So there you have it. Here are the links to my ten posts on the top ten bestelling books of all time. Why? What did you spend your Christmas break doing?
10. Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich (1937)
9. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (2003)
8. H. Rider Haggard, She (1887)
7. C S Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950)
6. Agatha Christie, Ten Little Niggers (1939)
5. Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber (1759-91)
4. J R R Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937)
3. J R R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)
2. Antoine Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince (1943)
1. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Tuesday, 3 January 2012
Monday, 2 January 2012
Top Ten All-Time Bestselling Books, 1: Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
So, we reach the end of this series with the world's bestselling book; and we do so just as 2011 folds over into 2012, the bicentenary of Dickens's birth. As to why this Dickens title, amongst so many other (let's be honest: better) Dickens novels, is the one to sell more than any other ... well I suppose it combines a vivid, well-plotted story -- and the plotting, though obviously melodramatic, is good -- with a degree of historical interest. Plus it's considerably shorter than the fat-man-sized masterpieces, from Copperfield through to Our Mutual Friend. Let us not underestimate the importance of relative shortness, in reaching a global audience who have heard that Dickens is one of the greatest novelists, but who don't feel like scaling a 1000-page mountain, particularly if English isn't their first language. On the downside, this book lacks some of the sheer brilliance of Dickens's humour at its finest; and where Bleak House and Little Dorrit (my personal favourites in the Dickens canon) do extraordinary, eloquent, resonant things with their respective structures of theme and symbol, the bi-urban Tale wrings a rather wearying stream from Christian tropes out of its narrower stretch of cloth: wine that is also blood; dead bodies coming to life; substitutionary atonement. Still, I do love this novel. I love it as the most autobiographical book Dickens ever wrote.
That's not normally how it's taken, of course. The Standard Critical View of A Tale of Two Cities is that it rehearses Carlyle's French Revolution in fictional form by way of airing CD's political views and anxieties. And that's certainly a part of what is going on here. It's just not (I think) a very important part. For the greater part, I'm gonna ask you to -- gimme a 'C'! ("C!") Gimme a 'D'! ("D!").
It is about justice, or more exactly about fairness, just like all of Dickens’s novels—one of the things that gives Dickens his unique appeal is his acute sense of the valences of fairness. Children understand this quality, and it matters very much to them; but some adults fall into cynicism, or despair, about it. I must say I’ve never understood why ‘but that’s not fair!’ has, as a phrase, the negative overtones of spoilt child about it. ‘It’s not fair’ is the most penetrating criticism it is possible to make about human social affairs: it is, at root, the force of the criticism of Marx—and the Gospels. A characteristic Dickens storyline concerns a child, with whom we empathise, who suffers a series of grotesque unfairnesses at the hand of adulthood. In his best books these unfairnesses accumulate, and are only paid-off with a restorative dose of justice right at the end of the book. In this sense A Tale of Two Cities is both intensely characteristic and rather unusual—unusual in that it concerns no children, it traces no Bildungsroman, it does not surround a bland everyman with a ring of exaggeratedly intensified caricature and grotesques. But it is characteristic, intensely so, in that the issue of fairness is elevated to a national, indeed a cosmic level. The abuses of Dickens’s ancien regime are so hyperbolically extreme, the unfairness of life for the poor so manifest, that it feels crude, even clumsy. This, though, is to read only on the level of manifest content. The more interesting things happening here are going on on the level of the latent.
Two cities, one tale. A tale about what? Well, most obviously about the French revolution, and various people (most especially Dr Manette and his daughter Lucy, virtuous Charles Darnay and dissolute Sidney Carton) caught up in it. What else? Well, it's also about the thread linking London and Paris. London, of course, was Dickens's city. He knew Paris pretty well, too: he holidayed there often, especially in the 1850s. And I think the key salient here is that, for respectable British Victorians, there was something disreputable about France, of course: a different alignment of sexual mores (or mœurs) both in life and art. In May 1856 he had a conversation with a friend, Mrs Brown, on this matter. I'll quote from Claire Tomalin's excellent new biography:
When she spoke against them, he praised their openness about social problems, telling her that a leading difference between them and the English was that "in England people dismiss the mention of social evils and vices which do nevertheless exist amongst them; and that in France people people do not dismiss the mention of the same things but habitually recognise their existence." Mrs Brown cried out, "Don't say that!" and Dickens insisted, "Oh but I must say it, you know, when according to our national vanity and prejudice, you disparage an unquestionably great nation." At which Mrs Brown burst into tears. [272]Hah! That told her! It's always edifying, I feel, when a millionaire celebrity, one of the most influential men of his day, makes an ordinary non-famous woman cry. On another occasion Dickens complained to his friend Forster that Balzac and Sand could write about real heroes, where the hero of an English novel must be 'always uninteresting -- too good.' This question of the representation of the 'indecencies' (Dickens's word) is one of the fault lines separating the English and French literary traditions, I suppose: but it points to one of the way 'France' functions, symbolically, in this novel. Violence and revolution, yes; but also sex.
Now, in the usual course of things I shy away from biographical criticism, and I urge my students to do the same. The notion that a work of literature can be ‘unlocked’ once we understand the life-story of the individual who wrote it can hardly escape banality. Speaking as an author myself I can confirm that the author is dead, and that the business of literary criticism is with literature. But I say all that in order to violate my own rules; and advance a strictly biographical reading of A Tale of Two Cities. Many critics before me have noticed biographical parallels in the novel, of course; but I wish to go further—to suggest, in fact, that this is a novel absolutely saturated with CD. A critical commonplace is that David Copperfield is CD’s most autobiographical novel; I propose that A Tale of Two Cities merits that title.
Appropriately for a novel much concerned with secrets, and repression, the autobiography it construes is a hidden one. In the mid 1850s, after nearly two decades of marriage, Dickens separated from his wife Catherine. After giving birth to ten children (not counting her miscarriages) Catherine had certainly played her part in the Victorian conception of marriage; and if she had grown fat and sluggish in the process I know of no contemporary commentators inclined to judge her harshly on that account. But it is clear that Dickens had long since grown to feel his marriage was a prison, and that being married to his slow, conventional wife and his (even by nineteenth-century standards) large brood of children was tantamount to being buried alive. A Tale of Two Cities opens with Dr Manette, who has been buried alive in an actual prison cell for nearly two decades, reduced to the obsessive making of shoes (shoes are an eloquent trope for the material demands of parenthood: any parent will confirm that one seems constantly to be buying new shoes. The little buggers’ feet keep growing). But the novel opens with him recalled to life, drawn back to the light by the golden thread of his beautiful, eighteen-year-old daughter Lucy—whose name, of course, means light.
The story of Dickens infatuation with the beautiful, eighteen-year-old Ellen Ternan has been well documented—CD first fell for her when she was playing a character called ‘Lucy’ in Dickens’s and Collins’s play, The Frozen Deep. Like Lucy Manette, Ternan was a petite, fair-faced blonde (unlike the large-limbed, corpulent, dark-haired Catherine). Intensely protective of his public reputation as the preëminent family entertainer of his day, CD kept his relationship with Ternan secret; he did such a good job, indeed, that there are professional Dickensians who refuse to accept that theirs was a sexual relationship at all. But of course it was. And CD would hardly be the first wealthy middle-aged-man to have had an affair with a complaisant beautiful younger woman and to feel, thereby, that he had been as it were released from prison.
It seems logical to me (although we have no hard evidence) to think that Dickens told Ellen—and her mother, who was certainly ‘in’ on the relationship—that he would marry her if and when he could. But divorcing the blameless Catherine was out of the question, and so they had to wait—in his letters to his All the Year Round editor Willis (who knew about the affair) CD refers to Ternan as ‘the Patient’, presumably because she was having to wait patiently for Catherine to die to wed. In the meantime, Dickens bought ‘Nelly’ (and her mother) a house in Slough—then, as now, a charming countryside village a short train ride from London.
I used to live a couple miles from Slough. I know all about it.
Later he sold the Slough house and bought her place in Peckham; and there are rumours that (contra the official story, in which Dickens died at his Kentish house Gad’s Hill) he died in Peckham in Nelly’s arms. Certainly the couple travelled often between England and France, on one occasion, perhaps, to go to a safely anonymous place in order for Ellen to give birth to Dickens's son (if this happened, it seems the boy did not live long). Meanwhile he forced his actual wife away from him, against her wishes, with a startling ruthlessness; he was pitiless to those friends, no matter of how longstanding, who did not entirely side with him, and said a raft of cruel things, some of them untrue, about Catherine. As he conceded to a friend: 'I am a man full of passion and energy, and my own wild way that I must go.' For many, to quote Tomalin again, 'the spectacle of a man famous for his goodness and his attachment to domestic virtues suddenly losing his moral compass is dismaying.' But Tomlin, in a perceptive move, speculates that it was precisely the middle-class propriety of Ternan that precipitated the savagery of CD's behaviour during this climacteric: 'a naughty girl,' she speculates, 'could have made him happy.' As it was Ternan seems to have held out, for a while at least. But Dickens, father of ten children and full of stomping, rushing, urgent, unsatisfied vitality, was (to quote his friend Macready) 'not the celibate type'. Tomalin puts it less laconically: 'Nelly simply succumbed. Dickens was a great performer who liked to please his audience. He was famous for his energy, and took his physical pleasures seriously, eating and drinking, walking, dancing, travelling, singing. He had fathered ten children on his wife in twenty years, not counting miscarriages, and he believed that sexual activity was necessary to a healthy man' [Tomalin, 327]. This is not the same thing as saying that he was happy to have so conspicuously lost his moral compass, of course; on the contrary. But however uncomfortable it may have been for CD himself, the rock-and-a-hard-place pressures applied to a genuinely creative imagination can at least generate great art.
At any rate, these circumstance presumably bred two Dickenses: the one who watched the dial on his own moral compass spin wildly and could not get past his self-revulsion at what he had done to his blameless wife, to his family, and potentially to his reputation--and the other, who feeling sexual activity was necessary to a healthy man could not get past his boyish delight that the sexual activity in question was now happening with a beautiful eighteen-year old rather than a corpulent woman his own age.
All in all, it would not overstate things to describe the appearance of Ternan as a revolution in Dickens's life. When things happen to writers, they tend to write about them. Dickens could not write directly about this illicit sexual connection, of course; but he was a writer to the marrow. And so he wrote the story by not writing the story. I've done the same thing myself. Most writers have.
In A Tale of Two Cities, we have three characters who act, to one degree or another, as ciphers for CD. One, Dr Manette, represents Dickens’s sense of himself as imprisoned; as old enough to be Nelly’s father (which he was) and as broken down physically (which, again, he increasingly was: Tomalin is particularly good on this). Two others are the doppelgangers, upon which the plot hinges: the virtuous, hard-working, uxorious Charles 'CD' Darnay—and the talented but alcoholic and reprobate Sidney Carton. Darnay is CD on a good day; with a guilty secret in his past, but making the best of the present. Carton is a repository of all of CD’s worst traits: his rootlessness, his boozing, his faithlessness. We might want to see Carton as a sort of anti-Dickens (hence his name; not C. DIC. but [C]ID C.). Both Carton and Darnay love the young, blonde Ellen Ternan, sorry, I mean, the young, blonde Lucy Manette; and both are prevented, in the novel, from being able to realise that love, Darnay by the outside world (rendered in the novel as in terms of the anger of the mob that feels itself to have been betrayed—CD’s own fears about crossing his own large fanbase) and Carton by his own fundamental unworthiness. This is the Dickens of the early days of his relationship with Ternan: feeling himself blocked from his happy-ever-after with the woman he loved both by the world’s opposition and his own unfitness.
As I say many critics have noted these sorts of parallels. It is less often pointed out that there's a greater preponderance of ‘C’s and ‘D’s in character names in this novel than any other by CD. So we have not only Charles Darnay and Carton, but also the Crunchers, the Defarges (Mr and Mrs). There’s also Cly. Even Stryver has the initial ‘C’. And when character names aren’t built up from Cs and Dcs, they tend instead to elaborate CD’s middle names, ‘John Huffam’—the great many Jacques in the novel, for instance, have a clear relationship to the John (for Dickens is also, in his heart, the force of Revolution and ruin in this novel too, as in his own life); just as the turncoat spy Barsad has the first name John, and even Lorry is a ‘J’ too. There's a plethora of Jacques running through the heart of the novel ("How goes it, Jacques? Is all the spilt wine swallowed?" "Every drop, Jacques" ... "It is not often that many of these miserable beasts know the taste of wine, or of anything but black bread and death. Is it not so, Jacques?" "It is so, Jacques." ... "Hard lives they live, Jacques. Am I right, Jacques?" "You are right, Jacques" and so on). Stretching it a little, I’ve always assumed that ‘Gaspard’, the man whose son is run over by the wicked Marquis, and who kills him in revenge, suggests the gasping, huffing-puffing ‘Huffam’ from inbetween the 'John' and the 'Dickens'. I tell you: I find myself thinking that there’s hardly a character name in the novel than doesn’t riff on Dickens’s own name.
There’s more—much more, I’d say, than even the most assiduous Dickensian has excavated from the novel (and, I must concede, more than many would consider plausible. Not that that's going to stop me). Part of the plot hinges on a letter, hidden in the prison itself, but unearthed by Defarge.
Upon a corner stone in an angle of the wall, one prisoner, who seemed to have gone to execution, had cut as his last work, three letters. They were done with some very poor instrument, and hurriedly, with an unsteady hand. At first, they were read as D. I. C.; but, on being more carefully examined, the last letter was found to be G. There was no record or legend of any prisoner with those initials, and many fruitless guesses were made what the name could have been. At length, it was suggested that the letters were not initials, but the complete word, DIG. The floor was examined very carefully under the inscription, and, in the earth beneath a stone, or tile, or some fragment of paving, were found the ashes of a paper, mingled with the ashes of a small leathern case or bag. What the unknown prisoner had written will never be read, but he had written something, and hidden it away to keep it from the gaoler." [1:6]DIC, right. What of the prisoner himself? So traumatised by his incarceration that his name has become a number:
"Did you ask me for my name?"What a name! We read it as 105, but there’s nothing stopping us as reading it as one hundred and then five (hundred); which is to say, in Roman numerals, as C and then D. Did you ask him for his name? It’s CD.
"Assuredly I did."
"One Hundred and Five, North Tower."
“Is that all?"
"One Hundred and Five, North Tower."
With a weary sound that was not a sigh, nor a groan, he bent to work again.
I’m going to go even further. Dickens originally wanted to call his novel Recalled To Life, which is a perfectly good title (he also toyed with The Golden Thread). Yet A Tale of Two Cities wouldn’t leave him alone as a title; and he went with it. A Tale of Two Cities struck him, on some level, as the right name for this novel. And that’s because of what the novel actually is: A Tale of Two CDs. The privately good CD who is blocked by the world, and the privately bad CD who looks exactly like him and who sacrifices himself so the other can go on with his life.
You want more? “Charles Darnay brought before the lawless Court, and examined” [3:4] CD and the Lawless court? Lawless (ah, but you know this already) was Ellen Ternan’s middle name. "When he awoke and was afoot again [by the river], he lingered there yet a little longer, watching an eddy that turned and turned purposeless, until the stream absorbed it, and carried it on to the sea.—'Like me.'" [3:9] Carton, here: the anti-Dickens watching an eddy (E for Ellen, D for Dickens) that ‘turned and’. That Ternan. Like him.
What's that? You don't want me to go on? Oh, alright.
To be clear, or a little clearer. I am not suggesting the A Tale of Two CDs is a designedly constructed allegory of CD’s relations with Ellen Lawless Ternan. On the contrary: I don't believe there's anything strictly allegorical here at all. What there is, I think, is the profound saturation of a imaginative creativity with a set of emotional quanta that relate intensely, in an intensely felt way, to his own life. This in turn produces a text that is haunted by the poltergeists of Dickens’s violent passion for his new inamoratas, and his equally violent guilt and self-disgust at breaking up his marriage, lying (by omission and commission both) to his public, friends and family and—more fundamentally—for being an old and physically broken-down man who had pressed his attentions upon a young, virtuous virgin. Rich old men who press their sexual attentions upon impoverished young women may spin themselves enabling fictions about how the girl in question ‘really’ likes older men—perhaps even going further, trying to convince themselves that he and she are soul-mates, or something of that fashion. But at some level they know that the true salient in ‘rich old man’ is the first of those three terms. And Dickens, however pulled-along he was by his desire for this beautiful young woman, can hardly have been able to keep from his knowledge the thought that had he been poor and unfamous, young Ellen wouldn’t have looked at him twice. Because -- well, of course not!
In other words, the shadow-play of their relationship may have had wonderful moments (who knows?); but the Substance of the Shadow (to use the name Dickens gives the chapter in A Tale of Two CDs where the buried secret of the novel is finally revealed) is surely one of sexual guilt. And, really, how could the buried secret at the heart of A Tale of Two CDs be anything other than the story of the sexual exploitation of a young powerless girl by a old powerful man? The document, written in secrecy by old Doctor Manette, and buried in the Bastille under the rebus 'DIC', reveals that the wicked old Marquis of Evrémonde exercised his droit de seigneur upon an innocent young girl. The girl's brother objected to this treatment, and was stabbed to death with a sword for his pains. As he dies he tells Manette:
They have had their shameful rights, these Nobles, in the modesty and virtue of our sisters, many years, but we have had good girls among us. I know it, and have heard my father say so. She was a good girl.In the fiercely compressed symbolic economy of the novel it is this (‘he took her away—for his pleasure and diversion’) that propels the entire country into revolution; this is the primal sin that can only be expiated in blood. And whilst Dickens’ outrage at a society in which a rich, old man can see an attractive younger woman and simply ‘take her away for his pleasure and diversion’ is doubtless real, so is his secret exhilaration at precisely that power. This conflict is the identity of the two CDs in this tale: the CD who is properly outraged by this scenario, and the CD who can’t help desire it for himself.
The brother dies, of course; and the woman herself repeatedly shrieks ‘'My husband, my father, and my brother!’—in reference to those of her family who have been killed, but also, we might think, channelling Ellen Ternan’s conflicted sense of the nature of Dickens’s relation to her: old enough to be her father; assisting her and her sisters with brotherly charity; secretly her sexual partner. CDs litter the prose throughout, but in this passage they become more cloggingly obvious: ("I write with so much Difficulty, the Cold is so severe, I am so fearful of being Detected and Consigned to an underground cell and total Darkness, that I must abridge this narrative. There is no Confusion in my memory; it can recall, and Could Detail, every word that was ever spoken between me and those brothers”). When the document is read, at the final trial, it seals CD’s doom, to the C and the D, ‘to the Conciergerie, and Death’.
This is not a novel that delineates the externalities of Dickens's 1850s. Such a book would be much duller. This, on the contrary, is a book about the overturning of an old regime not so much in terms of its externals but as the revolution of the heart and mind, the stirring up of old passions CD had tried to consider long buried. More specifically, it styles the force powering this revolution as dual: as Londonish and Parisian; as the desire to make a better world and the desire to indulge bad appetites and bestial yearnings. And since this is the story of one man, it is therefore the story of his two doppelgangers -- the man who wants to put his bad past behind him and live a virtuous life, only the world won't let him; and the man who wants to make love to a woman on an equal footing -- only he's not worthy. It is a far far better thing, and so on, and so forth.
Perhaps the most far-fetched claim I make in all this blogpost's parsec-far fetches, is the one that A Tale of Two CDs is actually a more interesting story than A Tale of Two Cities. Why is such a claim particularly far-fetched? Because (the contrary voice mutters in my ear) the story of a wealthy middle-aged man putting his wife away to have sex with a younger girl is worse than seedy and scuzzy -- it's banal. It's such a cliché! Whereas, for better or worse, the French Revolution was a unique and prodigious event in world history! But (I reply, to that contrary voice), especially when viewed from the auspice of moral fable, as A Tale of Two Cities does, the French Revolution is horribly one dimensional. The ancien regime was full of horrors; and the revolution, reacting against them, went too far the other way. End of, as the contemporary idiom has it. But A Tale of Two CDs is a story about something intrinsically dramatic, a man at war with himself. I once interviewed Brian Aldiss at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, and he expressed a low opinion of The Lord of the Rings because it had no characters in it, just two-dimensional types; and then he corrected himself -- no (he went on) there was one character in that novel, by far the most interesting figure Tolkien created. Gollum. Now, Dickens was, it seems to me, a better maker of characters than Tolkien. But nevertheless he is open to the charge that his characters tend to be defined by a single dominant. His greatest achievements in that way -- Pip, Clenham, maybe Scrooge -- stand out from the rest. And, I am suggesting here, the fullest articulation of that sense of human nature as intrinsically divided, striated and driven in ways it does not necessarily even understand itself, is here, in this novel. CD. Or the two CDs, of whom this novel is the tale.
Thursday, 29 December 2011
Top Ten All-Time Best-Selling Books, 2: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince (1943)
The third book in a row, in this series, that I have loved egregiously since childhood. Indeed, of all the books on this strange list, it is surely the most intrinsically lovable. In this blogpost I have two points to make, one serious (or at least 'serious') and a little complicated; the other simple but profound. And that latter point has already been made, but bears repeating. This is a book that provokes love. I love its invention, its wit, its gentleness and wisdom; I love the little prince himself. When I was a child myself I felt in my heart the rightness of its mutual perspectives upon childishness and adulthood, and the losses of passing from the former state to the latter -- like a warmer, funnier, more charming version of Wordsworth's 'Immortality Ode'. That, shown a picture of a boa constrictor that has swallowed an elephant, grown-ups can only see a hat. That grown-ups are besotted with material data. To quote from the English-language edition I read as a kid, and which I in turn read to my kids:
Grown-ups love figures. When you tell them that you have made a new friend, they never ask you about essential matters. They never say to you, "What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?" Instead they demand: "How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make?" Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him. [16]Of course I take the force of Saint-Exupéry's point here, although at the same time -- without the least hint of snark -- if my son came home saying 'I have made a new friend' and I replied How much does he weigh? I would get some very strange looks from my fellow grown-ups. The passage continues:
Say to the grown-ups: "I saw a beautiful house made of rosy brick, with geraniums in the windows and doves on the roof," and they would not be able to get any idea of the house at all. You would have to say to them: "I saw a house that cost £4000." Then they would exclaim: "Oh, what a pretty house that is!"This, I feel, would be unlikely to be their 2011 reaction. Four grand for a house? It's like playing Monopoly. The kids enjoy the game, and the adults spend their time picking up cards, saying '"Solicitors Fee £50"? Oh HAHAHA!' and '"School Fees Due: £150"? I SHOULD COCOA!' and falling about clutching their sides.
But I'm getting distracted. Not only do I love this book, I love Saint-Exupéry himself, surely of all the authors of this list the most fundamentally likeable: a pioneer aviator and a righteous man. I love that although he was a patriot, who died (probably) defending his country against the Nazis, he was nonetheless deeply opposed to war (in 1942's Pilote de guerre he wrote: 'la guerre n'est pas une aventure. La guerre est une maladie. Comme le typhus.'). I love that he recognised fascism for the great evil it was early on; and I love that he championed the bravery and skill of his fellow pilot Jean Israël in the teeth of contemporary anti-Semitism (Pilote de guerre was banned in Vichy France, Saint-Exupéry's own country, because of this). And I love the fact that, instead of looking like a lantern-jawed, aquiline-profiled, muscular man-of-action stereotype, Saint-Exupéry actually looked like Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory.
Most of all, like millions, I love the message of this beautiful little book. As the fox puts it, 'On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.' The only way to see properly is with the heart. The most important things are invisible to the eyes. True, that.
The conceit of the book, its miniature planetoids circling in space, and the various representative (crazy) humans who inhabit thereon, is charming. There's a Hillaire Belloc passage I like a great deal,and have quoted before [it starts 'The Inn Of The Margeride' (from Hills and the Sea, 1906)], about the appeal of miniaturisation:
Whatever, keeping its proportion and form, is designed upon a scale much greater or much less than that of our general experience, produces upon the mind an effect of phantasy.
A little perfect model of an engine or a ship does not only amuse or surprise; it rather casts over the imagination something of that veil through which the world is transfigured, and which I have called "the wing of Dalua"; the medium of appreciations beyond experience; the medium of vision, of original passion and of dreams. The principal spell of childhood returns as we bend over the astonishing details. We are giants--or there is no secure standard left in our intelligence.
So it is with the common thing built much larger than the million examples upon which we had based our petty security. It has been always in the nature of worship that heroes, or the gods made manifest, should be men, but larger than men. Not tall men or men grander, but men transcendent: men only in their form; in their dimension so much superior as to be lifted out of our world. An arch as old as Rome but not yet ruined, found on the sands of Africa, arrests the traveller in this fashion. In his modern cities he has seen greater things; but here in Africa, where men build so squat and punily, cowering under the heat upon the parched ground, so noble and so considerable a span, carved as men can carve under sober and temperate skies, catches the mind and clothes it with a sense of the strange. And of these emotions the strongest, perhaps, is that which most of those who travel to-day go seeking; the enchantment of mountains; the air by which we know them for something utterly different from high hills. Accustomed to the contour of downs and tors, or to the valleys and long slopes that introduce a range, we come to some wider horizon and see, far off, a further line of hills. To hills all the mind is attuned: a moderate ecstasy. The clouds are above the hills, lying level in the empty sky; men and their ploughs have visited, it seems, all the land about us; till, suddenly, faint but hard, a cloud less varied, a greyer portion of the infinite sky itself, is seen to be permanent above the world. Then all our grasp of the wide view breaks down. We change. The valleys and the tiny towns, the unseen mites of men, the gleams or thread of roads, are prostrate, covering a little watching space before the shrine of this dominant and towering presence.
It is as though humanity were permitted to break through the vulgar illusion of daily sense, and to learn in a physical experience how unreal are all the absolute standards by which we build. It is as though the vast and the unexpected had a purpose, and that purpose were the showing to mankind in rare glimpses what places are designed for the soul--those ultimate places where things common become shadows and fail, and the divine part in us, which adores and desires, breathes its own air, and is at last alive.
So what is my second point? Well, it has to do with the character's title. Why 'prince'? Now, it is true that -- for a country whose modern identity was established by a revolution that supposedly did away with all that aristocratic-monarchist gobbledegook -- France is unusually fascinated with ranks, titles and princeishnesses. Saint-Exupéry, himself a Count, knew a good deal about this airless status-discourse; but the mouthfeel of his book is so removed from the absurdity of all that (and indeed, in several of the adult characters, the book actively satirises all that) that it puzzles me his protagonist has the distinguished title of 'prince' at all. Perhaps he is 'prince' in the sense that, as his world's only inhabit, he is necessarily its ruler. But 'prince' makes me wonder whether there isn't some easy-for-an-Anglo-to-miss allusion to the last 'prince' to rule France, Prince Louis Napoleon, otherwise known as Napoleon III. Two thirds of a century separate Napoleon III's downfall from Saint-Exupéry's writing; but as his country's last absolute ruler (he was known as the 'Prince-President', and initially swept to power on the back of an 1848 plebsicite; but he seized absolute power in a coup-d-etat in 1851 and ruled as a dictator until the Prussians invaded in 1870 and chased him out) he was still a name to conjure with. More, he was known to satirists precisely as a little prince, a pygmy version of his much more famous uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte: Victor Hugo's savage 1852 book Napoléon le Petit was banned in France until the Prince-President's regime came to an end (you can read it here). This is Saint-Exupéry's 'best portrait' of his little prince:
Elsewhere in the book he is dressed more casually; but this first image is (it seems to me) a deliberate confection of the two most celebrated official portraits of Napoleon III: taking the cloak and boots from one, the colours and trappings from the other.
Beyond that (and assuming you swallow the parallel) it's hard to see the function of the parallel, unless it is there precisely to operate by a sort of photographic negative mode. Louis Napoleon, the 'little' Prince-President: calculating and cynical, addicted to pomp and pleasure, inward-looking and decadent, elderly and infirm. The Saintly Exupéry's little prince: young, holy, charming, widely-travelled, loving and loved, self-effacing and wise.
Tuesday, 27 December 2011
Top Ten All-Time Best-Selling Books, 3: J R R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)
Fellowship of the Ring I.
Fellowship of the Ring II.
The Two Towers I.
The Two Towers II.
Return of the King I.
Return of the King II.
Master-slave dialectic in Tolkien.
Pauline Baynes cover.
A placeholder, yes. Sorry about that; but -- you know. Christmas and whatnot. Still, there are real, actual posts about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Dickens just around the corner.
Sunday, 25 December 2011
Top Ten All-Time Best-Selling Books, 4: J R R Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937)
We're into the closing straight: the top 4 best-selling books of all time. And I had better disclose, fully: three of these four are texts I have no critical distance upon at all. They're books I have loved from a young age, and love still. That fact interpenetrates anything I might write about them, and therefore erodes the necessary critical distance. Ah well: can't be helped.
Chief among them is The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, which I read and heard (in 1974 my parents gave me a cassette-tape talking-book version, narrated by the never-knowingly-underacted Nicol Williamson, to which I listened obsessively over and over) and adored as a child. What to say about a text to which I'm so close?
Well, one thing I can say is that Tolkien wrote two versions of the story of The Hobbit. In the first, a troop of dwarves, to use what Tolkien insisted was the proper plural form of the word, are planning to trek to a distant mountain in order to steal a great pile of treasure guarded by a lethal, fire-breathing dragon -- or more properly, to steal it back, since they claim it belongs to them. They are looking for a professional thief to help them in this dangerous business. The wizard Gandalf, for reasons that appear largely capricious, tricks the dwarves into hiring Bilbo Baggins, an ordinary, sedentary, unadventurous hobbit; and likewise tricks Bilbo into going along. This situation is played broadly for laughs, because Bilbo is so patently unfitted to the business of adventuring. 'Unfitness' also seems to characterise the dwarves, mind you: the party stumbles from disaster to disaster as they journey, escaping death by hairs' breadths half a dozen times at the hands of trolls, goblins, wolves, spiders and hostile elves. They are saved from their early misadventures by Gandalf's interventions, for though eccentric he is considerably more competent than they. Later, though, Gandalf goes off on his own business, and the party has to rescue itself. As they continue to stumble into a series of potentially fatal pickles, they somehow manage, by a combination of luck and hobbit-judgment, always to get away. Indeed, following Bilbo's development from massively incompetent to marginally incompetent is one of the pleasures of the narrative. At one point in the story, as the group passes through subterranean tunnels and caves underneath a mountain range, Bilbo gets separated from the others, meets a fellow called Gollum. The two play a gambling game, guessing one another's riddles, and when Bilbo wins Gollum hands what he had wagered -- a magic ring that makes the wearer invisible.
Ownership of this ring, and a very shallow learning curve, gradually make Bilbo better at thieving and sneaking about. When, against the odds, the party reaches the dragon's Mountain, the quest is achieved, much much more by luck than judgement. Bilbo does use the magic ring to creep into the dragon's lair and to steal one cup from the great hillocks of piled pelf; but that's as much as he can do. Luckily for all of them, the loss of this single piece happens to enrage the dragon, causing him to leaves the mountain with the furious intention of burning up the local town of men. One of the defenders there, warned by a talking bird, shoots a lucky arrow that kills him. After this there is a big battle: armies converging on the mountain and its now undragoned hoard. The leader of the dwarf-band is killed, but otherwise things work out well for everybody. Finally, having spent almost all the novel adumbrating the 'there' of the novel's subtitle, the story sprints through the 'and back again', hurrying the materially enriched Bilbo home in a few pages.
I stress the 'incompetence' angle in my retelling here because, really, that's what characterises the main players. It's an endearing incompetence, used partly for comedy; partly for dramatic purposes (by way of ratcheting up the narrative tension and keeping things interesting) and partly to facilitate the readers'—our—engagement. Because we can be honest; we'd be rubbish on a dangerous quest. We're hobbitish types ourselves, and our idea of fun is snuggling into the sofa with a cup of cocoa and a good book, not fighting gigantic spiders with a sword. Or more precisely, we enjoy fighting giant spiders with a sword in our imaginations only. The book has sold as many copies as it has in part because the Hobbits are able (textually-speaking) so brilliantly to mediate our modern, cosseted perspectives and the rather forbidding antique warrior code and the pitiless Northern-European Folk Tale world.
That there is something haphazard about the larger conception of this adventure is part of its point: obviously, it makes for a jollier tale if an clearly unsuitable comic-foil is sent on a dangerous quest than some super-competent swordsman alpha-male. The bumbling, homely qualities of Bilbo, and the pinball-ball bouncing trajectory from frying pan to fire to bigger fire of the narrative, are loveable aspects of the whole. And that's right: the motor of the story is the idea that adventure will come and find you, and winkle you out of your comfortable hidey-hole. It's a beguiling idea, in part because it literalises the action of story itself. We settle ourselves to read, in physical comfort; but the story itself transports us imaginatively out of our hole and away, upon all manner of precarious, exciting, absorbing and diverting journeys.
This is The Hobbit that appeared in 1937, to both acclaim and commercial success. But there's another The Hobbit. I don't mean the upcoming film. I mean a second The Hobbit written by Tolkien, comprising revisions to this first edition, additional material written for the Lord of the Rings and the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, plus other material -- most importantly two separate prose pieces, both called 'The Quest for Erebor' that were collected in the posthumously-published Unfinished Tales (1980). JRRT's first revisions were confined to the 'Riddles in the Dark' chapter: for after writing he first Hobbit Tolkien came to the conclusion that 'the Ring' was more than just a magic ring, more even than a ring of Gyges: that it was indeed the most powerful artefact in the whole world, one with which people became so besotted they lose their souls. Gollum, he reasoned, would not freely give up such an item. So he rewrote the scene. But this is symptomatic of something larger -- a reconceptualising (Tolkien purists might say: a distillation or focussing) of the now-celebrated JRRT-legendarium: no longer a folk-story, now a grand sacramental drama of incarnation, atonement and redemption. I can't say I'm particularly fond of Tolkien's coinage 'legendarium', by the way, which to me sounds like a Bluewater store selling lead Warhammer miniatures. Not, I might add, that there's anything wrong with Warhammer miniatures. My point is this: Tolkien's celebrated 1939 essay 'On Fairy Stories' actually celebrates two modes of Fantasy, homely and transcendental. Traditional fairy tales, which Tolkien sees as beautiful and profound narratives of escape and resacralisation; and the New Testament, which he thinks shares those qualities with fairy stories but which he also thinks exists on a higher, truer and more important plane. This is how he puts it: 'the Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the "happy ending." The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation.'
My beef, if I may slip into a nonvegetarian idiom for a moment, is not with Tolkien's religious beliefs, which (although I do not share them) are clearly essential to the dynamic of his art. My beef is with the notion that all our bents and faculties have a purpose. In Tolkien's second version of The Hobbit, it is precisely the haphazardness, the intimations of glorious, human, comic incompetence, that must be sanded, smoothed and filed away. It is no longer enough for Gandalf to turn up on the doorstop of the world's least likely adventurer merely because that is the sort of thing batty old wizards do. Now he must do so because he has a larger plan. In the first version of the story it doesn't really matter why Gandalf chooses a hobbit, of all people; or more precisely, his whylessness of choice is actually the point of the story. ('I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging,' Gandalf says, with what sounds to me rather like desperation, 'and it's very difficult to find anyone.') This is because the novel is not about Gandalf's whys, it is about Bilbo's adventure: why he is chosen matters less than the way he acquits himself on his journey, and the extent to which he sheds his unheroism and becomes a better fellow. That's what matters because we are he. That's how the reading experience goes.
But in Tolkien's second version of the hobbit everything has to happen for a reason. Gandalf was not idly arranging an adventure; he was setting in motion one crucial play in a larger strategy of a grand war against Evil.
I knew that Sauron had arisen again and would soon declare himself, and I knew that he was preparing for a great war. ... The state of things in the North was very bad. The Kingdom under the Mountain and the strong Men of Dale were no more. To resist any force Sauron might send to regain the northern passes in the mountain and the old lands of Angmar there were only the Dwarves of the Iron Hills, and behind them lay a desolation and a Dragon. The Dragon Sauron might use with terrible effect. Often I said to myself: "I must find some means of dealing with Smaug." [Unfinished Tales, 322]Just to be clear; I have no problem with retconning; not in the least (for I take 'text' to be fundamentally fluid and adaptable). I can go further, and say that one of the things that gives Tolkien's art depth and resonance is precisely the way he layers medium and deep historical pasts into his present-set tale; and having this secondary perspective on the material of The Hobbit adds echoey, plangent splendour to the whole. But that's not to say that this piece of retconning makes sense. On the contrary: it compels us to believe that Gandalf, deciding that it was a strategic priority that Smaug be eliminated, thinks not of sending an army, and certainly not of going himself and tackling the dragon with his, you know, magic and that. Rather he thinks: "I'll go to the extreme other end of the continent, recruit a number of dwarves, some of them manifestly not up to the task (Bombur?), plus a hobbit without any experience or aptitude for a mission of this sort whatsoever, and send them off travelling halfway across the world past unnumbered perils in the hope that somehow they'll do the old worm in." Why the dwarves? Well, I suppose they can at least be persuaded to go, since they regard Erebor as rightfully theirs; although you have to wonder whether a military strategist who wasn't actually senile mightn't think first of approaching the men of Dale. But there is no reason in this scenario why Bilbo would be anyone's first, or thousand-and-first choice. In his second version of the story, Tolkien comes up with three reasons why it's a good idea to wager the entire success of the operation of Bilbo -- a figure of whom Thorin rightly says 'he is soft, soft as the mud of the Shire, and silly,' a judgement with which Gandalf concurs ('"You are quite right", I said' [Unfinished Tales, 325]). Those three reasons are:
1. That Hobbits don't wear shoes, where Dwarfs do ('suddenly in my mind [I pictured] the sturdy, heavy-booted Dwarves ... the quick, soft-footed hobbit'), a consideration, certainly, since Dragons have good hearing; although you might think that advising the Dwarves to take off their boots might be less precarious than hanging the success of the enterprise around the neck of a sort of Middle-Earth fur-footed Homer Simpson.The story of The Lord of the Rings is that even 'the little people' (that's us, of course) have their part to play in the great historical and martial dramas of the age -- and it is a potent and truthful story, well told. But The Hobbit is that story only in its second iteration. In its first, the one we are chiefly considering here, The Hobbit is not about the great dramas of the age; it is about us-sized dramas of people being taken out of their comfort zone -- whisked away by Story.
2. That Smaug would not know Bilbo's scent, where he would recognise the smell of Dwarves, although apparently Tolkien added this as an afterthought to his MS ('a scent that cannot be placed, at least not by Smaug, the enemy of Dwarves'). A scent that cannot be smelt at all by Smaug would make more sense, but OK. The fact that he smells a thief in his lair but can't immediately place the thief's provenance might confuse him for ... six seconds or so. The third reason is the most arbitrary of all --
3. Gandalf just feels in his water that it would be a good idea: 'listen to me Thorin Oakenshield ... if this hobbit goes with you, you will succeed. If not you will fail. A foresight is on me' [325]. Hard not to see this as code for 'I've already written this story and know how it turns out', which comes dangerously close to a cheat.
I'm happy that there are two versions of The Hobbit, and feel no desire to try and force them into some notional procrustean 'coherence'. Only narrative fundamentalists, the textual Taliban, believe that all stories must be brought into that sort of rigid alignment. But of the two stories, really I prefer the one (homely, funny, a little bit slapstick and a little bit wondrous) over the other (grand-verging-on-grandiose, theological, epic and strenuously, to coin a phrase, eutragic). Although I do love them both. And I love the Dwarves vastly more than any number of elves. I love precisely their lack of graceful elegance. Thorin Oakenshield has some noble speeches in The Hobbit it's true; but his Dwarves are better at stuffing themselves with food and drink, and getting (with endearing incompetence) into ridiculous scrapes. Consulting the Dwarf family tree, in the appendices to Return of the King, I discover that amongst Thorin relatives are "Borin" and "Groin". A little more groin would have done The Lord of the Rings no harm at all, I think. Not borin' in the least.
Friday, 23 December 2011
Top Ten All-Time Best-Selling Books, 5: 红楼梦 (1759-1791)
女娲炼石补天，剩一块石未用。这补天顽石（通灵宝玉）经过修炼已经有了灵性。一僧一道携它变幻为美玉带入尘世。适逢神瑛侍者对一株绛珠仙草有浇灌之恩，又动了凡心下凡游历人间。绛珠仙草后修炼成女体，闻讯亦随之下凡，打算把一生所有的眼泪还他。僧道二人欲了结这段公案，并将石头（通灵宝玉）夹带其中。元宵时节，霍启不慎丢失了英莲。葫芦庙失火祸及甄家，落魄的甄士隐被一僧一道点化，解出《好了歌注》出家。穷困的贾雨村反而由贫入官。贾府是金陵四大家族之一，受有功勋，分为宁荣二府，族中最长者为贾母，最疼生来口中就含有一块通灵宝玉（补天顽石）的孙儿贾宝玉（神瑛侍者）。贾宝玉生来不喜读圣贤书，却爱与青春女性玩耍，为此与其父贾政关系紧张。林黛玉（绛珠仙草）此时入居贾府。刘姥姥为了生计，也一进荣府。学堂内发生一场大混战，贾府男子众人，丑态尽出。
宁府长孙媳秦可卿去世，托梦叮嘱王熙凤盛筵必散。王熙凤协理秦氏丧事，场面辉煌，展示理家才能。荣府贾元春获选为妃并省亲，荣府为元春省亲修建别墅大观园，极尽奢华。
宝玉在池边读《会真记》，宝黛第一次葬花。赵姨娘与其子贾环，最恨贾宝玉。贾环欲烫瞎宝玉其眼，幸而未伤到眼睛，王夫人不骂贾环，把赵姨娘一顿臭骂。赵姨娘遂又命马道婆扎纸人作法害凤姐和宝玉。凤姐有事求黛玉，被打断，拿宝玉和黛玉的婚事取笑。宝凤二人忽随即因道婆作法而发狂，一僧一道前来相救。宝黛在春季结束时第二次葬花，林黛玉作成葬花词一首。
忽闻与贾府素无往来的忠顺王府来人，要找宝玉问琪官下落，说出交换汗巾之事，贾政大怒。贾政本要拿贾环出气，贾环却趁机说出金钏跳井之事，谎称金钏是因宝玉意图强奸而自尽。贾政怒不可遏，亲自下重手打了数十板，方被王夫人哭止，贾母闻讯训斥贾政，贾政亦自后悔。宝玉想听《牡丹亭》，却被龄官冷落，待见得贾蔷与龄官的景况，方知情缘皆有分定。
清光绪刊本的《红楼梦》插图，图上人物为袭人。改琦绘。
探春写帖邀众人结诗社，众姐妹和宝玉以海棠为题作诗。宝玉想起湘云，邀来入社，湘云之作众人皆赞。刘姥姥二进荣国府，贾母设宴招待刘姥姥，刘姥姥闹出不少笑话；众人行酒令，所说词句颇有寓意，黛玉不经意说了几句《西厢记》中的句子，引起宝钗的注意，刘姥姥的令词又引发哄堂大笑。众人途经拢翠庵，妙玉请宝钗、黛玉到里间喝体己茶，宝玉也跟去。刘姥姥用了妙玉的一个成窑杯，妙玉嫌脏准备扔掉，宝玉做顺水人情送给了刘姥姥。刘姥姥出恭之后误打误撞到了怡红院，在宝玉的床上睡着，好在被袭人发现并掩饰过去。宝钗审问黛玉在行酒令时背出《西厢记》词句之事，以正言相劝，二人从此和好。黛玉于风雨夜作《秋窗风雨夕》词。
贾赦欲纳鸳鸯为妾，鸳鸯发誓不嫁贾赦。贾赦闻讯，疑心鸳鸯看上了宝玉。贾母闻讯大怒，认为贾赦有意要把她身边的人支开。香菱向黛玉学作诗，以月为题，苦吟多首之后终得佳作。邢岫烟进京，路遇李纹、李绮，加上宝琴一起住进大观园，湘云也被贾母留下，园中热闹许多，交织成大观园中最美丽的景色。众人争联即景诗。宝琴作了十首怀古诗。元宵当晚，贾母在荣国府设宴。贾母把陈腐旧套批驳一番。
凤姐操劳成疾，李纨、探春、宝钗代为主持内务，更为严谨。蕊官托春燕给芳官带去蔷薇硝擦脸。贾环也想要，芳官把茉莉粉给了贾环。赵姨娘借此进园大闹，夏婆子从中加油添醋。
柳家的想叫女儿去宝玉房中当差，托芳官给宝玉说，芳官要玫瑰露给柳五儿吃。并答应让五儿在宝玉房里当差。赵姨娘内侄却欲娶柳五儿，柳家父母同意，五儿不愿，父母未敢应允，钱槐气愧，偏与柳家相与。柳家欲回，其哥嫂送给柳五儿茯苓霜。迎春的丫头莲花儿为司棋到厨房要炖鸡蛋羹，柳家的不给，迎春的大丫头司棋便领人大闹厨房。柳五儿将茯苓霜分些赠芳官，回来被林之孝家的发现，王熙凤叫把柳家的打四十板，永不许进二门，把五儿打四十板，交给庄子，或卖或配人。宝玉替彩云瞒赃，平儿向偷太太玫瑰露给环儿的彩云说明情况，凤姐还要追究，经过平儿相劝，凤姐方罢。贾敬归天，尤氏理丧，尤老娘母女三人到宁府着家，贾蓉戏二姨。
刚烈的尤三姐因柳湘莲的拒绝娶配而引剑自尽；温柔的尤二姐因王熙凤的迫害吞金自杀。黛玉做的“桃花诗”。众人改海棠社为桃花社，推黛玉为社主。湘云填柳絮词，黛玉邀众填词。宝钗诗中有“任他随聚随分”之句。众人后放风筝。鸳鸯望候凤姐，说凤姐患的是“血山崩”。贾琏请求鸳鸯暂把老太太的金银家伙偷着运出一箱子，暂押千数两银子支腾过去。
王夫人带着众仆抄检大观园，王熙凤消极配合。睿智聪颖的三妹贾探春愤而说出：「百足之虫，死而不僵！必须先要从家里自杀自灭起来，才能一败涂地！」宁府夜宴，祖先灵位前竟听见了诡谲的叹息声，似乎是在指责贾府的不肖子孙，即将毁掉百年的簪缨望族。史湘云和林黛玉中秋夜联诗，句句似乎预言了贾府的命运，极为凄凉感伤：「寒塘渡鹤影，冷月葬花魂」。之后宝玉的贴身丫鬟晴雯因聪明灵巧被逐，病亡之后宝玉作《芙蓉女儿诔》。而薛宝钗愚蠢纵玩的哥哥薛蟠，娶了泼辣闹家的妻子；贾宝玉懦弱温和的二姊(堂姊)贾迎春，嫁给了残暴淫秽的丈夫。
Wednesday, 21 December 2011
Top Ten All-Time Best-Selling Books, 6: Agatha Christie, Ten Little Niggers (1939)
To save myself a lot of tedious precis work, here's a quick wikisummary: 'Eight people, Lawrence Wargrave, Vera Claythorne, Philip Lombard, General Macarthur, Emily Brent, Anthony "Tony" Marston, Doctor Armstrong, and William Blore have been invited to a mansion on the fictional Soldier Island ("Nigger Island" in the original 1939 UK publication, "Indian Island" in the 1964 US publication), which is based upon Burgh Island off the coast of Devon. Upon arriving, they are told that their hosts, a Mr. and Mrs. U.N. Owen (Ulick Norman Owen and Una Nancy Owen), are currently away, but the guests will be attended to by Thomas and Ethel Rogers. Each guest finds in his or her room an odd bit of bric-a-brac and a framed copy of the nursery rhyme "Ten Little Soldiers" ("Niggers" or "Indians" in respective earlier editions) hanging on the wall ... During their meal, a gramophone record plays, accusing each of the ten of murder. Each guest acknowledges awareness of (and in some cases involvement with) the deaths of the persons named (except Emily Brent, who tells only Vera, who later tells the other guests), but denies any malice and/or legal culpability. (except for Lombard and Blore, the latter telling only the former.) The guests now realize they have been tricked into coming to the island, but find that they cannot leave: the boat which regularly delivers supplies has stopped arriving. They are murdered one by one, each death paralleling a verse of the nursery rhyme, with one of the figurines being removed after each murder. First to die is the spoiled Anthony Marston, who chokes to death when his drink is poisoned with cyanide ("one choked his little self"). That night, Thomas Rogers notices that a figurine is missing from the dining table. Mrs. Rogers dies in her sleep that night, which Dr. Armstrong attributes to a fatal overdose of sleeping draught ("one overslept himself"). General Macarthur fatalistically predicts that no one will leave the island alive, and at lunch, is indeed found dead from a blow to the back of his skull ("one said he'd stay there"). Meanwhile, two more figurines have disappeared from the dining room. In growing panic, the survivors search the island in vain for the murderer. Justice Wargrave establishes himself as the decisive leader of the group and asserts one of them must be the murderer playing a sadistic game with the rest. The killer's twisted humour is evidenced by the names of their "hosts": "U.N. Owen" is a pun and a homophone for "unknown". The next morning, Rogers is missing, as is another figurine. He is found dead in the woodshed, struck in the back of the head with an axe ("one chopped himself in halves"). Later that day, Emily Brent is killed in the dining room by an injection of potassium cyanide that leaves a mark on her neck ("A bumblebee stung one"), which at first appears to be a sting from a bumble bee placed in the room. The hypodermic needle is found outside her window next to a smashed china figurine. The five survivors — Dr. Armstrong, Justice Wargrave, Philip Lombard, Vera Claythorne, and William Blore — become increasingly frightened and almost frantic.'First of all, I must apologise for the use of the n-word, in this post title and elsewhere within the actual post. I appreciate it is an offensive term, nowadays. More, and just to be clear, it was offensive then: Dodd, Mead and Company published the book in November 1939 as Ten Little Niggers, but reissued it only two months later as And Then There Were None because of the original's racist tone. It has been published and adapted as Ten Little Indians and Ten Little Soldier Boys, and naturally the option is available to me to discuss the text under one or other of these euphemistic names. But the offensiveness of using the original title needs to be balanced against the greater need not to airbrush away the immanent low-level racism of the culture out of which these novels were created. To render the racism of the past invisible is to empower the racism of today by innoculating it against history.
Black characters crop up rarely in Christie (there are none in Ten Little Niggers, for instance, despite its title). But 'foreigners' are one of the key types of otherness by which her cosy-catastrophic narrative twostep of death (Order Lost) and detection (New Order Regained) are orchestrated. The other type, perhaps surprisingly, is 'middle aged men of the professional classes'. I can't remember where I first read about Christie's dislike of doctors, the textual consequence of which is that if you are reading a Christie whodunnit and one of the characters is a doctor (especially a surgeon or consultant) nine times out of ten he (of course the doctor will be a he) is the murderer. Other 'professionals', especially lawyers and judges, are also broadly distrusted by Christie. Nor do these two stereotypes fit together into an uncommon combination of dislike: the trope of distrusting, disliking and, of course, actively blaming the racial 'other' who has lots of money because he is unlike oneself and has lots of money gears only too easily up to some of the worst inhumanity of the twentieth century. The ten characters in Ten Little Niggers are all invited or induced to Nigger Island by the murderer, who cloaks him/herself under the ignotus-y pseudonym 'U.N.Owen' ('or by a slight stretch of fancy -- UNKNOWN! [72]'). The flash young Captain Lombard, for instance, is offered quite a lot of money, but although he goes he has his suspicions:
What exactly was up, he wondered? That little Jew had been damned mysterious ... A hundred guineas when he was literally down to his last square meal! He had fancied, though, that the little Jew had not been deceived -- that was the damnable part about Jews, you couldn't deceive them about money -- they knew! [16]1939, ladies and gentlemen.
This is glancing enough, but not untypical. Elsewhere in pre-War Christie, Jews are vermin (‘he was king of the rats … his face gleamed white and sharp in the moonlight. There was the least hint of a curve to the thin nose. His father had been a Polish Jew’ The Mystery of the Blue Train, 1928) or repulsive toad-like moneylenders—as in The Secret of Chimneys (1925) whose villain Isaacstein has ‘a fat yellow face and black eyes as impenetrable as those of a cobra’ as well as a ‘generous curve to [his] big nose’. He represents ‘Hebraic people. Yellow-faced financiers’ and is dismissively referred to as ‘Ikey Hermanstein’, ‘Nosystein’ and ‘Fat Ikey’ by the novel’s gentile dramatis personae. T S Eliot and Wagner make references of this stripe in their art, and critics fulminate or wring their hands. Christie does it and people nod indulgently, mumble that she is 'of her time' and pass over it in silence. Or they actively scrub it out of the books, via surruptitious Bowdlerisation and re-naming. This might be because people think they take Christie's art 'less seriously' than Eliot or Wagner; but I don't think her work is less serious. It's less complex, and less resonant, but its main theme -- death -- is exactly as serious, and she has enjoyed far greater cultural penetration and reach than either of the other two.
This, I think, is part of what is interesting about 'the whodunnit' as a form, a distinctively twentieth-century mode of art and indeed one of only a handful of modes invented by that troubled century (along with cinema, TV and pop music). Puzzle-mystery stories had been popular in the nineteenth-century, of course, but the emphasis there had been on the puzzle; it is a striking thing to read the complete run of Sherlock Holmes stories and appreciate how rarely Conan Doyle presented his detective with a dead body -- much more often the mystery will something stolen, somebody blackmailed or kidnapped, or a painted canine. But the default premise of the classic 20th-century crime novel is death, one or many; and that shift of emphasis is interesting.
One of the things that is new about the C20th-century whodunnit is precisely the way it handles death. Previously (excuse me if I talk a little over-generally) art encountered death as tragedy, either for the individual or (in Wagner) for the world, something to be apprehended with sorrow or defiance; or else art represented death as a portal, a transcendental supercession of mortality into (usually) a glorious spiritual state. These are both meaningful ways of relating to mortality, of course; but the Golden Age whodunit proposes a different one: it says not just that death is a puzzle -- which is fair enough, I suppose -- but that death is a soluble puzzle. That latter part is the radical bit, I think.
Martin Heidegger talks about humans embodying a 'being-towards-death', a dimension of our Dasein that, uniquely for us, can project itself forward against its own finitude. Now, Heidegger was for a time a member of the Nazi party, so we can intuit his attitude towards racial otherness. But putting that on one side for a moment. He elaborates 'being-towards-death' in his big book, Sein und Zeit, ('Being and Time' 1927) a text I'm tempted to characterise as 'boring-towards-death'. To cut a long boring short, here's Simon Critchley's deft summary:
There are four rather formal criteria in Heidegger's conception of being-towards-death: it is non-relational, certain, indefinite and not to be outstripped. Firstly, death is non-relational in the sense in standing before death one has cut off all relations to others. Death cannot be experienced through the deaths of others, but only through my relation to my death ... Secondly, it is certain that we are going to die. Although one might evade or run away from the fact, no one doubts that life comes to an end in death. Thirdly, death is indefinite in the sense that although death is certain, we do not know when it going to happen ... Fourthly, to say that death is not to be outstripped (unüberholbar) simply means that death is pretty damned important. There's no way of trumping it and it outstrips all the possibilities that my power of free projection possesses.The puzzle-whodunit dramatises the first three of these modes of being-towards-death, fairly straightforwardly, but where it gets interesting is the fourth. I suppose that on one level, even (perhaps) a banal level, it is central to the form that the veil of mystery is always stripped away by these books' conclusions. You may object that this only happens in a trivial sense, but I'd suggest both that the structure of these sorts of novels constellates a plotted trivium against a metaphorical profundity. More, I'd go further and suggest that, regardless of what a large number of 'serious' novelists suggest, this is the right way round, actually.
I'll dilate upon this point for a moment, before coming back to Christie's novel. Crime stories still have huge reader appeal, but the puzzle-whodunit has (broadly) gone out of fashion. Instead we have a great many novels that attempt to put the profundity up front. There is now a different sort of generalised anxiety about the ‘death’ around which the genre is structured, a desire to ‘take it seriously’, in contemporary crime fiction. Now personally speaking I’m drawn to the Golden Age whodunits because they often are superbly ingenious, and I prize ingenuity; but I suppose it's that contemporary crime stories have lost interest in ingenuity for its own sake. In such titles as I have read from the franchises of Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen books, or the Rebus novels of Ian Rankin, or from watching The Killing, the mystery itself is rather watery, and the emphasis is shifted over to the creation of atmosphere, location, a particular city (Rome,
One way of responding to Ten Little Niggers is to test it for plausibility and coherence. But this is not the best way, because of course the plot is implausible and incoherent; it makes no more pretence as far as this is concerned than do Samuel Beckett's plays. It's not likely all ten of the suspects would accept the invitation to the island, or that they would play along; it's not likely that the whole filigree elaborate scheme of 'the murderer' would run along its grooves as smoothly as the book has it doing. That the victims wouldn't simply swim away (the weather isn't always bad, and the mainland is clearly visible from the island), or build a boat. That they wouldn't all just lock themselves in their rooms until rescue came. But to think like this is to miss the point. The artifice of the scheme, worked through in the narrative, is a feature, not a bug. Arguably it is a key feature. From a metaphorical point of view, whodunits like these are in effect saying: death is complex, ingenious, unexpected and artificial. And although perhaps it sounds counterintuitive, I wonder if this doesn’t actually encode a greater existential veracity than the ‘realist’ mode. Think of your own mortality. Of course in one sense it is the very opposite of ‘an unexpected thing’; we all know we must die. But in another sense it is necessarily radically unexpected: we can never anticipate it, because we shall not live through it. It is something incommensurate with our living being-in-the-world. Its complexity derives, I think, from this.
But there is also this question of the solubility of mortality. It is something, in a deep sense, insoluble; and perhaps the logic of the ingeniously difficult mystery is a better way of apprehending that than notions that death is, in any sense, straightforward. Or to be a little more specific: obviously these sorts of books do offer a ‘solution’; but unlike the death of Othello, or of Prince André in War and Peace these ‘solutions’ are radically unsatisfying. They address the epiphenomena of the victim’s death without touching in any sense upon the deeper questions—and this, I’m arguing, is more existentially honest than the conventional tragic mode. The artificiality of the Golden Age whodunit set-up refracts Heidegger's perspective: any notional ‘realism’ about death must be existentially mendacious, because death is not ‘real’ in the sense that the events of my life are real (having breakfast, dropping the kids at school, going to work and so on). Death is not a part of life, not lived-through, only ever lived-towards. It is an artifice, not in the sense that it has an artificer; or more precisely only in the sense that its artificer is us ourselves, the stories we tell ourselves. And Ten Little Niggers makes great play with its egregious artificiality. A character notes that ‘it’s only in books people carry revolvers around as a matter of course’ [146] precisely to set-up the discovery that one character is carrying around a revolver around as a matter of course. To quote General Macarthur: “the whole thing is preposterous—preposterous!”’ [64]. Of course it is, and designedly so.
This is not to absolve Ten Little Niggers of its horrible title, or Christie's work generally of its ubiquitous though low-level racism. On the contrary; it is to highlight the way that this novel -- not to labour the point, but a book published in 1939 -- is precisely about an ingenious though sadistic plot to isolate a number of clever, mostly affluent but fundamentally wicked people on an island, and dispose of them. The late 30s and early 40s had no shortage of crazy schemes to solve the (please note my inverted commas) 'Jewish problem' by bunging them all on an island somewhere. Paul De Man wrote an essay on "The Jews in Contemporary Literature" (published, notoriously, in Le Soir early in 1941) in which Jews are described as possessing precisely the calculating, remorseless qualities of the murderer in Christie's novel ('Their cerebralness, their capacity to assimilate doctrines while maintaining a cold detachment from them ...'). De Man actively advocates isolating them all on an island: 'one can thus see that solution to the Jewish problem that would lead to the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would not have, for the literary life of the West, regrettable consequences. It would lose, in all, some personalities of mediocre worth.'
The 'solution' to Ten Little Niggers is a final one. In that respect the euphemistic re-titling is correct, 'and then there were none'. Film versions of the book fudge this issue, leaving a couple of survivors. Christie is more ruthless -- all die. All must die. We could put it, appropriating a contemporary's words, that her position is that reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking 'bad people' undesirable. And a spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated.
More particularly, in Ten Little Niggers, as in some other of her titles, Christie knowingly pushes the 'puzzle whodunit' form to an extreme. Usually, of course, a whodunit will entail one murder, a gaggle of suspects -- a dozen, say -- one of whom is shown to be guilty. But in Christie's most remarkable books everyone is guilty (Orient Express, Ten Little Niggers), or the Law itself is guilty, both in the sense that the representative of the law is the murderer (Ten Little Niggers, Hercule Poirot's Christmas, Mousetrap, Curtain) and in the broader sense that justice is the same indiscriminate, mortal process as murder. Her more conventional whodunits pale into feebleness beside this splendidly, Lutheran conceit -- that we are all guilty, that the law exists to punish us all.
Regular whodunits are stagey, right down to the assemble-in-the-library-please denouement. But Ten Little Niggers takes this aspect to stagier-than-thou lengths. The murderer addresses the assembled group via a pre-recorded gramophone record; but this is described in the novel in terms of a capitalised Voice (‘into that silence came The Voice. Without warning, inhuman, penetrating ...’ 56). The starkly typified characters—retired Judge, religious spinster, flash young man and so on—in this bright-lit artificial environment, as the storm rages outside, Lear-like (or Peter-Brook-Staging-King-Lear-like): there is a sense of unaccommodated man facing down his mortality, although when Christie reaches (uncharacteristically) for the Vatic it doesn’t really convince (all the following ellipses are hers: ‘Aeons passed ... worlds spun and whirled ... Time was motionless ... It stood still: it passed through a thousand ages ...’ [277])
The last two left alive are Vera and Philip Lombard. Vera has the gun, and Philip jumps her for it. ‘He sprang. Quick as a panther—as any other feline creature ... Automatically Vera pressed the trigger ... Lombard’s body stayed poised in mid-spring, then crashed heavily to the ground’ [281]. In another setting, the Wile E. Coyote touch of ‘Lombard’s body stayed poised in mid-spring’ would be simply risible. Here, in this pared-down Beckettian landscape, it feels oddly right.
What does all this have to do with the question of racism, with which this post opened? The obvious answer to this is that Christie's novels, as unusually pure examples of the puzzle-whodunit form, necessarily trade in stereotypical characters; and that therefore the Weltanschauung they construct must be stereotypical too. This is because a puzzle whodunit needs to put its pieces in play, for the reader to solve the puzzle; and that a too rich or detailed individuation of those pieces would interfere with the crispness of the larger pattern. Reading Christie's whodunits puts me in mind of what Nabokov said in Speak, Memory about his favourite hobby, constructing chess problems:
It is a beautiful, complex and sterile art related to the ordinary form of the game only insofar as, say, the properties of a sphere are made use of both by a juggler in weaving a new act and by a tennis player in winning a tournament. Most chess players, in fact, amateurs and masters alike, are only mildly interested in these highly specialized, fanciful, stylish riddles, and though appreciative of a catchy problem would be utterly baffled if asked to compose one.Mutatis mutandi, as the mutant Latin goes, this applies wonderfully to the relationship between Christie's puzzles and actual crime; the relationship between Christie's 'death' and actual death. There is a sterility to what she does, it is true; but an invigorating rather than enervating one.
I'm tempting to suggest that the real theme of Ten Little Niggers is not death, so much as the way we are trapped by death, the way it permits us no get-out. Like the monolithic, mind-straitjacket called racism, death closes down our possibilities, and fills us with fear and irrational suspicion. Plus, it has to be said, a weird, gallows hilarity. In the novel, all the occupants of the island have a mortal sin on their conscience. In the case of Philip Lombard, this is that when an army once officer he abandoned a company of native soldiers, making off with their supplies and so ensuring their death. Vera Claythorne and Emily Brent discuss his case. ‘He admits to having abandoned twenty men to their deaths,’ notes the latter. ‘They were only natives!’ retorts Vera. Emily’s response to this (that ‘black or white, they were our brothers’) provokes laughter in Vera: ‘our black brothers—our black brothers! Oh, I’m going to laugh. I’m hysterical. I’m not myself ...’ [122] What is it that Christie finds funny here, I wonder: that 'we' might consider black people 'brothers'? The grounds of the comparison are the gravest, and the most profound: that black people, Jews and white people all share the predicament that they are thinking, feeling beings who will die. This grim brother- and sisterhood unites us all, after all; and it is this, most fundamentally, that makes a mockery of racism.
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