“Not attractive – seductive”: Good versus Evil in John Buchan’s The Three Hostages

The Three Hostages (1924) is the fourth of John Buchan’s five novels centred on Richard Hannay. The first three entries in the series, The Thirty-nine Steps (1915), Greenmantle (1916) and Mr. Standfast (1919), are often considered a wartime trilogy. Hostages, coming several years later, is a departure in that the immediate threat of the world war has receded. Hannay, however, is no less anxious, his beloved England no less threatened by foreign contamination. Contamination seems the right word here, because the physical threat of the war years has been replaced with what Hannay considers a moral threat.

The threat facing Hannay and his vision of England in the 1920s is more diffuse and indefinable than what came before. It manifests itself in a bewildering variety of ways. There is “this chatter about psychoanalysis”, which is “half-baked”. There is the revolutionary disturbance in Ireland (made a “Free State” in 1921), which is evidence of “a dislocation of the mechanism of human reasoning, a general loosening of screws”. There are all those places in central Asia which are “run by seedy little gangs of communist Jews”. “The facts”, in short, “are no longer sober.” (Buchan, The Complete Richard Hannay Stories, Wordsworth, 2010, p. 578).

In the fantasy scape of this novel there must be a single thread holding it all together, an embodiment of all this chaos and degeneration. It is found, a few chapters in, to be located in the person of Dominic Medina, a charismatic politician and poet in London. Medina is very much in the tradition of Carlyle’s Great Man: he is great not at one thing, but at seemingly all things. He is surrounded by an aura of greatness. He is charming, preternaturally handsome and many things besides.

I’ll tell you what he is beyond doubt – he’s rather a great man. Hang it, Dick, you must have heard of him. He’s one of the finest shots living, and he’s done some tall things in the exploration way, and he was the devil of a fellow as a partisan leader in South Russia. Also – though it may not interest you – he’s an uncommon fine poet.

(603)

Just as Arthur Conan Doyle gave voice to a distrust of the Great Man in The Stark Munro Letters, so Buchan sees universal talent as having a somewhat diabolical quality. Hannay is certainly impressed by Medina, and in a rather surprising way: “He fascinated me as a man is fascinated by a pretty woman” (611). However, he comes to see him as not just a threat to national security, but an embodiment of evil. This novel thus becomes more Manichean than its predecessors as evil attains a purity hitherto unknown. Hannay has a sneaking admiration for his German wartime opponents, but here he grows fevered as he tries to articulate his strength of aversion to Medina:

I know no word to describe how he impressed me except “wickedness.” He seemed to annihilate the world of ordinary moral standards, all the little rags of honest impulse and stumbling kindness with which we try to shelter ourselves from the winds of space. His consuming egotism made life a bare cosmos in which his spirit scorched like a flame. […] Medina made an atmosphere which was like a cold bright air in which nothing can live. He was utterly and consumedly wicked, with no standard which could be remotely related to ordinary life.

(739)

It is all rather vague but serves to ratchet up the jeopardy. We know we are in the face of evil, albeit it is more a case of telling than showing.

So while the wartime trilogy involve two great powers fighting to be top dog, in The Three Hostages, it is good, represented by the English status quo, against evil. This evil comes in the form of Medina, with his links to bolshevism, Irish nationalism and various troubles in central Asia. We know little of his background, but he is described as “mainly Irish” and has spent considerable time on “the great valleys and the windy tablelands of Central Asia”(741). Thus he is a dangerous and terrifying amalgam of East and West. That, indeed, is central to the not very precise plan he has for world domination: “There has never, as I have said, been a true marriage of East and West, but when there is, its seed will rule the world” (663).

Medina’s favourite tool is hypnosis, which Buchan’s early readers would have associated both with the aforementioned “chatter about psychoanalysis” (Freud was an advocate of hypnosis in his early days) and with transcendental consciousness techniques associated broadly with the East. Hannay’s “intractable bedrock of commonplaceness” (624) prevents him from ever being fully hypnotised, though, and this resistance to Medina’s techniques proves key to the development of the novel. Hannay is nevertheless deeply impressed by Medina and repeatedly notes an urge to submit to the masterful temper of the Great Man.

Similarly, the notably un-Buchanian locale of the dancing club that plays a large part in the plot is a place of moral degradation but, still, seduction. Hannay’s wife Mary dances here, and does so very well, apparently, heavily made up and scantily dressed, in close embrace with another man. Here is a form of expression otherwise entirely denied to the Hannays, whose relationship we can only presume to be physical and affectionate (they have a son after all), but insofar as we are shown it, is respectful, productive and very similar to Hannay’s relationships with his friends. She is more physically intimate with her fellow dancer (who is, like her, in the club on a spying mission) than we ever read of her being with her husband.

In the dancing club things get blurred, perhaps even fall apart. (This is the era of Yeats’ “Second Coming” and Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, after all.) Hannay’s centre holds, ultimately, but when he, believed to be hypnotised, is being massaged by Medina’s aged mother, and the “long soft strokes” of her fingers induce “a pleasant langour beginning to creep down my neck and spine”, we note that Hannay is being afforded a form of physical pleasure hitherto undocumented in the series. In these scenes, the implication appears to be that a miasma of danger and evil surrounds any sort of physical intimacy and the pleasure derived therefrom. Hannay’s ambivalence is clear in his description of Mrs Medina’s appearance:

I realised that it was the most wonderful face of a woman I had ever looked on. And I realised in the same moment that I hated it, that the beauty of it was devilish, and the soul within was on fire with all the hatred of Hell.

(655)

The vertiginous leaps in Hannay’s reaction disorientate the reader, and it is similar with his reaction to Medina: beautiful yet hateful; great and terrible; or “not attractive, – seductive” (721), as Mary puts it. We know Hannay must defeat the interloper, but this is not wartime and for the first time his austere character is tested by the attraction of a side of life inexpressible within his ideology. Ultimately, that unease is channelled into his disgust for Medina and his associates, and Hannay hates like he has never done before. But though the prose threatens to overheat at times, that does not detract from the compelling quality of this book, and Hannay’s return to duty was worth it not only from the point of view of national security and morality, but from that of an immensely ripping yarn.

Harriet the Spy and the Heroism of Debt

Harriet the Spy, published in 1964, is a children’s book about a young girl who wants to be a writer and believes that to do so she needs to know everything and see everything. She spies on everyone in the neighbourhood, and writes everything down in a diary. As she is an observant and rather judgmental young person, the entries in her diary are sometimes cutting and insulting, especially regarding her schoolmates.

THAT PINKY WHITEHEAD IS THE MOST DISGUSTING THING I EVER SAW. WHAT MUST HIS MOTHER HAVE THOUGHT THE FIRST TIME SHE LOOKED AT HIM? SHE MUST HAVE THROWN UP.

Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh (HarperCollins, 2016), p. 228. [Harriet’s diary entries are in all caps throughout the book.]

SHE’S SO DULL IF I WAS HER I COULDN’T STAND MYSELF. I GUESS IT’S NOT MONEY THAT MAKES PEOPLE DULL. THERE IS A LOT I DON’T KNOW ABOUT THIS THING OF BEING DULL.

p. 57

She can be equally mean in person. With a classmate whose father is absent she initiates the following exchange:

[S]he asked Rachel Hennessey why she didn’t have a father living in the house. Actually what she said was, “You don’t have a father, do you, Rachel?” in a fairly conversational tone. Rachel looked at her, horrified, and yelled, “I do TOO.” Harriet said briskly, “Oh, no, you don’t.” “I do too,” Rachel shouted. “Well, he doesn’t love you.” “He does too.” “Well, then why doesn’t he live with you?” And Rachel burst into tears.

p. 243

This exchange is not entirely unprovoked as the class including Rachel are ganging up on Harriet during this part of the book. I will not go into detail on the plot leading up to that – the book is worth reading in full. Suffice it to say that Harriet is capable of being mean. However, she is not unsympathetic. She is unendingly curious. Her parents are well-to-do but slightly neglectful. Her nanny Ole Golly is attentive and encouraging but stern and emotionally reserved. Harriet doesn’t get people but she really wants to, and that is at the root of her spying. She has many questions, and they are good questions:

LIFE IS A GREAT MYSTERY. IS EVERYBODY A DIFFERENT PERSON WHEN THEY ARE WITH SOMEBODY ELSE?

p. 97

WHY DON’T THEY SAY WHAT THEY FEEL? OLE GOLLY SAID “ALWAYS SAY EXACTLY WHAT YOU FEEL. PEOPLE ARE HURT MORE BY MISUNDERSTANDING THAN ANYTHING ELSE.”

p. 170

Harriet is an interesting character, intelligent and well-meaning but somewhat at odds with her environment and having difficulty expressing herself in a socially acceptable way.

In 2021, Apple TV+ released for streaming a series based on the book. The book and the platform are an uncomfortable mixture. One is sharp, incisive and confrontational, the other designed to be uplifting, inclusive and family-oriented. The most popular product of Apple TV+ so far is Ted Lasso, the famously kind and optimistic comedy series. Its determination to stay on the sunny and inoffensive side is typical of Apple TV+ content. How would the acid-tongued Harriet fare in such a setting? The adaptation is, as the (rather unenthusiastic Kirkus review) notes, “kinder and gentler“. Harriet’s propensity for mordant commentary on those she encounters is removed. She still wants to write, to spy and to know everything and still has something of a non-conformist streak but her propensity for sharp and unkind commentary on those around her has disappeared, making her a less challenging character.

In the first episode of Harriet, the plot centres of one of Harriet’s spyees (unfortunately a word hitherto unknown to standard dictionaries), Agatha K. Plumber. Agatha appears in the book, too, interspersed through various chapters, but in the book the overarching plot concerns Harriet’s development rather than that of any of her spyees. In the series, by contrast, Harriet’s character is static throughout the opening episodes. She is not in conflict with her surroundings to the extent book-Harriet is, so she doesn’t need to go on a journey of adjustment. Instead, each episode has a self-contained plot and, in episode 1, it concerns Agatha, who has taken to her bed and shows little interest in leaving it.

Mrs Agatha K. Plumber … was a very strange, rather theatrical lady who had once married a man of considerable means. She was now divorced, lived alone, and apparently talked on the telephone all day.

p. 42

Book-Harriet is curious about Book-Mrs Plumber and wonders why she doesn’t try to do something, but she remains detached, an observer who writes what she sees and does not take part. Series-Agatha, rather than having wealth through marriage, was a lawyer but has left her job and taken to her bed. She dreams of setting up a dog-pants making business and Series-Harriet, less an observer and more activist than Book-Harriet, wants to help her to do it.

Episode 1 of the series ends with an extraordinary resolution. The moment of cathartic uplift at the end of the episode occurs with Agatha agreeing a loan with her bank manager. This is mentioned several times in the episode and provides the impetus for Harriet’s uplifting speech:

I have to try and fix what I messed up, which is you making history. I know it is scary to try something new, but Ole Golly says life is a struggle and you can never quit, whether you are a writer or a spy or someone who has a dream of making pants for dogs.

Harriet the Spy, Apple TV+, 2021, series 1 episode 1.

If you don’t get off your butt, get a hairdo that makes you feel like 10 million bucks and then go to the bank and get your loan and open your dog pants store, I swear I will barge into your room like a maniac every single day for the rest of your life.

1.1

Agatha does so, the music reaching a triumphant crescendo as she shakes the hand of her bank manager and agrees to take out a loan, Harriet spying outside the window with a pleased grin on her face. It is an extraordinary narrative point. Debt has often been a theme of fiction. Dickens characters like Mr Micawber and William Dorrit are classic examples of those whose life is blighted by debt. Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice turns on debt and the dangers inherent to it. It is never a good thing; at best, a necessary evil. Here, though, in a truly 21-century perspective on debt, it is a heroic embracing of life’s possibilities, the only alternative to opting out of the economic opportunities our society has to offer. Here we have one of popular culture’s first celebrations of the act of indebting oneself, and doing so in a cause so apparently unworthy and frivolous as a dog-pants business. We never find out how Agatha’s business goes, and that is the point: getting a loan is an end in itself, a moment of catharsis and triumph.

Harriet, spying, from Kirkus

We all, particularly the younger generations, face into an intended future wherein long-life debt is the norm. Housing debt, education debt and health debt have taken on astronomical proportions in some western countries and the trend is growing. Mauricio Lazzarato has written of The Making of the Indebted Man and Slavoj Žižek has outlined how, within current economic systems, “debt is an instrument to control and regulate the debtor, and, as such, it strives for its own expanded reproduction” (Event, Penguin: 2014, p. 184). That is, the debt does not want to get repaid, but for the state of indebtedness to continue endlessly. The modern citizen, Žižek argues, has to first of all become an entrepreneur of the self; he or she must consider everything an investment in his or her self and, thus, accept the principle of debt in relation to development of that self. Harriet, in this adaptation, has become an instrument of that ideology, a way of teaching children to expect and to love debt, to see the incurring of debt as an end in itself and as a key to life. In this regard, at least, Apple TV+’s Harriet the Spy is an innovative text and an utterly contemporary one.

The Life of the Mind and the Importance of the Bedchamber in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)

One of the greatest comic novels in the English language is At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), the first published novel of Irish author Flann O’Brien. It is a metafictional joke of epic breadth and density. The title itself appears entirely unfathomable and unhelpful to the first-time reader; however, it is a simple literal translation of an Irish place name, Snámh Dá Éan. “Snámh” is a common Irish word most often translated as “swim” but in the context of a place name it denotes a ford or river crossing. Snámh Dá Éan, “the ford of the two birds”, is a real place, a ford over the River Shannon which is associated in Irish mythology with the mad king Sweeney, an important character in the novel.

If the title is not as tricky as it sounds, the opening of the book is more so. It begins with the most apparently straightforward of markers: “CHAPTER ONE”. This is reassuring but it is only on rereading that one realises the work is not divided into chapters and this is the only chapter heading in the whole book. “CHAPTER ONE”, then, is a joke at the reader’s expense.

The opening sentence of the novel is worth lingering on. Though I don’t remember seeing it in lists of best opening sentences in English novels, it is very striking and immediately establishes the singularity and precision of O’Brien’s style, and introduces several themes of the novel:

Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression.

Paperview, 2005, 1

Flann O’Brien 1911-1966

The language here is not conventionally literary, rather it is absurdly formal and precise. The first detail, relating to the amount of chewing time provided by the bread he has eaten, takes the book out of the realm of conventional literary preoccupations and into that of a narrator whose attitude to his own bodily processes is marked by distance and calculation. There is a distinctly alien or robotic feel to the narrator’s reflections and observations, and this is heightened by the fact that he remains nameless to the reader throughout.

Having eaten the amount of bread specified, the narrator “withdrew his powers of sensory perception”. This brings in a key theme of the novel: the life of the mind as opposed to that of the body and the apparent impossibility of fully taking part in both. The second sentence makes apparent the reason for the narrator’s mental abstraction:

I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. (1)

Throughout the book, this subordination of the empirical to the intellectual, specifically literary activities, is explicitly stated.

This dichotomy of sensual v. literary brings to mind one of O’Brien’s major influences: Aldous Huxley. A couple of pages in, the narrator notes that in the bedroom of his uncle’s house where he lodges, he keeps a small collection of books “ranging from those of Mr Joyce to the widely read books of Mr A Huxley, the eminent English writer” (3). O’Brien’s debt to Joyce is well known, and it is rare to read an article on At Swim without reference to Joyce. The Huxley influence is much less discussed.

Huxley became a household name in the 1920s for a series of novels which were social satires with elements of novels of ideas. Later in his career, the ideas took precedence and his books became less novelistic, even those that were nominally novels. Huxley’s first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), created a significant stir on first publication and set the tone for his early work. It has been described as “the brightest and wittiest of Huxley’s books” (Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual, Kindle, loc 2635), and gives perhaps a better indication of the reasons for Huxley’s immense popularity and influence among his contemporaries than the now more famous Brave New World (1932).

The narrator of Crome Yellow, Dennis Stone, is reminiscent of that of At Swim. Dennis, too, is an intellectual young man. I have quoted the opening of Crome elsewhere, but here it is again. It relates Dennis’ experiences on a train:

Denis took his chattels off the rack and piled them neatly in the corner opposite his own. A futile proceeding. But one must have something to do. When he had finished, he sank back into his seat and closed his eyes. It was extremely hot.

Oh, this journey! It was two hours cut clean out of his life; two hours in which he might have done so much, so much—written the perfect poem, for example, or read the one illuminating book. Instead of which—his gorge rose at the smell of the dusty cushions against which he was leaning. (Chapter I)

Dennis, too, is consciously making a choice to renounce the sensual realm. Once he sits down in the train, his first action is to close his eyes to the outside world. Then he begins to reflect that he could be writing a perfect poem or reading an illuminating book before the smell of the dusty cushions intrude and create in him a feeling of disgust. All sensuality is tiresome or disgusting to Dennis, and he tries throughout the novel to escape from life into ideas, often failing in a semi-comic manner.

This same sensual disgust is a feature of At Swim. For the narrator of the novel, the everyday world he hates and wishes to flee is represented by the uncle he lives with, a resolutely unintellectual middle-class, middle-aged man whose worldview is reduced to a series of cliches about the value of work and the vice of idleness. There is a revealing episode halfway through the novel when the narrator is observing his uncle interact with his similarly bourgeois friend from the Rathmines and Rathgar operatic society, Mr. Corcoran:

Suddenly [Mr. Corcoran] sneezed, spattering his clothing with a mucous discharge from his nostrils. As my uncle hurried to his assistance, I felt my gorge rise. I retched slightly, making a noise with my throat similar to that utilized by persons in the article of death.

[…]

I went to my room and lay prostrate on my bed, endeavouring to recover my composure.

[…]

Such was the degree of my emotional disturbance that I walked down to the centre of the town without adverting to my surroundings and without a predetermined destination. (108)

The narrator’s response is clearly disproportionate. A poorly guarded sneeze leads him into a state of “emotional disturbance”, one of very few admissions of deep feeling in the novel. Like Huxley in the opening lines of Crome, O’Brien uses the metaphor of the gorge rising. It reveals what all of the narrator’s previous interactions with his uncle have suggested, a deep and unbridgeable fissure between the intellectual and literarily ambitious narrator and his working-class uncle. He never tries to analyse his feelings or his difficult relationship with his uncle, just as he never gives any personal or family background. He merely presents their various run-ins, in which the language they use is jarringly different. The one pedantically formal and exact; the other colloquial, conventional and full of trite moralising. True communication is impossible.

In the aftermath of the sneeze episode, the narrator’s retreat to his bed when he is upset points to the importance of that article throughout the novel. The narrator rows consistently with his uncle about the inordinate time he spends in bed. “Aren’t you very fond of your bedroom now” his uncle asks with exasperation. He is, and justifies it in the narration, referring to “the tender trestle of my bed’ and “the envelope of my bed”. Later, another character of an intellectuo-literary disposition, one Byrne, offers a lofty panegyric to beds and sleep. An opposing view appears in the dark and disorienting final passage of the novel, attributed to a Professor Du Fernier of the Sorbonne:

It is of importance the most inestimable, he writes, that for mental health there should he walking and not overmuch of the bedchamber. (246)

That is bad news for our narrator, for whom bed is the locus of reflection, ideas and the life of the mind. It is freedom from the repulsive vulgarity of the other. The narrator has cast off the world even more drastically than Dennis Stone in Huxley’s novel. The results of such a course of action are uncertain, and may hint at encroaching darkness and madness. All we know for sure from reading At Swim is that they are funny, to a degree perhaps unparalleled in literature.

Medical Paranoia in Stephen King’s The Institute (2019)

Stephen King published The Institute to positive but unspectacular reviews in 2019, the 60th novel (and that excludes the numerous short story and novella collections he has authored, as well as his small number of non-fiction books) of his near 50-year career. I didn’t read it at the time. I still enjoy his works but it is hard for any but the most dedicated reader to keep up. I read it this month, which proved a disorientating experience and reminder of how far our societal debates and priorities have travelled in the last two years of pandemic restrictions.

The Institute concerns a top-secret government camp way out in the Maine woods to which children who have telekinetic or telepathic abilities are kidnapped to be abused and exploited for reasons related to national security. While resident in the Institute, the children are subject to all manner of forced medical interventions, about which they feel an understandable paranoia:

‘Only what if they’re not taking out? What if they’re putting in? They say they’re taking samples, but they lie about everything!’

Holder & Stoughton, 2019, p. 194

Not only are medical paranoia and forced medical interventions central to the young protagonists’ life in the Institute, but it begins much earlier. The gifted children are chosen for abduction to the Institute through being surreptitiously tested for psychic abilities at birth:

Almost all newborns were tested for BDNF [brain-derived neurotrophic factor]. Children such as the two whose files Mrs Sigsby was now reading were flagged, followed, and eventually taken.

p. 284

BDNF testing, along with the heel-stick PKU and the Apgar score, was routine for infants born in American hospitals, but of course not all babies were born in hospitals, and plenty of parents, such as the ever more vocal anti-vaxxer contingent, forwent the tests.

p. 324

Thus the “anti-vaxxer contingent” is potentially able to shield children from the Institute, while all those who submit to standard hospital procedures for their new borns risk coming to its attention, which, given the brutal sadism King describes there, is a very serious risk. Indeed, there are frequent allusions to Nazism and its parallels to what the US deep state is up to in the Institute. Finally, it is confirmed that there is more than parallels and the Institute is a continuation of Nazi schemes:

‘The first Institute, although not by that name, was in Nazi Germany.’

‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’ Tim said.

p. 538

In taking this hard line on medical interventionism, King foresaw the vaccine wars which have begun in earnest since the introduction of Covid vaccines. To read The Institute is to experience the paranoia some feel about vaccines and, particularly, the universal mandating of same. King seems to be promoting a deep scepticism about them, and an anti-authoritarianism which places him at odds with the emergence of the Big State 1 2 in the last 21 months and the movement of authoritarianism from the right to the progressive left.

King is an outspokenly leftist figure, so it is unexpected to read his instinctive alliance with the side of medical paranoia. It is a reminder that this book was published in 2019 rather than 2021 and that public discourse and the shape of progressive western politics in the US and elsewhere has changed very quickly in recent months. Whether that is for good or ill is a question beyond the scope of this blog, but it will certainly be investigated and experienced intensely over the coming years. King’s novel is a reminder of the complexities of the situation, as well as being a work somewhat prophetic, if not exactly telepathic, in its interest in the deep ethico-philosophical issues at stake in the current debates and conflicts over our medical futures. We live in interesting times.

Revisiting Pickwick via Percy Fitzgerald’s Bardell v. Pickwick

While Charles Dickens might seem almost as popular now as in his mid-Victorian heyday, the curious thing is that the works of his that are most enjoyed have changed drastically. A case in point is his debut novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836-37). This was an immediate publishing sensation for the young writer: “by the time the book was completed it was clear that it had completely outdistanced the previous successes of Scott. Pickwick was to remain the most continuously popular of all Dickens’ books to the readers of his time, and later on there were moments when its persistent appeal seemed to him something of a liability” (Stephen Wall, “Introduction”, The Dickens Heritage, 1970, p. 26). Dickens’ later works, particularly from Bleak House (1852-53) onwards, were considered “forced and somber compared with the fun of his earlier ones” (Ibid p. 30)

The comparative popularity of Dickens’ different works has been almost inverted. goodreads.com provides a revealing snapshot of what is read and what is not. On that site, Pickwick has received 26,255 ratings, while Bleak House has received 106,094, David Copperfield 210,880, Great Expectations 704,848 and A Tale of Two Cities a whopping 859,593 (all figures as of 12 November 2021). Pickwick is not the least read Dickens novel (that is 1841’s Barnaby Rudge – 9,735 ratings) but it is at the lower end, and that is a fact that would have greatly surprised Dickens and his contemporary readers.

My experience of reading Pickwick was underwhelming when I did it several years ago. I have never returned to it since, partly because, unlike other Dickens novels, there is rarely a stimulus to. It is never adapted on screen, it does not turn up in contemporary works, unlike Two Cities, which was referenced several times in Christopher Nolan’s opus The Dark Night Rises, nor is it continuously brought up as a touch point in discussing influences on contemporary TV serials, as Bleak House is (like here and here regarding The Wire). But I happened to see a copy of Bardell v. Pickwick: A Dickens of a Case (originally published in 1902; read by me in the Hesperus Press 2012 edition) by Percy Fitzgerald in a book shop and thought maybe here was my way in. Here was the meta text that would give me an understanding of how this once beloved book by an author I admire greatly (but equivocally) had entranced a generation and alienated posterity. I might not quite have the stomach right now to retread the whole 800 pages of Pickwick, but I could have a go at the 120 pages of Pickwick v. Bardell.

Bardell v. Pickwick includes an introduction by Baroness Hale of Richmond. This is worth reading before the main text as it gives a good overview of the legal issues involved, pointing out that they are no longer part of the law and so will be unfamiliar to the reader, and also provides the excerpt from Pickwick where the proposal did or did not take place, a very short scene in the novel. This is all the introduction needed. You definitely don’t have to have read Pickwick to appreciate this book. The court case was one of the most popular sections of the novel, and one of Dickens’ most popular readings when he went out on his famous reading tours much later in his career. He was able to remove it from the novel’s larger context in these readings partly because his audience were familiar with the novel in any case, but also because the sub-plot stands alone easily without the scaffolding of the novel.

Fitzgerald was a lawyer, and also a friend and admirer of Dickens. His book, published when he was an old man and Dickens was long dead, purports to be a commentary on the titular legal case. Fitzgerald is playing a Pickwickian version of “The Game” beloved of Sherlockians, though he is not a pure exponent, for at times he switches from treating it as a real court case to extolling the genius of the writer who could have created such comic delights. One thing is sure, Fitzgerald loved this book, and this makes him a good representative of Dickens’ contemporaries, for whom literary comic genius reached its height in Pickwick.

The case of Bardell v. Pickwick forms a fairly small part of Pickwick, in terms of space. It is one of breach of promise. Mr. Pickwick speaks to his landlady about his proposition to hire a servant; he does it in such a way that she thinks he is proposing marriage. That miscommunication is at the heart of the comedy of the “proposal” scene. The humour partially lies in the completely virginal and asexual persona that Dickens builds around Pickwick, a middle-aged bachelor, and the absurdity that he could be propositioning Ms Bardell or anybody else.

Pickwick does not want to marry Ms Bardell and when she realises this she decides, or others convince her, to take a civil case against him. This case is the subject of Fitzgerald’s commentary. He comments both on the legal matters relevant to the case and on the humour it provides. The prosecuting council, Serjeant Buzfuz, describes amusingly how the poor innocent widow Bardell offers lodgings for single gentleman, in response to which:

[A] being, erect upon two legs, and bearing all the outward semblance of a man, and not of a monster, knocked at the door of Mrs. Bardell’s house. He inquired within—he took the lodgings; and on the very next day he entered into possession of them. This man was Pickwick—Pickwick, the defendant.’

The Pickwick Papers, Ch. XXXIV

Serjeant Buzfuz’s imputation is that Pickwick, appearance notwithstanding, is a monster, and his grandstanding is approvingly analysed by Fitzgerald as bearing a close resemblance to real counsel’s speeches.

An awkward situation as Mrs Bardell swoons in Pickwick’s arms and his friends walk in. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mr_Pickwick_and_boy.jpg

Pickwick’s guilt is sealed by Buzfuz’s masterly analysis of certain correspondence he sent to Mrs Bardell while her lodger, “The Incriminating Letters”, as Fitzgerald’s chapter title calls them:

Let me read the first: “Garraways, twelve o’clock. Dear Mrs. B.—Chops and tomato sauce. Yours, Pickwick.” Gentlemen, what does this mean? Chops and tomato sauce. Yours, Pickwick! Chops! Gracious heavens! and tomato sauce! Gentlemen, is the happiness of a sensitive and confiding female to be trifled away, by such shallow artifices as these?

The next has no date whatever, which is in itself suspicious. “Dear Mrs. B., I shall not be at home till to-morrow. Slow coach.” And then follows this very remarkable expression. “Don’t trouble yourself about the warming-pan.” The warming-pan! Why, gentlemen, who does trouble himself about a warming-pan? When was the peace of mind of man or woman broken or disturbed by a warming-pan, which is in itself a harmless, a useful, and I will add, gentlemen, a comforting article of domestic furniture?

The Pickwick Papers, Ch. XXXIV

All very suspicious, and it is no surprise when Pickwick is found guilty of breach of promise. Fitzgerald gives examples demonstrating how closely the processes involved in the trial echo those of real trials, such as the notorious Norton v. Lord Melbourne case, which had involved the (over)interpretation of similarly banal missives.

Fitzgerald also provides an amusingly against the grain reading of Pickwick’s character, denouncing him as “overbearing and arrogant and unrestrained and, I am afraid, vindictive” (p. 103) and supports this well with reference to the text. Not only that, he notes of Pickwick that “he was rather too effusive in his relations with the weaker sex. One of his great weaknesses was kissing. He would kiss everybody who was young or good-looking.” (p. 9) Even Fitzgerald’s caveat that he does all this “in his own paternal or privileged way” may make the matter all the more serious, given the shift in connotation of paternal and privileged.

Though Bardell v. Pickwick is an enjoyable read that gives one an appreciation for the young Dickens’ wit and eye for detail, one can only conclude that The Pickwick Papers is unredeemable to the contemporary reader because Pickwick is. The purity and innocence of this middle-aged man is unconvincing and his habit of kissing everybody would make him difficult to represent in a contemporary context without serious caveats. Less likely to be tried for breach of promise than for sexual assault, he is no less likely to be found guilty and, this time, would be denied his happy ending.

Disguises, Cowardice and Androgyny: Buchan’s Mr. Standfast (1919)

John Buchan is now best remembered as the author of The Thirty-nine Steps, memorably filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1939. I have already written about Steps’ sequel, Greenmantle, a great adventure novel which Hitchcock had wanted to film, but decided not to:

Buchan was a strong influence a long time before I undertook The Thirty-nine Steps, and some of it is reflected in The Man Who Knew Too Much. He had written Greenmantle, a novel that was probably inspired by the strange personality of Laurence of Arabia… I considered this book, but on second thought I chose The Thirty-nine Steps, which was a smaller subject. Probably for the very reason we mentioned in connection with Dostoevsky — my respect for a literary masterpiece.

(Hitchcock Truffaut, Faber, 2017, p. 95)

Ironically, Hitchcock’s decision to film Steps instead, based on his admiration for Greenmantle, has contributed significantly to the situation where the former is remembered as a classic, while the latter – and Buchan’s other works – have fallen by the wayside.

Still, Greenmantle is a really excellent work, and so is its sequel, the third in the Richard Hannay series, Mr. Standfast. Both are more substantial works than The 39 Steps, which is shorter and has a rushed feel to it, though it has some wonderful suspense scenes set amongst the moors and hills of Scotland. It was not only adapted by Hitchcock but it also inspired the famous crop-duster sequence in North by Northwest. All in all, they comprise a great wartime trilogy centred on the rivalry between England and Germany: still in the pre-war stage in the first book, then being subsumed in the wartime milieu. Like its two predecessors, there is a significant propaganda element in Standfast. Published in 1919, it is set during WWI. With respect to Greenmantle, I argued that Buchan had had to remove Hannay from the trenches to make the war seem fun and exciting, rather than an exercise in industrial slaughter. He performs the same trick in Standfast, but does return Hannay to the western front for the closing chapters of the book.

The book opens with a journey:

I spent one-third of my journey looking out of the window of a first-class carriage, the next in a local motor-car following the course of a trout stream in a shallow valley, and the last tramping over a ridge of downland through great beech-woods to my quarters for the night. In the first part I was in an infamous temper; in the second I was worried and mystified; but the cool twilight of the third stage calmed and heartened me, and I reached the gates of Fosse Manor with a mighty appetite and a quiet mind.

Mr. Standfast, Polygon, 2018, to p. 1

This is very characteristic of the Hannay novels: a journey in space, specifically from the city in the countryside, is also a journey in mind, from anxiety and unhappiness to freedom and well-being.

Of course, this freedom of the countryside is invariably attended by physical danger. Hannay’s adventures tend to take him from the city to the country. Once in the wilds, he uses his understanding of complicated terrain, his ability to walk tirelessly, climb the tallest hills and scramble up rock-faces to best those people – whether English or foreign they are always ultimately agents of the Boche – who pursue him relentlessly.

Polygon 2018 edition of Mr. Standfast

By the bottom of the first page of Standfast, Hannay has revealed that he is travelling under a false name and persona: a South African mining engineer named Cornelis Brand. This is a name he also used in Greenmantle. Not only can Hannay pass himself off as a South African, but also as a Dutch, a German or a Turk. Hannay remarks of the English in Greenmantle, in a moment of particular arrogance: “We call ourselves insular, but the truth is that we are the only race on earth that can produce men capable of getting inside the skin of remote peoples.” (23) Hannay spends more time being other people than he does being himself. similarly, his German nemesis in Steps who reappears in Standfast, is described as “the superbest actor that ever walked the earth” (44), able to appear unrecognised even to those who have seen him many times. The mania for disguise and adopting personae may point to an anxiety about the hyper-masculinity Hannay is always trying to live up to. It is not easy conforming of the ideal of imperial manhood.

Given the gung-ho mood that often pervades the story, Hannay as narrator is surprisingly open about his difficulty meeting expectations of masculinity, especially regarding courage. Most remarkably, he says of himself: “I belonged to the school of the cunning cowards”. (85). And, later: “I’ve given a good deal of thought to this courage business, for I haven’t got a great deal of it myself … I’ve got heaps of soft places in me. I’m afraid of being drowned for one thing, or of getting my eyes shot out.” (166). This is a motif of both Greenmantle and Mr. Standfast, demonstrating that Buchan, as he juggled his role in British Intelligence with his novel-writing career, was a propagandist of a nuanced and insightful sort. His hero acts like a model of bravery, but his narration lays bare a near-constant fear and (Hannay’s favourite word) “funk” that he has to overcome repeatedly but that he does not try to hide nor does he express shame about.

In a departure from Steps and Greenmantle, the opening pages of Standfast introduce nothing less than a love interest for Mr. Hannay, the first of his life, apparently, though he is 40 years old:

“I looked up to see the very prettiest girl I ever set eyes on. She seemed little more than a child, and before the war would probably have still ranked as a flapper. She wore the neat blue dress and apron of a V.A.D. and her white cap was set on hair like spun gold. She smiled demurely as she arranged the tea-things, and I thought I had never seen eyes at once so merry and so grave. I stared after her as she walked across the lawn, and I remember noticing that she moved with the free grace of an athletic boy.”

(7)

Starting with this reference to “the free grace of an athletic boy”, most references to Mary refer to a boylike quality. Androgyny is a particular motif for Buchan. Not only is Mary like a boy, but Hannay’s two closest friends are, in one aspect, girlish. Sandy Arbuthnot has “a pair of brown eyes like a pretty girl’s” (Greenmantle, 14) and Peter Pienaar, still more pointedly, has eyes “like Mary’s” (Standfast, 227, 228). There is a thin line between the male friendship Buchan extols and the romantic love Hannay eventually begins to explore with Mary. Androgyny is clearly a characteristic Hannay values highly in his companions, notwithstanding the famously male-dominated world Buchan creates.

These are some of the various complicating factors in Buchan’s novels which help them rise above competitors, all while remaining a fast-paced and exciting read. For all the love of country Buchan professed, he brought a level of perception and insight to Mr. Standfast which demonstrates that propaganda and art are not mutually exclusive.

Work and Happiness in Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents and in Thomas Carlyle

I have already discussed Carlyle’s thoughts on happiness (here), and his stance that the pursuit of same was self-defeating. Instead, he advocated the diligent performance of work as the central activity of a fulfilling human life. Slavoj Žižek is a more recent thinker who has rejected the relevance of happiness to humanity (I discussed that here). A further dismissal of the concept comes in Sigmund Freud’s late work, Civilization and its Discontents (1930), a long essay or short book, covering 106 pages in the Penguin Great Ideas series copy I will be referring to. It is a fascinating and wide-ranging book, not concerned with developing the “science” (as Freud considered it) of psychoanalysis like many of his previous works, but in looking at life in modern civilization in its totality. His psychoanalytic theories enter on occasion, but his thought ranges more widely and speculatively – more sage-like – than ever before.

Dr. Freud with a cigar, but maybe not just a cigar.

Early on, Freud offers his thoughts on happiness. Like Carlyle, he completely dismisses the idea of happiness being a valid or attainable goal for a human being:

One is inclined to say that the intention that man should be ‘happy’ has no place in the plan of
‘creation’. What we call happiness, in the strictest sense of the word, arises from the fairly sudden) satisfaction of pent-up needs. By its very nature, it can be no more than an episodic phenomenon. Any prolongation of a situation desired by the pleasure principle produces a feeling of lukewarm contentment; we are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself. Hence, our prospects of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. (16-17)

We are, much more often, unhappy, and Freud sees three primary sources of unhappiness:

Suffering threatens us from three sides: from our own body, which, being doomed to decay and dissolution, cannot even dispense with pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which can unleash overwhelming, implacable, destructive forces against us; and finally from our relations with others. The suffering that arises from this last source perhaps causes us more pain than any other. (17)

This is bad news. We cannot avoid our own body, we can only very imperfectly and temporarily block out the external world, and as for our relations to others, to do without them is for most still more painful than to endure them. Under that pressure, our “pleasure principal” does and must transmute into the “reality principle”. Under this new principal, we less and less seek positive pleasure, because the fruitlessness of that search leads only to further agony; we merely try to avoid suffering. How do we avoid suffering? By sublimating our urges which cannot safely be indulged in a civilized society. Civilization is, essentially, renunciation:

[I]t is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up on renunciation, how much it presupposes the non-satisfaction – by suppression, repression or some other means – of powerful instincts. Such ‘cultural frustration’ dominates the large sphere of interpersonal relations. (44)

We make this renunciation acceptable to ourselves by sublimation:

[S]ublimation of the drives plays a part in this. We achieve most if we can sufficiently heighten the pleasure derived from mental and intellectual work. Fate can then do little to harm us. This kind of satisfaction – the artist’s joy in creating, in fashioning forth the products of his imagination, or the scientist’s in solving problems and discovering truths – has a special quality which it will undoubtedly be possible one day to characterize in metapsychological terms. At present we can only say, figuratively, that they seem to us ‘finer and higher’, but their intensity is restrained when compared with that which results from the sating of crude, primary drives: they do not convulse our physical being. The weakness of this method, however, lies in the fact that it cannot be employed universally, as it is accessible only to the few. is that it is not applicable generally: it is accessible to only a few people. It presupposes special aptitudes and gifts which are not exactly common, not common enough to be effective. (21)

According to Freud, then, we cannot be actively and consistently happy, but we can sublimate our desires in our work – at least if we have rewarding work such as that of the artist or scientist – and that is the best we can hope for. Note that Freud, nominally a scientist, puts the artist on the same level; indeed his first example is the artist rather than the scientist. Freud himself was more of an artist and less of a scientist than he was conscious of, and his admiration for artists helped provide the art that is in his writings and makes them so compelling. But here, his dismissal of happiness and endorsement of work is very reminiscent of an important emphasis in the work of Carlyle. The latter sage, too, was keen to overturn the happiness principle of the utilitarians, and replace it with a dedication to work as the central goal of human existence, and for fundamentally similar reasons:

Thomas Carlyle, reflecting on the illusory nature of happiness.

It is, after all, the one unhappiness of a man, That he cannot work; that he cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled. Behold, the day is passing swiftly over, our life is passing swiftly over; and the night cometh, wherein no man can work. The night once come, our happiness, our unhappiness,–it is all abolished; vanished, clean gone; a thing that has been: ‘not of the slightest consequence’ whether we were happy as eupeptic Curtis, as the fattest pig of Epicurus, or unhappy as Job with potsherds, as musical Byron with Giaours and sensibilities of the heart; as the unmusical Meat-jack with hard labour and rust! But our work,–behold that is not abolished, that has not vanished: our work, behold, it remains, or the want of it remains;–for endless Times and Eternities, remains; and that is now the sole question with us forevermore!

Past and Present, Bk. II, Ch. IV

[O]nly this I know, If what thou namest Happiness be our true aim, then are we all astray. (SR, II, 7, “The Everlasting No”)

[…]

Man’s Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite. Will the whole Finance Ministers and Upholsterers and Confectioners of modern Europe undertake, in joint-stock company, to make one Shoeblack HAPPY? They cannot accomplish it, above an hour or two: for the Shoeblack also has a Soul quite other than his Stomach; and would require, if you consider it, for his permanent satisfaction and saturation, simply this allotment, no more, and no less: God’s infinite Universe altogether to himself, therein to enjoy infinitely, and fill every wish as fast as it rose. Oceans of Hochheimer, a Throat like that of Ophiuchus: speak not of them; to the infinite Shoeblack they are as nothing. No sooner is your ocean filled, than he grumbles that it might have been of better vintage. Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarrelling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. —Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even, as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.  (SR, II, 9, “The Everlasting Yea”)

Carlyle, like Freud, knew that happiness was at best fleeting. That which in the short term brings happiness soon turns into a source of dissatisfaction for Carlyle’s rhetorical Shoeblack and, to a less dramatic extent, for all of us. Work completed diligently and unselfconsciously is the cure for unhappiness. The problem is, one has to be unconscious of it to truly experience it. The conscious fixation on happiness was, Carlyle felt, one of the great illnesses of the Victorian age, always tending to turn into a consciousness of its absence.

If so, it is one that has gone unremedied until the present, despite the admonitions of Carlyle, Freud, Žižek and others. We have codified and theorised happiness to the point of having an annual World Happiness Report, Ministries of Happiness and a Journal of Happiness Studies. Truly now with such a wealth of resources and research, we have no excuse not to be happy, and, knowing that, we can only feel deep anxiety about the difficulty we find in attaining that desirable state of mind.

Oliver Twist (1999): The One that is mostly about Monks

Oliver Twist is one of the most filmed novels of all time, bringing up 187 title matches in IMDb and so filmic that the great Russian director Sergei Eisenstein posited it as the greatest precursor of the silent epics of D.W. Griffiths. Among the many adaptations is the 1999 ITV series, written by Alan Bleasdale, perhaps best known for the 1980s slice of social realism, Boys from the Blackstuff. With 4 episodes of 90+ minutes, it clocked in at 386 minutes running time, much longer than the best known precursors, David Lean’s 1948 film and Carol Reed’s 1968 musical. It had plenty of scope, then, to expand on the storyline, and it did so in an interesting way.

The first episode is given over almost entirely to backstory, one which renders the convoluted storyline of the novel more comprehensible. It focuses on Agnes, Oliver’s mother, and on Monks, Oliver’s half-brother who schemes to gain the inheritance due to Oliver. In the novel, the opening pages recount that Agnes (we do not know her name at this point) gives birth to Oliver and dies.

“Lor bless her dear heart, when she has lived as long as I have, sir, and had thirteen children of her own, and all on ’em dead except two, and them in the wurkus with me, she’ll know better than to take on in that way, bless her dear heart! Think what it is to be a mother, there’s a dear young lamb do.”

Apparently this consolatory perspective of a mother’s prospects failed in producing its due effect. The patient shook her head, and stretched out her hand towards the child.

The surgeon deposited it in her arms. She imprinted her cold white lips passionately on its forehead; passed her hands over her face; gazed wildly round; shuddered; fell back—and died. They chafed her breast, hands, and temples; but the blood had stopped forever. They talked of hope and comfort. They had been strangers too long. (Oliver Twist, Ch. I)

It is a quick and unsentimental death, by Dickens’ standards. Then the novel moves forward, as novels do and as previous adaptations, most of which began with the last moments or hours of Agnes, did.

• 

  A heavily pregnant Agnes (Josephine Smith) struggles towards the workhouse to give birth and die at the beginning of David Lean’s Oliver Twist.

The ITV series, however, does not do that. It uses a match cut, going from Agnes’ face softening into a smile as she dies to the same face, eyes closed and smiling with, perhaps, post-coital bliss while she lies talking to her lover Edwin Leeford, some months previously – probably nine. It goes backwards, in other words, and spends most of the next 90 minutes there, providing a prequel to Dickens’ novel. It tells how Agnes’ affair with Edwin fell apart because of his prior marriage to the scheming Elizabeth Leeford, how Agnes hides her pregnancy from her loving but drunken father and how Elizabeth dominates Edward, her and Edwin’s son, and tries to coax that disturbed young person into murdering Agnes. The first episode climaxes with Edward’s attempted murder of the pregnant Agnes. She escapes and runs away from home to die in the workhouse, leaving us, at the end of the episode, neatly back at the opening pages of the novel.

• 

  Sophia Myles as Agnes in the ITV serial Oliver Twist (1999), lying on the grass with Edwin.

This information is essentially as in Dickens, but in the novel it is provided in the closing pages as a resolution to the mystery surrounding Oliver’s parentage:

This child,” said Mr. Brownlow, drawing Oliver to him, and laying his hand upon his head, “is your half-brother; the illegitimate son of your father, my dear friend Edwin Leeford, by poor young Agnes Fleming, who died in giving him birth.”

“Yes,” said Monks, scowling at the trembling boy: the beating of whose heart he might have heard. “That is the bastard child.” (Oliver Twist, Ch. LI)

Bleasdale’s script does not hold this information over for the purpose of a final revelation. Instead, it is given at the beginning to set events in motion. This probably makes for a less confusing storyline and a less rushed ending, and it definitely allows the series to reorientate the central focus of the setory so that, in tandem with Oliver’s story and sometimes eclipsing it, it tells the story of Monks, who becomes a flesh and blood figure, rather than the shadowy presence in Dickens.

Monks and Fagin, by James Mahoney (1810-1879) – Scanned by Simsalabim, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15273166

Monks is introduced by Dickens, halfway through the novel, as follows: “a dark figure emerged from a projecting entrance which lay in deep shadow, and, crossing the road, glided up … unperceived” (Oliver Twist, Ch. XXXIII). The language of mystery and shadow follows Monks around throughout the novel. While it may create a certain atmosphere, it also empties Monks of substance and makes him a less memorable character. Adaptations have been far more successful in creating enduring characterisations of Fagin and Sikes, the other main villains in the novel, than with regard to Monks. Monks is central to the plot, but the imaginative power behind Dickens’ depictions of Fagin and Sikes is absent. Monks appears in Lean’s film, but makes little impression compared to Alec Guinness’ Fagin and Robert Newton’s Sikes. Oliver! dispenses with the character of Monks entirely.

In the “culture-text” of Oliver Twist, then, Edward Monks is a liminal figure. It is perhaps in search of artistic priority and to bring originality to a much-adapted story that Bleasdale makes Monks a co-protagonist in the ITV series. He is introduced 40 minutes into the first episode, alighting from a carriage with his mother, an imperious and glaring lady. Monks is immediately characterised as a person of supreme interpersonal awkwardness by his shy smile and nervous hand movements when a servant girl opens the door for him. He and his mother enter their living quarters and she immediately labels him a “doze pot”. We already feel a degree of sympathy for the young Edward Monks: he is naïve, bumbling and browbeaten by his mother, who is clearly a formidable and unpleasant person. They are constantly on the move because of her propensity to live beyond their means. Edward notes, “I have never left anywhere except at the dead of night or first dawn. I never made a friend that I knew that I would keep.” Elizabeth cuttingly replies, “We could be an eternity in the same place, Edward, and it would make no difference to your hopes of friendship.” With a mother like that, who needs enemies?

Mark Warren as Monks in Oliver Twist

Despite the somewhat sympathetic naivete of Monks, he is clearly a deeply disturbed individual. When trying to convince him to kill Agnes, Elizabeth notes, “You like to kill things, Edward. I have seen you in the fields”, to which he replies, “Only things … I won’t do it again.” He does, therefore, have serious mental issues and a sadistic bent, but he, unlike his mother, scruples at murder.

When, in the climactic scene of the first episode, he tries to kill Agnes, he is unable to bring himself to plunge the knife into her, and eventually falls onto a seizure. This corresponds to an incident in Dickens where Monks encounters Oliver:

“The man shook his fist, as he uttered these words incoherently. He advanced towards Oliver, as if with the intention of aiming a blow at him, but fell violently on the ground: writhing and foaming, in a fit.” (Oliver Twist, Ch. XXXIII)

While in Dickens this strange incident is never incorporated into the character of Monks in a coherent way, Bleasdale makes it central to Monks’ state of emotional disturbance, traumatised by an evil mother and uncaring father and forced towards an act of violence which, ultimately, runs against his nature.

That is where we leave Monks at the end of episode one: having been unable to kill Agnes, he has angered his mother and they have not got their hands on the money from Edward’s death. Yet he has been humanised far beyond any prior adaptation or the source.

Given just how popular Oliver! is, and how acclaimed Lean’s film has been, a straight adaptation of Oliver Twist struggles to create a reason for its own existence. There are many ways for an adopter to get around such an issue. One that is taken in this adaptation is to take a minor and hitherto ignored character, Monks, and add greatly to his backstory and complexity, interspersing it with more familiar scenes from the story. That works well in this instance, making this perhaps the most interesting serial adaptation of Dickens’ novel.

The Gospel of Work in Carlyle and in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

A central concern of Thomas Carlyle’s and one that was widely pondered by subsequent Victorian writers was the existential importance of work. Without work, or the right kind of work, life was hellish, productive of morbid introspection and paralytic inaction. Carlyle’s first commandment, pronounced in Sartor Resartus (1831-32; Bk. II, Ch VII) and Past and Present (1843; Bk. III, Ch. XI) was: “Know what thou canst work at”. It was a riff on Socrates’ “Know thyself” but it had very different implications. Socrates’ injunction was about thought; Carlyle’s was about action. Carlyle was of a generation for whom thought, reflection, introspection and self-consciousness – all of which had been taken to hitherto unknown extremes by writers and poets of the Romantic school in the late 17th and early 18th century – were decidedly double-edged swords.

Carlyle reacted against Romantic doctrine by declaring that “the sign of health is Unconsciousness” and that “[t]he healthy know not of their health, but only the sick (“Characteristics“, 1831). If one’s psyche was healthy, then, one just did not think about it or reflect on it. One did not know it; it just was. How did one escape self-consciousness, the disease of the Romantic temperament? Through work: “Man is sent hither not to question, but to work” (“Characteristics”). Therein lay the key to contentment and feeling at one with nature and one’s surroundings.

It was an influential notion, sometimes known as the “Gospel of Work“, and several notable Victorian novelists, such as Eliot and Dickens, reflected substantially on its implications. In the work of Joseph Conrad, too, the importance of work to one’s life experience is central. Marlow, the narrator of most of Heart of Darkness (1899), is particularly preoccupied with this. The experience he recounts in HoD is substantially about what it means to be a worker, to be devoted with one’s work, to face disillusionment about the goal of that work and how to respond to that disillusionment.

When Marlow contracts the job of captain of a ship which is assigned to sail up the Congo river, he is relieved, but struck also by the discourse surrounding the job he is to do:

It appeared, however, I was also one of the Workers, with a capital—you know. Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle. 

Heart of Darkness, Ch. 1

Marlow identifies that there is something quasi-religious in the discourse: “emissary of light”, “apostle”. This recalls the “Gospel of Work” and the capitalisation of “Workers” also suggests the famously erratic capitalisation habits of Carlyle, who does capitalise “Work” and “Workers” at times in Past and Present. Marlow is somewhat skeptical of the whole thing, disassociating himself from such language.

His skepticism is confirmed when he lands in Africa and one of his first experiences is the famous grove of death scene. A few pages later he returns to a contemplation of the nature of the “work”:

Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. Another mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder of the soil under my feet. The work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.

HoD, Ch. I

Here “The work!” appears as a single sentence fragment, the exclamation mark serving to contrast the reality – slavery and slow, brutal death – with the sanctified talk Marlow had been subjected to earlier. The Gospel of Work is so divorced from reality as to be both tragic and ridiculous.

As the story progresses, however, it is by no means so simple. Marlow cannot quite dismiss the notion of work as the essence of life. He tries to articulate his position:

I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

HoD, Ch. I

It is a rather delicate distinction. Marlow does not like work but he likes what is in the work. Without work, one sees only mere show and cannot tell what it really means. Work, then is the way to true knowledge and is the way to find yourself. This, in fact, has brought us very close to Carlyle’s position again, wherein work is the central activity for a properly developed self.

Even having seen what he has seen of the imperial work in the Congo, Marlow is still attached to the notion of work. He retains an optimism about work as embodied by the Great Man, Kurtz. The first section of the story ends with the observation:

I was curious to see whether this man, who had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort, would climb to the top after all and how he would set about his work when there.

HoD, Ch. I

That illustrates the difference between Kurtz and the functionaries of the rubber company Marlow meets. The latter believe in money; Kurtz believes in the civilizing mission. Kurtz’s work is for the betterment of humanity. When confronted with what is actually going on in the Congo, so different from the talk in Europe, Kurtz is too honest to go along with it and descends into a mostly undescribed madness. Marlow is less idealistic than Kurtz, though, and throughout keeps his head. How does Marlow stay sane in that atmosphere of horror? It is simple: through attendance to his work.

I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones; I was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I shaved by a fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the life out of the tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to keep a lookout for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night for next day’s steaming. When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality—the reality, I tell you—fades. The inner truth is hidden—luckily, luckiIy.

HoD, Ch. II

Work, then, keeps away “the inner truth”, and for Marlow that is a good thing. At the end of the story, Marlow returns to Kurtz’s Intended, and tells her the same lies he was told before he went to the Congo. His take on the Gospel of Work, then, is a) it is a cover for exploitation and greed which does not reflect the real world; and b) it is a necessary fiction to keep at bay the horror of the imperial mission and preserve the illusion of a beautiful world. Marlow goes along with the rhetoric of he Gospel of Work and becomes a liar. Conrad evidently put a good deal of himself into Marlow, but it would not be fair to say he goes along with Marlow’s dishonesty. If he did, he would never have described the grove of death or the other horrific realities he had experienced in the Congo.

“One huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine”: Carlyle, Existentialism and Schizophrenia

Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833-34) was one of the classic coming-of-age texts of Victorian Britain. The protagonist, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, based to a significant extent on Carlyle himself, endures a long period of aimlessness and ostracisation, which he calls the “Everlasting No”, before finding a sort of God and embracing life in the “Everlasting Yea”. One of the most powerful sections of the book is the description of the Everlasting No. This occurs in Teufelsdröckh’s mid-20s, a time when he has no vocation, no money, no friends, has been unlucky in love and has renounced the faith in which he was brought up. Carlyle provides a searing account of the existential despair Teufelsdröckh undergoes:

It is all a grim Desert, this once-fair world of his; wherein is heard only the howling of wild beasts, or the shrieks of despairing, hate-filled men; and no Pillar of Cloud by day, and no Pillar of Fire by night, any longer guides the Pilgrim. 

[…]

A feeble unit in the middle of a threatening Infinitude, I seemed to have nothing given me but eyes, whereby to discern my own wretchedness. Invisible yet impenetrable walls, as of Enchantment, divided me from all living: was there, in the wide world, any true bosom I could press trustfully to mine? O Heaven, No, there was none! I kept a lock upon my lips: why should I speak much with that shifting variety of so-called Friends, in whose withered, vain and too-hungry souls Friendship was but an incredible tradition? In such cases, your resource is to talk little, and that little mostly from the Newspapers. Now when I look back, it was a strange isolation I then lived in. The men and women around me, even speaking with me, were but Figures; I had, practically, forgotten that they were alive, that they were not merely automatic. In the midst of their crowded streets and assemblages, I walked solitary; and (except as it was my own heart, not another’s, that I kept devouring) savage also, as the tiger in his jungle. Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life, though only diabolic Life, were more frightful: but in our age of Down-pulling and Disbelief, the very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh, the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death!

Sartor Resartus, Bk. II, Ch. 7

Men and women became figures or automatons to Teufelsdröckh, the universe is a huge, dead, immeasurable steam-engine, he has not even the consolation of a devil on whom to blame the state of his life. His angst and despair is not religious but existential. It is the angst of a non-religious age, when God is dead and leaves a gaping void.

Carlyle’s description is an early and particularly powerful articulation of the existentialist dilemma. Sartor Resartus is sometimes considered an early existentialist text, though perhaps not as often as it should be.

It is also the ultimate anti-poetic vision, the aesthetic nightmare par excellence, cited as such by Aldous Huxley in an appendix to Heaven and Hell. Huxley’s essay, a sequel to The Doors of Perception, is about the artistic vision, which he likens to a mescalin trip. While Huxley has to take mescalin to heighten the sense and, in his phraseology, lift the veil, the artist – Blake, Vuillard and so on – can do it without external stimulant. He goes on to note that a close relation to the negative artistic vision is the schizophrenic:

But for […] the schizophrenic, the illumination is infernal – an intense electric glare without a
shadow, ubiquitous and implacable. Everything that, for healthy visionaries, is a source of bliss, brings to [the schizophrenic] only fear and a nightmarish sense of unreality. The summer sunshine is malignant; the gleam of polished surfaces is suggestive, not of gems, but of machinery and enamelled tin; the intensity of existence which animates every object, when seen at close range and out of its utilitarian context, is felt as a menace.

The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (Vintage, 2004), p. 89.

This schizophrenic, anti-artistic vision Huxley finds in Van Gogh, Kafka and in Sartor Resartus (which he discusses in Appendix VIII, p. 124 of the essay) and it is the Hell of the essay’s title, identical to that experienced by the individual on a bad mescalin or lysergic acid trip (p. 90).

Carlyle’s passage then, is not only a precursor of existentialism, but an early description of both the bad trip and the schizophrenic state. Indeed, R.D. Laing’s famous The Divided Self (1959), a detailed and ambitious investigation of schizophrenia from a combined clinical and philosophical (specifically, existentialist) standpoint, includes excerpts which bring Teufelsdrockh strongly to mind. Laing, too, cites Kafka as the prose artist of existentialism and schizophrenia, though not Carlyle. Laing refers to one patient who declared herself to be “frightened of everything, ‘even of the sky'” (Penguin, 2010, p. 59); another put it that she felt herself to be “scorched under the glare of a black sun” (p. 112). For both the threat is truly existential, emanating from the universe itself. Laing documented that schizophrenics experienced others as automatons, but this, he contended, was different only in degree and not in kind to how sane people did:

Most relationships are based on some partial depersonalizing tendency in so far as one treats the other not in terms of any awareness of who he or what he might be in himself but as virtually an android robot playing a role in a large machine in which one too may be acting yet another part.

(p. 47)

R.D. Laing, from here

Laing felt that schizophrenia was a particularly 20th-century condition: not an illness, but a response to an insane world. Similarly, existentialism was the 20th-century philosophy. Reading about Teufelsdröckh’s Everlasting No in Sartor Resartus, however, we feel that Carlyle lived the 20th century before it happened, and that he articulated a form of being that was well before his time. It was so far before its time that it has been almost forgotten, subsumed by later articulations of that experience. Yet in Teufelsdröckh’s progress we find a powerful precursor to the existential anguish that was widely experienced in the 20th century and that is still relevant today in the perhaps even more anxious age we live in.