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House of Leaves, postmodernism and the administration of fear

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Dan Fraser) — Thu, 02 May 2013 12:18:33 GMT

In his recent piece on the administration of fear, Mark Thwaite asks whether “The Ministry of Fear is not just the name of a novel but a name for what novels are?” Does Art itself have as one of its tasks the administration of fear, the potential to perpetuate the environment of fear in which the State has placed us? Two immediately identifiable formulations of this idea present themselves: that all literature by its very nature contributes to the state’s fear control system (the ‘negative’ conception) alternatively the thought that the inherent thread of fear permeating literature can either disrupt or accentuate the State’s environment.

Modernism’s literature often stood at the chasm of the dazzling void before falling back in awe, failure, humility or all three of the above and more. Since then, postmodernist texts have often “progressed” from this by delving into the void for empty self-reflection such as the cheap conjuror’s tricks performed by Rushdie et al where the very act of self-reflexivity is its own exploration and explanation. A literary space is forged where self-awareness, melancholy and memory bare their white teeth with gimmicky interjections, letting the reader know this is questioning their own experience but never attempting to nourish by engaging with hunger. The work is framed in a self-conscious setting and removed of its power to disrupt is the same manner as activist art might be if placed in the setting of a gallery.

Elsewhere, for example, the works of the Oulipo movement have used tight mathematical and cognitive constraints in order to create works which can, depending on one’s tastes, leave one full of wonder at their puzzle-box complexity or, alternatively, left cold at the movement’s apolitical, hermetic literary exercises in cognitive novelty.

In his piece Mark further mentions that “The Ministry of Fear could very well be the title of Kafka’s collected works.” And one might plausibly suggest many modernist texts which could be said to engage with fear and its administration. But how can one attempt to further this concept when so much of the other literature being written in this climate of fear might be entitled either The Ministry for Performative Administration or The Administration of Melancholy?

In an attempt to perform a John Stuart Mill in minutiae and reconcile these seemingly disparate threads then this essay will turn to Mark Z. Danielewski’s complex and unashamedly postmodern novel House of Leaves.

I still get nightmares. In fact I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I’m not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares.

From this paradoxical construction onwards House of Leaves oozes and seeps fear. Captured in this excerpt is something fundamental which the work is positing about the nature of fear and by the extension of the concept opening this essay something about postmodern literature’s attempt at exploring, mapping and deconstructing the void. That it cannot be contained. That fear and the void are only promulgated by self-examination.

For Navidson, the protagonist of the non-existent film about the labyrinth growing inside his house which the tattoo artist Johnny finds a review of in his dead neighbour’s apartment, these elements of the void could not be more apparent. The labyrinth which grows inside his house does so because of his obsession with that discrepancy between the interior and the exterior. This obsession with this initially tiny space, of exploring and explicating its contents only serves to perpetuate the void’s size and leaves us lost without any hope of seeing the dazzling abyss at whose edge we once stood. Or worse, we may end up back at the edge of that same abyss but the tiresome exploration has removed the fear and awe it once instilled in us. Its presence becomes the norm and the cannibalistic environment of fear subsumes us.

To say something about what the void is, to attempt to give it properties, spatial location etc. is futile. It is both internal to human beings and felt by us and located elsewhere, it is an absence. One may view it from the outside yet its nothingness is endless. Bu to try to treat it as a black rock face, to be abseiled down in to armed with rope and cameras with only self-referential morsels of irony for sustenance. However it may be a place where real self-reflexivity might be possible. If the void is not a black mirror where some slightly tainted doppelganger stares vacantly back but a vastness which one finds a loneliness so complete that: “When at last nothing was present but my perfect nothingness and there was nothing more to see, they ceased to see me too.” And the gaze which is returned is one’s own returned eternally by the abyss.

The fact that House of Leaves uses a postmodern toolbox of stylistic features to accomplish this exposé ultimately means that Danielewski too must fail in order to succeed. However in this instance the fact that the text succumbs to its own logic is a triumph. Everywhere Danielewski’s use of codes, postmodern metafictional referentiality and Oulipian games, whilst no less carefully constructed, curl in parabolic arcs to nothingness. These are not just empty tricks deployed as meaning; they are failures, not of the text (which “cannot be blamed”) but of the method, with each repeated failure contributing to the success in exposing postmodernism’s own shortcomings.

This is further accentuated by the book’s attempts to turn the very act of reading into a postmodern performance. When there is unbearable tension the number of words on the page is reduced so that the pages must be turned faster and the multi-layered codes continue to encourage many to obsessively make notes on their own copy of the book. Its fear cannot be confined even to the fiction it has created, it is truly afraid of what a novel can be and do, leaving the reader in a labyrinth where:

You will see nothing in that distance of eternal emptiness, you will not hear your own step, you will find nothing solid for your rest.

House of Leaves uses the literary techniques of postmodernism in order to reveal postmodernism’s own failings in attempting to familiarise the void. In attempting to map the perfect nothingness postmodernism only serves to amplify it’s threat.

This self-perpetuating cartography of dark coordinates often mirrors the State’s belief that any state of peace can be convincingly presented as a state of impending war so long as new threats can be identified commercialised and ‘sold’. If it can bombard the people with these clear patches of darkness it may produce an environment where distinct entities are identified in such great numbers that all action is paralysed by fear. By the very nature of the techniques it employs, House of Leaves offers no solution of its own, a solution which may lie in accepting the void’s defamiliarity, removing the self-conscious exploration and simply falling back.

But what of the negative conception mentioned initially: the idea that all art contributes to the administration of fear? Despite being intuitively false, it does not seem beyond possibility. But might this not lead to the Freudian compulsions which result in direct action against the state’s control? After all:

Jackals have little importance if truth for gazelles is to taste fear, if it is fear alone that makes them surpass themselves, driving them to the most spectacular acrobatics!

The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Mark Thwaite) — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 08:29:05 GMT

Franco "Bifo" Berardi's The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (part of Semiotext(e)'s excellent Intervention Series) is a perplexing text – often perplexingly bad, it has to be said. But beneath the autonomist reworking of a post-Foucauldian politics, and amidst the ruinous post-poststructuralist neologisms, a truth is trying to fight its way out. Infuriatingly, in such an often wooden (and when not wooden, wooly) essay, that truth is about poetry – the poetry intrinsic to all language that isn't tied to instrumental use, the poetry we see when language unmoors itself from crude referentiality.

When language is reduced to information exchange it loses its ironic potential; when language tries to describe those things that lie beyond language – love, hope, another possible world – its failure to pin things down ambiguously reveals its human success:

Poetry is language's excess: poetry is what in language cannot be reduced to information, and is not exchangeable, but gives way to a new common ground of understanding, of shared meaning: the creation of a new world.

Poetry shows that language cannot be counted upon – not least that it can't be counted on simply to count. When it is showing, it is always telling: as language's excess, it can never quite account for itself. Language's imprecision, its limitless lability, is precisely what proves it is fit for purpose. Fit to indicate hope, fit to hint at what the dream meant or might mean. Language fails at simplicity, and by failing succeeds: a cast iron definition of love wouldn't help anyone make love or know they were in love. Poetry shows us language is defined by what it cannot quite name.

Somewhere in Bifo's book something like this is trying to be articulated. And for that reason alone (helped along by some nice riffs about capitalist time and precarity) I commend it to the House!

The Iliad: A New Translation

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Mark Martin) — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 05:38:06 GMT

How much did Homer know about war? Well, for a start he’s pretty shaky on military tactics. Warfare in the Iliad breaks down into a series of impromptu duels, to which heroes commute via otherwise redundant chariots. Instead of the phalanx and the struggle of a mass of troops to outflank the enemy line, it’s individual warriors who determine the course of battle. Nor does Homer provide any explanation for the logistical implausibility central to the story. How is it that a Bronze Age army numbering tens of thousands is not only able to support itself on a foreign expedition for a decade, but to do so in such style its officer class can dispatch oxen by the hundred when circumstances call for a hecatomb? About three hundred years after the Iliad was first written down, Spartan armies could only besiege relatively nearby Athens in the summer months; the campaigns couldn’t last longer until the Spartans established a fort at Decelea.

I’m not suggesting we should think less of Homer because he plays fast and loose with military facts of life. We’re talking about the plain of Scamandar, not Sandhurst or West Point. But the poet’s indisputable carelessness in this area is a corollary to something more disturbing. The Iliad, despite its generous helpings of gore and guts, isn’t totally upfront about what happens when men get handy with the spear’s business end. Homer goes heavy on the violence; he skips the worst of the suffering.

Such a claim must be blasphemy to Stephen Mitchell, whose sleek new translation is informed by a very contemporary sensibility. In his introduction, Mitchell – a Zen practitioner, it’s worth noting – argues that when we consider the dozens of decapitations, the eyeballs rolling in the dirt (two pairs, by my count), the pierced livers and tongues sliced off at the root, moral judgment is ‘inappropriate’. When Patroclus spears Thestor ‘as if he were a prize-winning marlin, we feel his pride as a sportsman’. But though it’s certainly true that the dispassionate appreciation of brutality is at the heart of what’s fascinating in Homer, I wouldn’t go as far as to say we should check our morals at the door. Godlike in our transcendent point of view we may well be when reading the Iliad; but it’s the perspective of a callous Greek god, not the Buddha.

Actually, Homer’s dispassion, though incredible, is nonetheless contrived; he has his thumb on the scale. Consider what he leaves out of the book and what’s in. Penéleos brandishes Ilioneus’s head on spear ‘like a poppy upon a stalk’; Agamemnon kicks the dismembered torso of Hippolochus through a line of troops, rolling it ‘like a log’. There is plenty of horror, but it is not the full-spectrum variety, but contained, limited, because nobody in the Iliad, not a single combatant, has the ill manners to suffer the kind of lingering death that must have been the common lot among Bronze Age fatalities. The closest anyone comes to such a death is when Meriones stabs Adamas below the navel, ‘the most agonizing way for a man to die’. Hapless Adamas bucks like a captured bull, but only ‘a little while, not for long’. The mode of departure may be horrible, but it remains an unbroken law in Homeric etiquette that the end must come quickly – darkness soon covers the eyes of the fallen.

Contrast Homer with the war writing of the twentieth century, where slow death is a recurrent motif and the maiming of soldiers a complementary counterpoint. The first example to come to my mind is Private Wilson in The Naked and the Dead catching a bullet in what we’ll call the Adamas Zone. What follows is a long doomed haul on a stretcher, an odyssey of pain, before he dies. Or one could recall the noble indignation of Siegfried Sassoon’s poetry, with his ‘Does it matter? – losing your legs?’ or the drawn-out agonies of ‘The Death-Bed’. There are countless examples, all moral equivalents to the World War One cliché of the dying Tommy in No Man’s Land crying out for his mum. These modern depictions of prolonged suffering represent a moral innovation in the general understanding of armed conflict. They put an enormous divide between our world and Homer’s.

In the Iliad, war is an inherent aspect of the human condition. Like aging, it is something both inevitable and foolish to resist, as much an essential part of the natural order as the crashing waves and beasts to which the Achaeans and Trojans are frequently compared. Most of us are so far from this way of thinking it’s hard to tune in properly. Like a liberal traveller in foreign lands, we readily concede our values are out of place and ‘inappropriate’. And a great writer – of all things, a great poet – with the mindset of a military contractor is a hard pill to swallow. Mitchell can’t do it, as is evidenced by the Homer next-door depicted in his introduction. Trying to normalize Bronze Age ethics, he writes that ‘well into the twentieth century, distinguished men were still killing each other in duels over so-called “affairs of honour”.’ True enough – indeed, it happens today – but ‘Bronze Age’ is still the right pejorative for such behaviour.

Mitchell’s rather ahistorical, relativist take on the poem is light years away from that of Robert Graves, who didn’t flinch from acknowledging the disgraceful behaviour of Achaean ‘heroes’ and couldn’t bring himself to believe Homer shared their outlook. For Graves, the Iliad is satire. Mitchell departs, too, from the influential classical scholar M. I. Finley, whose The World of Odysseus uncovered a Greek culture in which Homer taught the Hellenes ‘glorification of piracy... and encouragement of robbery’.

So, how does Mitchell’s critical angle affect his translation? To be honest, not that much. He avoids the poetic diction that hobbled Robert Fitzgerald and creates something stripped-down and Hemingway-esque. Compare Mitchell’s ‘As dawn spread its saffron glow over all the earth’ with the same line from one of the most popular of the modern translators, Robert Fagles: ‘Now as the Dawn flung out her golden robe across the earth’. Mitchell’s translation is fast and robust, but perhaps a little too un-epic for some tastes. His irregular five-beat lines don’t smack of capital-L Literature quite as does Fagles’s stately iambics. To many tastes, there will be too much of the creative writing class about Mitchell, who ditches most of the repetitive epithets – ‘fleet-footed’ Achilles, ‘flashing-helmeted’ Hector, ‘wine-dark’ sea, ‘rosy-fingered’ dawn and so on – a decision many readers will regret. Imagine a translator of Hamlet deciding ‘mortal coil’ is too hackneyed to reproduce.

The epic is whittled down in other ways. Mitchell bases his translation on the recent Greek edition of textual scholar M. I. West, the Homeri Ilias, and disposes of the parts West believes to be interpolations. Gone in its entirety is Book 10, the Doloneia. There Odysseus and Diomedes conduct a nighttime raid, slaughter sleeping Trojans and execute Dolon, a prisoner tricked into thinking he has made a bargain for his life. Putting aside the arguments about whether Book 10 deserves to be considered part of the original – and there is no consensus – it’s worth noting that its excision dovetails nicely with Mitchell’s philosophical position. Without it, it’s a bit easier to believe Homer is above, rather than below, our moral judgements.

If Book 10 doesn’t carry the authorization of whatever mistily conceived individual or group we imagine when we talk of Homer, it still carries the imprimatur of posterity. It was probably added in the sixth century BCE under the Athenian tyrant Peisistratos. It would have nestled under Alexander the Great’s pillow with the other twenty-three books, and people have read it for two and a half millennia – another reason this elegant and inspired translation is best left to those looking for a fresh take on a familiar story. It will never be close to definitive. Occasionally, too, there’s the irksome suspicion that something abrasive and stimulating has become smooth under Mitchell’s hand. When Agamemnon calls on Zeus to enforce respect for a truce, he cries:

Whichever contenders trample on this treaty first, spill their brains on the ground as this wine spills – theirs, their children’s too – their enemies rape their wives!

At least, that’s what Agamemnon says in Fagles. Mitchell’s ruler of men ends the entreaty ‘may their dear wives be other men’s slaves and whores.’ Odd, isn’t it, that someone avowedly aiming to be ‘eminently plain and direct’, as Matthew Arnold advised Homer’s would-be translators, should skirt the word ‘rape’.

The Peregrine

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Dan Fraser) — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 11:36:53 GMT

To discover The Peregrine is to discover the secret of flight: to betray humankind and beat a great retreat; to flee beyond the horizon. It is a convergence of the midpoints of lines drawn by the swooping birds in glinting light and breaking cloud.

On the surface, The Peregrine is a piece of nature writing in which the author/narrator spends the period from October to April tirelessly following two pairs of peregrines, which have arrived in autumn to hunt, over a small stretch of coastal East Anglia. The opening sections are used to give a rough outline of the make-up of the landscape and detail the size and characteristics of the birds themselves: food sources, colour variation, prey etc. What follows after is a broken diary of the walks taken by Baker in his search for these elusive birds.

In those initial segments one may already recognise the germination of the narrator’s desire for transmogrification. To...

let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence... to return to the town as a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.

This is not a straight metamorphosis from man into bird. In this initial moment the tropes of betrayal and flight, which are at the core of Baker’s work, are merely posited. Assembling them here in microcosm, one sees that despite the narrator’s initial assertion of the desire to leave his humanity behind, it is not a specific taxonomic or geographic destination which is the most important, it is merely to wander. There is no future and no past. All that Baker has, like the peregrine, is the present: the next spot, the next kill, the next hedge, the next sunset.

So, the wandering begins. Baker’s diary entries record his movements over the land. The birds, the woods and the light are described in fantastic descriptive language: the golden plovers shimmer like sails, the river estuary ‘opens its mouth’ and the peregrine’s glitter like shields. Their dives cut and slash the sky like scimitars. Despite this exuberance of description mixed with scientific detail, any notion of precise geographical location is consciously avoided. One is aware, as one has been told, that it is the same stretch of ground each day over which the narrator treads. However the experience of reading is cyclical. The vagueness and lack of spatial signifiers makes each hunt seem fresh, a new day brings a new landscape to identical terrain.

Therefore, despite the establishing work done to construct a familiar rural English environment in the landscape, the narrator’s explicit knowledge of the terrain he inhabits only increases his ability to become lost within it.

Baker’s writing deterritorialises the reader. It swoops and dives amid the flocks and beams of light, tracing myriad flights across the same skies, a whole cartography of convergent lines which defamiliarise the narrator’s own lands. The English countryside becomes a foreign wilderness. These almost angelic descriptions, coupled with the complete lack of directional or architectural features (only magnetic compass points and natural features are used: copse, marsh, and valley), further negate the notion of a journey or voyage to anywhere. The walks instead resemble, in their repetition both in terms of their lyric descriptiveness and in their actual content, the stumbling attempts of a young bird turning its back on the dark earth and attempting to take flight.

It is this characteristic of the book which cements the overarching ‘Englishness’ that pertains throughout The Peregrine. One easily accepts that in some sense this is the countryside so often present in Anglo-centric literature. And yet, like DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow, it manages to go beyond this by this idea of losing oneself between fixed points, of becoming isolated and lost in the familiar, the grass growing wild between well-trod paving slabs.

Through this process of wandering Baker manages to avoid the reterritorialisation which lies in wait for the narrator. The repetition of this act is paramount here. In fleeing the world of man he is in danger of becoming once again within its confines and values but the constant experience of the marshlands and hedgerows, the same ones, this is his destruction. It destroys the point of origin, the anchor, and the point of conclusion: interrupting into a broken line of flight resembling that which the peregrine above draws in the winter sky.

The narrator however is not a nomad, nor is he embarking on anything organised or linear enough to constitute any kind of voyage. There is no implication of re-immersion in another land. It is not a journey of escape from one’s homeland, this too often merely results in re-imprisonment on foreign soil. The narrator flees by remaining still, there are no past chains being cast off in exchange or any future ones awaiting. He simply becomes ungrounded through his repeated pursuit and his human past dissipates. ‘A clean break is such because it is irretrievable, the past ceases to exist.’

Further, one encounters the conception of The Peregrine as a betrayal. A betrayal of the established laws of mankind whose trickery of nature has left: ‘many to die on their backs, clutching insanely at the sky in their last convulsions, withered and burnt away by the filthy, insidious pollen of farm chemicals.’ The peregrines are an escape. Baker has rejected the world of man. When the subject of humanity does arise, its presence repulses him.

Baker turns his back on the human world of pesticides and factories, chemicals and continual droning. But it is a double rejection, for the world of man turns its own back, to face away from him. They are the enemy. The betrayal here is a double turning away: Baker turns away from man. Who in turn turns his face away from Baker. Humanity abandons him for the town as he abandons them for the sky. He is a traitor.

The line of flight always entails betrayal. This is the ordinary betrayal of a man who simply has no past or future. He betrays the fixed powers of the earth. The narrator has become a traitor. In choosing peregrines over humans he creates a bird-becoming. This is not a simply transformation or metamorphosis of man into bird. There is not start or end point. There is a short circuit which deterritorialises both himself and the bird. In seeking them peregrines and acquiring their habits the narrator not only moves along the line towards the bird, becoming wild and predatory, the peregrine too becomes used to him, behaves with increasingly human emotions projected onto it. It has a man-becoming.

He does not transform directly into the animal, declaring loudly ‘I am a bird now’ that would be a conjuror’s trick. A traitor, he allows his identity to disappear. Baker thus becomes increasingly invisible, indistinguishable from the oaks and the feathers. This imperceptibility, a characteristic of the speed and greatest slowness, is the embodiment of the traitor. The narrator’s ego disappears in repetition and lack of movement: in stillness and shrub. The identity of the birds, for its part, becomes imperceptible at the other end of the scale.

It is here with this imperceptibility which one encounters the crux of The Peregrine. The ideas of deterritorialisation and becoming allow it to relate to the process of writing itself.

The writing which Baker has produced here is an assemblage: a multiplicity of terms which establish relations across different natures, functioning together in symbiosis. These relations are countless. One of the most simple and obvious examples is the technological apparatus of the binoculars. They allow his eyes to move beyond the confines of human sight and function as the birds’ eyes do: for hunting. This creates a relation of sight between Baker and the peregrines. Everywhere the converging lines within the overall assemblage map the space around that mid-point which cannot be expressed.

This is true of writing as well. The author’s goal is to move beyond writing, to become something other: becoming a traitor to the process of writing. The assemblage releases something which cannot be fixed or defined. This is no more clearly expressed than in one of the book’s early sentences: ‘In my diary of a single winter I have tried to preserve a unity, binding together the bird, the watcher, and the place that holds them both.’

This unity is bound to the idea of imperceptibility. The narrator becomes the peregrine only by the peregrine becoming something other: light, colour, shape and sound. Both enter into a variety of becomings resulting from the process of deterritorialisation.

Everything which becomes is a pure line which ceases to represent whatever it may be.

The unity or symbiosis then is something beyond that which can be fixed or defined. This is reminiscent of Blanchot’s statement, which epitomises this idea and distils the goal of The Peregrine. That the assemblage process Baker’s writing exposes through deterritorialisation seeks to discover: ‘that part of the event which its accomplishment cannot realise.’

The originality and lyrical beauty of his method of composing this symbiosis is often breath-taking. Baker’s radical approach to nature writing forms a similar symbiosis to that pertaining in the figure of the modernist traitor or anti-hero. The author is the wanderer who is in continual motion, with no destination or name, who is sometimes hurried sometimes immobilized, his past and future do not exist as he travels along the abstract line which carries him off.

The Great Alexander

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Barry Baldwin) — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 11:39:33 GMT

The first of these (Legends of Alexander the Great; 9781848857858) is a revised version of a 1994 original, the second (The Book of Alexander the Great; 9781848852945) brand new. Both are paperback publications by the versatile firm of I.B. Tauris, to which Stoneman happens to be Consulting Editor for Classics. These, along with his cognate The Greek Alexander Romance (1991) and Alexander the Great: A Life in Legend (2007), cement Stoneman’s reputation as World Number One in this exotic field.

It was appropriate that I began drafting this review on the day Ray Bradbury died and The Avengers opened here in Calgary. A good deal of the various Alexander romances is unabashed science fiction, strange landscapes and stranger monsters, where devotees of Dr Who, Star Trek/Wars, and Fortean Times would be quite at home. Speaking of this last, its eponymous hero Charles Fort described his notional Super-Sargasso Sea (Move over, Jean Rhys) thus:

Derelicts, rubbish, old cargoes from inter-planetary wrecks; things cast out into what is called space by convulsions of other planets, things from the times of the Alexanders, Caesars and Napoleons of Mars and Jupiter and Neptune; things raised by this earth’s cyclones... treasure troves for the palaeontologists and for the archaeologists – accumulations of centuries – cyclones of Egypt, Greece and Assyria.

Alexander has much mutated from his own day to modern entertainment. In film, he was played by Richard Burton (suitably, in that both became alcoholics) in 1956 and Colin Farrell in 2004 under the direction of Oliver Stone, perhaps a logical retrogression after Platoon. A more oblique compliment came from the 2010 Malaysian movie Alexander the Great, an Asiatic take on Rain Man with Alexander playing no part.

For one not altogether flattering example of many from his literary Nachleben (devotees of historical novels cherish Mary Renault’s trilogy), take this 1973 Anthony Burgess delineation (reproduced in a New Yorker article, May 11, 2012, pp.69-76) of his anti-hero in Clockwork Orange:

Alex is a comic reduction of Alexander the Great, slashing his way through the world and conquering it.

Not an unreasonable equation -hard though it might be to visualise him as a Droog – given the Macedonian’s later military aggressions, a theme prevalent in some of the romances, played down in others. Burgess being Burgess, Alex also comports a bilingual pun: A-Lex = Lawless. The Greek name Alexandros (Protector of Men) went back to Homer, where it is Paris’ alternative divine moniker. As The Book of Alexander the Great dimly remembers, Homer played a big role in Alexander’s life, enriching his fantasies of being a new Achilles. He kept a copy of the Iliad under his pillow, along with a dagger - a striking symbiosis of escapism and realism.

Alexander became a legend in his own time. Plutarch in his Life (17.6) gibes at the “many historians” who came up with wondrous rubbish. The historian Callisthenes, on whom the Ur-text of Alexander romances was fathered, accompanying the great leader on his campaigns, declared the Cilician Sea drew back and prostrated itself before the conqueror. This permits us two kinds of smile over this lick-spittle’s subsequent execution for refusing to bow the knee in formal Oriental style. After Alexander’s demise, another travelling historian, Onescritus, claimed his boss had trysted with Thalestris, Queen of the Amazons. Last word on this twaddle goes to Alexander’s general Lysimachus who (says Plutarch, 46) on hearing Onescritus read this passage aloud quipped, “I wonder where I was at the time?”

It’s often said that Julius Caesar and Roman emperors such as Augustus and Trajan took Alexander as their model, incorporating his name into their personal propaganda. Much of this was long ago demolished by Peter Green in an article (American Journal of Ancient History, 1978) ‘Caesar and Alexander: aemulatio, imitatio, comparatio,’ reprinted in his Classical Bearings (1989), concluding that the evidence for this is “surprisingly little.” More to this point was actually Caesar’s rival Pompey, who gave himself the title ‘Great’, thereby attracting much contemporary derision. Indeed, it was not until Longinus (On the Sublime, 4. 2) in (probably - his date is disputed) the first century AD that any surviving Greek text dubs Alexander ‘Great’. By and large, his name cut little ice with the Romans down to Caesar’s time. Their first extant mention of him occurs around 200 BC in Plautus’ comedy Mostellaria (The Little Ghost) where (vv.775-77) a slave remarks with striking casualness “They say Alexander the Great and Agathocles were a pair who did really big things. How about me as number three? Look at the immortal feats I pull off without any help.”

In Nero’s reign (AD 54-68), Lucan in his poem on the Civil War between Caesar and Pompey tirades (10. 18-48) against Alexander as “a lucky bandit, crazed offspring of Philip,” and other choice insults. Stoneman sees this as a piece of Stoic horror at the slaughter caused by his wars, influenced by his philosopher-uncle Seneca, both victims of Nero. He might have added that, according to Suetonius’ Life (19.2), Nero himself went in for a bit of Alexander imitation, thereby adding contemporary point to Lucan’s lines.

As to Trajan, Stoneman claims “it is no accident” that Arrian’s favourable history of Alexander was composed in his reign. In point of fact, as suggested by Peter Brunt in his Loeb edition of the work (1976), this could have been written several decades later: we simply do not know. This was also an age in which Alexander’s divine pretensions and other traits were being mocked in the lively Greek prose satires of Lucian. Stoneman also needed to consider why the younger Pliny’s hyper-flattering Panegyric on Trajan (delivered to the emperor in, as modernly estimated, a five-hour marathon – shades of Fidel Castro or Enver Hoxha) takes none of his many opportunities for Alexander comparisons. On the matter of long-winded oratory, one recalls the rejoinder attributed (among others) to Churchill when rebuked for excessive length: “I didn’t have time to make it shorter.”

As that grand old song The British Grenadiers kicks off: “Some talk of Alexander, and some of Hercules, of Hector and Lysander, and such great names as these.” Not a far cry from Chaucer in his Monk’s Tale: “The storie of Alisaundre is so commune/ That every wight that has discrecioun/ Hathe heard somewhere or al of his fortune.” Alexander Romances burgeoned into a world-wide industry. Stoneman surveys much of this with his usual crisp erudition; available supplements include Thomas Banchich’s review-article on his original Legends (Bryn Mawr Classical Review 95.08.06 - online) and - they are not all to be despised - the Wikipedia notice thereof. Multifarious Western and Eastern versions converge and diverge. More might have been said about the Byzantine contribution; cf. the unmentioned H.J. Gleixner’s Das Alexanderbild der Byzantiner (Munich, 1961), also relevant entries in the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (1991). It is here worth noticing how the romances develop in tandem with historiographical and other literary allusions to the real Alexander. One case in point is the anonymous 12th-century Lucianic satire Timarion (see my annotated translation, Detroit, 1984), where the Cynic Diogenes boasts about his respectful reception by Alexander, “the man who enslaved all of Asia.” A strand of this tradition surfaces in the largely fictional Athenian scenes in The Book of Alexander.

Stoneman’s reference to the interplay between the romances and Qur’an (18: 60-65) - which which? as Lenin might have put it - could have been enriched by pointing to the discussion by John D’Urso and others in the online Islamic Awareness magazine (1999, updated 2005). Likewise with N. Gopala Pillai’s analysis of the Indian tradition in Skanda: The Alexander Romance in India, electronically reproduced from the Proceedings of the All-India Oriental Conference 9 (1937).

For the British reader, Stoneman is especially intriguing on the English and Scottish romances from Chaucer on. In the Book of Alexander (68-69), Alexander makes a rest-stop in our green and pleasant land (I here think of the Star Trek episode ‘Shore-leave’), where he orders the “rulers of England” (unspecified: when this yarn was first published in 1670, Charles II was on the throne) to rush out 12.000 new vessels - what a boon that would be for our modern cash-strapped ship-building industry!

At least there was a lively England to go to. According to Plutarch, one reason Caesar went there was to confirm the existence of a place often dismissed as a poetic invention. The early Byzantine historian Procopius declared it was a “country of the dead, inhabited only by ghosts.” Tacitus was the first to comment on its gloomy climate. At least one Roman poet described it as “unfriendly to strangers”, a description with which many modern tourists might still agree.

I’d subjoin one further branch of the industry, with the same incorporation of fact and fiction. Namely, the Albanian national hero George Kastrioti Skanderbeg (1405-1468), his last name deriving from Turkish Iskander Bey (Lord or Leader Alexander). His first biography (Rome, 1508) was penned (in Latin) by Albanian historian Marin Barletti. Though not attributing to him the kind of exotic adventures that abound in the Alexander romances, Barleti does in the manner of the latter invent letters between him and fellow-rulers such as Turkish Mehmet II (the 1453 conqueror of Constantinople) and Wallachian Vladislav II. Praised for his generalship and leadership by the likes of Gibbon, Voltaire, Sir William Temple, and General Wolfe, Skanderbeg inspired a trio of operas, the first a lost one by Vivaldi; three 18th-century English tragic dramas; poems and poetic salutes from (e.g.) Ronsard, Samuel Johnson (Irene), Byron, and Longfellow. In a just-discovered Venetian cache of Albanian-related documents (information from the weekly magazine Java (April 21, 2012, 12-13), the 1770 Albanian lord of the village Margëllici is said to have been particularly devoted to biographies of Alexander and Julius Caesar.

Now to specifics and the nit-pickings reviewers must indulge in to show they have actually read the book in question - not always the case, it sometimes seems. In Legends, Stoneman handles the multifarious texts with - subject to reservations noted above - his customary aplomb. Manuscript traditions and the content, context, and purpose of the individual texts are lucidly presented. Stoneman writes clearly, eschewing academic bafflegab. A certain breeziness and some humorous seasonings (nice joke about Callisthenes on p. ix) add to the pleasure. His translations are accurate and readable. Terse notes convey a wealth of information, though sometimes more information might have been offered. One cannot document everything in texts of this kind, but (for easy examples) a few words on the fates of Alexander’s sisters (all murdered) and the allegations of his own poisoning would not have come amiss. The Index is serviceable, bibliographies to primary and secondary sources direct readers to most of the right places, albeit valuable work (mainly articles) by Boyle, Chasseur, Gero, Gosman, and Selden is passed over, as is the useful electronic Medieval Alexander Project.

In The Book, Stoneman (as in the famous Star Trek slogan, boldly going where no man has gone before) provides a pioneering English translation of a Greek text first published in 1680 at Venice. He might have mentioned that in modern Greek the titular word Phyllada means ‘pamphlet’ (he translates it as ‘little book’). Could this suggest it was originally put out as a kind of gospel-cum-rallying call? There was also more to be said on the subsequent use of Alexander’s name, possibly thanks to this romance, in the Greek War of Independence against the Turks. As Peter Green (p. 155), quoting Nicolas Yalouris (Director of Greek Antiquities) writes: “Alexander was virtually the only figure from antiquity to survive, however mythicised, in the folk-consciousness of medieval and modern Greece. He became the symbol that embodied the desire for a national uprising...Rhigas Pheraios, the revolutionary Greek poet later shot by the Turks, and a passionate promoter of ‘The Great Idea’, featured the bust of Alexander on the clandestine broadsheet that he circulated in 1797.” These supplements apart, there is nothing to add to Stoneman’s introductory cornucopia of crisply-expressed learning, except I think he somewhat (p. xxiv) underrates the author’s classical knowledge. No space here for all the fine print, but I was left with the impression that, as well as Homer, the author knew his Arrian and Herodotus, plus such Byzantine chroniclers as John Malalas. Still, I can readily endorse what Stoneman well calls the “elegant” conclusion of Kariofilis Mitsakis: “ Alexander was born an antique pagan, but died a Byzantine Christian.”

All the compliments paid to Legends can be repeated here. Reservations, too. The Phyllada’s error about Pella (capital of Macedon, not an ancient name for the country) might have been noted, likewise Plutarch on Alexander’s supposed meeting with the Amazons. Alexander Demandt’s Alexander der grosse: Leben und Legende (Munich, 2009) may be added to the Bibliography, also the various articles of Liam Gallagher, e.g. the one on manuscript illustrations in Thesaurismata 16 (1979), 179-205. Homer nods once in the notes (p.167): Diogenes is not the only genuine philosopher in the author’s list; Antisthenes is equally authentic. Likewise, Philon (p, xxv) may not be the “puzzle” Stoneman thinks, being named by Plutarch as one of Alexander’s historians. There are a couple of spots where I offer tentative suggestions. The Daphnaion said to have murdered Xerxes is branded “unidentifiable” by Stoneman. True enough. Possibly, it is a confusion with the Daphnaion that was a shrine of Apollo? Or, given that Ctesias has the spelling ‘Dariaios’, the author’s word may indicate ‘followers of Darius’. In the finale, where Alexander is poisoned (this has remained an open question from his own time), Stoneman is floored by the sentence “ Philip split a living mule, and hustled Alexander inside.” I wonder if this is a confused version of Arrian’s statement (7.27) that the poison was brought in a mule’s hoof? Alternatively, that there is a notion of a mule being cut up either as a sacrifice for Alexander’s recovery or in a desperate search for some presumed remedy? But, I do not wish to make an ass of myself.

Overall, full marks to Stoneman yet again for these fresh ventures into the ever-fascinating world of Alexander Romances – also kudos to I.B. Tauris for their elegant and accurate production. I hope that, as Alexander (and as Mrs Thatcher aspired in 1987) he will go on and on. Despite some resemblances, these fictional Alexanders knock hell out of John Carter.

Love and Monsters: The Doctor Who Experience, 1979 to the Present

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Barry Baldwin) — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 04:13:16 GMT

The main title is that of an episode in the Tennant/Piper regime, in which Booy avers that script-writer Russell Davies “dramatised his views on the bulldozer attitude of obnoxious fans.”

This is a book for fanatics, obnoxious or otherwise. Booy (a veritable “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles”) aims to “trace the development of discourse surrounding DW from 1979” – genesis of the Doctor Who Weekly, which (I am glad to say, as one of its columnists) mined Fortean Times for the Fantastic Facts section. An appropriate source, FT’s eponymous founding father Charles Fort being credited with coining that key Sci-Fi word ‘Teleportation’.

Despite this, he reaches back to the 1963 starting point. Happily: I prefer old to new, though still watch in the hope of understanding a Russell Davies plot. Never joined my local fan club, though – the self-styled ‘Ice Lords of Calgary’ – whom I mention to augment Booy’s round-up of North American sects. No detail of DW fandom is too small for Booys to pinpoint. One reels under the avalanche whilst admiring his industry. But, for someone like me, too much information. As William Shatner famously rebuked the Trekkies: “Get a Life!”

Occasionally Homer nods. Tomb of the Cybermen was (p.83) rediscovered in Hong Kong (1991), subsequently twice released on DVD. Missing episodes deserve more attention. For comic instance, one turned up (1996) in the Australian censor’s archives. Other topics meriting deeper treatment include Malcolm Hulke’s ‘Marxist screenplays’ (p.17), and links with other TV programmes: the Autons were surely influenced by The Avengers’ Cybernauts, whilst The Gunfighters prefigures Star Trek’s Spectre of the Gun, both allegedly derided.

Booys is, though, excellent on how ‘novelisations’ add to and subtract from the original scripts, for both personal and ideological reasons. His style has brio and wit, but is also infected by the hyper-academic absurdities of Fiske and Tulloch. For goodness sake, it’s only a television programme, one originally for children at which their parents peeked, now the reverse.

Readers may regret/wonder at the lack of illustrations for so richly pictorial a subject. The Index is haphazard, with major actors and characters omitted and chance items included; also, some false page references.

Fan ‘feedback’ about most/least liked doctors, companions, and episodes is a recurrent theme, so I shall wade in. I was for long handicapped by taking off to strange worlds (Australia) before the Tardis did, hence saw nothing of Hartnell and Troughton. When our local American Public Broadcasting Service caught on, they would never screen the black-and-white episodes, pleading viewer resistance. Now, thanks to DVDs, I’ve seen enough of Hartnell to award him the palm. One thing that strikes me is that there is no great sense of him being a Time Lord. More like an intergalactic Steptoe – a view reinforced by the Tardis’ inaugural materialisation in a junkyard at 76 Totter’s Lane. I still puzzle over Susan, though. How did the bachelor-celibate Doctor come to have a grand-daughter? To what Gallifreyan lass did he lose his two hearts?

It took me a while to warm to Patrick Troughton, but warm I did, thanks above all to Tomb of the Cybermen and The Five Doctors. Sartorially and tonsorially challenged he may have been, but his mixture of bumbling bravery and pedantic diction resulted in a quite captivating fey charm. Jon Pertwee gave a new twist to Hartnell’s authoritarianism, his manner effectively counterpointed by the Brigadier, basically his earthly alter ego. Oddly (too many jelly babies, perhaps?), I used to adore Tom Baker, as did my children, but in re-viewings his appeal has worn off, though (by chance, his final appearance) Logopolis remains my Desert Island choice. Still fancy both Romanas, though: Mary Tam and his real-life missus, the Hon Lalla Ward – both absent from Booy’s index.

Talking of female companions (the Docs have had their share of male ones as well), it’s a bit of a myth that the early ones were basically there to flash their fleshly charms and scream “Help, Doctor!” Katie Manning (Jo Grant) was a bit that way and so, too, was Bonnie Langford (Mel), whom Vox Populi seems to put at the bottom of the Tardis, but I didn’t mind her half so much as Leela – those animal skins... The steely schoolmarm Barbara was no wilting violet, nor Liz Shaw, whilst Sara Jane Smith (the late lamented Elizabeth Sladen) was surely in the running for first female Doctor.

I’ve always thought Peter Davison sadly underrated. Perhaps I’m seduced by his cricketing clobber. His mild manner (albeit broken by occasional volcanic verbals), partly harking back to All Creatures Great and Small, partly looking forward to Campion and Dangerous Davies, provided ideal balance to the Antipodean virago Tegan (actress Janet Fielding described her as “a mouth on legs” – did she treat her Qantas passengers that way?), the sultry Nyssa (according to Booy, pin-ups of Sarah Sutton were much in demand), and intense schoolboy swot Turlow. Thank goodness they killed off the insufferable Adric who should never have been let out of E-Space. As for K-9, he/it can be defended as a reminder that the show was supposed to be for the kiddies; Buck Rogers’ Twiki had the same function.

Colin Baker easily wins the Most Irritating Award, nor was I much charmed by Nicola Bryant’s/Peri’s frightening breastworks. But, then came Sylvester McCoy, close runner-up to Hartnell for the Baldwin Trophy, despite a totally different manner and wardrobe, ably abetted by Sophie Aldred whose Ace not only had Street Cred but Avenue Cred. It was a sad day when McCoy was killed off in that appalling Americanised movie version and regenerated into the utterly charmless Paul McGann. Speaking of big screen Doctors, spare a thought for the now often-overlooked 1960s series of Peter Cushing adequately combatting the Daleks.

As to those malevolent pepperpots, I doubt they frighten many children these days, and suppose Cybermen and company have also lost their scariness. I’ve read that in the new series’ The Empty Child genuine terror was induced in many young viewers by the gas-masked figure wandering around asking “Are you my Mummy?” As one who remembers bomb-sites and gas masks, I can go along with that. For my money, though, two of the most effectively eerie episodes, both McCoys, were Paradise Towers (a resounding send-off for Mel) and The Happiness Patrol – I shall never forget the robot executioner Kandy Man, apparently constructed entirely of Bassetts Liquorice Allsorts.

As to the new series, apart from Russell Davies’ impossible-to-fathom plots, its worst crime has been to reduce The Master from his original role as superbly sinister and dark-humoured rival to a ridiculously manic caricature. Eccleston and Tennant I approve, but Matt Smith (except for the clothes, Colin Baker reborn) needs a regeneration fast. Of the female companions (here again, there are male ones), Billy Piper’s Rose seems top choice and has certainly had the most publicity, but with her the programme too often drifted into The Doctor and Rose Show. Freema Agyeman’s Martha broke the galactic colour bar, but too tedious in her arid political correctness. I may or may not be the only man in all the universes who gives first prize to Catherine Tate’s Donna Noble, a shrewdly conceived mixture of ladette aggression and sexuality. Plaudits here, too, for Bernard Cribbins as her grand-dad Wilfred Mott, a nifty combination of both old and new series style - in my head, I can hear his old novelty hit songs Hole in the Ground and Right, Said Fred.

At the moment, far as I can gather, the Tardis is in no danger of being re-mothballed, so in due course there should be opportunity for an updated Booy. What (I wonder) odds are Ladbrokes giving that by that time we shall have had the first female/gay/non-white Doctor? As they used to say, Answers On A Postcard, Please...

Brian Cummings

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Mark Thwaite) — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 11:18:56 GMT

Brian Cummings is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He was previously Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and has held Visiting Fellowships at the Huntington Library, California, and the Center for Advanced Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich. His books include The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (OUP, 2002). Currently, he holds a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship for 2009-12, researching his next book, The Confessions of Shakespeare. In May 2012 he gave the British Academy Shakespeare Lecture and in October 2012 he will give the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford University. He is currently guest curator of the 2012 exhibition at Lambeth Palace Library, Royal Devotion: Monarchy and the Book of Common Prayer. which runs from 1 May to 14 July 2012 (for details see lambethpalacelibrary.org). His most recent book, and cause of our interview, is The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662.

Mark Thwaite: Please tell us something of the historic background to the first edition to the Book of Common Prayer?

Brian Cummings: The Book of Common Prayer was first published in March 1549. This was fifteen years after the Act of Supremacy inaugurated the English Reformation, and ten years after the Great Bible was introduced in English churches. So it is clear that the introduction of a liturgy in the vernacular was neither an obvious nor an easy matter. It is significant that it was not done under Henry VIII, who was content to keep the old Latin services while breaking free of the power of the papacy. Like for many people, the Latin mass was a ritual of great emotion for him and he would have considered anything else a sacrilege. Medieval ritual life in England before the Reformation was very rich – a vast panoply of ceremony and processional which varied through the seasons but was always centred on the mass.

Thomas Cranmer, however, his Archbishop of Canterbury, had been experimenting with the idea of a Reformed, and even English, liturgy for a long time. He first heard a Protestant service in Nuremberg in Germany in 1532 – on the same visit that he first encountered Margaret, the niece of Osiander the theologian, and married her in secret. Cranmer made two drafts of a Reformed liturgy by the death of Henry.

After Edward VI came to the throne, the pace of the Reformation picked up. It was a period of iconoclasm and violent religious controversy. A version of communion was printed in 1548 and parliament debated the mass in detail. Cranmer assembled the BCP from a wide range of existing material. Morning and Evening Prayer were compiled by translating parts of the Roman Breviary, while leaving out key parts such as the Ave Maria. Baptism and Burial were adapted from the Sarum Manual, while leaving out many bodily rituals. Most difficult of all was the mass, but Cranmer for the moment retained a version of the Roman Canon, while creating a complex compromise over the doctrine of real presence.

In some ways the BCP of 1549 was a careful balance, which horrified Catholic traditionalists while also failing to satisfy full demands for Protestant reform. Cranmer himself perhaps thought of it as a staging post, the best he could do in the current political climate. But it was also a triumph just to bring out an English liturgy at all.

Two printers were involved in what was a massive publishing exercise by the standards of the time: to comply with an Act of Uniformity which required a copy in every parish church, thousands of copies were needed (when print runs were normally in the low hundreds).

The book was first used at Whitsun, 9 June, in a communion at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, with Cranmer giving a sermon. In the west country, the same day, riots broke out: the demands of the rebels in Exeter including ‘bringing back the mass in Latin’. So despite Cranmer’s claim that he was making a religion fit for the people to understand in their own language, not all the people wanted it.

Mark Thwaite: And, now, if you could unpick some of the background/differences to the three editions you've focussed on, and tell us why you've picked out the 1549, 1559, and 1662 editions...

Brian Cummings: After 1549, there was an immediate campaign to produce a more radical version. The great German theologian Martin Bucer, in exile in Cambridge, produced a commentary to assist in this process. The new book of 1552 made profound changes to the Communion and to Burial, and lesser ones to many other services such as Baptism. Morning and Evening Prayer, and Marriage and Confirmation, were much less changed.

But within months Edward was dead and his sister Mary I brought back the Catholic faith and abolished the BCP. When Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, religion turned again – although it wasn’t clear straightaway that the 1552 BCP would be reintroduced, and some hoped for the revived Latin rites to continue, while others wanted the 1549 book back. In the end, a new edition of the BCP was brought out quite quickly in 1559, very closely related to 1552. Religious controversy did not end: Catholics often refused to use the new book; while the group who became known as Puritans often aspired to the Geneva forms of worship without bishops and with simpler ritual forms. In 1603, after James I came to the throne, Puritans hoped that a new king who had been brought up a presbyterian would favour them. But the 1604 revision, apart from Baptism, was more or less a repeat of 1559.

The Puritans got their way in 1645 and the BCP was banned again, and there were no editions between then and 1660 when the king was restored. While we now think of 1662 as inevitable, it was not at all clear at the time. Charles II himself liked the BCP, however, and a Royal Commission was set up to revise a book now over a hundred years old. While old Laudians wanted to change the Elizabethan book back into a more ritually traditionalist mould, presbyterians wanted a more enthusiastic and less formal kind of service format. Neither got what they wanted: the Savoy Conference made a political decision to alter as little as possible (always a safe move when passions are at stake), and the 1662 version, while incorporating a lot of important change, was much closer to 1552 than we might think.

I could have chosen any three of these five texts. I decided on 1549, 1559 and 1662 instantly – as the three which give the longest continuous life. 1549 and 1662 were obvious and uncontroversial choices. 1552 was the hard one to leave out. In the end I felt that although it has been often reprinted, and while it is important for textual and doctrinal reasons, it was in use for at most six months. 1559 was heard by Shakespeare and the other writers of the Elizabethan period. It is also very little different from 1552.

Mark Thwaite: Of the differences you discovered between the editions, did any particular ones shock and/or delight?

Brian Cummings: In general, I learned that liturgy is as much about bodily ritual as it is about the words said. Many of the most emotional arguments at the time were about what Cranmer called ‘Ceremonies’ – rituals as corporeal signs and symbolic actions. So the kinds of change I became fascinated by were of that kind. For instance, in Baptism, before the Reformation the priest would anoint the ear and mouth of the infant with spittle, in an action known as the ephphatha – from New Testament Greek – meaning ‘let it be opened’. This was dropped in the 1549 edition of the BCP, but anointing with oil was kept. Then that was removed in 1552, yet signing with the cross remained. That action caused debate and sometimes violence right up to the Civil Wars – when the child might be snatched from the priest’s hands, or the priest’s hand held behind his back, to prevent the ritual being done.

Another moment of delight was finding that the word ‘bell’ is used only once in any text of the BCP – for the Ash Wednesday service in 1549 – and yet bells were being cast throughout the sixteenth century, and their inscriptions show they were still being used for rituals associated with burial – the ‘passing bell and the ‘death knell’. Indeed, seventeenth-century England was a hey-day of English bell-ringing. So despite religious qualms about rituals, many of them thrived in ways that can be hidden from us.

Since I am also working on Shakespeare at the moment, I also took great enjoyment from tracing some of the marriage and funeral rites in the plays.

My favourite footnote is on p.755. St Enurchus was only introduced to the Calendar of saints in 1604. He never existed, since it was a misprint, probably for Evurtius. But the true reason for his entry into the BCP – discovered after a little digging – was both more obscure and quite wonderful. The 7 September was Queen Elizabeth’s birthday. So someone seems to have put Enurchus in as a kind of secret code so that those who wanted to could continue to celebrate the cult of the Virgin Queen after her death. Nobody seems to have noticed in 1662, and Enurchus stayed in; in the 19th century someone checked, and could not find Enurchus, and put in Evurtius instead.

By chance, as I sent off the final manuscript of however many pages to the commissioning editor at OUP, Judith Luna, I saw that the date was 7 September. I laughed out loud and added the saint’s day to my acknowledgments.

Mark Thwaite: Tell us a little about how the 1662 edition was already "archaic", and why you call the Book a "site of deep social memory"?

Brian Cummings: 1662 is a self-consciously old-fashioned book. It is printed in Black Letter, the old ‘Gothic’ script. This was still in use in the 1660s, especially for official and legal texts, but it was archaic by this point. And the ornamental letters also help to lend an ‘old’ appearance. The reason was to give people the impression that the book belonged to an old tradition that was now venerable. Some of the orthography, too, while still found in other places in printing of that decade, errs on the side of the old-fashioned. The revisers changed some language to make it more comprehensible, but in general they seem to have wanted to respect the old. An example is that there was a move to change ‘With my body I thee worship’ to ‘I thee honour’. The change was approved, and then at the last minute cancelled. It was not until 1928 that the revised text made that change. Myself I like the old version.

One of the things that seems to me most moving and significant about the BCP is this sense of a text over time. That is what made me want to use that phrase. We remember who we are by using these words – and we remember our connection with those who have gone before. ‘In the midst of life we are in death’.

Mark Thwaite: What were the particularly editorial challenges of bringing all three editions together and picking through their differences?

Brian Cummings: The book was an enormous challenge in every possible way. The decision to include three separate texts was taken very early. It immediately led to two things. One was that it had to be, at least moderately, an ‘old-spelling’ edition, since modernizing everything would have led to a smoothing over of difference. But a totally old-spelling edition is not altogether user-friendly, and the World’s Classics Series is intended for general readers. So I came up with a solution of light modernization, and I feel that works. The other consequence was that the texts needed to be completely re-edited from first principles. Although they have been reprinted and edited in the past, no edition has ever been made according to the standards of modern textual practice such as might be used for Shakespeare and Milton. Sometimes it seemed to me to be taking forever. This part of the work alone took a few years.

It also felt rather daunting – such an important and venerable text. One thing that helped me here was a choice of font. I decided for my own draft material to use Baskerville – because Baskerville was a great printer of the BCP in the eighteenth century, and worked in Birmingham, where I grew up. Once I put my texts into Baskerville it gave me confidence that these were ‘my’ texts - and that the whole thing might work after all. I would have loved the finished product to be in Baskerville, but this is a publisher’s decision. I worked closely with the book’s designer, Paul Luna, to get the lay-out right. Paul is a genius of typography, and I couldn’t have been luckier in having him work on the book, or in the intense interest he took in it. I am intensely proud of the look of the text.

Mark Thwaite: Why was the Book of Common Prayer so important when it was first published and why has it remained so important since?

Brian Cummings: The BCP is one of the most-used and best-loved books in history. As well as one of the earliest Protestant liturgies in Europe, it was the standard book for religious service in cathedrals and churches for centuries in the English-speaking worlds. It comprises traditions in the Western and Eastern churches that go back to the beginnings of organized religion, and continues to influence anyone interested in religious devotional practice and prayer to this day. Beyond this religious significance, it was a book produced to be used by everybody. It covers life from beginning to end, a book, as I have put it, ‘to live, love and die to’. Human life is ritual to its core, and this is one of the most wonderful examples of lived experience to be found in any book in the world.

Mark Thwaite: What is significant about the word 'common' in the Book's title? And of the word 'prayer' - particularly when this is really a book of rituals?

Brian Cummings: This is an interesting question to answer. The word ‘ritual’ was not used as a noun before 1604. ‘Common prayer’ was a familiar term in medieval usage for collective worship in church; e.g. in the fifteenth-century Dives and Pauper: ‘Comon prayer is the prayer of the ministres of hooly churche and of comon persones in holy churche.’ But I think more can be said. ‘Prayer’ was a term that avoided association with ‘mass-book’ or ‘breviary’ or other terms that implied Catholic practice. It was general to any Christian act before God. And ‘common’ beautifully embraces the way that the book reaches out to everyday and universal use. That might be sometimes a pious wish, and the book has been used exclusively and controversially from the beginning, but I think Cranmer did aspire to a general human commonwealth.

Mark Thwaite: In what way is the Book a "quintessential Reformation book"?

Brian Cummings: At the heart of the book is a paradox of profound historical significance. Historians have argued long and hard about whether this is a book ‘of the people’ or a book ‘imposed from above’. I think it is both. It was introduced by an Act of Uniformity in Parliament that was authoritarian and even rather threatening in measure. The Tudors loved ‘uniformity’: they wanted one realm, one sovereign in religion as well as politics – and one Bible, one prayer book, and one grammar.

But Cranmer also meant it when he said in his Preface that: ‘S. Paule would have suche language spoken to the people in the churche, as they mighte understande and have profite by hearyng the same: the service in this Churche of England (these many yeares) hath been read in Latin to the people, whiche they understoode not, so that they have heard with theyr eares onely: and their hartes, spirite and minde, have not been edified thereby.’

The book is democratic in spirit even though authorized by king and parliament.

Mark Thwaite: Why do we need this edition now? What do you hope your edition achieves?

Brian Cummings: I think an edition like this has been needed for a long time. The BCP is one the most reprinted books in history. But there have been relatively few editions which reach beyond church use. Historical editions of 1549, 1552 and 1559 have been made, but even the Everyman edition of 1662 includes a text which is really that of 1952 – it has the Accession service for Elizabeth II, and her name is used in all the state prayers. And no publisher that I know of has produced comprehensive explanatory notes for the meanings of words and the histories of rituals or doctrines. I tried to produce the edition that I needed when I was a student and could not find. The one that inspired me was F.E. Brightman’s edition of a parallel text of 1549, 1552 and 1662. I love that edition. But even it has no Notes.

But this is also a special time to produce the edition. It is the 350th anniversary of 1662. And yet it is also a period of some nostalgia for other reasons. The BCP is still is use – but its use grows less and less. Most churches in the Church of England use modern liturgies. So it is possible that the book is receding a little into history. It is time for its importance to be recognized in that context.

Mark Thwaite: What does the Book tell us about England and Englishness?

Brian Cummings: The BCP is a book profoundly bound up with national identity. I have had the privilege to co-curate an exhibition this year at Lambeth Palace Library (http://www.lambethpalacelibrary.org/content/royaldevotion) which celebrates a certain version of the national myth via this book. For many people its words somehow sum up a view of national consciousness and memory. But it should be remembered – and the exhibition tries to reflect this – that many people have been excluded by this myth. Catholics rioted when the book was first produced; the Oath of Allegiance enshrined in the book was used to stop people taking university degrees and is still used to stop someone becoming or marrying the monarch without belonging to this religious community. Protestants of a more radical kind have equally felt offended by it, and after 1662 many ministers were excluded from their ministry as a result: this was the time of the Great Ejection, when about 2000 puritan clergy who refused to adopt the liturgies of the BCP were expelled from the Church of England. The 1662 book in some ways marked the birth of England’s 'non-conformist' (Baptist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist) churches, which have had such a rich contribution to national, social and political (as well as religious) life.

Mark Thwaite: How do you think the Book has affected the English language? Can you separate that effect out from the effect of the King James Version of the Bible?

Brian Cummings: The BCP is perhaps the most used book in English history. It is even more significant than the King James Bible in that respect. Many ordinary people heard the Bible through the BCP rather than read it at home. Through weekly services, and through the rites of passage of baptism, marriage and burial, it has entered the bloodstream of the language.

It is easy to sentimentalize this. But anyone who loves language can see immediately that this is a beautiful, moving, and profound book.

Mark Thwaite: What does prayer mean to you Brian? What, for you, is the interface between faith and thought, prayer and philosophy?

Brian Cummings: I was brought up an atheist. My family is Northumbrian, a mixture of miners and whalers. On my father’s side in the past we were Methodist and resolutely non-conformist. But I only went to church to be a page boy when my aunt get married. When I was in my teens, for historical and aesthetic reasons, I started to like religious art, and enjoyed looking round churches in England, France, Italy and elsewhere. I have had a face-to-face experience with liturgy on and off ever since.

Intellectually I have long been drawn to the study of the religious past, partly because in literary history it had received such short shrift. In my other work I have been writing a lot about Shakespeare – who became a kind of ‘secular’ writer in the 20th century. I am trying to dispute that, to bring the study of Shakespeare into the context of the social life that surrounded him – with religion in the middle of it. My special interest is the relation between ritual in religion, in everyday gesture, and in theatre.

I love Dante and Milton; Augustine and Luther; Josquin and Byrd; Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca. Something is going on there. I would think of it as philosophical and emotional rather than religious in the narrow sense. Faith is a difficult concept: in Luther, quite the opposite of the common view of him, it is described as being very like doubt in formation. I am as much a student of doubt as faith. But I think that is ‘religious’ too.

Mark Thwaite:Your book is dedicated to Stephen Medcalf -- can you tell us something about what Stephen and his work meant to you?

Brian Cummings: Stephen Medcalf was a writer and academic from the 1960s until his death in 2007. I worked with him at the University of Sussex for nearly twenty years. He was a classicist by training, and a pupil of Iris Murdoch (she thought him one of the two best students she ever had). But he was really the nearest thing to a polymath I have ever known. Even though very unmathematical he had intense interest in science; he was a scholar of the Bible but also of P.G. Wodehouse.

Stephen is one of the most remarkable men I ever met. He was intensely soulful as well as wonderfully earthy and human. He had more poetry inside of him than any person I have known (I mean by heart, at a moment’s recall). He was learned to his finger tips and yet also extraordinarily simple in his habits and pleasures.

Stephen’s conversation was a constant education. We talked about this edition over dinner in a number of his favourite restaurants over quite a few years. I remember telling him how editing Cranmer’s communion service was so moving because you could tell at every word how much it was costing him: Stephen’s eyes told you how deeply he understood.

I am made to think at such moments about a film he once told me to see, which is one of my favourites: Babette’s Feast (1987) It is written in Danish, the story of the most extravagant feast prepared by a Parisian chef (played by Stephane Audran, one of the great actresses of the French avant garde) for the daughters of a Lutheran pastor. It is exquisitely funny and yet also philosophical (it is full of Kierkegaard). It is a hymn to the body and the human soul at the same time. I don’t think I can explain the meaning that the BCP has for me better than by recommending anyone who has never seen it to do so. The scene when the old general eats quail is pure Medcalf.

Mark Thwaite: What were your reading highlights in 2011, and what are you currently reading and/or looking forward to in 2012?

Brian Cummings: I spent much of 2011 reading Moby-Dick. I knew it from long ago; but this was the first time I in any way understood it. It was a complete revelation. The language is sheer pleasure. It took me ages to read because I kept going back over paragraphs, reading some out loud. It’s also a great book about providence, the theologian in me was in heaven. I made a little grace note to Melville’s genius in the glossary of my edition; fellow Mobyists can seek it out.

Since then I relaxed by reading the Robert Harris Cicero novels. I didn’t expect to like them as much as I did; they are enchanting, and wonderfully complex about Cicero. I started looking at Cicero’s letters a bit as a result. For all his faults Cicero is on the side of the angels.

I have also been reading, because of a work project I have been doing, some of the plays of the Dutch poet Joost van den Vondel. What a writer he is: the combination of demotic simplicity and figurative complexity is like Shakespeare. Lucifer is in a recent English translation: I can’t commend it too highly.

Mark Thwaite:Anything else you'd like to say?

Brian Cummings: I’m really happy the edition is finished. It was a monster to do. But also a life-changing privilege.

Dublinesque

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (David Winters) — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 09:12:05 GMT

Dublinesque is the story of Samuel Riba, retired publisher, recovered alcoholic, and more importantly someone for whom ‘reading is a way of being in the world, an instrument for interpreting day to day life.’ On the brink of his sixtieth birthday Riba plots a trip to Dublin, prompted by ‘a strange, premonitory dream’ he had while almost fatally ill two years earlier. There he hopes to perform ‘a funeral for the age of print, for the golden age of Gutenberg,’ loosely based on a literary model: Paddy Dignam’s funeral in chapter six of Joyce’s Ulysses.

The funeral acts as the focal point for an elision of life and literature – a writerly ritual where the mundane is remade as metaphor. Thus, although Riba is described as a ‘publisher,’ in Dublinesque this is not a job title. Instead it denotes an inner disposition, ‘an exaggerated fanaticism for literature’ which would put Riba at odds with the book trade today. In fact, Dublinesque has almost nothing to do with publishing, and Riba’s grief for the passing of print’s ‘golden age’ isn’t cultural commentary; it’s largely a grief for his own lived losses, and for ‘everything that, with time, he’d come to see was buried.’

Riba’s journey to Dublin is therefore a journey inward, ‘to the very centre of his dream.’ Indeed, it isn’t just that Riba’s ‘real’ journey is determined by the dream that precedes it. Rather, we sense that he’s still asleep, perhaps even already dead; either way, the dream never ended. He seems forever immersed in reverie, whether relapsing into drunkenness, reminiscing, or dissociatively surfing the internet. Hence his dream is less an event that sets his story in motion than a horizon within which it occurs. To reach its centre would be to achieve what Jung called ‘individuation,’ knowing himself anew, like when one first looks in a mirror. What’s more, it would also mean writing a story, all of whose words would indirectly refer to himself – the sort of story written in dreams and forgotten on waking. In this respect Riba is, as Freud said of writers, ‘a dreamer in broad daylight.’

For Riba, then, to live is to dream is to write is to read. For better or worse, he can’t detach these terms from each other. This is why his inner life, and his narrative voice, consist of ‘an accumulation of literary quotations,’ an intertextual tissue where countless writers – Larkin, Gracq, Auster, almost anyone – coexist in a ‘tangled mess,’ their words and his rendered inextricable. Yet while Dublinesque is densely referential, it is emphatically not a ‘postmodern’ novel. Its practices of collage and pastiche don’t purport to connect to any collective condition. Instead, and more enigmatically, literature is a private language through which Riba relates to himself. His references rely on an associative freight accrued for him alone. For him, literature is wholly embedded in lived experience; his allusions are only intelligible in terms of his habitus. So, although the book implies infinite literary linkages, this is a bounded infinity, fully enclosed – less like an intertext than an inexplicable dream.

Describing a dream is like describing another person; in each case, the object withdraws from observation. The interiors of people and dreams are fractal: like Mandelbrot’s coastlines, they can’t be conclusively mapped. With Dublinesque, the same can be said of the novel. Near the beginning of the book, Riba’s father refers to ‘the unfathomable dimension,’ a remark which recurs whenever Riba encounters something ‘inextinguishable, unreachable.’ He detects this dimension in great literature, but also in ‘the grey rhythm of the prosaic,’ the inscrutable details of daily life. In Walter Benjamin’s words, we could say Dublinesque is entangled in ‘the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.’ Because of this, the book itself becomes unaccountable, exceeding the reach of our reading. Whenever it briefly clears into coherence, an alien phrase or fragment will arise as if from nowhere, returning us to total estrangement. To take one example, ‘even the rain beneath which all the dead once fell in love will have faded away.’

The problem presented by Dublinesque is one of orientation. How are we to find our feet within an unfathomable work? Of course, this is also the problem that Ulysses poses – it is Joyce’s challenge to literature. With Joyce, maybe more than with any author before him, the literary work requires a literary theory. Not only this, but Ulysses sets out to prove that a work can theorise itself through its practice. It does so by means of a complex web of ‘correspondences,’ mapping its textual territory with a system of symbols. Indeed, Ulysses aims to exhaust itself in this internal project of explication. Signs of a similar project can be seen in Dublinesque, where Riba seems surrounded by ‘secret forces’ and ‘metaphorical associations,’ as if ‘a code lay concealed behind every scene in his life.’ But if the book hints at Joycean encryption, it only does so to delight in misleading us. Dublinesque does not and cannot contain a map of itself. In this sense it’s telling that Riba, too, tries to construct a ‘theory of the novel.’ Before long he concludes that ‘the best thing to do is to travel and to lose theories, lose them all.’ Dublinesque is a work that has built but abandoned its theory. Yet it has let its ruined landmarks stand, the better to lose itself by.

Ultimately, even Ulysses fails to fully explain itself, which is why Joyce resorted to the supplementary ‘schema’ he sent to Stuart Gilbert in 1921. Towards its end, Dublinesque dovetails with this device, dividing its episodes into subheaded sections with titles like ‘time,’ ‘style’, ‘action’ and ‘themes.’ But the effect is not one of rationalisation. Joyce’s schematic title for chapter six of Ulysses was ‘Hades’ – Dignam’s funeral is designed to echo Odysseus’ descent to the realm of the dead. Perhaps the difference between these books is best grasped through an allegory of death and rebirth. Ulysses buries its thematic workings, whereas Dublinesque raises them to the surface. The book’s most unfathomable mystery lies in the way it insistently spells itself out. Whenever Riba sees a pattern, a parallelism, some figurative flourish, he can’t help but refer to it. For him, after all, literature is self-relation. As a result – and this is the real achievement of Dublinesque – literature is returned to experience. The novel is not a puzzle to be solved. It has always already solved itself, bringing what was buried back to life. This is a book in which things are no longer concealed; where writing and reading revivify whatever we thought was dead inside us. ‘You haven’t come to Dublin to turn yourself into a metaphor, have you?’ Riba is asked at one point. ‘That and so I can feel alive,’ he replies.

The Quest for Christa T.

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Leora Skolkin-Smith) — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 07:59:38 GMT

“To become oneself,” Christa Wolf writes in The Quest for Christa T. “... with all one’s strength. Difficult. A bomb, a speech, a rifle shot—and the world can look like a different place, and then where is this self?”

Christa T. is a fictionalized character in Wolf’s novella The Quest for Christa T. but, as such, she is also the author's mirroring alter-self defiantly challenging and mourning her post-Hitler Germany, a place where the Stasi's Communism replaced Nazism, offering nothing but another oppressive tyranny of State vs. the individual. Living loudly and unashamedly in open rebellion, the character, Christa T. is presented as both an enigma and heroine against the political extremes and history of a divided, half-destroyed post-World War II Germany. The author stands as witness to this great shift in history, from Nazism to a Communist dictatorship – the world changing into a different place after “a bomb, a speech and a rifle shot” – and Wolf’s alter-self, the fictional Christa T., embodies the question: “...then where is the self?”

Christa Wolf was born in Landsberg an der Warthe in Brandenburg. Her childhood was suffered under Nazism and her adulthood under Communism. She was, as one critic put it, "a writer of scrupulous 'touchstone' honesty, and it is the pursuit and uncovering of truth, under the most beleaguered circumstances, that defines her.”

In 1992, Wolf was accused by Western journalists and intellectuals of being a collaborator and informant for the Stasi – inoffizieller Mitarbeiter. However, it is clear that Wolf was not guilty of collaborating, that she gave no information to the Stasi; indeed, was dropped by the Stasi for “reticence", but became the subject of their surveillance for 30 years. The fierce attacks from "stone-throwing West Germans" (as her translator, Michael Hofmann, called them) drove her into a depression. She refused to exonerate herself. Instead she started writing The Quest for Christa T., Hofmann contends, “as a continuation of her life's work of intense self-interrogation and reflection, in which one must ‘execute the verdict oneself’.”

I felt that urgency in reconsidering this novella, certainly Wolf’s most controversial work, and one that is as rich in philosophical and literary questions as it is in language and in-depth characterizations. It seemed, also, to fit into difficulties I was having in defining the slippery meanings of “modernism”, where Wolf falls into a post-modern era, while carrying many of the earlier modernist visions and literary ideas into her work. Wolf was decidedly more concerned with the ineffable and enigmatic processes of consciousness, the questioning self adrift in the waves of merging identities, as her predecessor, Virginia Woolf was. The ways in which one’s reach towards empathy and connection with the outside world spirals inward and eventually becomes an inquiry into writing and literature as truth or artifice is important to the work. Wolf, like the modernists, also asks if capturing or knowing anyone is even possible. That is, her unease with certitude and absolutes seemed to be rooted in the fertile ground that European modernism once offered.

In many ways, for Christa Wolf, as for Virginia Woolf, writing and groping for defining visions through writing were the very instruments and means that would form a self against the turbulent tides of oppression from the “society”, and, later, with the rise of Communism, the “State”. Writing, rather than being an artifice, was, in the end, for Woolfe and Wolf, the very form of truth and life itself. Or as Harold Bloom once noted in The Anatomy of Influence, “literature is a way of life... any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life which has no other form.”

In opening the story, Christa Wolf informs us quickly that Christa T. is ultimately ungraspable except for in fleeting moments, and in a kind of symbiotic author/character duality, where the author and her character merge into one another.

Wolf writes:

“Mightn’t the net that has been woven and set for her finally turn out to be incapable of catching her? The sentences I have written, yes. Also the ways she traveled, a room she has lived in, or a landscape that is near and dear to her, a house even a feeling—but not herself. Even if I could do it, faithfully present everything about her that I’ve known or experienced, even then it's conceivable that the person to whom I tell the story whom I need and whose support I solicit might finally know nothing about her. As good as nothing unless I contrive to say the most important thing about her, which is this Christa T., had a vision of herself... no one doesn’t invent a person's visions, though sometimes one can find them.”

What makes Wolf’s work different than her predecessors, is that question of a self in history, and how that “self” confronts the oppressive political dictatorships of our own times. Though there are other modernist ideas Wolf embraces, she supplements them with a sense of a new helplessness in our post World War II world order.

In a quite beautiful poem Wolf describes how the tyranny of regimes, Nazism and Communism, bring her, as writer, to these new conclusive aesthetics and guideposts:

Across the green and clean cool of the sky
Still shoot these arc and loops the swallow dares
From every house a wave of radiance breaks
And a black turmoil fills the thoroughfares
I stand and want to sing a song to myself.
The breeze brings fragrance from the lime tree blooms
How pleasant it would be to spend the whole night here
I climb downstairs to dark cemetery rooms

The writer's responsibility to develop for a personal truth to pit against the political landscape has become urgent, desperate. Although superficially a political and moral novel, The Quest for Christa T. is close to the concepts of modernism, perhaps placing those concepts into a contemporary world, which will include the State vs. the individual.

We are first introduced to Christa T. through the perceptions of a younger Wolf. “Then she began to blow or shout,” Wolf writes, “there’s no proper word for it... there she was walking along in front, talking, head in air along the curb and suddenly she put a rolled newspaper to her mouth and let go with her shout HOOOHAAHOOO — something like that. She blew her trumpet and the off-duty sergeants and corporal of the local defense corps stopped and stared and shook her heads at her. Well she’s cuckoo, that’s for sure (they thought). Now you see what she can be like, one of the others girls said to me.”

But Christa Wolf had already been seduced, not so much by the real person Christa T. but by the idea of Christa T., all that Christa T. stands up for and against: “Rapidly and regardlessly I had broken all other threads” Wolf tells us, “Suddenly I felt the terror that you'll come to a bad end if you suppress all the shouts prematurely; I had no time to lose; I wanted to share in a life that produced such shouts as her hooohaahooo.”

As Christa T. grows from the young child to the teacher, and to a woman purposively estranged from the regime by her rebellious nature, Wolf tells us people found Christa T. increasingly unstable with "no sense of reality". Correcting this misperception, Wolf tells us Christa T. simply could not manage money, questioned "everybody" and was “hungering for reality... she (Christa T.) sat in the seminars, insatiable for what professors might say about books, saw the poets of past time sink in serried ranks back into the graves, since they won’t be adequate... For it was only Christa T. who could be assailed by feelings of love and reticence, who pulled them out again when evening came and she stayed in the seminar library alone.”

We follow Wolf as she navigates the resistance her mirror self, Christa T. offers as a liberating vicarious journey for the author and reader. Brave and reckless as she is, Christa T. keeps triumphing through writing, even her diary scraps are pieces of her threatened selfhood held and put back together, and they restore her alter self, Wolf, to hope and meaning.

“And then a word came up,” Wolf tells us towards the end of the novella, “as if newly invented: truth We kept repeating it: truth, truth, truth, and believed the word was closely more than ever our concern, as if it were some animal with small eyes which lives in the dark and is timid but which one can surprise and catch to possess it for the first time... Writing means making things large. Thus her (Christa T.’s) deep and persistent wish guarantees the secret existence of her work: this long and never-ending journey towards oneself."

After Christa T.’s death, Wolf is faced with countless pages of Christa T's writing, poems, stories, and personal bits “preserved in a grayish spring back folder with a green calf spine stored with hundreds of other theses the decades have deposited, and only the dry dust of the institute shows any interest in.”

During the expulsion of many Germans to a life behind the Iron Curtain under the Stasi dictatorship, “When everything depended on one's getting away with a little light luggage,“ Wolf tells us, “Christa T. kept a small notebook... and on the cover in her childish scrawl: I would like to write poems and I like stories too.”

“To stand obscure among other obscurities while the fires are blazing,” Wolf writes, letting us know again that The Quest for Christa T. is as much about how the process of writing itself is a survival means by which the authentic "self” can find itself again in the "blazing fire" caused by drastic, severe, and external political changes in one's personal world.

For Wolf, like the author Clarice Lispector, the writer was meant to intrude on the text, assert their mirroring inner selves with their characters, but not to direct and provide objective editorial distance but to dissolve the boundaries between writer/reader/character. The writer's task is to tangle all three up inescapably and show empathy as a reflecting mirror and the essential task of literature. Like Clarice Lispector’s Macabea, in The Hour of the Star, Christa Wolf’s Christa T. will self-destruct, vanish from our reach, but before she dies, she will present us and the author one of the almost unbearable question of existence: how does one find that authentic but fluid "self" sent adrift by sudden shifts of outside forces, (“a bomb, a speech, or a rifle shot”)? What is the responsibility of literature to answer this question and be a means and tool for our search? How, finally, is our search really a search for our own self?

I can think of no other who captures the threat of losing ourselves in a fluid drastically labile world, regimes mirroring each other -- Fascism, Communism, and elements of a pervasive Western Capitalism. Wolf asks us to confront the potential loss of personal self in the tumult of this new world order. Without our personal writing and a literature of searching questions, Wolf tells us there is only “the abiding sense of the abyss that yawns before us, the fear of a future with no countering vision, a world with nothing but the military-industrial complex to guide our dreams.” Wolf asks at some point in the novel. What if writing is the only way to find and define our self? Is writing incurable?

The Quest for Christa T., in the end, is about a personal silent battle and collision of the individual with the damning gears of a corrupted collectivism, a perversion of community and authentic human desires and voices.

Christa Wolf was an important writer, among few who continued a modernist literary tradition, exploring and then expanding the tradition to encompass the Cold War tensions of State and dictatorship. Perhaps, like Christa T, Wolf and her work “needs to be protected again oblivion”, as she writes in this masterpiece, "she really might have died, yes almost. But she mustn’t leave us. This is the time at which to think about her, to think her further, to let her live and grow older as other people do…useless to pretend its for her sake... no: the compulsion to make her stand and be recognized is our own... Because it seems we need her.”

Wilde and Morris – Saving Socialism’s Soul

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Ben Granger) — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:31:16 GMT

Is this Utopian? A map of the world which does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. And when humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

Oscar Wilde

It is the province of art to set the true ideal of a full and reasonable life….a life to which the perception and creation of beauty, the enjoyment of real pleasure that is, shall be felt to be as necessary to man as his daily bread…

William Morris

We are living through capitalism’s greatest crisis, witnessing what should be the death-throes of a discredited system, as bankrupt in credibility as it is financially. And yet Rightist political parties benefit from the chaos.A dead system has risen up and mugged us in such a crafty and audacious a way that we have been left dazed, staggering in a hazy psychosis. We are now showing all the symptoms of a kind of global Stockholm Syndrome. The parties of the Left are left floundering and flapping, wrong-footed by their earlier surrender to the disastrous deregulation of the neo-liberal project. There was a reason however, for this initial retreat, the cowardice that made this collapse possible. The popular conception of socialism had already been blasted and blackened, trod to the mud. An understatement: socialism has something of an image problem. If something is deemed to be even worse than the mess we currently find the world in, then it really must be in trouble.

The experience of the soi-disant Communist countries, the ‘actually existing socialism’ of the Soviet Union, Eastern Bloc, China, and assorted lower-league tyrannical basket cases is of course the greatest argument capitalism has for socialism ‘not working’. The Marxist replies that these regimes were perversions, distortions and contortions, that Marx should no more be blamed for Stalin and Mao than Jesus for Torquemada and Franco. True enough, though the fact nearly every Communist country came to fester a similar way suggests that the source text has, at least, a case to answer.

Most thinking people however seem to understand that these economic backwaters were the worst possible areas in which try out any socialist experiment, press the point and even most fair-minded Rightists will concede this point. No, the allergic reaction to socialism goes deeper than revulsion at the horrors of the Great Leap Forward or the Gulag. There is a nameless fear of uniformity, of regimentation of the human mind, a cold grey labyrinthine bureaucracy of the soul, a monochrome maze where individuality loses itself, shrivels and dies. Over the years a sturdy connecting corridor has been built in the world’s collective consciousness between ‘socialism’ and this netherworld, and the link cannot easily be severed. It’s a structure frightening and ruinous enough to convince millions of people to vote against their own economic interests. It isn’t just Stalinist Red Tape to blame for this. Amongst the social reforming Fabians of Britain, amongst the continental Social Democrats too, a species of socialism formed, which, when given a vague taste of power, seemed more about regulation, order and uniformity than freedom. A creed of liberation seems to have curdled into officialdom, Spartacus re-clothed as a jobsworth traffic warden.

Of course, if we do live in such a colour-drained petty tyranny of ticket-stampers, it is not socialists of any stripe who have installed it. Bureaucracy festers in a market economy just as much as a planned one, moreso once the legal classes get their mucky thumbs in the pie. The irony of surburban Daily Mail letter-writers complaining that “under socialism we’d all be the same” has not been lost on many. But just because they are duped and duplicitous, we still don’t somehow believe them to be entirely wrong. The lingering idea of coldness, of sterile desiccation, is still there. How to cleanse it? Where might we find the answer?

To the casual reader, Oscar Wilde would seem an unlikely response. Wilde has the reputation of an airy aesthete, a genius of frivolity, master of the mannerism and bon mot, but neither rabble-rouser nor theoretician. With a superficial glance at apparently superficial statements, an argument could be made to bear this out. The only banner Wilde seemed to wave was “Art for art’s sake” “all art is quite useless”. Where his reputation does touch on “political issues”, it is as his unwanted role as the great Liberal Martyr, persecuted by Victorian conservatism for his homosexuality (a fate and reputation which would surely have bored him for its drab worthiness. )

Yet this masks an essential truth: Wilde was a socialist, avowedly and dedicatedly so. The many audiences of his plays who see only the wit and wicked humour make a fundamental error. As Lord Darlington says to Lady Windemere “Life is too important thing to take it seriously.” Wilde may have been vehemently opposed to didactic art, art with a controlling and improving “message”. Nevertheless, razor sharp dissections of bourgeois society criss-cross his work, plays such as Lady Windermere’s Fan and A Woman of No Importance swipe savagely at the grubby hypocrisies which stick the system together. They are all the more deadly for being subtle, yet the subtlety is such that many audiences do not even notice them. Only once was Wilde uncharacteristically direct in his politics, in a brief essay entitled The Soul of Man Under Socialism written in 1891. It remains his clearest and most candid vision of how he wished the world to be, what he thought it could be. It is also one of the most inspiring – and overlooked – arguments for socialism ever written.

Wilde’s most deadly weapon was always the paradox, which he wields in this text as soon as we start. The first line:- “The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is undoubtedly the fact that Socialism would relieve us from the sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody.” The chief argument of the anti-socialist down the ages has always been individualism, that living for others is an unnatural state. And here is Wilde, agreeing whole-heartedly.

On the same page, Wilde wrong-foots the reactionary even further, continuing the onslaught against unnatural altruism by laying into the whole pantheon of social reformers, philanthropists, and ‘do-gooders’ of the late-Victorian day. On one level this is the familiar argument of the revolutionary against the reformist – putting sticking plasters on society doesn’t solve the real problems, and instead makes revolution less likely. “Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of England, the people who do most harm are those who try to do good.” But Wilde is against this altruism for a more fundamental reason – he sees it as a distraction for people being true to themselves, in particular, for the few men living who are able to realise their greatness.

Indeed, Wilde is every bit as much a believer in the Great Man – the intellectual and spiritual Titan who stands above and beyond the herd – as that other great aphorist Nietzsche. Wilde mentions Keats and Flaubert earlier in the piece, and Byron, Shelley, Victor Hugo and Baudellaire later as among the few who have managed to ‘keep out of the reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand ‘under the shelter of the wall’ as Plato puts it, and so to realise the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world.’ The difference between the two is that Wilde thought it desirable, and thought it possible, that everyone should be able to follow in this perfection, that all could became ‘real men, the men who have realised themselves’. He believed we all had the capacity to be ubermensch, supermen.

The present state of class relations, the rank injustice of the division between masters and men is shown to have an enslaving effect on the owners almost as much as the owned. “Property is really a nuisance... Property not merely has duties, but has so many duties that its possession to any large extent is a bore.” He goes on to note even the greatest men such as Caesar and Marcus Aurelius were made less great by the ‘waste’ of having to exert their authority on others. Note however, that Wilde is still making the claim that the few who have managed to realise themselves are among the wealthy and moneyed. Here Wilde goes against the Leftist grain again with an apparently disdainful view of the working classes as they are. “There is only one class that thinks about money more than the rich – the poor.” Wilde says that the poor have no wit or cultivation “no grace of manner or charm of speech”, but his real scorn and contempt is saved and savoured for the ‘decent, hard working poor’, those who are contented with their lot. “They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for a very pad potage. They must be extraordinarily stupid.” On the other hand, Wilde has much time for those poor who are “ungrateful, discontented, disobedient and rebellious. They are quite right to be so.”

It is safe to assume he would have quite approved of our recent riots, however indiscriminate the targets. Violent, arbitrary, aimless : at least they were rebelling in some way. Rather rambunctious rebellion than craven compromise. There is a great schism within the broad church of socialism on the role of those that Marx termed the “lumpenproletariat” can play in a revolution. One tradition states that only the organised working-class, the unionised workers, united and resolved can achieve anything either within, or against capitalism. The lumpens, the long term unemployed, the criminals, confidence tricksters, prostitutes, beggars and other assorted outlaws are an objectively conservative force which will always be bought off by the rich, “a tool of reactionary intrigue.” Such was Marx’s view, and phrase. The wider labour movement has been in broad agreement. Bakunin took the opposite stance. He thought that organisation in itself always corrupted, always led to hierarchy. Given this, the unionised were more likely to be co-opted by the state, and that the more lawless the workers, the more independent: and therefore the more revolutionary. A century later, Huey Newton and the American Black Panthers thought so too, despite being ideologically closer to Maoism than anarchism.

Wilde, it seems, was in agreement. On his lecture tours of the USA he found his favourite audience in the town of Leadville, Colorado, an utterly lawless Wild West crew of prospecting miners, hustlers and prostitutes – “the best dressed men in America” as he termed them (they loved him back, admiring his ability to drink them under the table, and naming a sliver mine after him). His exploration of the underworld of the rent boys of London brought him further contact with the criminal classes. He came to admire the transgressive in general – larceny in person and lawlessness in the abstract (“genius steals”), as a bulwark against bourgeois morality. We will return later as to whether this necessarily makes Wilde an “anarchist”, but suffice to say this is part of Wilde’s view that “man’s original virtue is disobedience”. And as such he has no time for a state modelled on obedience, however “progressive”, whether Stalinist or Fabian.

Wilde is strikingly prophetic in his denunciations of what he describes here as “authoritarian socialism”. He says again that in the present state of affairs, at least some men with the advantages of privilege manage to find themselves, to realise their potential “If the Socialism is authoritarian; if there are governments to be armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have industrial tyrannies, than the last state of man will be worse than the first.” At least some can have freedom now, in this state, no-one would at all. Wilde sees no virtue at all in the equitable distribution of misery. The collectivism of compunction which existed in Soviet Russia or Mao’s China was precisely the nightmare scenario he was warning against. It seems clear though that Wilde actually thought the sheer unattractiveness of this made it unlikely. “I hardly think any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose that an inspector should call every morning to see that each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours”. He may have ‘hardly thought’ it, but at the same time Wilde wrote this there were plenty of socialists who had just such a vision in mind – and sadly their type were to proliferate, and in some areas to predominate. No wonder that The Soul of Man was an inspiration to many revolutionaries rebelling against the Tsars of Russia, but was later suppressed and banned by Stalin himself.

Wilde’s antipathy for this vision stemmed from a hatred not just of tyranny, but for utilitarianism, for grey functional necessity in all its forms. For this ultimate aesthete anything which smelt of soul-shrivelling drudgery of utility was poison to his nostrils. When Wilde said earlier that “all art is quite useless”, he meant it as the highest form of compliment to art. In this essay he states “the Renaissance was great, because it sought to solve no social problem, and busied it self not with such things, but suffered the individual to develop freely”. The ‘dignity of labour’ seems to have little appeal for Wilde (recalling his earlier witticism “a man who calls a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.”)

Wilde had a life-long aversion to the regimentation of the old Latin Roman world, preferring instead the free intelligence of the Greeks (and Athens rather than Sparta.) Here he says that the Greeks were right to say that civilisation needs slaves – but that machines are now the new slaves. The machine is key to Wilde’s vision of liberation, saving people from soulless drudgery, from living to work rather than working to live, allowing them to spend time exploring their own true potential. Wilde’s actual criticism of capitalism’s depredations is generally non specific and allusive, he is at his most exact in decrying the fact that at the moment machines only exacerbate the problem, they put people out of work but do not give them leisure in return. After the revolution this “surplus value” will be given back to the people, machines will serve man rather than the other way around.

A familiar criticism of socialism is that it engenders conformity, the hive mind and “tyranny of the majority.” In fact, this is a criticism levelled not just at socialism, but at democracy itself, and has been directed by the libertarian down the years at the conformity of societies from Atlee’s UK to Eisenhower’s USA. De Tocqueville’s criticisms of American democracy were an early warning of the tyrannising dangers inherent to a mass society. Again, the avowedly libertarian Wilde is in full agreement. “Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people." Perhaps the majority of the second half of the essay is given to a defence of the individual, not against oppressive government, but against the tyranny of public opinion, the drab ochlochracy of the press pack. “In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an improvement certainly. But it is still very bad, and wrong, and demoralising.”

The press is the grand villain of the piece, not for its defence of the powers-that-be, but for its low, utilitarian pandering to public opinion and prejudice. With signature deftness of paradox, the public are credited with an insatiable habit for curiosity for everything except that which is worth knowing, “and the journalist, with his tradesman-like habits, supplies their demand.” This is a denunciation of the tabloid mentality, the double-faced prurience and puritan morality which has persisted down the years and which was to devour Wilde himself in the end. These journalists are in the gutter, but their eyes follow the sewers, not the stars. His point here though, is rather more profound than a critique of Paul Dacre, Kelvin Mackenzie and their spiritual forbears. The press is merely the clearest and most obvious example of pandering to the public rather than challenging them, of playing to the gallery, feeding on the underbelly of the lowest common denominator. Art and politics are just as guilty, and the enervating effect of the herd who must be heard is even greater. Poetry, declares Wilde, is only of quality in Britain because the public don’t care about it and so leave it alone, novels and drama are soiled with the influence of public opinion. This may appear to be snobbery. On one level, it is. But Wilde is keen to stress that the collective opinion of the “educated” is even more harmful than that of the wider masses. His true point is this: a piece of art should be true to the artist, it should be made to for the artist, not his audience. Hence “Thackeray’s ‘Esmond’ is a beautiful work because he wrote it to please himself. In his other novels... he is too conscious of the public, and spoils his work by appealing directly to the sympathies of the public...”

The implication of this message in art is that true genius is unique. The implication in politics is that the individual must not be stifled in any way. This does not mean that people should be free to trample on others, as in the infantile, one-eyed, self-interested and self-contradictory arguments of modern day so-called libertarians (those who conveniently forget that finance capital is only given meaning by the reviled state itself. ) It does mean as complete a freedom from restraint by the state as is possible. Just as crucially, it also means freedom of the constraints of physical want and need, from the talons of finance.

Perhaps a more controversial view from the socialist perspective, is that, if the crowd is usually wrong, then it takes an exceptional individual or group to make change. Wilde is adamant about this – slaves never freed themselves, it was outsiders with unpopular ideas which achieved emancipation. He makes such a demon of popular opinion that popular morality itself takes on a devilish form, to the extent that Wilde claims that to be accused of ‘immorality’ is the highest compliment that can be paid, whether to art or individual (to be respectable is to be repellent, as Lady Bracknell cattily remarks of Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest.)

Again Wilde seems to be with Nietzsche here, both in his desire to escape the slave morality of the masses (a continual theme in his plays), and also his defence of history being shaped by powerful personalities, Carlyle’s “great men.” Nietzsche had said that madness was rare in individuals but in “groups, parties, nations and epochs, is the rule.” Much earlier than in this essay, Wilde had said that “To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.” We needn’t go into the obvious ways in which such a message is prone to perversion, except to say Wilde’s defence of absolute freedom in every area of human life is something of an inoculation against any usurpation by dictators, that his elitism of individuality should not equate to a political elitism. His absolute individualism is an inoculation against oppression, whether that tyranny is brought about by government or money power.

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinion, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation” said Wilde later in De Profundis, text more tormentedly personal of course, but the message was essentially the same. Society as it stands does not allow people to be what they want to be, and that is its greatest crime. In The Soul Of Man, Wilde holds that being absolutely true to yourself was the most essential message to be found in the teachings of Jesus Christ and the greatest goal of any society. The pain which Jesus’ endured is no longer necessary, and the self which we reach will be a new state, beyond the necessity of sacrifice. It is hard to deny that such a vision is utterly removed from any bureaucratic statistopia. It is equally hard to deny that it is quite as equally far removed from a capitalism where the poor are shackled to the rich, and all are shackled to commerce. “It will be a marvellous thing, the true personality of a man” when it finally appears.

In fairness to Marx, he too could offer the odd glimpse into the liberated society which he envisaged socialism would lead to, and in his vision too it was one in which the true potential of the individual was unleashed. In the German Ideology, he wrote that in a society un-encumbered by the division of labour and bolstered by plentiful and bountiful resources, that a man could would be able to "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner... without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic." Sadly this was an all too rare insight into the end goal of the purest liberty which Marx had in mind. Can this absence really be unrelated to the abysmal tyrannies committed blindly in the man's name? In The Soul Of Man, Wilde gives full untrammelled voice to the liberation dreams hidden largely in Marx's head, as the German spent his devoted his energies to what we might call with wry understatement "the details" of society as it is, how and why revolution was to occur. Marx inspired action where Wilde only dreamt. But dreams are necessary too. As with much of Wilde’s writing, one feels the presence of a large and loving wisdom, a generous genius, all the more profound for being informal and approachable. To hear this voice speak out for the cause of equality and liberation is a truly a liberation in itself, and a release.

If Wilde's essay is dreamlike in its idealism, and in its unique beauty, it is amorphous like a dream too. When it comes to what communism will “look like”, Wilde gives more of the specifics in aesthetics and principle lacking in Marx, but he is as vague as the man himself in concrete examples of the how the society is to function. Still, no-one ever came to Wilde to seek the steely rigours of practical instruction. Yet to another great Victorian polymath, quite a few people often did.

William Morris loomed as large over the intellectual world of late 19th century Britain as did Wilde, though his shadow fell on different areas. Both were writers, both were poets, and both had a very particular aesthetic vision which was to prove as inspirational as it was divisive. Morris’ pastoral view of England, a bucolic arcadia with a rustic, rural and Nordic spirit, was every bit as influential as Wilde’s iconoclastic and urbane art for art’s sake. But the more practically minded Morris was a craftsman and draughtsman as much as a dreamer and thinker, a man whose textile designs are more well-known to the wider public today than his writings. Morris was the high overseer of the arts and crafts movement, a print-maker and editor or the highest distinction, and a founder member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Morris was more a joiner than Wilde in more ways than one.

Wilde neither joined nor applied for membership of any political parties or societies. Like a later, wise-cracking left-winger, he probably wouldn’t belong to any that would have him. Morris by contrast was a leading figure in both the Social Democratic Federation and the later Socialist League, the earliest organisations in Britain to have fought for a fully realised socialism in both name and form. His temperament tended more to the aesthetic than the ascetic, and he was happier conversing on art with his friends the pre-Raphaelites than reviewing policy documents. Nevertheless he was not averse to the organisational side of the political world, and proved an effective leader. He helped build organisations with the same methodical care in which he produced beautifully bound editions of Chaucer, and, with his inspirational lectures, did as much as any other one man to promote the popularity of the socialist cause in the century’s later years. Perhaps it should not be surprising then that Morris should seek to combine his literary and artistic sensibilities to his proselytising for a freer and more equal world. To him there was no contradiction between the two. The result of this marriage of aesthete art and political purpose was his 1890 novella News from Nowhere.

The inspiration for News From Nowhere was a negative one. The American lawyer, writer and socialist Edward Bellamy had written his own utopian fantasy novel Looking Backward, which sought to imagine the perfected future society which a socialist revolution would bring about. In Looking Backward, America is transformed into a machine-led society of plenty-for-all, a rationalised utopia organised from the centre. Unemployment and poverty are banished, great rationalised and nationalised chain stores provide citizens with all they need. Morris reviewed the novel in the Socialist League magazine the Commonweal, and his reaction, while polite, was unmistakably hostile. It was not just the impersonality of Bellamy’s vision which unnerved him, nor the centralisation, with all the propensity for dictatorial abuse which that entailed. It was the fact that Bellamy saw work itself as an evil to be vanquished, a primitive throwback to be banished in his labour-saving, leisure oriented utopia. This was deeply unsatisfying to Morris, and was determined to offer an alternative view as to the promised land where socialism might lead. News From Nowhere was the response.

Its plot was a response too. Just as in Looking Backward, News from Nowhere features a narrator who is spirited away from the dingy present to a fantastically improved future. But unlike the earlier book gleaming mechanised world of Bellamy, that very futuristic future, Morris’ hero at first seems to be stepping not into the future at all, but further into the past.

Awakening one day following an evening discussing what a future society might look like with his friends at the Socialist League, middle-aged, middle class Londoner William Guest takes a walk along the Thames to find it oddly cleaner than usual. Taking a boat ride with a curiously dressed, handsome oarsman, Guest travels up the river to find the rickety habitations thrown up by industrialisation remarkably absent, “the soap-works with their smoke-vomiting chimneys had gone; the lead works gone, and no sound of riveting and hammering came down the west wind from Thorneycroft’s.” In their place are verdant greenery interspersed with beautifully designed medievalesque houses. Guest is as unnerved by this as he is by the fact that his oarsman (also dressed in a style closer to the 1400s than the 1800s) seems mightily amused when Guest suggests payment for the ride.

"I think I know what you mean. You think that I have done you a service; so you feel yourself bound to give me something which I am not to give to a neighbour, unless he has done something special for me. I have heard of this kind of thing; but pardon me for saying, that it seems to us a troublesome and roundabout custom; and we don't know how to manage it.”

The ruggedly handsome oarsman, whose name it transpires is Dick, takes warm pity on the on the confusion of the relatively haggard Guest, and takes him on a quick tour of the hamlet style commune in which he and his fellow healthy, youthful and cheerful citizens live. Guest sees citizens displaying arts, crafts and furniture they have made themselves at stalls, giving or exchanging wares but expecting no payment in return. He sees craftsmen working on benches and then relaxing in the woods afterwards, and finding equal satisfaction in each activity. It becomes clear than many people he meets are a good few years older than they look, such is the succouring and flourishing environment in which they dwell. Seeing that Guest’s confusion is still intense given the alien world from which he has arrived, Dick and his girlfriend Clara, another vivacious and hearty character give him over to the more detailed instruction of an older man; the wry and avuncular Hammond. Seeing that Guest is truly an outsider, from what is in effect another world, he explains as patiently as he can.

Hammond explains that in today’s world money is meaningless, and that small, autonomous interdependent communities produce what they need and trade with one another. Cities have in effect have dissolved, there is no distinction between town and country, habitations are distributed precisely where people want and need them, enmeshed within surrounding nature.

Central authority does not exist, decisions are based entirely at a local level. “I must now shock you by telling you that we have no longer anything which you, a native of another planet, would call a government.” Marriage and divorce are no more, free and equal relationships are forged between men and women at will, based on mutual affection alone. This may seem the least radical of Morris’ ideas to us today, upon its earlier readings it was probably the most. Morris tells Guest how Dick and Clara have been lovers for many years but for a while they grew apart and each had other partners between them, before realising that they were in the end happier together. Entrapped as the earlier reader would have been in the draconian bonds of Victorian marriage, Guest can hardly fathom the sexual freedom on display. “Socialist” though he is, he finds it as hard to accept this as to accept that people can work without payment. How can you get people to work when there is no reward for labour? Hammond explains the reward is “the reward of creation. The wages that God gets, as people might have said in time agone. If you are going to ask to be paid for the pleasure of creation, which is what excellence in work means, the next thing we shall hear of will be a bill sent in for the begetting of children.”

Morris’s society is a world revolving heavily around “work”, but work is no longer seen in any way as something divorced from enjoyment, as something that has to be done to ward off starvation or to accumulate abstract wealth. Work is no longer a chore. From an early age children are taught to create things which they love, and which make them happy. If their surroundings do not suit them, they are taught to make their own. Some may find it more amenable to fashion pottery, some to write poetry, some to assemble brickwork, some to cook, some to perform athletic feats. But to all, a sense of art is integral, not additional to life.

Everyone is encouraged to try their hand at everything, so they are not limited to one path of expression, and to have a large degree of self sufficiency. And yet, equally importantly, people are allowed to pursue their own desires and enthusiasms so that the activities which they spend most time on are the ones they enjoy the most, and which in turn they can excel at to the best of their abilities. The boy who enjoys welding with brass will turn his love into an essential service for the community, in just the same way that the girl who enjoys poetry the most will create this into a commodity for those who enjoy it. Crucially though, she is not writing the poems to please others, but to please herself. Division of labour is gone, all work is now a “hobby”, or rather more than that - a thing of enjoyment and fulfilment. Yet in being harnessed for the community becomes so much more than that. The same principle is applied to physical work and mental work, to music and exercise, to the serious and the jocular, so that people are able to achieve the very zenith of what they are capable, hence the beautiful bodies and minds on display. This society would contain “Neither brain-slack brain workers, nor heart-sick hand workers” to quote a phrase Morris uses elsewhere.

One of the great innovations of Marx’s writings was the theory of alienation, the fact that workers, toiling for wages on work completely divorced from their own needs, become separated from their essence, their very being. While this alienation has been fascinatingly explored by many, from Lukacs to Debord and the Situationists, it is much rarer to see an explanation of what humanity would look like with the alienation removed. Morris sought to achieve this through the bucolic natives of News from Nowhere. These were not just men and women working how, where and why they wanted, these were self-contained artists, producing their own aesthetic surroundings producing their own reality, rather than living in another’s.

As the book’s plot unwinds in its charming way, just as even the most hard-headed capitalist may find it hard to refute some of its arguments, so even the most idealistic utopian may find it unlikely that such a society could ever genuinely be created. Guest himself shares this incredulity with his host. It is at this point, when Hammond begins to explain the history of how the commonwealth came about, that the tale takes on a sterner tone. He explains at some length how the capitalists did not give up their wealth through education, through persuasion, or any sudden spasm battalions of philanthropy on their part. On the contrary, Hammond recounts how capitalist Britain was wracked through heroic strikes from the working classes which lead to increasingly violent and vicious repression from the rulers. This bloody impasse eventually leads to all out civil war, leaving carnage in its wake. In a fairly brief aside he mentions thuggish pro-government leagues bought off by the bosses to put down the masses, which go by the name of the “Friends of Order”, an eerie augur of Fascism. This struggle eventually comes to an end after several years, when the workers begin to generate their own self governing communities which win over more and more converts. Eventually the capitalists simply cannot afford to buy off the loyalties of sections of the proletariat any more. As their capital supplies dwindle, and communities become increasingly more self sufficient, they lose their potential to either bribe or blackmail the wider populace.

Whatever one makes of this scenario, it certainly takes News from Nowhere out of the realms of the abstract utopia, or for that matter prissy pacifist idealism. On the contrary, it places the plot in a specifically Marxist framework of class war, fleshing out for the first time what such a violent struggle might look like in practice. Morris did indeed consider himself a follower of Marx, but found equal inspiration in the teachings of John Ruskin. The great genius art critic (a teacher of Wilde at Oxford) was as influential to Morris for his theory of man being degraded by an urban environment as he was in his arguments that all work should be pleasing as well as productive, “labour without joy is base, joy without labour is base.” He wanted to expunge the arid abstraction from Marx, and the lingering desire for social hierarchy in Ruskin. News from Nowhere is Morris’s audacious synthesis of the father of scientific socialism and the self-professed “violent Tory of the old school”.

As William Guest wakes after his blissfully inspiring sojourn with Hammond, Dick and Clara, he finds himself back in dingy industrial London, sad to leave them, but hopeful for the future. And so this seminal tract ends with the very conventional plot device of the ‘ambiguous dream’, at the end of what is in some ways a quite traditional story. Quite apart from its ideological controversies, it has been quite as divisive as a piece of art. Its vision of a hopeful future served as a great beacon of idealism inspiring many thousands to take up a lifelong struggle of a freer and more equal future . At its best its arcadian idyll can give the socialist reader the feeling that the ghosts of old England are on their side, that the cause of a just future has found its greatest ally in the ancient past. Its pastoral prose style has found admirers who are not socialists themselves.

On the other hand it has had its detractors as well. George Orwell for one was unimpressed with what he termed its “watery melancholy”, meaning the very satisfaction and self-containment of its characters made them insipid. Orwell made this observation in an essay which maintained that describing a perfect, or even a particularly happy society in inspirational terms was so hard as to be nearly impossible. There is perhaps a certain lack of spark in the prose, but perhaps this is, as Orwell says, the sheer impossibility of capturing utopia in print. Dystopias are far more vivid, as he and others proved. When challenged with imagining an ideal world, even Swift, the greatest of imaginative writers, could only create those very wise, very dignified, very dreary horses, the Houyhnhnms. Morris managed better than most.

What would Wilde himself have made of it? As far as I know there is no record of this. Wilde was certainly an admirer of Morris himself, of much of his work and his aesthetic vision. One biographer speculated whether the playwright visited the engraver on his deathbed, it transpires this was probably not true, though the pair were certainly on warm correspondence terms in earlier years. It does seem likely though that a man whose work is rife with waspish worldly-wise aphorists like Lord Henry Wooton, Jack Worthing and Mrs Erlynne, may have found Dick, Clara and the whole rustic crew a little too clean living for his tastes.

There were other fundamental differences. Wilde’s attitude to nature is ambivalent; witheringly contemptuous of “wearisome, uncomfortable nature” which he finds hopelessly inferior to art in The Decay Of Lying, and yet later finding sublime wonder in natural simplicity near the end of De Profundis. Wilde seems to swing both ways here, but taken as a whole his essentially sophisticate worldview seems as urban as it is urbane, elementally distanced in sensibility from Morris’ communism of carpentry. For Morris, nature was supreme, an organic ideal to which humanity should aspire. A different palette of thought was being drawn from in both men. Wilde’s well of cultural inspiration was essentially cosmopolitan; pagan Greece and the Catholic Europe of Italy and France. The Europe which inspired Morris was that of the North, he espoused an organic, medieval rural idea of the British isles which he saw as interwoven with the ancient sagas of Scandinavia. Wilde was Classical, Morris was Gothic. Visions of the future inspired by these two quite separate and unique imaginations were bound to have their differences.

The line about a man calling a spade a spade being compelled to use one does not indicate in Wilde a man who sees any intrinsic value to manual work, however fresh and free the environment where the digging takes place. The Soul of Man claims that the Greeks were correct on the need for slaves, and that we now have machines to play such a role. Morris, by contrast, sees machinery itself as an anonymising tool of the market, which would, to coin a phrase, “wither away” once socialism had arrived. Morris found fulfilment in labour, Wilde sought to escape it altogether. This is a major schism to put it mildly, and in that area at least, it seems likely Wilde may have preferred Edward Bellamy’s labour –saving utopia closer to his Hellenic ideal than Morris’s pastoral paradise.

The similarities however, are more striking than the differences. Classical and Gothic aside, both were Romantic. These were visions of socialism which both showed a profound understanding of how inequality and the market economy poisons human relationships, distorting life into a warped mirror of its own debased priorities and limiting possibilities. While abhorring capitalism, they both warned against a vision of an alternative which would set against the power of capital an equally oppressive power of the state, the “industrial tyranny” of augur. Most importantly, both were visions in which the autonomy of the individual was sacrosanct, in which the absolute freedom of the individual to be what they wanted to be was inviolable. Marx may have wanted this too, but the ambiguities surrounding his wishes have led to the darkest of consequences.

While Morris was the more practical man, he was every bit as committed as Wilde to the aesthetics of human happiness, and to the principle that art and culture were central to society, not just a by-product. Both were passionate in their belief in the sanctity of the independent human spirit. The sheer stupefying dullness and uniformity which characterised the societies of post-war Poland, of Honnecker’s East Germany, of Czechoslovakia following brave Dubcek’s defeat, would have been as alien to them as muck to marble, with less similarity in form and spirit than the bile of Pat Robertson has with the Sermon on the Mount.

It is not suggested here that either The Soul of Man or News From Nowhere are a stand-in or replacement for the great works of the socialist canon, that Marx and Tawney can be thrown from the window, or that lyrical dreams are a substitute for the lived experience of struggle. Nor is either work without important flaws. Wilde’s vision is beautiful, but its reliance on the Great Man, on outside agitators as the only agent of change, is frankly elitist. News from Nowhere on the other hand is so tied into Morris’s particular ruralist outlook as to put anyone who actually quite likes living in a city (not an insignificant number of people) off the idea of socialism altogether. What they are however, apart from being brilliantly inspiring revelations in themselves, are magnificent correctives to the high-handed excesses of other thinkers, so heavy is the air of freedom about them.

Some would claim it is not correct to classify the pair as socialists at all, but rather as anarchists. Certainly those within the modern Left Anarchist tradition passionately claim them for their own. In their denunciation of state tyranny and advocacy of decentralised community power allied to their egalitarianism, it is very clear there is at the very least much common ground. Wilde and Morris, while clear on the way their ideal society would look, were not prescriptive as to their method of travel. Wilde gave no indication at all. Morris clearly believed a violent revolution would be necessary to uproot and overturn the capitalist system, but issued no prescription against accessing the levers of power to move society towards this direction. Anarchists denounce any function of the state, or participation in Parliamentary process. The heroic achievements won by social democracy: full employment, free healthcare, support for the weak and disabled (now being systematically destroyed) were great steps towards the empowerment of both working people as a group, and towards unleashing the potential of individuals to lead the lives they want to lead, emancipated from the slavery of poverty. Of course Wilde and Morris would have thought these measures didn’t go nearly far enough, but I still believe they would have treasured these achievements, not scorned them.

Take a look at the index of any dictionary of witty quotations, and Wilde is likely to be one with the most entries, or in the top five at any rate. Jostling with him for position is likely to be that other great Anglo-Irish wit; George Bernard Shaw. The pair were contemporaries and friends – on one occasion when Shaw launched a petition to free the Haymarket Martyrs (anarchists jailed in America), Wilde was the only one to sign it. Shaw went on to outlive Wilde for half a century, and his vision and version of socialism was the one which came to predominate. For Wilde, this was a tragedy, for Shaw, a dubious vindication by default. For socialism, it was a disaster.

If the driving force behind Wilde’s socialism was liberty, the controlling passion for Shaw was order. Of course he could write the most brilliant denunciations of the horrors inflicted by poverty on the workers, or on the absurdities of sexual inequality. But it was the chaos of capitalist society which he opposed more than its injustice. It was the wanton inefficiency of unemployment which irked him more than the human misery it caused.

In Wilde’s wit there is always a warmth, no matter how sharp the surface. Shaw’s barbs have an icier quality to them, the air of a sarcastic schoolmaster chiding his children for disappointing him -yet again. Shaw didn’t see himself as a poet, but as grand designer, the great engineer of the human soul (as Stalin himself said a writer should be), re-sculpting it in his own image. He had no faith in the working-class as an agent of its own liberation, and his attitude to individual proletarians in his plays was one of ill-concealed contempt. No, the only way that workers, and society as a whole could be saved was by the benign tutorship of the enlightened, rationalised middle-class, by individuals, in short, such as his good self. It was this corrosive spirit which formed the kernel of the Fabianism which has so sullied the soul of socialism in this country.

I simplify perhaps, but not too much. When one moves beyond the UK and into the realms of international politics, it is hard to overstate how detrimental and deleterious Shaw’s attitude was. He was, of course, one of the main cheerleaders for the Stalin regime, apologist-in-chief for the crimes of Communism, the myopic scar which was to disfigure sections of the Left, and bring the rest into disrepute by association. His was a rather worse betrayal however, than those many Communists of the 20s and 30s who had misguidedly come to see the Soviet Union as carrying out the Marxist mission. Shaw did not even believe in revolution - never had - far too messy, too combustible. He had little time for Marx - but he did have time for Stalin. He admired the tyrant, without even endorsing the thinker who gave the tyrant spurious justification. Here after all was another great engineer of humanity, a “great man” who “got things done”. A man of destiny who didn’t allow such trifles as the value of liberty or the sanctity of human life to get in his way.

Shaw would take this ruthlessness and power-worship even further however, into sympathy not just for Stalin, but even for Mussolini, and, to a lesser extent, Hitler. In this rather rarer perversion, we see in even purer relief the moral and intellectual monstrosities which can be justified when socialism becomes nothing more the desire for a planned economy and opposition to the free market, divorced from the humanistic vision which should inspire it. The modern Right, particularly in America, is full of pseudo-libertarian quarter-wits yelping “Hitler was a socialist too! You’re all the same!”, while trying to prise Barack Obama into their demented and nonsensical Venn diagram. It is Shaw’s intellectual outrages with give this drivel currency. George Orwell observed that most Englishmen either considered Communism and Fascism as opposites, and so sympathised with one over the other, or else they saw them as the same, and opposed them both. Only Shaw, he ruefully remarked, saw them as the same and so supported them both for that very reason (“though Shaw is not an Englishman”.) This is where you can end up when the means engulfs the end, where your enemy’s enemy is always your friend.

Though they did not live long enough to give us hard proof, it is literally unthinkable to imagine either Wilde or Morris displaying the slightest sympathy for Stalin (let alone the Fascists.) Turning the tables, it is equally impossible to imagine Stalin, Mao, Hoxha or Gaddafi reading their works with anything other then seething contempt. Such effete decadence , such rebellious individualism, such unworkable idealism…The very fibre of their writing pulse with a humanity, a sheer will to freedom which these arid tyrants entirely lacked. But it is not just the Stalinists who lacked this basic vitamin of respect for individuality and autonomy. Many Fabians, Shaw among their number were very nearly as corrupted. The same corruption led to the enthusiasm which many of them had for eugenics, “re-scalpelling” society in the most sinister way possible. Take Shaw’s chilling phrase “the only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialism of the selective breeding of man.” The same inhumanity and inflexibility would lead others into anti-Semitism. Here is Shaw again: "This is the real enemy, the invader from the East, the Druze, the ruffian, the oriental parasite; in a word: the Jew.” It would be hard to dream up a clearer example of how a creed of liberation had been wrenched from its origins.

Stalinist and Fabian, revolutionary and reformer alike were to end up betraying the very basic tenets of socialism because they ended up the free autonomy of the individual human being. Arch-Fabian Beatrice Webb dismissed the 1926 General Strike, the nearest this country has ever came to revolution in the twentieth century, as “a monstrous irrelevance in the sphere of social reform”.The working man was not to be trusted, he was too brutalised by capitalism. He would be led to salvation either by a revolutionary vanguard political party run by intellectuals and warriors, or a reforming state run by intellectuals and bureaucrats. In rejecting individuality, they ended up jettisoning the fundamental freedom of the worker to live the life that he or she wishes to lead: the whole reason why the creed evolved in the first place.

The biggest defence of the true spirit of socialism is not in the example of any one leader, writer or thinker, but in the lived experience and struggle of the working people down the decades who have fought for fairer wages, more spare time to live their lives, freedom from being ravaged by want: what E.P. Thompson termed the “moral economy” of the masses. Nonetheless, the brave and bold example of a few magnificent, unique individuals did much to not only inspire a movement, but also made it truer to itself. Wilde and Morris are not alone here.

There are other inoculations against the viruses of Stalin and Shaw, other heroes. E.P. Thompson himself, the historian who did more than most to rescue the voice of ordinary people from “the enormous condescension of posterity.” Orwell of course, famous enemy of Stalinism, but an equal foe of Fascism, British imperialism and the brutalities of the free market. William Cobbett, the great agrarian writer, farmer and eternal rebel whose dogged and rugged individualism has been claimed by Tories, but whose unassailable fight for the underdog places him as a the champion of the common man against the powers-that-be, ( a man whose anti-intellectual outlook, taken in small doses, is a valuable corrective to the systemising excesses of the urban middle-class left.) Above all, the heroic stand of all those on the Labour Left, from Bevan to Foot, from Tony Benn to Dennis Skinner who have kept alive the strongest support for egalitarianism, and workers’ rights without ever falling under the Soviet spell.

All the same, the examples of Wilde and Morris offer a unique counterbalance of idealism and clarity, of insight and inspiration, warriors with words, grand sentinels of soul and mind. It is time to take heed. Movements for freedom, fighting the stagnant tyranny of the plutocracy are flaring the world over, armed insurrections, occupations, protests, strikes. The Occupy movements may be scorned for their blank-slate idealism, but at least they are finally free from the deadening sectarianism which has ultimately strangled every previous insurrection. They are not in thrall to dead Russians, and this is a good thing. Time for some dead English and Irishmen to be heard instead. Not Shaw though: his time is over, his day is done. Let’s let Wilde and Morris have their say.