Changeling

This novel by Matt Wesolowski is very easy to read. I read it under a day- in a matter of hours actually- it is short but it is also a book in which I was thoroughly absorbed. Wesolowski's book starts with a scenario which is familiar to anyone who is a routine consumer of the news (sadly): a child, in this case a small boy called Alfie, disappeared when his father stopped the car in some woods on the Welsh/English border (the location is important). The cold case is taken up by a true crime podcaster- who presents the material in six narrative segments, each roughly from the perspective of one of the main participants in the drama. These podcast episodes are written out for us as live scripts: one chapter for example will begin in the tone of the young boy's favourite teacher, another will focus on the account of a worker of strange happenings on a building site near the woods, a third will take place in the frame of reference of a friend of the family and so on. We read the interviews which are written in the kind of language people speak and gradually we get a sense of the family and the scenario from which the child was kidnapped and what might have happened thirty years ago.

The first thing that I noticed about this book is the format. Telling this story through six podcast episodes makes the story very immediate. There were moments when I could almost hear the music that comes with one of those podcast- a "serial" or something like it that would set the scene. Wesolowski captures the voices of these individuals very powerfully too: the supply teacher and her affection for the boy, the builder, the retired businessman who owned the building site- all of them are precisely situated. You could imagine these interviews happening on this podcast in that way. Secondly, and perhaps the reason I picked up the book, I noticed the setting. Woods have their own mythical arcana in European folk history. The Welsh and English border speaks to tales of the wilderness and of the marches which spread across it in the Middle Ages. This is set in a place that does have resonances within the culture I grew up in of being ancient, uncanny and strange. Wesolowski plays with images of fairies, and beasts who rise out of the past to confront the conscience of the presence. The wood has a personality: my mind flipped to the wood which the hobbits walk through from Hobbiton in the Lord of the Rings and Old Man Willow's deceit but I'm sure everyone will have their favourite tale. The wood continues to be an image winding through the entire book: an image of darkness and mystery and crookedness.

The interviews and the woods set up what is a tale of the darkness of humanity. Most of the characters here operate on the margins of poverty: they are the school drop outs, the waiters, actors etc. It is interesting that there is very little political context to the book: 1988, when the murder happened, was a very particular time in the history of the UK: after the miner's strike but just on the edge of the recession of the early nineties and the poll tax riots. The book does have its standard political characters; the knighted industrialist is instantly identifiable, for example, as a figure from that period. The marginality of most of the characters here is important to the plot- but it is also important to the atmosphere: the stakes for young Alfie are high precisely because everyone around him is on the edge, so to speak. Wesolowski is also brilliant at capturing the attractiveness of various characters: the school teacher with her motherly ability to deal with any child put across from her, the father who is able to convey a kind of sexual charm to almost all the women in the story, the podcast host, whose sincerity I took as axiomatic as I read. There is a message to the story, and I'll leave that for you to discover, as there are surprises along route- but I think the intensity of the character development here is impressive. If you bind that together with the notion of the forest, with the notion of myth, I think what you get is a story that in its darkness has a lot to compare with myth itself.

Winston Churchill predicted it

I am currently reading Andrew Roberts's book on Winston Churchill- its a good read and Roberts has an eye for a good quotation and anecdote. There are a couple of things that I'm not happy about in the book however- one is that half the book seems to be given over to Churchill's first premiership which is probably the period of his life that we know most about and where (I haven't got there yet so may be wrong) there is  least "new" to say. The second is the occasional moment where I think Roberts overclaims for Churchill. For example, on page 43 Roberts quotes a teenage Churchill suggesting that vast changes were coming for Europe:

great upheavals, terrible struggles; wars such as one cannot imagine, and I tell you London will be in danger- London will be attacked and I will be very prominent in the defence of London. I see further ahead than you do. I see into the future. This country will be subjected somehow, to a tremendous invasion, by what means I do not know but I tell you I shall be in command of the defences of London and I shall save England and London from disaster

Anyone who knows Churchill's subsequent career, as Prime Minister in the second world war and the leader who took Britain through the Blitz, must experience a reaction reading those words. Roberts labels this "extraordinary prescience" but is it? I would argue strongly that this is not a prediction that is anything more than a teenager's grandiosity. There are details which are wrong- Britain was not invaded in 1940 but bombed and Churchill was not directly in control of the defences of London- he was Prime Minister not say Field Marshall for the capital. Churchill did not explain in his prediction, as Roberts retells it, why he thought that disaster was coming either.

This is a case as well of history being told backwards not forwards. What I mean by that is simple- we are reading Churchill as is Roberts through the lens of 1940-5. It is understandable- people often talk about history explaining who we are and how we came to be the kind of people we are. It does not help us understand the past that well: we can't see Churchill correctly if we view his entire career as a preparation for the moment he faced Hitler. Churchill in 1893 or 1903 or 1913 had no knowledge- and neither did any of his friends or enemies- of what would happen in 1943 or 1953. When you read the statement above, you can only see what it really means if you forget the blitz and Dunkirk, and even forget the Somme and Gallipoli and Sidney Street and think of it through the lens of a precocious teenager, arguing with and boasting to his friends at school. It tells us a lot about that teenager- both in terms of his interests (clearly historical and in the broad sweep of history and politics), his ability to imagine and his sense of his own importance- but it tells us little about that teenager's future or indeed the future of his country.

Silence

I saw Martin Scorsese's Silence back in January and I have been thinking about it ever since. It is a film about the persecution of Christians in Japan in the mid seventeenth century and the real phenomenon of priests who went there from the Spanish possessions in the Philippines and,after capture, recanted their faith. The story is based upon a novel by the Japanese novelist Shusako Endo, which reimagines the story from the point of view of an imagined priest (Sebastião Rodrigues) modelled on Guissepe Chiara. There is so much that is of interest in the film and the story: for a start, the mid seventeenth century is an important point in the history of Japan. Japan is not the only country to have partially formed through the persecution of a religious minority- you could say the same of England and Spain for example. There is also the story of the Japanese Christians which is touched on here, who survived through this persecution right down to the present day. Lastly there is the story that I think Scorsese is most interested in, the story of the priest who recanted and why.

The history of Christianity is the history of an extended meditation on this theme. For the Church Fathers this was a real issue or one that was real in living memory. The early Church was persecuted under Emperors such as Nero, Decius and Diocletian. The son of God, according to Christians, met his death in an act of religious persecution. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church said Tertullian in the 2nd Century. Furthermore those images have resonated down the centuries. Martin Luther, for example, cast himself in their image when he went to the Diet of Worms. Martyrdom is key to Christianity- so the real challenge of this film is explaining how a priest, who went to Japan knowing that persecution was happening, knowing that he would be captured, confessed.

The first thing to say is that we don't and can't know why the priests who recanted confessed. Neither I, nor Scorsese, nor Endo have any access to what they thought or why they did it. Even memoirs would be self serving. So all we have is an imagined thought experiment- why did they confess? What I think is interesting about this film is that it provides a Christian counter narrative for that confession. The argument here is that the priest who does not confess is arrogantly seeking to sacrifice others for his own vanity. Confessing is a way of saving the lives of others. The inquisitors do not threaten the priest with torture and death, they say that if he holds out, they will threaten his followers with torture and death. Notice for a second that I have used the word life- not soul. This to me is the real weakness of the argument of the film. There is a Christian case for allowing people to die when they are being persecuted- for tonight they shall be in Paradise. I found this argument on first sight therefore rather weak. It seemed to miss the point of Christian theology. Augustine for example continuously says in De Civitate Dei that the focus of human hope and human fear should be on the City of God not the City of Man.

This is not an easy dilemma but its one on which I think Silence largely turns. Scorsese seeks to address this dilemma in part by having his main character at the end of the film face Christ himself who commands him to make the decision to recant. We can see this as an easy way out for the director. We could also see this as part of another tension in Christianity between the word- scripture- and revelation from God directly. This conflict played its way out in the seventeenth century- just take the English Civil War- but also in the Catholic Church over time, with the conflict between the Church hierarchy and various orders of monks, nuns and friars. Is the Christ that we see a devil or really Christ and how would someone, racked by hunger, listening to the screams of his co-accused, realising the pain and agony that is to come, make that distinction?

I am not going to answer any of these questions. Theologically, there are probably cases on both sides. What I feel is so interesting about Silence as a film is its attempt to take us inside these dilemmas, to let us try and imagine what the right decision for this priest in Japan might have been. From a secular view point in the 21st century, admittedly one I probably subscribe to, that choice seems obvious- confess, recant and save lives. What I think the film almost does and where it does do this, it succeeds in being a great film, is show us that that decision for a 17th Century Catholic priest was not simple nor was it morally uncomplicated.

Lady Macbeth

I have tried to write a review of Lady Macbeth three times so far and failed each time. It is easy to write a synopsis of this film but I don't want to do that. The film is about one of the oldest cinematic story- a young wife, with an older husband, who falls in love with a younger man. We've seen it often from the male point of view- think for example of The Postman always rings twice- a story which focusses on John Garfield as the central narrator. Lady Macbeth plays with this narrative because the central character is not the male lover, not the husband, both of whom have barely any character at all. The central figure in the film is the wife- she is the only character in this film with any character whatsoever. Florence Pugh plays this Lady Macbeth- Catherine- brilliantly and her performance is definitely the best thing about the film. What she shows though is a character who is neither likeable nor admirable- though possibly sympathetic.

It is easy to sympathise with Catherine in the film. She is married to a husband who not merely is older and implicitly not sexually attractive to her but who will not give her any sexual outlet. Her father in law humiliates her- demanding that she has a child when he knows that his son will not take the necessary action. She is confined in doors by the two of them and by respectable opinion and she is clearly constrained in everything she can or might do. She is treated by her husband as though she were a commodity that his father bought for him, along with a piece of land that as he says would not even provide enough fodder for a cow. This is a woman trapped in a sexist household and constrained in a sexist society. Even after her husband dies, she is still threatened by the potential threat of a male coming into her world and taking it over. Perhaps most symbolically, the film traps Catherine in her house- which feels very Victorian and starchy. She is also trapped by her clothes- we see her again and again being put into corseted dresses, a symbol of her constrained circumstances.

However whilst she is sympathetic, she is not likeable. Catherine is not dislikeable because she has an affair. I think any reasonable woman or man seeing her position would see how an affair was natural. She wants in the early parts of the film affection and sexual desire which her husband will not, for some unexplained reason, give her. However, she is still not likeable. There is another set of relationships in the film apart from the relationships between Catherine and the men in her life and that is the relationships between Catherine and her social inferiors- including her maid and her lover. Catherine's relationship with her maid- Anna- is vicious and she exploits her position as a mistress to the full. She clearly treats Anna badly at several points in the film. This is a woman who sees nothing in making her maid complicit in murder. She also steals Anna's love interest. With her lover, Catherine's behaviour may not be as coercive, but it is still clear that their relationship is all about sex and not about his personality or his qualities. Catherine is unlikeable because she constrains other characters in similar ways to the ways in which her husband and father constrain her.

What I took from Lady Macbeth was a horror story. It is set in an imagined 19th century- where slavery existed in the North of England. Her fieriness may remind one of Catherine Earnshaw- but that Catherine's story is very different. This is fictional setting I think makes me generalise this story- it is not about a particular place or time but about a human condition of constraint. What's interesting about it I think is that no character in this film really has a character. Catherine's character is the most fully developed- but I think for her, we have three real insights- firstly the effects of sexist constraint, secondly her exploitation of class constraint and thirdly her raw desire for pleasure and independence. Character has been obliterated by convention. In an odd way, the very stylised dialogue which made me think of Pinter reasserts that point. Human beings communicate in this film to express lust, domination and order- rather than to communicate about their different worlds. Catherine has no apparent interests- her one interest (going outside) is really a symbolic choice by the director to suggest her desire for freedom.

Some reviewers have seen this film and come across with much less complicated feelings about it than mine (take Deborah Ross in the Spectator for example). My own analysis is that this film is in a sense a fable about how extreme constraints on human behaviour produce a humanity drained of everything save for its desire for freedom. The constraints on Catherine and on Anna mean that their personalities are only really visible in their conformity or struggle against those constraints. It is suggestive I think that these two- both of the characters who we feel sympathy with in the film- are left at the end of it both mutely looking into an uncertain future.

The railways in Scotland

I was doing some research a couple of years ago in the British Library and came across John Kerr's Memories Grave and Gay- an account of his life as a school inspector. Kerr is an interesting source for school inspection in the late 19th century but he is also an interesting source for the way in which Scots treated the inspector. Kerr was interested not just in recording the content and the ideology of his inspections but also the way in which he found Scotland itself. One of the most interesting facets of this was transport. Kerr was appointed to be an inspector in 1860 within the 'whole of the north of Scotland, between Dundee and Shetland, with the exception of Perthshire and the Western Islands'. He was one of three men who covered this vast area and he described them as 'regular vagabonds' (p.14). Kerr says in his memoir that he was 'one of the last men in Scotland who did his travelling by the now almost disused pair of saddle-bags' and equipped with waterproofs said he rode several times from Dundee to John O'Groats and back.

Trains were just making it to Scotland in this period. Kerr describes his experiences with them in this fairly long passage.

On the Elgin and Rothes line I saw the Provost of Elgin walk across a field with a letter in his hand, which he waved to the driver of a train going at its usual full speed. The train stopped and the guard took charge of the letter. At Ordens, a siding on the Banff and Buckie branch line, I was instructed to go into this siding and as the train approached, set fire to a newspaper or other material that would make a good blaze and the train would stop. The night was very dark and windy and I failed to set fire to the newspaper, but a stentorian shout which I executed had the same effect and I was taken on board. On another occasion, I called on a school correspondent whose house was about a mile from a station on the Findhorn line. When I proposed to walk back to the station, he said "You needn't take the trouble. I always stop it as it goes past." And he did. (pp. 22-3) 

There is a serious point here beyond the whimsy of stopping trains like taxis. Transport in these remote areas of Scotland was obviously badly used and limited. What Kerr was doing would not have been out of the ordinary to someone in the reign of Macbeth- riding around the northern hamlets and villages. What was different is that there is no indication in his memoir of any fear of highwaymen or bandits- something that anyone doing what he did in centuries past would have faced. Secondly in terms of the railways, I think you can see the fascinating way in which railways came in to life here- in the response of the correspondent you see an attitude to railways that is far less limited to the station than our attitude today- but also depends as Kerr notes on the fact that that line was under used. (Incidentally he points out it was closed by 1902 when he wrote the book- a line that didn't even make the Beeching cull of the early 1960s). The availability of this kind of transport though was only arriving in the Britain of 1860: and that tells us something about the way in which the UK government could project its power. I wonder as well whether it is entirely an accident that the kind of administrative welfare that Kerr represented- with its systems of central funding and inspection- arose at the same time as the mass transport Kerr recognised arriving in the Highlands.

Medieval Poisoning a doorway on the past

I haven't yet finished Stephen Bednarski's book on Margarida du Portu, accused of poisoning in her medieval town in the fourteenth century. Du Portu was accused of poisoning her husband by her brother in law, Raymon, and for the moment I'll leave it there. Bednarski's book is interesting because its a reflexive book. He goes inside his own choices and shows you the different books he might have written. His interest is in family history so the first story he shows you is the story of Margarita and Raymon. Then he shows you how you could tell the same story but focus on the gender aspects or the way that it reveals how Roman law was practiced in a medieval French town. The story becomes illuminated from different points with the different angles of light illuminating different features of the tale.

It is a really interesting way of writing history and one I've not seen much of before. It takes you inside the box with the historian. I found it quite disorientating. I was quite gripped by the story of Du Portu's family and to be suddenly transported back into the confines of Roman legal procedure and how it worked in this case- I found quite disturbing. I also found it spoiled the book for me in some ways- the neat flowing story that my mind wanted was broken up. That's possibly a good thing- but its an interesting thing because it shows to me how much I am dependent on that narrative flow to understand the world. As soon as you present the way that the light shifts depending on how the historian shines the torch, my mind struggles and gets upset.

12 year a slave: views of Washington

After seeing the film, 12 years a slave, I went away and read the book by Solomon Northup, published in 1853 on which the film is based. There are numerous features which aren't in the film but are in the book. One that I thought was really interesting was that the film doesn't make explicit some of the things that Northup says. Northup is very keen to bring out the hypocrisy of the Washington establishment: for example, he talks of Washington, and says of the house that he was imprisoned in

Strange as it may seem, within plain sight of this same house, looking down from its commanding height upon it, was the Capitol. The voices of patriotic representatives boasting of freedom and equality and the rattling of the poor slave's chains, almost commingled. A slave pen within the very shadow of the Capitol.

We can support Solomon's insight with other sources. Solomon also mentions a time when the ships sailed bearing him south, as they passed Mount Vernon, the White Men bared their heads to the memory of George Washington, whether the black slaves did is left to us to imagine.

There were probably good artistic reasons to leave these things out. Slavery is not a live political issue today- but I think they also demonstrate the change of genre that the film represents as opposed to the book. The Book is quite clearly a political polemic: its saying, look America is the land of the free and Washington fought for justice for all- look at how you don't do this. The film is talking about the suffering of the slaves in the past- a suffering that thanks to the sacrifice of US citizens (both black and white) has passed. I can imagine reading the book in 1853 would have been a completely different experience to how we see the film in 2014: the latter is a shocking artefact, the former something more akin to reading about an atrocity today. Our responses are different therefore: the book is trying to rouse anger, the film, understanding and regret. The book fights against actual southerners who believed in slavery, the film against forgetting the suffering.

Twelve Years a Slave

Slavery is a big word. It is a horrific word, one that sums up a horrific reality in which the fortunes of a few were made with the sinews of the many. Its a concept that has been central to European thought since at least Aristotle and the fear of becoming a slave haunts the imagination of most European republican thinkers. Of course slavery became most famous on the western shores of the Atlantic, in the southern United States. I would be surprised if anyone now thought that slavery was in any way justified: the days in which a Calhoun or Alexander Stephens might fulminate on the floor of the senate in support of natural slavery are thankfully long gone. So why does the world need a new film which focuses on slavery and which retells the story of Solomon Northup, a kidnapped slave from the north who was brought to work on the cotton fields of the south for 12 long years? It is a question that some people have asked: I think they are wrong.

Slavery is a word that gets used a lot. Politicians talk about slavery all the time, comparing in America and Britain various political initiatives from their opponents to slavery. We have almost emptied slavery of its reality: it didn't look or feel like Obamacare, I could use other examples but am wary of going round the internet to find them. 12 years a slave brings you face to face with a reconstruction of what slavery might have been like. Based, fairly accurately on the life story of Northup, it doesn't spare any of the brutality. Once he is kidnapped, Northup gets beaten for claiming his real name. On the fields, he gets lashed by overseers and sadistic masters. He gets beaten and attacked by others. Perhaps the violence is not really the shocking element of the film: more its the sign of slaves being stripped down as their masters treat them and talk about them like cattle or horses, beasts whose muscles may be praised rather than humans whose feelings must be respected. (Of course, although the violence seers the screen, the director didn't portray as much as is in the memoir!)

Slavery in this context doesn't just mean theoretical subjugation, it means the real deprivation of freedom. Northup the slave may work even for a benevolent master such as Mr Ford, but when that master decides to sell him, his life is at that master's whim. This is particularly illustrated by the case of Eliza- a fellow slave of Northup in the early part of the film. She became the mistress of her master (as we can see later in the film this was not neccessarily a voluntary relationship): having born him a child, when he dies, she was flung out of his house by his wife and daughter. She was sold into slavery: and her children were sold separately so that Eliza spends most of the early part of the film weeping her loss. It is agonising to watch this innocent woman bewail her loss, a loss that she did not in any way deserve. Slavery reckoned a mother's love as less important than her children's price.

I think there is a real moral point in this film and its one that we should think about ourselves. Slavery reduced people to goods. Solomon forever as a slave is shown not speaking, a silent presence on the stage of history. He can't write- save for in blackberry juice. Only when he meets an abolitionist can his words get north. Without writing, without honest speech, he loses family and name- all the coordinates of his existence. He and his fellow slaves have become mere property. Save of course for the fact that they are not. This is nowhere more ironically portrayed than in the relationship of masters to slave girls: Patsey a young slave girl (amazingly played by Lupita Nyong'o) is treated as an economic asset, a piece of sexual meat and a threat but never as a person by her master. Only Northup treats her thus, by refusing to help her commit suicide. This is part of the fundamental immorality of slavery: 12 years a slave captures this on screen.

This lack of personhood is written through everyday life, it runs through it. So for example when Solomon for a trivial episode is hung by the neck, kids play around his body. McQueen captures the pettiness of the entire system, the bullying songs that were sung in the South, the environment in which slavery took place. The horror is partly the normality: a normality that has everything for a human apart from their humanity. At one point in the film, a slave owner lashes a slave: he responds to a question by telling the questioner that there is no sin in owning property. For him the fact that human beings have become property empties them of their humanity: he can enjoy ridiculing it, he can enjoy sexualising it, brutalising it, battering it, working it into the ground but it can never assert itself.

Perhaps one of the greatest horrors we have as human beings is to be treated not as beings but as things... if so then that's what slavery was in part about and that's what I found this film captured.

All is lost: a film without a character

Who is the central character of All is lost- the recent film starring Robert Redford? I think almost everyone will say that the central character is Redford's man, played outstandingly by the Hollywood veteran. He is the only human being who appears in the film. We watch his face for an hour and a half as his boat is blown hither and thither by the storms of the pacific, as his hopes rise and fall, as he learns to cope with the disasters that continually effect him. We watch him as he responds to the problems that come upon him. We watch him when he writes home a last letter, watch him as he exclaims in a swear word even Mary Whitehouse might have allowed, 'fuck', watch him as he battles to stay alive. So he must be the central character, the psychological presence that defines the film.

If so, then he is a pretty odd character. Character means choice. I am who I am because I chose to eat satsumas rather than grapes, prefer Leeds United to Manchester United, like talking about politics. Do you notice something about those three things: they are all positive choices. I am not forced into any of them. Freedom is in a sense a condition of character because its the space in which character can evolve- that's why Auden's lines about a 'million boots' in line make us cringe- human beings have become mechanisms. In all is lost, Redford's man doesn't make a single decision: all his decisions are merely expedients to survive- they are the decision of a man to cling on to an overhanging rock when teetering on the brink of a drop. They don't offer anything that we can comprehend in terms of character: you can't say anything about what this character loves or likes- you can say he is a fighter and he endures- you cannot say though why he fights or endures.

Equally the thing he fights does not have a character. Nature threatens Redford but there is no sense that it cares. The film moves us away from comforting myths of providence: there are no reasons for Redford to suffer and we can't invent any because we know nothing of him. Nature just is. It buffets him with waves and rewards him with sunshine. Sharks look at him with a greedy eye. Fish pass underneath him, without curiosity. The man is abandoned as the film makes clear against the vastness of the great Pacific ocean and the ocean has no interest in whether he survives or not. If Redford is reacting, he is reacting against forces he does not understand or control- against forces who have no ultimate goal as far as he is concerned at all. He is alone against them because they do not share any companionship with him at all. In that sense Redford's fight is characterless because he cannot respond save by resisting.

I am unsurprised that the Oscar academy didn't know what to do with this picture: Redford's performance is monumental and he deserves the best actor as much as the other nominees (I hasten to add I've only seen American Hustle of the other films) but its not a performance which is easy to categorise or understand. Redford only has a couple of lines of dialogue. The film has no easy message- it isn't about the environment nor the triumph of the human spirit. If anything its about the lack of location of that spirit, the strangeness of the world and its lack of recognition of these hairless bipeds within it. That's a hard message to give an oscar to, but its a rewarding insight into our condition.

Geoffrey Elton and Alexis de Tocqueville

Although the Ancien Regime is still quite close to us in time, since we daily come across men who were born under its laws, it already seems to be lost in the obscurity of the past. The radical revolution which separates us  from it has the same effect as centuries would have- it has cast a veil over everything it did not destroy. Thus few people exist today who might give a precise reply to this simple question: how was the countryside administered before 1789? In fact, it cannot be answered with any accuracy or in any detail unless you have studied, not the books, but the administrative archives or that period (Alexis de Tocqueville The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution)

I love this quotation from Alexis de Tocqueville: in part because it reflects the thought of Geoffrey Elton about history- one of the intellectual legacies that I've grown up in the shadow of. Partly though I think what Tocqueville gets at here is a really interesting distinction. There is a history that we all know and a history that was documented at the time. Neither history is free from distortion: the history that we remember is interpreted through what happened next. You can see this everywhere. Take two periods in American history. The 1850s are always remembered as the prelude to the 1860s: we think of them through the lens of the war that was to come. It can lead to mistakes. Some might argue that the divisiveness of the politics of the 1950s in the UK is forgotten because of the breakthrough of Thatcherism in the 1980s. What comes after often means that we forget about what came before.

Tocqueville's history is based on what he sees as more contemporary evidence and that's a very modern concern. Memory though is important and can itself be underrated. Tocqueville in this way is a predecessor to Ranke- but documents can deceive as much as they can illustrate. To privilege what is recorded over what is not recorded may privilege those activities which are recorded and those actors who author the records. This can have sinister implications. Tacitus in the annals speaks of the control that emperors had over those who kept records and we know from our own century too well the danger of propaganda. However distortion doesn't need to be sinister to be there. For example, Geoffrey Elton's histories of the reign of Henry VIII were focussed on Thomas Cromwell because Cromwell was the master of the records: more recently historians have embraced a more expansive vision of court culture precisely because they recognised that documents may distort. To use another example, documents only preserve the trace of an activity which is documented: take an operation, a document will preserve what the operation was, it will preserve how much it cost, it might even preserve what the medical outcome was and possibly a scale of patient satisfaction. It won't preserve the doctor's forgiving manner, the nurse's smile, the feeling of pain and of relief: those things are lost.

I'm not criticising Tocqueville here- more I'm riffing on his words- but I do think its interesting to think about what he was trying to analyse. He was trying to get to the meaning of an event: the French Revolution. The key question there though is that the meaning of an event may be dual. It may be what the event meant in reality: the actual conditions which provoked and ended up sustaining or failing to sustain that event and the change it brought. It may mean that we are interested in the meaning of the event for those who lived through it- people who might have believed all sorts of inaccurate things about it. Meaning is multifaceted and the stories people tell about events can be more important than the events themselves: the revolution in France for example only meant something to the world because people told stories about it as the origin of democracy or the bourgeois moment of conquest. Its worth us both reexamining the validity of those stories but also enquiring into what stories people told about events: we must go back to the documents for both halves of that picture.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert's death yesterday is a sad moment. There are many reasons I think why its so sad. He was one of those writers that made you feel like he would be fantastic to meet. He wrote with such engagement and enthusiasm that it was hard not to share what he thought. He also incarnated I think one of the key functions of a critic- he was an essayist rather than a writer of articles. The difference is that whereas often reviewers of films seek to write about the film and its story and the performances- Ebert often managed to use the film to think about wider issues. This didn't mean his reviews were an excuse to write about those issues: rather Ebert allowed the film to grow those issues inside his head. I didn't always agree with his reviews- some of them I downright disagreed with- but I always found his reviews interesting to read and rewarding. Sometimes I read a review of a film I wanted to review on this blog and thought having read his article that I couldn't say anything- there wasn't anything left to add. More often I found his perspective was interesting and different. His writing about his later cancer was moving and profound at moments and his blog came across like the blog of someone who you could like.

Amour

I have walked out of films because I found them execrably bad (Four Weddings and a Funeral), I've walked out of films because I thought the history was inaccurate (ok I didn't see JFK in the cinema but I would have....) but I've never walked out of a film because I found it too painful to watch- or not until now. Amour is a wonderful film- but its a deeply disturbing film because it takes you right to the frontier of what human life is at the end. Its not pretty. It deals with a couple in their old age- they come on to the screen as typical representatives of a particular European intellectual and social class, rejoicing in the classical music that postwar respectability has brought them. The day afterwards they have breakfast together but it slowly becomes evident that she is unable to function properly anymore- she is suffering from several little strokes and will eventually lose her mind and her individuality.

The film's title points I think to its subject- and plenty of other reviewers have made this comment- that amour is about love. Its about sexual love between a couple and the way that that becomes at the end the only love in this case that matters. Children, friends, even former pupils cannot reach the woman who can only be exposed in the nakedness of her madness to her lover. In that sense it says that Lear would have company on the heath, if his queen survived. I think this picture of romantic love is of course very relevant. In a society where generations are torn apart culturally and economically and even technologically, its very difficult to see people outside your cohort as your peers. The picture of love here is an assertion of understanding: the husband asserts he understands the wife in a way that daughters and nurses can't- the problem and I've faced this myself in a small way- is that there is an insistant totalitarianism is this assertion of understanding. Its hard to understand someone who is closed off from the world- but as soon as you start saying that you understand them better than anyone else by virtue of your relationship with them, the ethics get cloudy.

Most people talk about amour as though its a film about the power of love and I suppose yes it is- but I think its more powerful as a film about the limits of love. We are what we think and how we behave ultimately. Once only the shell of the human being is left: what is it that you are loving? I think Emmanuelle Riva's performance conveys this perfectly- the cultivated older woman slips into being a grotesque infant, one without the capacity for growth. What surrounds her is her husband's memories and we call that love: but in reality whereas love is often seen as a moment of communication- this kind of love is a deliberate deception about the continuing of something that has just left. Or rather we are left with the sense that the husband for all his charity and ability to communicate, just can't break through the wall to his wife- can't communicate to her.

Epictetus being pleasant

'While you are kissing your child', Epictetus once said, 'murmur under your breath, tomorrow it may be dead.' 'Ominous words' they told him. 'Not at all' he said 'but only signifying an act of nature. Would it be ominous to speak of the gathering of the ripe corn'.

This comes from Marcus Aurelius's meditations but its a fascinating vignette about Epictetus. I think it demonstrates something about the ancient world: after all his advice was much more practical in the days when infant mortality and young child mortality were much higher. In one of Chinua Achebe's novels about Nigeria the young Nigerian is not reckoned a full human until they have passed 12, before then they might easily die and I think Epictetus is making a similar point. Whereas Achebe's characters think religiously though, Epictetus is using a philosophical comparison to nature- and perhaps this comparison allows us to explain a bit more of the psychology behind Stoicism. Its a theory of acceptance of the world- elsewhere in the Meditations, Aurelius says that the fool experiences the world through sensation, the wise man through action- note he doesn't say that the wise man experiences the world through thinking. What's going on here is a theory of acceptance.

Marcus's attitude to the present

I'm sure that everyone has thought about the meaning of a particular metaphysical proposition for their own lives. I rather like Marcus Aurelius on this:

Either things must have their origin in one single intelligent source and all fall into place to compose, as it were, one single body- in which case no part ought to complain of what happens for the good of the whole- or else the world is nothing but atoms and their confused minglings and dispersions. So why be so harassed?

The argument is of course very comforting! Its also interesting that those are the alternatives- picking up on an earlier post they look still like alternatives that seem real to us today.

The concept of Infinity

One of the least appealing modern traits is to imagine that we've discovered everything new- in some ways that's true. The ancient world did not have television and were not plagued by endless reruns of Friends on E4. But equally they did have concepts that we might not have expected them to have: take this statement from Marcus Aurelius: 'the phrase infinity may pass, even if the world be in fact administered in finite cycles'. It seems to me what this throwaway comment is getting at is that there are different types of infinity: one might be an infinity which is truly infinite, one might be an infinity that is infinite because the finity that really exists is unccountable or unknowable and a last might be that infinity is a reasonable approximation of a set of a finite number of cycles. I'm happy with whichever infinity you want Marcus to define- but the fact seems to be here is an ancient author, not a mathematician, with at least two concepts of infinity.

A sobering reflection

Mislead yourself no longer, you will never read these notebooks again now, nor the annals of the bygone Romans and Greeks, nor that choice selection of writings you have put by for your old age. (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)

I read this passage from the Meditations with nothing but despair- for since Marcus died, all those centuries ago, how much has been published? How many learned men and women have worked and slaved away at scholarship? You could get amazingly dizzy thinking of all the fields that you need to understand to really understand even one fraction of human knowledge- one subject today. Think about the history of Marcus's life: just to read all the books about the Meditations would probably take at least the length of a post-graduate qualification, probably half an academic career. Then move on to the think about the archaeology and sociology of that period- its interpretations by further periods and more and more. Intellectual vertigo existed in Marcus's life- it exists just as much today.

Marcus Aurelius and monarchy

Monarchy is distinguished from tyranny by several things in the classical tradition. One might be that monarchs are restrained, whereas tyrants are servants of appetite. I've just come across another really interesting reflection in Marcus Aurelius's meditations

Through him [Marcus's brother Severus] I came to know of Thrasea, Cato, Helvidius, Dion and Brutus, and became acquainted with the conception of a community based on equality and freedom of speech for all, and a monarchy concerned primarily to uphold the liberty of the subject.

Marcus's statement here is fascinating. Monarchy is coupled with liberty. Furthermore within the statement is an implicit rebuke to tyranny: Thrasea was executed by Nero, as was his son Helvidius. Cato died at the hands of Caesar. Brutus could refer either to Lucius Brutus- who slew Tarquin- or Marcus Brutus- who slew Caesar himself and died at the hands of Octavian. These are emblems not just of good citizenship in a republic- indeed none of them lived under a republic (if you agree with Harriet Flowers' account of the Roman state)- they were emblems of rebellion. Its as though Prince William were to sign off a letter about the liberty under a crown by saying that he believed in the ideal of liberty under monarchy as preached by Cromwell and Tom Paine.

How could Marcus say this? In part I think its because he shared a philosophical attitude with these men- throughout his meditations he stresses the importance of standing up for one's own beliefs and opinions- being true to onesself in the ghastly modern phrase. Marcus means something more by this than we might- in the sense that he sees every single human reason as an expression of divine reason. In part I think its because the contrast he draws here is between one type of 'bad' monarchy and another more legitimate 'good' monarchy: because Rome's system was not hereditary, Marcus is not involved in the fate of Nero or Caesar in the same way as Victoria was in the fate of Charles. His belief system brings together these two conceptions- the first of self control and the second of good monarchy- I think through something else- which is the image of a good statesman. Curiously enough a rebellious subject may become the emblem of a good statesman in Marcus's world- so Brutus looks more like a monarch than does Nero. If that's true then lauding these individuals for their steadfastness in the public interest becomes in a way a certificate that men can hold to the principles of good statesmanship. In that sense- the rebellious subject is the mirror image of the good monarch- the tyrant of the flattering subject.

Bertrand Russell and FC Coplestone

Here is a rather interesting debate on the existence of God between Bertrand Russell and F.C. Coplestone- which the Open University edited and broadcast. I'll let it stand for itself.

The Master

I saw the Master a couple of weeks ago and tried to review it then but couldn't find the words. I'm not sure I can find them now. I was deeply impressed by the film. Images from it keep returning to me during the day and the night. They are not pleasant images. The Master was not a pleasant film. They are not scary either. They neither terrify nor appall. There is no hideous injustice in the film. There is nothing that cries out to the viewer as a deed that must be avenged. Rather the sense I've got- the enduring sense I've got- is of a very strange world. The world of the Master- the world of religious indoctrination- is weird. It could turn unpleasant very easily and there are plenty of hints in the film to suggest how that might happen. It could turn unreasonable. Ultimately though in this film it is not unpleasant- it is just strange.

The Master is a film about a science fiction writer in the states who founds a religious cult. That's what the publicity rightly says. Its also a film about a soldier returning post World War Two to find his place in society. It is also a film about how men sublimate the desire for sex into religion. It also might be a film about how followers can become even more zealous than their religious masters. I think though more than anything its a film about the 1950s in America. There is something in it that reminds me of Pleasantville- the film in which two modern teenage kids- Reese Witherspoon and Tobey Maguire- find themselves in the midst of a Happy Days like sitcom and proceed to wreak sexual and psychological havoc. It reminded me of Pleasantville because of the same sense of restraint and violence.

The Master is about a man who returns from war, damaged. He returns to a world in which all he basically wants is sex. Joaquin Phoenix's character is not very pleasant: he is positively unpleasant. He'll sleep with anything- even piled sand on a beach and kill for kicks. What restrains him is the fact that he finds religion. Under the tutelage of the Master, he sublimates his violence and his sexual anger into the practice of religious dogma, the dance of cultic movement. Within the group, he is seen as dangerous- the Master's daughter wants to sleep with him, the Master's wife wants him expelled and in a curious way, both are sensing the same thing: he represents the possibility of change and of disruption, of violence. The Master feels that the real test of his repressive system is whether it can cope with this ultimate explosion of the human unconsciousness- in a sense the film deals with the fundemental question of the fifties, how does one repress the memory of war and the difficulty of desire?

Perhaps that's why my favourite character in the whole film is neither of the male protagonists but Amy Adams's wife of the Master. It is because she incarnates the double sense of the film- this masterpiece of repression and desire. She will permit her husband to have affairs, to do anything, so long as the religious movement survives- and she will turn on anyone who in any way damages that survival. Its a fantastic piece of acting- never has a fanatic been brought to screen with such tender ferociousness. Amy Adams both smiles tenderly and stabs at the same time. Its a terribly horrifying display of what repression is. I was wrong the Master is terrifying: its all in Adams's smile.

Theseus

What's the purpose of writing history? Some people might say "to tell the truth" and that's a perfectly reasonable response- its there in one of the first history books when Herodotus talks about making sure that the deeds of Greeks and Barbarians are not forgotten. Some more postmodern people might talk about writing different narratives of the past and that's legitimate too: whether its women's history or black history or the history of the poor, that kind of history has added a lot to our understanding. We don't write history from the perspective of white men anymore and that's all to the good: we are more sensitive to the fact that there are other stories about the past that need to be read and written. These two modern senses of history though don't really help us understand why someone would write a history about someone who was a King but who they believed almost certainly never existed. Such a history isn't true but nor does it rescue some marginalised group from the margins- so why would you write it?

I can see your raised eyebrow right now- why Gracchi are you asking that kind of question. I'm asking it because it gets right to the heart of something I find fascinating about ancient historians- because they did write that kind of history. Take Plutarch. I'm currently reading his life of Theseus. Early on he admits that to write a life of Theseus goes beyond the 'solid foundation of fact'. He promises his readers that he will attempt to purify fable and 'make her submit to reason' but he acknowledges that she may defy him and he may not be able to tame her. (The verbs are lovely- the historian here is male, the myth is female and the language is that of 'submit' and 'defies'. Let me stick to my task though and not wonder off into an excursus on Plutarch's sexism!) The question therefore remains why should he write such a life?

Plutarch is quite coy. Firstly it must be said he does accept that something around Theseus's life is probably true. At the end of the life for example he talks about Cimon's discovery of the bones of Theseus and his restitution of them to Athens and talks about Theseus's qualities as a King- his ability for example to help the poor as though these were real things. But I think something else is going on here.

Plutarch's history is being used in a two different senses. Firstly he wants to tell the story of Theseus because he thinks Theseus was an admirable man- in that sense Theseus's life is one of instruction and he takes moments in the life to compare between Theseus and other politicians. For example he suggests that Theseus thought of Hercules like Themistocles later thought about Miltiades: Plutarch sees some aspects of politics as universal through time- a key difference to a modern historian who would stress discontinuity rather than continuity. Amongst those continuities is the continuity that Plutarch sees in a state. So Plutarch's lives are mapping out the histories of Athens and Rome- by addressing Theseus as well as Romulus Plutarch maps out a continuity in the city's characters. In both cases, the continuity means that the myth doesn't have to be true- it is the universal quality that has to be true. Plutarch is using his history to explore the nature of Athens and the nature of envy, and the key issue is whether he is right about them- his story is just an illustration.