The Ghost Writer

Roman Polanski's latest film is bound to be interpreted in the context of the director's life, which I have commented on before: I will leave others to speculate about whether it is connected however. Partly this is because the film was completed before Mr Polanski was thrown in a Swiss jail, partly because this is an interesting piece of work in its own light without any of the outside scandal. The Ghost Writer is about a character, played by Ewan McGregor, who is invited to ghost write the memoirs of a British Prime Minister, Adam Lang. Lang is loosely modelled on Tony Blair (there are references to Halliburton, Condi Rice, Cheri Blair, Robin Cook and others scattered through it) and has the same loose charisma, easy charm and non-political background. Like Blair at Oxford, Lang at Cambridge was by his own account more interested in girls than politics and for Blair's pop music, we are tempted to read Lang's theatre. The ghost writer is brought in because his predecessor- loosely modelled on Alistair Campbell- has died under suspicious circumstances. His job is to finish the memoirs, but he soon turns to investigating why the other man died.

All this takes place against another kind of background. From the first moment we meet Lang, almost, we are aware that he is under investigation at the ICC. This adds an atmosphere of confinement to the movie- it also brings the ghost writer to the Lang's complex in America. He has to come in so as to escape the press and unwittingly becomes an actor in the internal domestic dramas of Lang's home. Ruth becomes close to the ghost writer and accuses Mrs Bly of being Lang's mistress. Her intelligence is one of the features of the film. Lang himself is around but not there, the household is left to his wife, the ghost and the security men for much of the crucial middle section of the film whilst he travels to Washington to receive support from the American Congress and Administration. Whilst he is gone, the relationships inside the house become more and more intense. Polanski, an old master if nothing else, is able to make the atmosphere seem both wild and confined. McGregor seems to suspect that he is in real danger at many points- cars follow him to a marvellously sinister meeting with a Harvard Professor (played by Tom Wilkinson) and mysterious meetings are arranged in American diners.

What I liked about the film was the narrative thrust, as Roger Ebert says in his review this is a film which is purely a good story told well. The implied contemporary history is of course nonsense and Lang is not Blair: the film does not capture Blair's idealism at all. If I were Cherie Blair, I would be very flattered: Ruth Lang is the most intelligent character in the entire film and Olivia Williams portraying her gives the performance that sticks in your mind most. As a complete fiction though the film still is interesting: it charts a junction between politics and high finance and arms production charted many times before. What is interesting about this is the temptation of that frame to an intelligent man like Polanski: I think it reflects on a second quality which the film does get, the unreality of political life. Political life takes place amongst normal people but at a distance from the rest of us: politicians like Adam Lang inhabit secure complexes with every imaginable luxury. Those luxuries though taste like dirt because of another factor that I think the film does capture.

This is the loneliness of power. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown says Henry IV, and he is right. Lang is lonely- he doesn't have friends he can trust or even perhaps a wife he can trust. Ruth is lonely, so spiky that she puts thorns into any hand that is reached out to her. You can go on with a list of people whose relationships are all professional. The ghost writer is the only real source of affection in the film, his affection is used but in a sense the reason why you retain sympathy with him is both the absurd plot, but even more so it is the fact that he gives back an emotional commitment that the other characters are not capable of.

John Rogers and quotations

I've been reading John Rogers' Ohel and Bethshemesh recently for a piece I'm trying to put together. Rogers was a pastor in Ireland during the 1650s and had a convoluted career in seventeenth century radical politics before and after that. Ohel and Bethshemesh is one of the vast puritan tracts- it runs to over five hundred pages- that historians have to deal with: it is often repetitive (I've just read two successive chapters on why the church is a garden) and frequently reads better as a speech than as a text. For example Rogers writes one sentence that has no fullstop for three and a half pages: as a reader you are gasping for breath, as a preacher you would fit your own pauses in to his semi-colons and commas. However there is more of interest to say about his style than this.

Rogers is addicted to short quotations from the scriptures. He never quotes in context, never uses a quotation longer than a sentence. He assumes that every line in scripture relates directly to his own time and not the time of the scripture: when God speaks to the Isrealites in Exodus he is directly speaking, for Rogers, to Rogers and his congregation. This habit of seeing every line in scripture as a reference to the present is aided by his habit of quotation: he strips out any aspect of any quotation that refers to a particular moment, leaving the universal. Rogers uses all other texts in a similar way- Plutarch refers directly to seventeenth century England. All his reading takes place in a universal present- the only sense of time that he has is not historical but eschatological (leading to a second coming)- he does not see that others in other times had different priorities even within the eschatalogical framework he develops.

This substantiates a very old point, made by John Pocock in the 1950s, that historical understanding- the understanding that people differ across time in their priorities- arose late in European culture. Rogers is a figure who definitely had a sense of the past, but definitely did not read historically: to some extent he read the bible like the writers of the ars historica read their classical texts, phrase by phrase seeking maxims rather than book by book seeking truths about the past. In that sense, the move that history underwent: from corroding understandings of Caesar as a knight to in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries corroding understandings of the resurrection, was a natural one. Rogers and his congregation as his text makes clear lived in a prehistorical world.

Particular or Universal

Joanne Bailey in her study of early modern marriage notes that 'it is important for the historian not to treat these moments of extreme marital tension as abstracts'. She is absolutely right- the historian's focus is not, like the social scientist's, upon society in the abstract but upon individuals as they go to make up society. It is worth thinking about the implications and reasons for this for a moment and this is what I propose to do here. Basically why is history about the particular and not the general? And what furthermore can the particular tell us that the general law or principle can miss? The answer to the first might be a just so argument- history is history, not social science which is why I think we need to consider the second question in a little more detail because it will tell us why it is neccessary that we understand the particular and think about it before moving to general theories.

The first is suggested by Bailey's next line, 'these events, invariably sad, sometimes uplifting and touching, often brutal and callous, had great meaning for the people involved'. History does in one sense fulfill an obligation to remember, conveyed on the future by the past. Secondly remembering this kind of event makes it easier to understand people's lives in the round, and it is easier in this context to understand those events in the particular. The reason for this is that all people from all times do not react in the same ways to events, what may be a source of joy in one civilisation is the source of anger in another. Empathy is a large part of the historian's armory when she comes to deal with what happened. It is important precisely because if we are to discover anything more than our own impressions of the events of the past, we need to recover what those events meant to those involved. The general rule that we might formulate therefore is effected by our particular instances: searching for the general may bias our conclusions towards accepting realities of modern life, whereas searching for the particular confronts us with the strangeness of their lives.

History, if done properly, is about strangeness- its about trying to find out what was different about the past and see why intelligent men and women, good men and women, believed in witchcraft or sacrafice or patriarchy. History seeks not to excuse but to understand how the world looked to them- because if we do not understand that all our conclusions about that world will become false- that's why Bailey's statement is true. She has grasped that the particular conditions our approach to the general- because only through a particular instance can you grasp how people in the past related different facets of their lives together, and through doing so you are committed to unravelling the strangeness in those lives, rather than stringing together the commonalities between now and then in a skein of general theory.