrying all the sins and suffering of humanity, has become Flesh in the person of Judas. The lower has become the mirror of the higher; Judas is the mirror of Christ, and burns forever for his sins and ours. The witness was not that of Christ’s Passion, the act of a single day, but an eternity of suffering.

So proceeds Runeberg (so proceeds Borges, which I may have to remind you); so his thesis is published; and so it is rejected. He continues to work, refining, adapting and perfecting his argument. The prophecy contained in Isaiah 53: 2-3, the prophecy of the man of sorrows is not that of moment but “….a whole atrocious future, in time and in eternity, of the Word made flesh.”

God made himself totally a man but a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of reprobation and the abyss. To save us, He could have chosen any of the destinies which make up the complex web of history; he could have been Alexander or Pythagoras or Rurik or Jesus; He chose the vilest destiny of all: He was Judas.

His book is re-published; it is scorned and it is ignored. The author has a moment of epiphany: God did not wish the great secret to be known on earth. Had he not himself fallen into the great blasphemy: had he not revealed the secret name of God? In his fevered anxiety Runeberg runs through the streets of Malmo, “…begging at the top of his voice that he be granted the grace of joining his Redeemer in Hell.”

Runeberg dies in 1912, having added, Borges tells us, to the concept of the Son, which seemed exhausted, “the complexities of evil and misfortune.”

Orwell and Communism

I have always felt it to be wrong that Orwell has been classified as an anti-Stalinist, when a reading of his work gives plenty of indications that he was opposed to Communism in general. Even Animal Farm is only in a partial sense a parable against Stalinism, though this is the form in which it is generally understood. But careful reading will show that the ideal is corrupted well before Napoleon takes absolute power.

On the wider point, let the author speak for himself;

It is probably a good thing for Lenin's reputation that he died so early. Trotsky, in exile, denounces the Russian dictatorship, but he is probably as much responsible for it as any man now living, and there is no certainty that as a dictator he would have been preferable to Stalin. (New English Weekly, January, 1939)

The fact that Trotskyists are everywhere a persecuted minority, and the accusation usually made against them, i.e. of collaborating with the Fascists, is absolutely false, creates the impression that Trotskyism is intellectually and morally superior to communism; but it is doubtful if there is much difference. (Notes on Nationalism, October 1945)

Now, as far as his membership of the Marxist POUM during the Spanish Civil War is concerned, this seems to have come about largely by accident;

I was associated with the Trotskyists in Spain. It was chance that I was serving in the POUM militia and not another, and I largely disagreed with the POUM 'line' and told the leaders so freely...(Partisan Review, Sept.-October, 1942)

Orwell's own politics are neatly summarised in two of his essays, The Lion and the Unicorn and The English People. He draws his inspiration from a long native radical tradition, a tradition deeply hostile to the abstractions of alien political theories;

The various other Marxist parties, all of them claiming to be the true and uncorrupted successors of Lenin, are in an even more hopeless position. The average Englishman is unable to grasp their doctrines and uninterested in their grievances. And in England the lack of a conspiratorial mentality which has developed in police-ridden European countries is a deep handicap. English people in large numbers will not accept any creed whose dominant notes are hated and illegality. The ruthless ideologies of the Continent-not merely Communism and Fascism, but Anarchism, Trotskyism, and even ultramontane Catholicism-are accepted in their pure form by only the intelligentsia, who constitute a sort of island bigotry amid the general vagueness. (The English People).

Swan Song

I saw that Barack Obama declared that he likes Joseph O’Neil’s Netherland, after which sales underwent a sudden leap.

I love it when politicians feel the need to let the wider community know about their literary tastes, particularly as the book in question often reveals so much about their character.

I see that Joker Brown, not to be outdone by Super Obama, has announced his own preference. Can you guess what it is? No? Well, it’s Sunset Song, part of a trilogy by the name of A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon. It just so happens that I’ve read all three.

Sunset Song is a fine piece of writing, indeed it is. But the characters are for the most part unlovely; dour, petty-minded, vicious, hypocritical and cynical. If it was intended as lament for a vanishing way of life, the life of the peasantry of that district in north-east Scotland known as The Mearns, so far as I am concerned it was a way of life that deserved to die! Overall, Sunset Song, like its two sisters, is an extraordinarily depressing book. I now understand our benighted Prime Minister aka ‘The Best Man for the Job’, better and better. I wonder how the sales are doing in the wake of his endorsement? :-))

Courage in the Face of Death: Examples from Literature

Lev Tolstoy's novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich leaps to mind. Also Ernest Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro. This theme might also encompass those who face execution, or are already on their way to the gallows, like Rubashov in Darkness at Noon, or Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities. But the saddest account of a man facing death heroically and with great resolution is depicted in the The Last of the Just, a novel by Andre Schwartz-Bart, which deserves to be much better known in the Anglo-Saxon world. The last few pages left me completely numb: no easy thing, I assure you.