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Lucian’s Trips to the Moon

By Aaron Parrett
June 26, 2013

With his Vera Historia, the 2nd century satirist Lucian of Samosata wrote the first detailed account of a trip to the moon in the Western tradition and, some argue, also one of the earliest science fiction narratives. Aaron Parrett explores how Lucian used this lunar vantage point to take a satirical look back at the philosophers of Earth and their ideas of "truth".

The Greek-speaking rhetorician and writer Lucian of Samosata, born around 125 CE in what is now known as Syria, has had a somewhat mixed reception through the ages. Scholars agree that his contemporaries and successors viewed him with a great deal of respect. Early Christians were less admiring of Lucian and his pagan and vitriolic pen, though by the time of the renaissance, he had regained favor among learned people. Italian humanists translated him from Greek, and thus Lucian went on to influence the post-renaissance modern world.
While scholars divide themselves over whether Lucian’s greatest contribution lies in his preservation of classical rhetoric or his innovative force as a satirist, in either case what continues to interest casual readers and scholars alike is his profound sense of humor in investigating what are serious philosophical subjects: the moral life, epistemology, and politics. It is perhaps epistemology which can be seen as Lucian’s main focus of satire in what has become his best known work, Vera Historia (in English, True Story), a detailed and elaborate fantasy about travelling to the moon.
The Vera Historia is not only the first detailed narrative about traveling through space to the moon in the Western tradition, it is also, arguably, the strangest. On Lucian’s lunar surface we encounter a dizzying litany of bizarre beasts: three headed vultures, grass-bodied birds with wings of giant leaves, elephant-sized fleas, half women half grapevine beings from whom a kiss would send one “reeling drunk”, and men who sweat milk of such quality “that cheese can actually be made from it by dripping in a little of the honey” which runs from their noses. He also gives particular attention to innovative new methods of reproduction, a necessity in a land devoid of women. On one part of the moon babies are born from men’s swollen calves, delivered dead but brought to life “by putting it in the wind with its mouth open”. A people known as the Arboreals have a different method: a man’s right genital gland is cut off, planted, and from it “grows a very large tree of flesh, resembling the emblem of Priapus”, and from its fruit of huge acorns men are ‘shelled’. ※※Indexed under…Kissfrom half-grapevine being causing drunkenness
For readers in the 2nd century a trip to the moon would have been fantastical enough, but with these strange array of creatures and outlandish adventures thrown in, the story is clearly anything but “true”. Lucian’s naming of his tale is immediately provoking. He was familiar with the paradox of Epimenides, the man from Crete who announced as gospel truth that “All Cretans are liars” — if he is telling the truth he is lying, but if he is lying then he is telling the truth. Similarly, when Lucian calls his fantastic tale (which makes fun of liars) a “true story,” he references one of the key paradoxes of philosophy and its inability to be completely self-grounding.
In the prologue, he explores the problem of narratorial authority — a key problem for literary criticism in the twentieth century. With an obvious reference to Epimenides, Lucian proclaims: “But my lying is far more honest than [the philosophers’], for though I tell the truth in nothing else, I shall at least be truthful in saying that I am a liar.” Critics have observed that within the first few lines, the persona of the “author” himself is immediately called into question: from the perspective of the author Lucian, what follows is fiction; for the narrator, however, everything is “true.” Since the play of his text unfolds against the backdrop of a paradox, Lucian prevents the reader from gaining even a foothold of privileged perspective from which to objectively judge the truth value of the narrative. More subtly, his statement evokes Homer’s epics and Herodotus’s histories, as well as the dialogues of Plato. He also anticipates the folly of Rousseau’s impossible oath to honesty at the outset of his Confessions centuries later; indeed the Epimenidean paradox applies to almost any work of fiction that purports to tell ‘truth.’
The Vera Historia satirizes the philosophical schools deluded by their own uncritical arrogance when it comes to making and evaluating truth claims. In the way that Lucian exposes the manner literary critical terms dissolve into one another, his satire has much in common with a postmodern outlook because fiction tells a ‘truth,’ but it announces itself as ‘made up’; conversely, ‘history’ announces itself as ‘truth,’ but also tends to be ‘made up.’ Likewise, the authority of the author is challenged, as is the reliability of any narrator — both of which are issues dear to Nietzsche and his French progeny in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Lucian makes the problem even more urgent by inserting into his fictive narrative assertions that do not conflict with known reality. Including known facts and plausible interpretations of physical phenomena go a long way toward establishing the sort of verisimilitude that gives any fiction its compelling power, but it also forces the reader to recognize that the line between truth and fiction is a blurry one at best. Lucian’s referral to Venus, or “the morning star,” for example, as the site of a battle between the moon and the sun acknowledges contemporary Greek scientific knowledge regarding the occultation of Venus by the moon, and the transits of Venus across the sun. But at the same time, the battle is fictive insofar as it is merely an allegory of human affairs. Critics have noted that Lucian’s use of verisimilitude bolsters the satire precisely because of the way in which credibility adds force to any argument.
The most probable source of some of the more verisimilar aspects of Lucian’s work is Plutarch’s On the Face Appearing in the Orb of the Moon. In this work, Plutarch includes a tale much like the myth of Er from Plato’s Republic, although the work itself is really a compendium of all the speculative knowledge about the moon current in Plutarch’s (and Lucian’s) time. Plutarch’s book is important to a reading of Lucian for two reasons: on the one hand, it offers a view of the moon as “earth-like” in many respects, thus lending credibility to Lucian’s descriptions in the Vera Historia of the moon as an inhabited world, and, on the other hand, it couples “science” with “fiction,” when Lucian repeats the mythical lunar story.
Lucian also uses his satire to ridicule pseudo-science and superstition, especially when he writes, “Everything in my story is a more or less comical parody of one or another of the poets, historians and philosophers of old, who have written much that smacks of miracles and fables.” (250-251)1 It’s worth reiterating that even though poets like Homer and historians like Herodotus suffer under Lucian’s satirical lash, the real culprits are the philosophers, and he intends to give them a proper whipping. He takes great offense at the epistemological hypocrisy of those who would elevate themselves as arbiters of truth and falsity, while at the same time resorting to ‘lies’ and ‘fictions’ (for example, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave), to make their case. As Lucian puts it: “On reading all these authors I did not find fault with them for their lying, as I saw that this was already a common practice even among men who profess philosophy.” (251)2
Finally, the exasperating manner in which Lucian finishes his ‘true story’ also satirizes the lofty claims of philosophers insofar as they are what Nietzsche called “systematizers,” since Lucian promises something he cannot, nor has any intention of, delivering — completeness or closure. Lucian teases the reader with the final line of the second book: “What happened in that other world I shall tell you in the succeeding books” (357). The translator’s footnote to this line more or less summarizes its importance relative to the title of the work: “The biggest lie of all, as a disgruntled Greek scribe remarks in the margin!” (357). Assuming that the conventional wisdom of Lucian scholars is correct and that he never intended to “finish” the Vera Historia, one is struck by the fact that once again the issues of truth and untruth (and by extension, authorial intent and authority) are at stake.
A later work of Lucian’s entitled Icaromenippus also involves a trip to the moon, although in contrast to the Vera Historia, the tale is a more straightforward satire. In fact, this work sets the bar for a whole species of satire that bears the eponymous descriptor “Menippean Satire.” As in the Vera Historia, philosophers bear the brunt of Lucian’s satirical wit, and the dialogue actually reaches its zenith when Zeus vows to Menippus that he will do the lot of philosophers in with thunderbolts. The central issue once again concerns epistemology — what is the value of “knowledge” that is for sale as it is by the sophists? In this sense, Lucian is perhaps closer to Plato than he would like to admit. Lucian’s challenge to Plato and other Hellenic philosophers is the logician’s tu quoque — what you criticize in the sophists you do yourselves. Nevertheless, the trip to the moon again affords Lucian’s hero to gain a supramundane perspective on an earthly, human problem.
The dialogue begins with a presentation of Menippus as world-weary and yearning for another world. He invokes the example of philosophy, as he remarks, “Being in that state of mind, I thought it best to learn about these points from the philosophers, for I supposed they surely would be able to tell the whole truth.” (274-275) But in keeping with the satirical mode, the ‘philosophers’ he ‘employs’ are simply sophists — rhetoricians willing to speak on any subject whatever so long as payment for services is involved. The ‘knowledge’ they pass off is nothing more than fiction: “they presume to say just how many cubits it is in distance from the sun to the moon . . . without knowing how many furlongs it is from Megara to Athens” (279). Like Plato, Lucian calls into question the validity of “selling” knowledge, but he also wants to include Plato (and philosophy in general) within the scope of his larger critique, which is that philosophy does no better than sophistry — it just doesn’t get paid! In other words, a theory paid for is no worse than one got for free. The lack of consensus among philosophers reveals the paucity of its claims about knowledge and its presumptions toward truth. As an example, Menippus points out a logical absurdity in their reasoning that Bertrand Russell will level against Christianity nearly 1800 years later: “[the philosophers] made some god or other the creator of the universe, but did not tell us where he came from or where he stood when he created it all” (281).
In the Icaromenippus, what captures the attention of Menippus are the petty foibles of humanity: the hidden motives and the secret hypocrisies indiscernible on earth that the lunar vantage point is able to reveal. Moreover, kings are as bad as common men — no class of person is particularly ethical. Through the history of western literature, many writers will use the device of traveling to the moon or another planet in order to gain a perspective from which to look back at earth and satirize its proudest inhabitants: humanity. Lucian is merely the first to do it.
In his Menippus dialogue, Lucian seems sure that knowledge itself is a function of perspective, and that the base fact of being earthbound ensures that we cannot have an unbiased and objective view of any ‘truth.’ From the moon, he sees the world as a small and fragile object, upon whose surface wars and empires appear absurd: “And when I looked to the Peloponnese and caught sight of Cynuria, I noted what a tiny region, no bigger any way than an Egyptian bean, had caused so many Argives and Spartans to fall in a single day.” (298-299) 1800 years before humans even ventured into space, Lucian articulated a sentiment that almost every astronaut fortunate enough actually to have traveled into space and looked back at the earth has also voiced: a profound and nearly religious sense of the fragility of our planet, our “pale blue dot,” as Carl Sagan called it, and the stupidity of conflicts between countries separated by arbitrary lines drawn on maps. As Menippus puts it, “I was especially inclined to laugh at the people who quarreled about boundary-lines, and at those who plumed themselves on working the plain of Sicyon or possessing the district of Oenoe in Marathon or owning a thousand acres in Archarnae.” (298-299).
In order to succeed, satire must offer some moral lesson, some didactic purpose. The revelation of Lucian’s trips to the moon seems rather simple: we ought not take ourselves too seriously, especially when it comes to philosophy.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Aaron Parrett


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Mrs Giacometti Prodgers, the Cabman’s Nemesis

By Heather Tweed
September 19, 2012

Heather Tweed explores the story of the woman whose obsessive penchant for the lawsuit struck fear into the magistrates and cabmen of Victorian London alike.

Imagine, if you will, strolling towards a Hackney cabstand in late 19th century London. Suddenly the cry ‘Mother Prodgers!’ echoes around the streets. The cab drivers scarper, leaving the stand empty but for a seemingly innocuous, overdressed woman: Mrs Caroline Giacometti Prodgers, nemesis of cabmen, zealous litigant and infamous music hall conversation topic.
Over the course of two decades she was to lead a one woman campaign against the notorioulsy truculent cabmen of London. She took to court the publisher of a major newspaper and even her own cook. Her stubbornness was caricatured in print and sung about in music halls. One desperate cab driver went so far as to burn her effigy on bonfire night.
Her first taste of life in the courts came in 1871, when she began proceedings to divorce her husband of ten years, an Austrian naval captain called Giovanni Battista Giacometti. The case set a precedent for divorces in which the wife was wealthier than the husband (the Prodgers family found itself with a considerable fortune through her mother, a wealthy heiress whom her father, the Reverand Prodgers, had married after rescuing her from drowning). The details of Giacometti v Prodgers would regularly make the papers, including such oddities as Mrs Prodgers questioning the legitimacy of her own children, presumably in an attempt to try and disinherit Giovanni from her family fortune. Following the actual divorce there were other legal wranglings. It was reported that her husband Giovanni had given up his whole career at Mrs Prodgers’ request and that, after the divorce, he had taken her to court over non payment of a yearly settlement. The Prodgers family, taking his side, agreed on an additional several hundred pounds per year. Mrs Prodgers found herself again in court after failing to pay a shorthand writer she had, debatably, hired during the divorce proceedings.
It was soon after the divorce and its various spin off cases that Mrs Prodgers began her infamous crusade against London cab drivers. Her modus operandi was to catch a cab to a specific destination to which she knew the exact distance (she had familiarised herself with the cost charts), then ask the cabman to stop just at the point where the fare would change. Invariably the cabman would attempt to charge her for the next part of the fare, which she would dispute. One or other party would then threaten a lawsuit and she would continue to goad the often irate cabman into verbal abuse and swearing whereupon she’d immediately threaten another writ.
She was remarkably successful and ended up bringing over 50 cases to court — many of which descended into farce. Reports on the various cases are packed with amusing incidents. There is extended banter over the use of her full name (which she always insisted upon). One judge suggests that it might be cheaper for her to purchase a carriage than keep returning to court.
In addition to cab related litigations she was involved in a string of court cases regarding other matters. She sued her dismissed cook for refusing to leave her house (and continuing ‘to sing about the place’). She sued a newspaper publisher for accidentally tearing her dress during an altercation after she refused to pay the full penny for a paper (which she thought she might be mentioned in). She sued a watchmaker for returning the wrong watch to her house. Her obsessive and sometimes bizarre activity in the courts did not go unnoticed.
In 1875 she had the dubious honour of having an effigy of her burnt on bonfire night, a ‘gigantic figure’ paraded around on a cab. The police intervened and arrested the cab driver — rather bizarrely on the charge of ‘begging’ (the accounts don’t report if Mrs Prodgers had any influence over the arrest). The judge dismissed the case saying that the cabbie was ‘acting as a showman for the amusement of the public’ and that it was merely meant as a joke.
Mrs Giacometti Prodgers appeared several times in Punch magazine. A satirical piece in 1890, the year of her death, coincided with controversial plans to fit each Hackney cab with a mechanical device to measure distances and calculate the cost of each journey:
A Autumn-attic happaratusFor measuring off our blooming fares!Oh, hang it all! They slang and slate us;They say we crawls, and cheats, and swears.And we surwives the sneering slaters,Wot tries our games to circumvent,But treating us like Try-yer-weighters,Or chockerlate, or stamps, or scent!Upon my soul the stingy dodgersDid ought to be shut up. They’re wussThan Mrs. JACKERMETTY PRODGERS,Who earned the ‘onest Cabman’s cuss.It’s sickening! Ah, I tell yer wot, Sir,Next they’ll stick hup―oh, you may smile―This:―“Drop a shilling in the slot. Sir,And the Cab goes for just two mile!”Beastly! I ain’t no blessed babby,Thus to be measured off like tape.Yah! Make a autumn-attic Cabby,With clock-work whip and a tin cape.May as well, while you’re on the job, Sir.And then―may rust upset yer works!The poor man of his beer they’d rob, Sir,Who’d rob poor Cabby of his perks!
Such was her notoriety that the reverse of her name, Sregdorpittemmocaig, was used for a character in The Sunless City, a novel by J.E. Preston and Punch punnily suggested that she had penned her own book after the Hansom cab: ‘Hansom Is As Hansom Does’. She also made it onto the pantomime circuit when comedian Herbert Campbell performed a verse about her:
‘All great men have their statues and it’s but their due,But I wonder why the ladies don’t have them too;If they did, to the Academy I’d like to send,A bust of Mrs Prodgers the Cabman’s friend.Of all the strong-minded females she’s the worst I ever saw,Oh, wouldn’t she be lovely as a mother-in-law?At the corner of every cab-rank her flag should be unfurledAs a horrible example to this wicked world.’
The press painted a picture of a formidable if eccentric woman who should be avoided at all costs if one did not wish to encounter her wrath. One might speculate that a certain amount of misogyny and sexism fuelled by the women’s suffrage movement may have played its part in the press coverage and urban mythology. Had she been a man might she have been hailed as a champion of consumer rights, rather than dismissed as a caricature?
One person who seemed to take her seriously was the explorer and Victorian polymath Sir Richard Burton, who entertained her in his house, and reportedly supported her campaign. According to Burton’s biographer Thomas Wright two of Burton’s cousins had a running family joke about the relationship between Mrs Giacometti Prodgers and Sir Richard:
At the (Athenæum) club he was never at home to anybody except a certain Mrs. Giacometti Prodgers . . . according to rumour, there was a flavour of romance about her marriage. It was said that while the laws of certain countries regarded her as married, those of other countries insisted that she was still single. However, married or not, she concentrated all her spleen on cab-drivers, . . . and having a profound respect for Burton’s judgment, she often went to him about these cab disputes, and, oddly enough, though nobody else could get at him, he was always at the service of Mrs. Prodgers, and good-naturedly gave her the benefit of his wisdom. To the London magistrates the good lady was a perpetual terror, and Frederick Burton, a diligent newspaper reader, took a pleasure in following her experiences. “St. George,” he would call across the breakfast table, “Mrs. Giacometti Prodgers again: She’s had another cab-man up”.
Sadly first hand anecdotal evidence does nothing to alleviate the true awfulness of her character. She appears to have been as rude to fellow members of the public as she was to porters and cab drivers. Upon being offered a cup of tea by another passenger on a ship she was travelling on, she allegedly replied “I have only had afternoon tea once in my life, and that was with the Duke of Sutherland”. Her arrival in various ports around the world was often reported upon in the local press — followed by a sigh of relief when she departed. Unfortunately one has the impression the same might be said about her departure from life in 1890. Her obituary as reported in foreign papers was blunt and concise:
Mrs. Giacometti Prodgers, the terror of London cabmen, is dead. Her habit was to drive the fullest possible distance for the money, pay the exact legal fare, and then cause the arrest of the cabman for expressing his feelings.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 19, 2012

author: Heather Tweed

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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The Implacability of Things

By Jonathan Lamb
October 3, 2012

Jonathan Lamb explores the genre of 'it-narratives' - stories told from the point of view of an object, often as it travels in circulation through human hands.

Some of the best recent books about things, such as John Plotz’s Portable Property (2008) and Elaine Freedgood’s Ideas in Things (2006), deal with artefacts, commodities and curiosities that find their value and significance by means of circulation, moving from place to place and hand to hand. These journeys of things were the theme of the essays edited by Arjun Appadurai in his landmark collection, The Social Lives of Things (1986). The title glanced at Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, sharing the assumption made in Capital I that things get a life by moving about and meeting other things; and that if these things have an ambition, it is to act like human beings: that is socially. The sociability of things seems to be co-extensive with the market that generated the system of exchange value; for just as the merchant’s interest is focused on the most desirable commodities — those that move the fastest and never lie upon his hands — so the commodities themselves desire nothing better than to be in perpetual motion, meeting their own kind and mutually proclaiming their importance.   Even among thing-theorists operating with a very different model, the principle of sociability looms large.  Bruno Latour believes that things “circulate in our hands and define our social bond by their very circulation.”
The rapid transit of things in trade and commerce provided the impulse behind a genre of fiction that became popular in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with titles such as The Adventures of a Watch and The History of a Lady’s Slipper.  They were called ‘it-narratives’ or ‘novels of circulation’ and they recorded (usually in the first person singular) the experience of things as they pass through the hands of a series of owners.  The things that lent themselves most readily to this new format were those that were most mobile — money and vehicles.   Two of the most popular it-narratives in the latter half of the eighteenth-century were Chrysal; or Adventures of a Guinea (1760) and the anonymously authored Adventures of a Hackney Coach (1783).
It struck me after reading some of these stories that if one were to look for the ancestors and descendants of this new genre, they would not yield such a congenial meeting of the interests of humans and things.  In the animal fables and oriental tales to which it-narratives are clearly indebted, pain, degradation and extinction await those in thrall to despotic power; and despotic power, as Sir William Blackstone pointed out, was what all property-owners long to exert over their possessions.  To this contradiction is owing the many scenes of cruelty depicted in it-narratives, inflicted on animate and inanimate things alike.  In the slave narratives that followed it-narratives, many of the humiliations befalling things in the hands of humans (see, for example, The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (1784)) are endured again by humans who have been transformed into property. These are not worlds where goods and owners see their sociability reflected in each other’s freedom of movement. They are more like the scenes of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the power of the gods painfully transforms humans into what is not human. Apuleius’s The Golden Ass is an extraordinary display of the politics of divine oppression in which Venus enslaves Psyche, her clandestine daughter-in-law, and Psyche resists with the help of things — insects, water, reeds and stone.
Where among the books I had been reading might one find examples of this resistance?  Well, in Charles Gildon’s inaugural it-narrative, The Golden Spy (1709),  a story owing its title to Apuleius and its narrative to a collection of vocal coins, the narrator confesses he has edited his material for fear that money’s scandalous revelations should “destroy all Confidence betwixt Man and Man, and so put an End to human Society” (Gildon 1709: 116).  The impetus is not towards sociability but its very opposite:  humans are exposed as hypocrites by things whose motive is not a principle of moral honesty and social unity but feelings of contempt and revenge.   There is no invisible hand in this story capable of restoring the passions and the interests to a social equilibrium.  Nor is there in one of its most important successors, Gulliver’s Travels.  Here is an it-narrative told by a horse — not a horse that has found a human voice like Black Beauty, but one that was formerly a human until the bond of species was broken by disgust, and whose isolation from the reader is dramatically and obviously total.
Theodor Adorno called the thing at the other side of this stand-off implacable (he was talking about the door-handles of American cars), a word suggestive of a non-negotiable hostility that flourishes in the literature of things, jeopardising the mental health of the humans who encounter it.  An implacable whale drives Captain Ahab mad in Moby-Dick;  implacable collectibles drive Owen Gereth to arson in The Spoils of Poynton; and Fagin is driven to despair in Oliver Twist by the things he stares at so attentively while under sentence of death — a broken pencil, an iron spike with the end knocked off — because they are so devoid of pity.  John Banville catches the echo of such implacability in his detective story The Silver Swan:
Over every scene of violent death . . . there hung a particular kind of silence, the kind that follows after the last echoes of a great outcry have faded.  There was shock in it, of course, and awe and outrage, the sense of many hands lifted quickly to many mouths, but something else as well, a kind of gleefulness, a kind of startled, happy, unable-to-believe-its-luckiness.  Things . . . even inanimate things, it seemed, loved a killing.

You can see Dickens learning about the implacability of things.  In Sketches by Boz he includes ‘Meditations in Monmouth Street,’ a market for second-hand clothes. Boz looks at the garments hanging up and imagines the lives of their owners:  “We have gone on speculating in this way, until whole rows of coats have started from their pegs, and buttoned up, of their own accord, round the waists of imaginary wearers.”   It is an exercise in anthropomorphism:  property makes sense again when it is bulked out by the form of an owner.  How different to the mementoes arranged on the mantelpiece of Jaggers’s office, or on Wemmick’s watch-chain, in Great Expectations.  These are travesties of curiosities and sentimental keepsakes, mementoes alien to human interests, coming fully into their own when owners are removed, usually suddenly and violently.   This is exactly how Wemmick is driven to define his ideal of portable property after Magwitch’s capture and imminent death:  “I do not think he could have been saved.  Whereas, the portable property certainly could have been saved.  That’s the difference between the property and the owner, don’t you see?”
Edmund de Waal’s memoir published last year, The Hare with the Amber Eyes, was a story of the loss and recovery of a family heirloom, a collection of Japanese netsuke.  These tiny figures of creatures and humans made of ivory or boxwood were owned by the rich banking family of Ephrussi in Vienna, until they were sequestered by the Nazis along with the rest of their treasures as ‘ownerless Jewish property’ — a category close to Wemmick’s idea of portable property.   The story offered to be a heartwarming account of sentimental value, and generally this is how it has been read.  Anna, the faithful servant who has been allowed to remain in the Ephrussi palace, saves the netsuke in twos and threes, hiding them first in her pocket then in her mattress until a member of the family arrives after the end of the war to whom she can say, “I have something to return to you.”  De Waal grants that for Anna each one of the netsuke may be “a resistance to the sapping of memory . . . a story recalled, a future held on to.”  But that is emphatically not how they strike him:  “The survival of the netsuke in Anna’s pocket, in her mattress, is an affront . . . . Why should they have got through this war in a hiding-place, when so many hidden people did not?  I can’t make people, places, and things fit together any more.”  This is a shocking moment but it has been carefully advertised by the narrator when he talks of the heaviness acquired by things during an Umsturz in civil society, and when he quotes Maupassant to the effect that  “The bibelot is not only a passion, it is a mania.”  Maupassant wrote a story about a man who came back from the opera to find all his possessions leaving the house.  After a series of fruitless attempts to repurchase them he lodges himself in an insane asylum, whereupon his missing things reoccupy the house, presumably on their own implacable and defiant terms.
There are genres of fiction where we allow things to be sinister or significant in an unsettling way — Gothic romance and the detective story, for example — but the it-narrative is generally expected to be comic and anthropocentric.  Yet for a number of reasons this is seldom how it deserves to be read.  Whether it is owing to its origin and terminus in the narratives of slaves, or to its coincidence with the financial revolution and the growing unaccountability of mass human behaviour, or to the growing appetite for print ephemera, or to the end of feudal tenures and the resulting anomalies of personal portable property, or to the irreversible metamorphoses precipitated by the holocaust, ordinary things situated in banal circumstances develop a salience that has nothing to do with symbolism or hidden meaning.  They are just there, eying their human adversaries, implacable and meditating affronts.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 3, 2012

author: Jonathan Lamb


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Vesalius and the Body Metaphor

By Marri Lynn
April 18, 2013

City streets, a winepress, pulleys, spinning tops, a ray fish, curdled milk: just a few of the many images used by 16th century anatomist Andreas Vesalius to explain the workings of the human body in his seminal work De Humani Corporis Fabrica. Marri Lynn explores.

Andreas Vesalius threw down a glove in front of established medicine and its scholars when, in 1543, he produced a massive anatomy text titled De Humani Corporis Fabrica — on the fabric of the human body.
Vesalius believed that the field of medicine was being ill served by sending its students to books to learn their anatomy. The flesh itself had to teach, not merely the page. This idea of hands-on learning trumping an ancient textual legacy was an affront to many of Vesalius’ medical peers. Medicine was not a handicraft, but a noble scholastic art. Far from trying to disparage his discipline, Vesalius intended to elevate the most denigrated field of medicine — surgery — to that same level of esteem. He was taking a professional risk. But the Fabrica, the result of untold hours of dissection and writing, largely spoke persuasively for itself. Vesalius exposed hundreds of mistakes made by Galen, whose writings were still considered the chief source on anatomy over a thousand years after they had been written.
Naturally, there were some who still believed that Vesalius had misunderstood what he had seen in his dissections, or Galen’s explanation itself. But the stance the Fabrica and its author took gained attention, and the idea of an apprenticeship in anatomy at the slab, rather than the desk, began to gain ground.
Still, opportunities for students to actually observe dissections were rarer than Vesalius would like, and could never fill the need of a student or professional to occasionally fact-check their memory, or consult a confusing realm of the body in more depth at their leisure. The Fabrica’s illustrations were a small effort to reproduce, for the study, the complexity that would confront the anatomy student in the anatomy theatre. The resulting woodcut illustrations, beautiful works prepared at Vesalius’ own expense in Titian’s Venetian workshop, have become the centerpiece of the Fabrica’s lasting impression.
But it is telling that Vesalius had his Latin text published in German only days afterward. The Fabrica was meant to be read, and read again — not merely looked at. This was all the more true for the students of anatomy Vesalius wanted to reach out to, who would be buying abbreviated versions of the massive text, without nearly as many (if any) expensive illustrations reproduced inside. And furthermore, two-dimensional images could never properly convey the constant movement and form of a three-dimensional body. Vesalius had to, as best as he was able, paint a moving mental picture with words that would be good enough for surgeons to use as guidance when they lowered their blade into the flesh of their patients.
To draw the reader’s mind toward a mental model of the body’s inner workings, Vesalius used his full toolkit of pedagogic devices. Metaphor and analogy, especially, could be used to help the student make the cognitive leap to understanding the alien. Now, these metaphors show us the ways in which anatomists might visualize and understand the structures, dynamic processes, and physical motions of the body. While he broke with tradition in many ways, Vesalius’ use of metaphor was in fact a continuation of a stylistic and polemic tradition. Metaphor had been used by earlier writers, and in some cases, Vesalius drew from their dictionary of established comparisons directly.
But always, observation served imagination, and never the opposite. The best example of Vesalius’ insistence on deriving metaphor from observable truth is his abandonment of the Galenic conception of the liver as having four main lobes, an idea which Galen acquired from his dissections of dogs. These lobes were colorfully called the hearth, the table, the knife, and the charioteer, in relation to their functions. After describing this tradition, Vesalius addresses this metaphor directly and in his usual straightforward way: “This arrant nonsense exemplifies the fancies of those who study the human fabric by imagination rather than dissection or try to learn from procedures on animals rather than humans.”
Since many of the structures Vesalius encountered did not yet have proper names, using creative analogues as visual signposts and descriptions of function was still a natural solution. With the intention that both elites and humble students would read his work, he carefully chose accessible symbols as his objects of comparison. His metaphors reveal not only the state of anatomical knowledge of the time, but realms of shared experience.
Many of the metaphors used in the Fabrica could have been written today. Vesalius sees the veins and arteries like a pipe, synovial fluid like oil, and the skeleton like the walls and supportive beams of a house. His mechanical metaphors strike one as especially current to our post-industrial way of thinking, but Vesalius’ conception of the body as a whole formed by moving parts placed man’s engines and inventions in imitation of Nature, and not the other way around.
We find city streets in the digestive system, a winepress in the sinuses, a storeroom in the stomach, and reins and pulleys in the ligaments. The Vesalian body was not gears and oil, but rather wood, stone, and all things organic and ingeniously designed by Nature. (Ingeniously, but pragmatically. Of the physical separation of the mouth and the remainder of the digestive system, he writes, “. . . the Creator of the world set the stomach below the thorax and the viscera contained therein, so that the outflow of the excrement would be lower down and well away from the senses that reside in the head; similarly in buildings the architects keep the inescapably unpleasant outflows well away from the eyes and nostrils of the owners.”)
To describe muscles, he draws upon the images of a spinning top, a ray fish, a pyramid, the letter C, a butcher’s cleaver, and Benedictine cowls. Horns, nets, rivers, pumpkin vines, pigeon coops, wickerwork baskets full of curdled milk, grape root, and tree trunks shelter elsewhere in the anatomy, somehow envisioned amidst what must have appeared, to the untrained eye, as a bloody mess beneath the scalpel. Amidst lengthy, precise descriptions, these metaphors are bursts of color and clarity, never mixed or muddled even when presented in close proximity. As a Latin stylist, Vesalius was far from florid, making his choices of imagery interesting in their individual precision, contrasted with their overall diversity across the pages.
A modern translation of the Fabrica from Latin to English, in its entirety, has revealed the full breadth of the author’s attention to detail, as well as his clarity in describing anatomical structures which still puzzle and entrance new students of anatomy to this day. Jacob Soll has suggested that Vesalius’ manner of making the body more complex while at once demystifying it “changed the nature of corporeal metaphor.” The recent discovery of his own annotated copy of the Fabrica suggests that Vesalius continued to think about his choice of words well after publication. Whatever his qualms with the minutiae of his legacy, the Fabrica remains a work that struck the imaginative faculties and changed the practice of anatomy generations before technology would penetrate the flesh and render it truly visible in three dimensions.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Marri Lynn


text:
John Martin and the Theatre of Subversion

By Max Adams
July 12, 2012

Max Adams, author of The Prometheans, looks at the art of John Martin and how in his epic landscapes of apocalyptic scale one can see reflected his revolutionary leanings.

John Martin, born in the week that the Bastille was stormed in July 1789, was an instinctive revolutionary. His generation may have suffered from a misty-eyed envy of new-found liberties in America and France, but they understood what practical revolution might mean at home and they strove to achieve liberation from repression and tyranny without bloodshed; very largely they succeeded.
Martin has often, and wrongly, been seen as a religious fanatic by a comprehensive misunderstanding of his paintings and by false association with his schizophrenic arsonist brother.  He has also been portrayed as a Luddite (by critics who should have known better) and by Ruskin, a late contemporary, as a mere artisan in lamp-black.  Poor Martin.  Despite his very evident technical deficiencies as a painter – he inevitably suffers by comparison with his friends and contemporaries Turner and Constable – he was equally adept at creating a theatrical sense of a world undergoing irreversible change, and more fervent than either in his desire to be an engine of that change.  If there were dramatists better placed to portray the dilemmas of the human condition, and one immediately thinks of Shelley and Byron, of Delacroix and Dickens, no-one came closer than Martin to designing the perfect sets on which to act out the drama: he was the supreme architect and engineer of the sublime.
To start at the curtain’s uncertain opening, we see Martin, a Geordie ingénue with a chip on his shoulder, arrive in London to find that its streets are not paved with gold but with beggars.  He makes his debut in the greatest city on earth in 1806, the year in which Pitt the Younger and Charles James Fox die and in which Nelson’s pickled body is carried up the Thames in mawkish pomp.  Martin struggles against more proficient competition: has insufficient imagination in his mental palette other than to paint the misty blue hills of his native Northumbria and dream of maidens in skimpy veils straight out of Ovid.  By 1812 his mood has darkened: his radical friends the Hunts have been jailed for seditious libel (the Prince Regent was a fat, useless libertine, a drain on the treasury and a traitor to his Whig friends but saying so in the pages of the Examiner in such terms was asking for trouble); the first global war showed no sign of ending, nor did the horrors of wage-labour poverty.  Caricaturists had a field day: they could not be imprisoned.  Martin’s response was weightier, loftier.  His Sadak of 1812 is a dark, portrait-format theatre flat of abysmal fire in which the struggling righteous loner (his friends the Hunts, the beggar, or Martin himself: take your pick) faces alpine odds in seeking the Waters of Oblivion.
From here on in Martin was on a mission to bring down the unjust from their lofty perches to the level of the populace.  For him scale was everything: his deployment of trompe l’oeil devices, three-dimensional column-and-tunnel special effects and epic scales has often, and rightly, been seen as a forerunner of the Hollywood movie set of the 1920s and beyond.  By 1821, when he produced his Old Testament masterpiece Belshazzar’s Feast (a thinly disguised libel on the self-same Prince Regent made more potent by his coronation as George IV and the grotesque accompanying feast) Martin was exploiting his audience’s familiarity with the Bible to recreate for them the immensity of its drama, its injustices and the majesty of the retribution which God (not Martin’s God – he was a sceptic) could and would visit on those who committed the sin of hubris.
The Tate Gallery, which recently hosted the largest Martin exhibition for over a hundred years, hung his paintings wrong: that is to say, too low, with the viewer’s eye line directed into the centre of the picture when Martin’s intention, I am certain, was to force the viewer to look up, up at the crenellated towers of the tyrant, to be left in no doubt of the task required in bringing its monuments down.  Martin liked to open his play right in the middle of the drama, just like a modern movie director: he drops us into the action so that we are part of it, believe we can be part of it.  Martin is inciting us to tear down the house; but we are certain, as participants, that we start at the bottom, as Martin had.
Shelley, whose sympathies were in tune with Martin and with Prometheus, the liberator of humanity, chose to set Ozymandias (1818), his own cameo drama of fallen tyranny, after the action had long finished, in the shapeless desert where two vast and trunkless legs of stone stood as a quiet, if profoundly eloquent, epilogue to Martin’s revolutions.  Shelley was interested in what the world would be like after the revolution and, in describing his idealistic new world in Prometheus Unbound (also 1821) he offered a later Romantic poet and activist, Karl Marx, the blueprint for the real thing: a revolution every bit as fantastic as Martin’s.
The mid-1820s witnessed a reformist lull in Britain and abroad: opposition emasculated by internal rivalry and suicide, the lassitude of once-fervent ideologues like Wordsworth and William Godwin (a friend of Martin’s); the announcement by critics like William Hazlitt of the passing of an age of action.  Martin set himself to make money to support the realities of a large family and generous domestic establishment, and he was not the only one (he lost his first fortune to a dodgy banker).  But the appearance of somnolence is an illusion, just like Martin’s various engravings of Paradise Lost during that decade.  Britain’s creative revolutionaries were not done.  The French have a phrase for it: reculer pour mieux sauter – draw back to take a running jump.  In France itself dissatisfaction with the post-Napoleonic world would lead to revolution in 1830 and its diarist-in-oils, Eugène Delacroix, heavily influenced by Martin but more interested in the actors than the stage sets, has left us the supreme finale of the drama in Liberty Leading the People (1830), with its bare-breasted Amazonian heroine and her pistol-toting lieutenants climbing on piles of bodies to wave the Tricolore.  It is virtually a curtain call.  Not to be outdone, John Martin’s own brother Jonathan had been tried for his life after setting fire to York Minster in a suitably Promethean gesture and by 1830 was confined for life in Bedlam.  Martin himself began to plan for a new world before the old had been brought down: he designed a new sewage system for London and evolved a curious idea for a circular underground railway to run beneath the streets of the capital: Babylon-on-Thames, as it was known in a public nod to his prescience.
More subtle revolutionaries – Michael Faraday and Charles Wheatsone making sparks in the laboratory, the Brunels with their tunnels, the Stephensons with their belching locomotives and railways – were busy forging a completely new symbolic lexicon of steam, electricity and subterranean sublimity for artists to work up on their canvases.  Turner, as so often, was first on the scene.  He was there, when the old Houses of Parliament burned down in 1834, to record the irony of a Reform Bill, passed the year before, which left Parliament more or less unreformed.  He was there when the old warship Temeraire, a symbol of the patriotic Heart of Oak Royal Navy, was towed up the Thames by a steam tug to be scrapped.  He was there, in spirit at least, to record the impression which the onrushing steam railway age left on a generation which had previously only known the pedestrian power of the horse and millwheel (Rain, Steam and Speed, 1844).  In doing so he leaves us still physically reeling, as if the action is now so hot that we cannot, literally, focus on it.  The stage has become a roundabout and we are dizzy, clinging on for dear life.
A look at Martin’s later works, from 1838 (when he and his son Leopold visited Turner in Chelsea to watch progress on the Fighting Temeraire) and his overtly populist and tediously static Coronation of Queen Victoria, to the ethereal beauties of Solitude (1843) and Arthur and Aigle in the Happy Valley (1849) might give the impression that Martin, like Wordsworth, had become an old fogey, too comfortable or cynical or tired to light the touch paper for any further apocalypse.  The impression is understandable; but it is quite wrong.
One of the things I most admire about Martin is that, almost with his last breath, he had the guts to once more put on the costume of the grand ringmaster, crack his whip and serve up the greatest show on earth.  Until The Great Day of His Wrath (1853) the victims of Martin’s retributive fury had always been tyrants or hubristic fools: Pharaoh; Lot; Belshazzar; Edward I, even.  Now, as if to say ‘That’s all, folks!’ (and meaning just that) Martin took the set, the whole set, and burned it down, stage, proscenium arch, auditorium, theatre and all: the entire world is folded in upon itself in an unimaginable (by anyone but Martin) volcanic conflagration.  Everything, everyone is terminally punished for every sin ever conceived.  This is the Day of Judgement.  The world ends.  The End (and no curtain call).
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Max Adams


text:
An 18th-Century Genius in Bondage
The Poems and Politics of Phillis Wheatley
By Vincent Carretta
February 6, 2012

Transported as a slave from West Africa to America when just a child, Phillis Wheatley published in 1773, at the age of twenty, her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Vincent Carretta takes a look at the remarkable life of the first ever African-American woman to be published.

The African-American poet Phillis Wheatley has achieved iconic status in American culture. A 174-word letter from her to a fellow servant of African descent in 1776 sold at auction in 2005 for $253,000, well over double what it had been expected to fetch, and the highest price ever paid for a letter by a woman of African descent. Elementary, middle, and high schools throughout the United States bear her name. A prominent statue in Boston memorializes her. Wheatley is the subject of numerous recent stories written for children and adolescents. Googling “Phillis Wheatley” turns up about 665,000 items.
The author we now know as Phillis Wheatley was born around 1753 somewhere in West Africa, probably between present-day Gambia and Ghana. She was forced to endure the Middle Passage from Africa to America when she was about seven or eight years old, and brought to Boston, where she was sold as a domestic servant to John and Susanna Wheatley. They called her Phillis, after the name of the slave ship that brought her from Africa. Encouraged by her owners, Phillis Wheatley quickly became literate and began writing poetry that soon found its way into local newspapers. Notwithstanding the prejudices against her race, social status, gender, and age, Wheatley became the first published woman of African descent in 1767. She gained international recognition with her funeral elegy on the death of the evangelist George Whitefield, addressed to his English patron, the Countess of Huntingdon, and published in Boston and London in 1770. By 1772, Wheatley had written enough poems to enable her to try to capitalize on her growing transatlantic reputation by producing a book of previously published and new works. Unable to find a publisher in Boston, in part because of racial prejudice, Wheatley and her owners successfully sought a London publisher and Huntingdon’s patronage in 1773 for her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.
Phillis Wheatley’s trip to London with her master’s son to arrange for the publication of her book was a turning point in her personal and professional lives. Her six-week stay in London enabled her to establish a network of associations that included many of the militarily, politically, religiously, and socially most important people in North America and Britain. She arrived in England a year after a court decision declared that slave owners could not legally compel their slaves to return to the colonies. Phillis returned to Boston shortly before her book was published. Within a month of her return she wrote a friend that she had been freed “at the desire of my friends in England.” She had apparently agreed to return only after her owner was compelled to promise to free her if she did.
The assertiveness that Phillis probably displayed in her dealings with Nathaniel Wheatley was anticipated more subtly in her Poems. Wheatley does not hesitate in Poems to proclaim her African heritage. Her opening poem, “To Maecenas”, thanks her unnamed patron, loosely imitating Classical models such as Virgil and Horace’s poems dedicated to Maecenas, the Roman politician and patron of the arts. Emphasizing in a footnote that the Classical Roman poet Terence “was an African by birth”, Wheatley implies that her “Maecenas” has enabled her to claim a place in the Western literary tradition, which has included Africans since its beginning. Elsewhere in her poems, Wheatley appropriates the persona of authority or power normally associated with men and her social superiors. For example, in “To the University of Cambridge, in New-England”, first composed when she was about fifteen years old, Wheatley speaks as a teacher to students, or a minister to his flock, in addressing the young men of what was to become Harvard University, many of whom were being trained there to become ministers themselves.
Several of Wheatley’s poems demonstrate a nuanced treatment of slavery unrecognized by some of her critics. For example, written in October 1772 to celebrate Dartmouth’s appointment the previous August, “To the Right Honourable WILLIAM, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for North America, &c.” is one of the most carefully crafted poems in the 1773 volume. In it Wheatley re-appropriates the concept of slavery from its common metaphorical use in the colonial rhetoric of discontent, which described any perceived limitation on colonial rights and liberty as an attempt by England to “enslave” (white) Americans. Wheatley appears to use slavery in this conventional sense in the poem:
No more, America, in mournful strain    Of wrongs, and grievance unredress’d complain,    No longer shall thou dread the iron chain,    Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand    Had made, and with it meant t’enslave the land.
But Wheatley’s reference to her authority to speak against this conventionally metaphorical slavery reminds her readers of the reality of chattel slavery trivialized by the political metaphor:
Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,Whence flow these wishes for the common good,By feeling hearts alone best understood,I, young in life, by seeming cruel fateWas snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat. . . .Such, such my case. And can I then but prayOthers may never feel tyrannic sway?
Having gone to England as an enslaved African Briton, Wheatley returned to the colonies prepared to embrace the free African-American identity that the American Revolution soon made available to her. Her anti-slavery stance became more overt once she was free, compared to her poems published while she had been enslaved. She denounces slave owners as “Modern Egyptians” in a letter to the Indian Presbyterian minister Samson Occom that was widely reprinted in newspapers in March 1774 throughout New England, as well as in Canada. Wheatley increasingly came to believe that the colonial struggle for freedom from Britain would lead to the end of slavery in the former colonies. In her poem “To His Excellency General Washington” Wheatley pledged her allegiance in 1776 to the revolutionary cause, hoping that even the most eminent slave owner in North America would ultimately apply the revolutionary ideology of equality and liberty to people of African as well as European descent. In the poem “On the Death of General Wooster”, included in a letter to Wooster’s widow, Mary, on July 15, 1778, Wheatley exclaims, “But how, presumptuous shall we hope to find/Divine acceptance with th’Almighty mind—/While yet (O deed ungenerous!) they disgrace/And hold in bondage Afric’s blameless race?”
The hopes that Wheatley brought home with her from England were soon frustrated. She did not live to see the enfranchisement of her fellow people of African descent. Nor was she able to publish a second volume. Susanna Wheatley died within months of Phillis’s return from London, and John Wheatley died in 1778. Eight months later, Phillis married John Peters, a free black, on Thanksgiving Day. Although the marriage of Phillis and John Peters was initially prosperous, they soon fell victim to the general economic depression that followed the war. Peters, who at various times in his life advertised himself as a lawyer, physician, and gentleman was repeatedly jailed for debt. He was probably in prison when Phillis died on December 5, 1784, when she was about thirty-one years old. The cause of her death is unknown, but it may have been related to the “Asthmatic complaint” she suffered from in previous winters. The first American edition of her Poems was not published until 1786, in Philadelphia.
Wheatley was not only the first person of African descent to publish a book, but consequently the first international celebrity of African descent. She also founded the literary tradition of English-speaking authors of African descent. Although Wheatley never met her contemporaries Jupiter Hammon, an enslaved African-American poet, Philip Quaque, an African-born Christian missionary to Africa, or Ignatius Sancho, a renowned contemporaneous African-British author, they all knew of her and her writings. Sancho called her a “Genius in Bondage”.
Eighteenth-century opponents of the transatlantic slave trade, as well as nineteenth-century ante-bellum American abolitionists, cited Wheatley’s poetry as proof of the humanity, equality, and literary talents of people of African descent. But she and her work have not always been so highly valued. Arguments about the significance of Wheatley and her writings, from her own lifetime on, reflect the evolving re-assessment of African-American and African-British culture. Some commentators, Black as well as white, questioned the literary quality of her writings, or the political and social significance of her life, in support of their own ideological positions on whether and how people of African descent should produce literature. The most notorious critic was Thomas Jefferson, who denied that she was a poet. During the period from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s, a number of critics expressed neo-Jeffersonian denunciations of Wheatley’s literary abilities, as well as of her racial loyalty.
Phillis Wheatley’s place in the developing tradition of early transatlantic literature by people of African descent, and her role as the mother of African-American literature are now finally secure. The many ways in which she subtly and indirectly confronted the issues of racism, sexism, and slavery have been increasingly appreciated. The prophecy offered by the pseudonymous “Matilda” in “On Reading the Poems of Phillis Wheatley, the African Poetess” (New York Magazine, October 1796) has been realized:
A PHILLIS rises, and the world no more    Denies the sacred right to mental pow’r;    While, Heav’n-inspir’d, she proves her Country’s claim    To Freedom, and her own to deathless Fame.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 6, 2012

author: Vincent Carretta


text:
Richard Dadd’s Master-Stroke

By Nicholas Tromans
March 14, 2012

Nicholas Tromans, author of Richard Dadd: The Artist and the Asylum, takes a look at Dadd's most famous painting The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke.

Richard Dadd was a young British painter of huge promise who fell into mental illness while touring the Mediterranean in the early 1840s. He spent over forty years in lunatic asylums, dying at Broadmoor in 1886, but never gave up his calling, producing mesmerisingly detailed watercolours and oil paintings of which The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke is now the most well known. The picture’s history encapsulates the peculiar rise and, if not fall then the suspension, of its maker’s reputation, and indeed begs the question of what happens to any long-dead forgotten genius after they’ve been rediscovered.
Among the symptoms of Dadd’s illness — which sounds today like a form of schizophrenia — were delusions of persecution and the receipt of messages from the Ancient Egyptian deity Osiris. Dadd was commanded to kill his father (or the demon who it appeared to him had taken his place) and did so with efficiency in the summer of 1843, not long after returning from his tour. After an equally well planned escape to France, the artist was eventually admitted to the Criminal Lunatic department of Bethlem Hospital in Lambeth (now the Imperial War Museum) and it was here that he painted the Fairy Feller. According to the inscription on the back of the canvas it took him nine years to complete, although Dadd qualifies this claim with “quasi” (“sort of”) which may mean he only worked at it on and off between 1855 and 1864.
It is an exhaustingly complex image, with a substantial cast of characters, none of whom are doing much with the exception of the “feller” himself who is about to hew a hazelnut in half in order to provide the diminutive queen of the fairies, Mab, with a new chariot. Dadd’s starting point was evidently Mercutio’s teasing speech in Romeo and Juliet in which he imagines in excruciating detail the nightly wanderings of Mab as she seeds dreams in sleepers’ heads, nocturnal visions in which suppressed ambitions and desires reveal themselves. Dadd’s inscription further informs us that the picture was painted for the Steward of Bethlem, George Henry Haydon, and in a long poem (or at least rhymed catalogue) which the artist wrote in 1865, he gives a kind of cast-list as well as offering an account of how the picture came to be painted. It was apparently Haydon who suggested some “verse about the fairies” as a “point from which to throw” — presumably the Mercutio speech which may have been intended by the Bethlem official as a means of encouraging Dadd to revisit his early life before illness had struck, when he had made his reputation as a painter of Shakespearean fairy subjects. Victorian psychiatrists were in any case fond of writing on the “cases” described by the Bard, and Charles Lamb observed how, despite the extravagant imaginative leaps of his fairy scenes, Shakespeare himself presented a kind of inverse monomania, maintaining the thread of sanity even through the most outlandish journeys of the mind.
Having received the commission for a new fairy painting from Haydon, however, Dadd says inspiration failed to materialise. He took the idea of spiritual inspiration very literally, seeing indeed the work of spirits in all human endeavour. Individuals and entire cultures may aspire to noble achievements, but the help or hindrance of the spirit world was what counted and its genii were not inclined to submit themselves to human service for long.  “What’s the use of attempting the enlightenment?” asked Dadd in some notes written in the 1850s. “What a number of times the destroying angel has triumphed over the different nations of the earth — sucking them up & knocking them down”. And equally for an artist seeking to pin down their genius and compel it to answer: “What a clever angel the genius of painting must be to escape from all these hot pursuits . . . but once free, not all the arts of any old fellow I suppose can lure back the pretty bird to its own disgrace and bondage.” Dadd’s theory of art was thus thoroughly pessimistic. The public were a waste of time, and “one might fancy pictures are like monks secluded from and very little noticed by the world so that after all what matters about its quality except to the few, the initiated”. This might at least allow that Haydon may have been a worthwhile patron, but as for the artist himself, “what more slavish than painting, what more hopeless?” So when seeking to make a beginning of the Fairy Feller, Dadd’s only strategy upon realising that “Fancy was not to be evoked /  From her etherial realms” was to accept his passive role, to entirely empty his mind: “I thought on nought — a shift / As good perhaps as thinking hard.” Finally the method succeeded: “Indefinite, almost unseen, / Lay vacant entities of chance” and gradually the “Design and composition” evolved “Without intent”. Dadd’s description of the painting, which he styled Elimination of a Picture and its Subject, thus has a curious sense of disavowal about it, as if saying who is in it is all he can do, their significance being beyond his explanation. When Dadd comes to note the head of a man wearing a conical red cap, poking out of the landscape in the top-left of the picture, he tells us that “Of the / Chinese Small Foot Societee,  He’s a small member.  But  /  if Confucius sent him Now I can’t remember.”
The characters of the Fairy Feller are mainly arranged in pairs and clusters. A group of men watch the feller intently while over the lead actor’s head is the Patriarch with epic beard, along the elongated brim of whose crown cavort a troupe of dancers apparently in Spanish costume, and indeed Dadd observes that “One is / dressed like to Duvernay”, that is Pauline Duvernay, a flamenco dancer famous on the stages of 1830s London. On either side of the Patriarch are pairs of maids and gallants, all showing an exaggeratedly gendered leg. Above the Patriarch are Oberon and Titania — rival monarchs to Mab who waits for her new chariot just below them to the left. She is, as Mercutio had described her, microscopic and yet painted by Dadd with an entirely convincing series of miniaturised impressionist touches. In the upper-left of the painting strange creatures summon further witnesses to the great moment of the splitting of the nut, and then Dadd offers — in the sequence of seven figures along the top of the picture — a version of the counting rhyme whereby boys allowed fate to choose them a profession, or girls a husband: soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, ploughboy, apothecary, thief. If the Fairy Feller were a work intended for critical interpretation, which it probably was not, then we might talk of the suspended action with which the seed was to be split; the deferred moment of sex; the mutual isolation of the groups of figures suggesting the impossibility of generating a family or a community; and we might connect these themes to Dadd’s awareness of his own position as a long-stay patient in London’s high-security lunatic asylum where, “shut out from nature’s game” and “banished from nature’s book of life, because some angel in the strife had got the worser fate”, his lot was “in a paradise of fools [to] contented live.” But Dadd knew, given the workings of spirits, angels and fate, that autobiography was a vain fiction, and we should be wary of assuming that his most famous picture must somehow be his personal testament.
The Fairy Feller became Dadd’s most famous work because, in 1963, it entered the Tate collection where it was soon a popular favourite. It was presented to the Gallery by the then elderly poet Siegfried Sassoon, who had himself been given it by his mother-in-law, the daughter of the vastly wealthy connoisseur Alfred Morrison whose encyclopaedic collections included several Dadds. Sassoon had a special interest in the artist, having befriended, in the trenches, three brothers who were the grandsons of Richard Dadd’s elder brother. The Fairy Feller was presented to the Tate “by Siegfried Sassoon in memory of his friend and fellow officer Julian Dadd, a great-nephew of the artist, and of his two brothers who gave their lives in the First World War”, a dedication which always still accompanies the painting today. Sassoon of course had yet further personal reason for taking an interest in Dadd, having himself been a patient at Craiglockhart outside Edinburgh which functioned during the War as a hospital for shell-shocked officers.
The arrival of the Fairy Feller at the Tate, allowing Dadd a substantial audience for the first time since the 1840s, could not have been timed better if Sassoon had planned it (which he hadn’t: he donated the picture to a public collection having taken fright at the underhand tactics of an art dealer keen to relieve him of it). This was the period during which a new intellectual consensus was fomenting against the inherited system of nineteenth-century asylums, a consensus embracing everyone from the radical historian of psychiatry Michel Foucault to Enoch Powell, then British Secretary of State for Health. Dadd, having been more or less (if never completely) forgotten since the onset of his illness, now appeared something of a hero — a brave survivor of a vicious system which (so went the new story) locked away all those with whom the Victorians could not cope, which was to say many. Dadd appeared as the dark unconscious which underlay mainstream Victorian painting with its floppy maidens (Dadd contrarily had a penchant for sturdy women) and limp-wristed draughtsmanship (Dadd’s taught line was admired by some critics even when the world at large had forgotten him). The notorious magazine of Sixties counter-culture, Oz, ran a spread on the artist in 1971 and in 1974 Freddie Mercury used text from the Elimination poem for lyrics to a song titled the Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke which appeared on Queen’s second album.
But also in 1974 there appeared the results of a more sober, academic approach to Dadd. Patricia Allderidge took up the new post of archivist to the ancient Bethlem Hospital in the late 1960s and was able to recover much of Dadd’s forgotten biography and oeuvre, publishing her findings in the still indispensible catalogue to an exhibition devoted to the artist at the Tate. At this point, in retrospect, it seems the romanticised “anti-psychiatry” Dadd on one hand, and on the other the history of Dadd written from within the hospital itself, effectively cancelled one another out. At least, only the slightest amount of new research was published on the artist for decades after 1974. There seemed nowhere he might confidently be placed in the history of either art or psychiatry. So: how to deal with a long-dead forgotten genius once they’ve been rediscovered? If the talent in question never fitted in when alive, there’s little chance a permanent plinth in the pantheon of their field will be found for them even once posterity has handed them their posthumous prize. Once the ghost is raised from obscurity, where can we lay it down again?
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Nicholas Tromans


text:
Selma Lagerlöf
Surface and Depth
By Jenny Watson
January 11, 2012

In 2011 many countries around the world welcomed The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and the other works of the Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf into the public domain. Jenny Watson looks at the importance of Lagerlöf's oeuvre and the complex depths beneath her seemingly simple tales and public persona.

In 1909, an ageing “spinster,” with a marked limp, stood in the Grand Hotel in Stockholm.  That woman was Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman and the first Swede to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.  She stood in front of a large audience, which included the King and Queen of Sweden, and delivered her Nobel Prize Banquet Speech, a speech which to many epitomized who she was, a charming and humble sagotant,  a quaint, sweet storyteller aunt, who received her inspiration from Wermland and in particular, her father.
Lagerlöf opened her speech by explaining that she had been nervous coming up to Stockholm to receive the prize,  that her previous trips to Stockholm had been to do something “difficult,” such as take examinations or try to find a publisher for her work, never to be celebrated.  Moreover, in the past few months she had lived in solitude and had become shy.  She dispelled her anxiety, though, by thinking of those who would be happy for her.  This was when she had thought of her father and wished that he were still alive to see the moment. Almost imperceptibly, Lagerlöf glides into storytelling, creating a scene in which she imagines visiting her father in Paradise and telling him she is in debt and needs his help.  It eventually becomes clear that this debt is what she owes to those who have contributed to and supported her as a writer:  the vagabonds who gave her stories to tell through their actions, the Swedish language and those who taught it to her, the great authors of Sweden, her readers and most of all the Academy which has placed its trust in her. In true Lagerlöf fashion, she humbly deflected the recognition she deserved for the Nobel Prize, and at the same time ― through a charming story ― demonstrated her storytelling sagotant abilities and her devotion to her father.
In a less flattering light, the contemporary Swedish writer, P.O. Enquist, has interpreted Lagerlöf’s speech as a reflection of Lagerlöf’s co-dependence on an alcoholic father.  No doubt, Lagerlöf’s father was an alcoholic, something on which Lagerlöf did not concentrate in her later fictional memoirs (Mårbacka and A Child’s Memories).  Nor did she concentrate on the fact that her father was completely against her furthering her education; and in direct defiance of his wishes, she did so anyway.  Instead, she highlighted the father who sang songs, brought laughter to the family and had dreams for the family home, Mårbacka.   Does this indicate repression and co-dependence, as Enquist argues?  Perhaps.
More likely, however, and better supported by her life and works, is that Lagerlöf was a multi-faceted woman who understood the difference between surface and content. Lagerlöf entered the world of writing with few female role models, a strong desire to make her mark on the world and the recognition that it would be men who would make or break her career.
And she was correct.  Lagerlöf’s first literary attempts were at the age of fifteen, but her breakthrough came in the late 1880s when she finally gained the courage to write the work she wanted to, Gösta Berlings Saga (1891) ― an epic novel that contradicted the Naturalist tendencies of the time.  In 1890 she sent the first five chapters to Idun magazine’s literary contest and won.  Following this recognition, the full manuscript was published by Fritiof Hellberg in Stockholm.  Although the work was well received by her fellow Wermlander, Gustaf Fröding (also a distant relative to Lagerlöf), most literary critics who took notice were not so enthusiastic, claiming that the narration was “strange,” the style “unnatural,” and the structure “rather loose.”  These aspects, however, were exactly what the internationally renowned literary critic, Georg Brandes, would praise in 1893, when he reviewed the book for the first time.  He found the presentation of material “original,” and praised the “narrative’s rhythmically fluid, often quite simply lyric style.”
With these words and the following attention from other critics, Lagerlöf’s career was launched.  Interestingly, Lagerlöf had originally named her work “Gösta Berling,” but the publisher of the first edition, in order to strengthen the title, added saga, which means a story in terms of an Icelandic saga or a fairy tale.  Critics quickly jumped on the fairy tale definition. This, along with Brandes’ random thoughts about the author while he critiqued her first novel — that is, that Lagerlöf was no doubt a “maiden lady” whose “warm, living imagination is like a child’s” — led to the image of Lagerlöf as  a naïve, kind spinster who told simple stories from her homeland.  Lagerlöf did not fight the image of herself, mainly because her audience liked it and it increased her popularity.
Many of the works she wrote in her lifetime — on the surface — appeared to support this image; to name a few:  The Queen of Kungahälla and Other Sketches from a Swedish Homestead (1899), Jersualem I (1901),  Herr Arnes Hoard (1903), The Girl from the Marshcroft (1908), They Soul Shall Bear Witness (1912), and The Ring Trilogy (1925-1928).  However, it is perhaps her most internationally famous work, The Wonderful Adventure of Nils, published in 1906-7, that cemented the image, both at home and abroad.  Lagerlöf was commissioned by the National Teachers Association in 1902 to write a geography reader for the Swedish public schools.  She spent three years learning about the landscape, animals and plant life, industry and folk life of Sweden and then interwove these facts into the story of Nils Holgersson, a young boy who is punished for his bad behavior by the farm tomte.  He is shrunken to a small size.  In this form, he is able to talk and understand the animals around him and he ends up flying across Sweden on the back of a goose.  During the trip, the reader learns about each province and the geography of Sweden.
The Wonderful Adventures of Nils was an instantaneous success, not only in the public schools and Sweden, but across the world. Indeed, still today it is probably her most famous work. Nils Holgersson appears on the back of the Swedish 20 crown note (Lagerlöf is on the front), and from Germany to Russia to Japan, Nils Holgersson can be found in bookstores (and on TV).
Yet, Lagerlöf was in no way a simple sagotant from Sweden ― not in her works and not in her life. Lagerlöf did not only tell stories of Sweden.  For example, The Miracles of Antichrist (1897) was a novel set in Italy, centering on the moral conflict between Socialism and Christianity;  Jerusalem II (1902) takes place in Palestine; and The Outcast (1918) was a pacifist novel in reaction to World War I. On the surface, most of Lagerlöf’s works can be read at face value and they are indeed enjoyable.  However, even as can be seen in her public school reader, there are numerous layers beneath the surface―layers which are thought out and constructed (e.g. the pedagogy behind Nils Holgersson).  Lagerlöf’s novels and stories explore human psychology  ―the psychological layers of murder, love, jealousy, war, greed, religion.   Her work, Herr Arnes Hoard, is a good example of such a story-- a ghost story which is thrilling to read, but which, if one understands the ghost as human conscience, is an in depth study of guilt and love.
Lagerlöf’s life had a similar dynamic between surface and depth.  On the surface (as she herself portrayed in her autobiographical fiction, Mårbacka I and II (1922, 1930) and The Diary of Selma Lagerlöf (1932), she was a simple girl from Wermland, a devoted and subservient daughter, a woman who became a spinster due to her limp, and a storyteller indebted to her country. Yet, beneath the surface, she was an exceptionally well-read woman who clearly drew from the classic literature of the Western world.  She was a woman of strong will―defying her father who did not want her to continue her education and a strong voice in the woman’s movement in Sweden. Although she was a spinster in the “traditional” sense, she was involved with at least one woman, Valborg Olander, if not more. Finally, although she was clearly indebted to her country for many stories, she did not simply retell them.  She created new masterpieces in the Swedish language, in-depth studies of human nature and psychology.  She created literature worthy of the Nobel Prize. And even upon receiving the Nobel Prize, she continued the image of herself.  Lagerlöf spun stories, whether they were about others or herself — incredible stories, with fascinating depths.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 11, 2012

author: Jenny Watson


text:
The First Olympic Protest

By Rebecca Jenkins
July 25, 2012

Rebecca Jenkins looks back to when London first hosted the Olympic Games and how a mix up with flags gave birth to the first Olympic protest.

Just over 100 years ago London hosted its first Olympic Games — the Fourth Olympiad of 1908. It was a fledgling version of what we have today — only 2023 athletes competed, approximately the same number that will contest the Athletic events in 2012.
Of course, the Olympic Games were rather different then — there was no torch relay, or spectacular opening ceremony with a stadium transformed by pageants of England’s green and pleasant land. In 1908 the tug-of-war was a medal winning contest, as were massed gymnastic displays (very popular with the northern European nations with military conscription) and marathon runners were not encouraged to re-hydrate, so the winning time wouldn’t have even qualified a modern athlete for the Olympic team today.
It is well know that in 1908 the marathon was run for the first time at the modern Olympic distance of 26 miles, 385 yards.  But what is often overlooked is that these Edwardian games were the first to have an opening ceremony revolving around a parade of nations; in short, the first London Olympics witnessed the birth of Team GB.
It has been said that whereas the Germans excavated Ancient Olympia and the French reanimated its spirit, the Edwardian sons of the British Empire set out to organise it.   In the first Games of the modern Olympics, any one — or perhaps more accurately, any sporting man (Baron de Coubertin, the “father” of the Olympic movement, did not approve of women performing in public sporting contests) — who had the private means to turn up at the venue could put himself down to compete.
Faced with an increasing interest in the Games, the small group of gentlemen who set out to organise the London Olympics of 1908 decided it would be more efficient only to accept contestants registered through national teams selected through national Olympic associations.  This administrative decision was re-enforced by an opening ceremony in which the athletic teams paraded into the stadium dressed in athletic or national costume, four abreast behind “their respective representatives, [bearing] the flag and entablature of their country.”
The eye of the Olympic spectator was moved irrevocably from the individual athelete to the flag they wore on their chest. And flags, as the Edwardian organising committee soon discovered, cause conflict.
In 1908 the US Olympic Committee sent their largest team so far to the Olympic Games: 122 men (no women), in team costume with the stars and stripes on their breast. The managers of Team US 1908 were determined that they were going to sweep England off the athletic map. The ground they chose was track and field and their modern gladiators were dominated by Irish American track and field stars from New York.
Even before the Games began, the press were reporting spats between the American managers and the British Olympic Association over the rules governing pole vaulting.   (The British organisers had sent out their rules in advance, assuming no one would complain.   After all, as the Daily Mail wrote: “We have carried our dress clothes and our games throughout the world.”)
It was, perhaps unfortunate, therefore, that in the rush to prepare the White City stadium for King’s arrival to open the Games on the afternoon of Monday, July 13th, 1908, the national flags run up the poles included those of Japan and China (neither of whom would send representatives to the Olympics games for some years yet), but omitted those of Sweden and the United States of America.
The Crown Prince of Sweden, president of the Swedish Amateur Athletic Association had been a key supporter of the Olympics since their revival. He and the Swedish Government had — unlike the British government — provided substantial subsidies to send the third largest national team to London for the 1908 Games.   And, Prince Gustavus, an honoured guest of the British King and Queen, was among the royal party in the royal box.
The Prince was polite in front of his royal hosts about the omission of his national flag.  The American Committee however suspected a deliberate insult.   They produced their own Stars and Stripes and had it run up the pole.  The Swedes had to make do with the single flag carried before their team in the parade.
The parade climaxed with the massed ranks of athletes behind their flagbearers facing the royal box.   With a fanfare from the trumpeters of the Life Guards, the flag were dipped to salute King Edward VII; every flag, that is, except the Stars and Stripes held by the Californian law student and shot putter, Ralph Rose.
The British press at the time over-looked the incident, but the Irish paper in New York, The Gaelic American, picked up Rose’s gesture and made much of it. When an American sports journalist revived the story in the 1950s, it told of Ralph Rose being “taken aside” the night before the opening ceremony by a core of Irish American athletes determined to make a stand against the British tyrant who oppressed the Irish. ‘This flag dips to no earthly king’, the young democrat was supposed to have said as he held his flag high.
Historians dispute whether the words were actually said by Rose or were a later embellishment to the story, but the fact remains that after 1908 the national Olympic team was here to stay and 1908 US team had made the first Olympic political protest.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Rebecca Jenkins