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.

Enlightenment Economics and the US constitution

What did the writers of the US constitution think about the major issues of economic policy? The question has a vital political importance in America because it is tied to an argument about the legitimate sources of law. Some judges and scholars argue that the original writers' interpretation of the text that they wrote must take precedence over any later interpretation: consequently they argue Americans should refer to the past in thinking about their institutions. I'm not interested in that argument today. What I am interested in is another argument- which is what did the writers of the constitution actually think about economics. 

Renee Lettow Lerner has written an exceedingly short article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy on exactly this issue. She basically argues that in the eighteenth century Europeans in general were moving from one theory of economics- in which national wealth was crucial and mercantilism was axiomatic- to another in which the free market promoted the wealth of all. She sees Adam Smith as the crucial influence in this movement and argues that British power rested on a swift adaptation of Smith's ideas. Furthermore she suggests that the framers of the US constitution came to their task with a copy of Smith in one hand and a draft in the other. She argues that luckily Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were away from Philadelphia and consequently the framers were able to draft a Smithian document. 

Professor Lerner's characterisation of European history is a caricature at the least. There were plenty of people in Europe in 1800 who did not believe in the free market- plenty who held to Rousseauian ideals of Republican liberty as opposed to Smith's view of a self sustaining market. This caricature is not the centre of her argument though: that revolves around the individuals at Philadelphia. It is significant that Professor Lettow cites almost no historians of the political thought of the period- no John Pocock, no Bernard Bailyn, no Gordon Wood. Although she derides Jefferson as an agrarian, she fails to mention that many of his attitudes were shared by others at the convention: James Maddison for example derided paper money and despaired of easy credit. For many Americans, Machiavelli and Cicero were as key to the revolution as Locke and Hobbes.

Professor Lerner's views are obviously part of a current legal argument- and in that argument I have no stake. However there is a historical question as well as a legal question at the heart of this argument. The historical question is did the people who framed and the people who ratified the US constitution (the people who granted it authority were those who ratified it, not those who framed it!)- did those people believe universally in the economics of Adam Smith. Given that so many of them believed in a different kind of economics and elected an agrarian (to use Lerner's words- I would prefer Republican) Thomas Jefferson as President 13 years later- I think that case is uncertain to say the least.

The Failure of Peter Jackson

When I was 12 and first read the Lord of the Rings I loved it. When I saw the films which came out later, I felt betrayed. Let me show you why and then explain why I think Jackson made the choices he made. The youtube clip below shows a key moment from the Two Towers. In the film, Saruman has possessed the King of Rohan, Theoden and Gandalf deals with the possession. In the book Gandalf persuades the King to be more vigourous and cast away the pretence of his old age. This key scene in the Two Towers has the same outcome in both versions of the tale- but in the film Gandalf is a wizard who does a magic trick, in the book Gandalf is a wizard who acts as a wise counsellor. The difference is pretty profound and disappointed me when I saw the scene.



However Jackson's choice I think, on rereading, reveals a weakness in the architecture of the book at this point. Tolkien quite clearly means that Gandalf should argue Theoden out of his dotage and onto his steed to fight evil- but he doesn't show us argument. Gandalf asserts that this is what Theoden should do. After many years of sitting depressed in his halls about old age, Theoden discards the counsellor- Wormtongue- who supported the latter course after a speech from Gandalf and then proceeds to mount his steed and ride away. He surprises Gandalf with his own dedication. Tolkien's choice is undoubtedly more interesting but he gives us nothing to explain Theoden's decision: he shows us none of the reasoning, none of the mechanism. His story is psychological but lacks psychological depth. Partly that's because Tolkien is writing a kind of myth- possibly one that Jackson does not understand- because what Tolkien was doing was not writing a fantasy novel but a myth about consciousness. In that sense both psychological motivation and magic do not fit his purposes: what he writes is assertion based because he writes in a mode which seeks to assert not to explain.

Sadness and the Lord of the Rings

I'm rereading the Lord of the Rings for the first time in a long time. I first read it when I was 12 and loved the books and the BBC radio series. It is strange to come back to it after all that time and some things in it seem overblown. My 12 year old self did not take offence at the bombast in the book nor did he notice the racial divisions within Middle Earth. One thing though that he noticed and I notice now is the deep sadness that permeates the book. Tolkien's vision is filled with pathos and the ebbing of the tide. The Ents ride to their last fight. The men of the West may be accomplishing their last great deed. The great heroes of the story are flawed and mortal and even victory is tinged with death and disappointment. In part this is a legacy of Tolkien's religious vision: the Lord of the Rings is as much a Catholic epic as Lewis's Narnia is an Anglican ethic. He picks up though on other elegy- rereading it I can't hope thinking of Tennyson's line on Virgil 'Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind'.

The Lord of the Rings is based on sadness. I think its wrong to read that sadness in the light of Britain's long withdrawing roar from the world. Tolkien himself pointed to the story's origins in the war of 1914 not the war of 1939: however historians now look at the First War, at the time Britain was a victor and her empire expanded. If the world was ever painted pink, it was in the 1920s. I don't think the Lord of the Rings should be read as a sad epic about national or political decline. I don't read myths of socialism into the book nor was Tolkien writing about liberalism (which he probably would have hated). I think the sadness of the book is much more tied to the industrialisation of England. The fall of Isengard is about the fall of the industrial city scape: the way that Tolkien describes Isengard, this black stone fortress, with claws that rise to the skies, almost evokes Fritz Lang's visions of modernity in the 1920s films (which I doubt the Oxford scholar would have ever seen). Tolkien in his introduction says that the new mill in Hobbiton was based on his own personal memories of a new mill near where he grew up.

Tolkien no doubt did not write just about industrialisation- but I think its there and may be at the root of the sadness that he expresses. His story form is archaic itself: Aragorn, Eomer, Gandalf, these are all characters whose roots are medieval not modern. Even the speech is consciously archaic. There are many reasons why this is interesting. Firstly I think it betrays something I feel often as well: a sense that the lives I have studied are now all forgotten, passed away and gone and that this is unbelievably sad. To be a scholar (and I am no scholar) is to get deeply involved in the lives of people who breathed and lived and loved as much and as tenderly as any of us: but have now vanished. Perhaps I import my own attitudes into Tolkien's work- but its a meaning his writing has to me. A lamentation that the past is past. Secondly I think he shows us how close the industrial revolution in England is- even to us. To put it in context, he could mourn the demise of an England that he almost remembered- and he died in the 1970s.

Tolkien may have had more in mind than just these sadnesses when he came to write his book. His battle scenes and the walk over the dead marshes are definitely filled with memories of the first war. I think some of the grief of parting which is in this novel: whether its of Elrond and Arwen, of the company which splits almost as it is formed, of the Hobbits at the grey havens must be modelled on the deaths of his own friends in the 14 war. I think though these other sadnesses permeate the book as well- it is strange to think that this most modern of genres has at its back a kind of elegy for a world which has been lost.

Weather Forecasting

Does anything ever change? It seems not. In 1863 Lincoln appointed Francis Capen meteorologist to the war department, however he soon regretted his choice:

It seems to me Mr Capen knows nothing about the weather in advance. He told me three days ago that it would not rain until the 30th of April or 1st of May. It is raining now and has been for ten hours. (Abraham Lincoln 28th April 1863)

So much for weather forecasting.

The Selfishness of Salmon Chase

Following on from seeing Lincoln on Saturday, I'm currently in the midst of Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals- her account of the Lincoln administration. I remember it really as the book everyone talked about when Barack Obama appointed Hillary Clinton in 2008: apparantly Obama had read and reread it before he made that decision,. Whether that's true or not, the idea of writing a book which concentrates on the relationships between leading politicians rather than focussing on the heroic figure of Lincoln (or say in a British context Churchill) is interesting. That noone has done this for the 1940 cabinet is fascinating.

I'll write a bit more on that once I've finished the book though. Today I want to think about something else. Goodwin begins her book by taking us through the histories of the men who ran against each other for the Republican nomination for President in 1860: Abraham Lincoln, William H Seward of New York, Salmon Chase of Ohio and Edward Bates of Missouri. They are all fascinating characters but Chase is the one I'm going to write about tonight because one of the things that earned him his reputation was a case which I think offers a fascinating insight into his personality.

The case is that of a farmer called Van Zandt. I'm relying entirely on Goodwin here for her summary: basically Van Zandt picked up some slaves on an April night in 1841 and promised to help them escape to freedom. 2 slave catchers acosted him on the route and found the slaves and the owner of the slaves brought a suit against Van Zandt for harboring and concealing the slaves- essentially helping to 'steal' their property. The key thing about the case, which Salmon Chase took up in the Ohio courts and then Chase and Seward prosecuted in the Supreme Court, was that if he lost Van Zandt would be ruined.

What Chase did was bring a case which would almost certainly lose. As Goodwin argues it, he argued before the courts that slavery was unjust, unconstitutional and could not therefore be maintained in law. Think about what that argument is. Its an argument on principle. As soon as Chase made it, three things instantly followed from it. Firstly Chase acquired a reputation as a stalwart opponent of slavery who could make a principled argument against it- hence he obtained an appeal to others who shared his values. Secondly making that principled argument meant that the cause of American anti-slavery was pushed along- was articulated even to the highest cause in the land. Thirdly it meant that Van Zandt would lose his case- no court would strike down slavery as property on a case such as his- especially when that court as the Supreme Court had, had a southern majority.

Van Zandt was completely ruined- he lost his land, property, children and life. Chase went on to serve in the US Senate, in the governorship of Ohio, in the cabinet of Lincoln and on the Supreme Court. Slavery was abolished. I'm not saying that Chase was entirely selfish, Goodwin suggests that his ambition was married to his belief and that sounds right. What I'm trying to get at and what I think is interesting here is that Chase's strong belief, allied to his ambition, rendered him blind to the interests of the individual whose case he was defending. I'm not sure what I think of this as an individual act of morality but I think its revealing of the priorities of the man- who probably could think more about the abstract needs of the slaves than the concrete difficulties of the man in front of him.

A thought on Lincoln

At one point in the film Lincoln that Steven Spielburg has just released, Lincoln comes face to face with his great radical republican opponent Thadeus Stevens and they argue about slavery. Stevens says and I cannot remember the actual words, but near enough says that Lincoln is a compromiser. He argues that he had always known what was right and wrong and had fought for the repeal of slavery for years and years. Stevens compares himself to a compass which always points north, Lincoln he says veers about all over the map. The rejoinder from Lincoln is equally powerful. Daniel Day Lewis's Lincoln responds that yes he is compromiser: but he wants to get things done. He compares himself to a traveller, journeying with a compass. Of course he knows where north is but sometimes he has to go south and then east to go round a swamp, sometimes west to go over a mountain pass. He asks Stevens rhetorically what use it would be if the traveller confronted with a desert and a swamp which were impassable, just continued to assault them. A bit more subtlety and the traveller might find his way north.

In the context of the film- the debate matters because it sets up Stevens to later accommodate the northern moderates by implying that repealing slavery will not bring in black equality. I think there are some wider points that are interesting though that flow from the conversation. The most important and probably most surprising to modern ears is the simple fact that this conversation takes place in the film after the civil war. The North had won- and yet still the problems of the war had not gone away. Civil Wars don't resolve things in that way. The English Civil War is the same: you still had to think about the royalists in 1647. What Lincoln is arguing with Stevens about are two alternative attitudes about the end of an ideological civil war. The first attitude (associated with Stevens here) is the attitude which says, we won, we now go in, reorganise our opponents, impose military rule and hope that they come round to our view. The second attitude (associated here with Lincoln) is that we won- now we can begin negotiations again: maybe this time we can get free slaves- but we might not get black equality till further down the line.

I'm not going to say that one is right or wrong or works or doesn't work. The important thing I think here is that both courses of action have costs. What Lincoln as a film is good at is portraying that cost. So Lincoln's view has an obvious cost: it is what happened. In 1865 the black slaves were free. Blacks were not free really in the south though until the 1960s and the Civil Rights act. Jim Crow was able to rule in the south for a full century after Lincoln's abolition. On the other hand the film makes it clear just what the price of conviction was: hundreds of thousands died in the civil war and all that achieved was the abolition of slavery. How many more would have had to die in the occupation of the south that Stevens wanted. I expect almost everyone reading this has strong views one way or the other. I thought the excellent thing about Spielberg's film was that it allowed you to see the strengths of both cases.

The Captain of Kopenich

On Tuesday I went to a play at the National Theatre with some friends- an adaptation of a German classic the Captain of Kopenich.

We opened at a prison with all the men (disrespectfully) listening to an old warden recounting stories about Sedan and the victory of the Prussians over the French. One of the prisoners to be released that day- Voigt- has no papers to be released with and therefore no legal personality in outside society. Those two sentences set up what is interesting about the Captain of Kopenich- as adopted at the National at the moment- on the one hand the cult of reminiscence and the military, on the other the man who has no name and therefore no chance within society. That is until he, by chance, comes across the uniform of a captain within the Germany army, masquerades as said Captain to get a passport, fails and eventually only succeeds in doing so by... you'll have to watch the play to find out but the realisation of his plan is amusing.

The point of the play seems to be specific to its time. The play is set by the director as though it was the 1930s in Germany. Great displays that resemble the silent film Metropolis are set up behind the set. You can see and feel the atmosphere of pre-war jingoism: we are off to fight the French at every opportunity. Perhaps its just what I've been reading recently, but there is a certain poignancy about those scenes- if the stress on Prussian militarism plays a bit much to type and prejudice. The point though is well made. Germany in 1910 and in 1930 was a heavy militarised society. Something of that cult of the military went into what happened in 1914. Jonathan Steinberg argues as much in his book about Bismark: so do Chris Clark and Norman Stone in their books which I have written about on this blog. The cult of the military was important to Germany: Prussia, founded as an army with a country attached, had founded the new German empire and founded it through military success.

The second dilemma is also true and perhaps even more interesting. Voigt has no papers and therefore no personality. The play doesn't really play with this as an idea enough. The play is set in 1910 when two things drive the creation of papers for people (don't forget that until 1914 most European states did not have passports). The first thing was conscription- the Boer war in Britain revealed that the British poor were just unable to fight for example. The second related phenomenon was the welfare state. To have either conscription or the welfare state you need to know who your citizens are. Taking England as an example, in the 18th Century noone knew how many Englishmen there were- quite simply because services were administered by parishes. As long as the clergyman or local notable knew who was who: it didn't matter what Whitehall thought. In a world with conscription and welfare, Whitehall and its equivalents have to know who people are. Voigt's dilemma is a real one but it is a much more modern one than the director gave it credit for: and its a German one for Bismark's welfare state was amongst the most advanced in Europe.

These are interesting ideas but the play at the National disappointed me because it did not really take them further- and the points it did make- gestures towards 1914 and the Nazis were too broad. Much of the first half of this Captain was made up of broad humour and platitude- both of which left me tired and grumpy. I confess at the interval I walked out in a mood, wondering if I should walk back in. The second half focussing on the military issue was much better but still just played either issue for laughs: both issues have more to them than the play revealed- a pity as it was based on a real case and the original text is supposed to be a classic (no doubt this was heavily adapted).

Ancient Israel

I'm fascinated by ancient Israel- not for religious reasons but because for religious reasons documents have survived from a very ancient civilisation and from some quite interesting people in that civilisation.  William Dever's book on the origins of Israel is really interesting, not primarily because of its theological content. It basically argues that one story in the Bible (the Exodus story) is less likely to be true than another story in the Bible (Judges) when it comes to explaining who were the Ancient Israelites. That's interesting because it sheds light on a question that I think is important. If we exclude for a  moment theological explanations about why the idea of monotheism arose, and leave those as beyond the bounds of this article: we are still left trying to account for why monotheism arose and what the inspiration for the religious literature of the Bible was in historical terms.

Dever's account basically argues that the people we call Israelites- he calls them proto-Israelites- were Canaanites. If you imagine the ancient world in the second millennia BC- you are imagining a world that has been hit by economic crisis. We know that many of the great ancient states of that era were disturbed: Egypt was invaded by mysterious 'sea peoples', the Myceneans vanished never again to rise. Dever posits that all this stuff had an impact on Canaan. Falling farm yields, rising prices, rising inequality: these are all the attributes of crisis. And in letters from the Kings of Canaan to the Egyptians we can see these crises impacting on Canaan in those ways.

So the story he puts together goes like this. Groups of people in the Canaanite towns became frustrated and irritated and moved. They moved up into the hills around the coastal areas- into the hills near Jerusalem and began farming there. They elected their own chiefs. These chiefs fought with the Canaanite states below. He suggests this makes sense of the archaeological evidence which describes an increase in population in this hill country (and shows no record of the kinds of conquest that Joshua is said to have made)- and of Egyptian evidence which names Israel as the hill country. He devotes a lot of time to proving this- and I don't have either the expertise or the patience to rehearse the argument.

The implications though are really fascinating. Firstly they suggest that the Bible's attitudes to wealth and poverty are very much the attitudes of peasant farmers who were faced with inequality and mounting debt. The problem of debt slavery- so intrinsic to later societies right up until and beyond colonial Africa- is not unknown in the Bible and reflects this kind of societal transformation. Secondly the Bible's model of statehood must be influenced by this early history: so the Book of Judges becomes a very interesting text because it shows a movement from poverty and chieftenship to Kingship.