Thucydidean Reason

Given the unparalleled misery, pain and death of war, how can we see it as anything but irrational?

Roughly thirty years ago I read an English translation of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War.  I had trouble following it.  Part of that stemmed from my profound ignorance of eastern Mediterranean geography--seems like most of the time I didn't know where anyone was.  But a greater part stemmed from the paucity of what I expected in a history of a war between Athens and Sparta:  big battles between Athenian and Spartan armies.  Unlike the Persian wars narrated by Herodotus, there is no Marathon, no Thermopylai, no Salamis.

Late last year I thought I'd try to go through it again, slowly, in Greek.  My geography is much improved.  I have some idea what not to expect.  Even so, now that I've reached the end of book I, I find that what I most forgot was how much talk there is in the book.  Much more talking than fighting.

War stories go back a long way.  The war-ballad is one of the first products of almost any literary culture, from the Iliad to the Chanson de Roland to Beowulf.  Accounts of war are commonplace in world literature and history.  But Thucydides, I think, has the distinction that his account is the first where center stage belongs, not to wrongs revenged, or deeds of heroism, or the praiseworthy leadership of the chieftain or the king or the general,  but to the careful, reasoned exposition of calculated advantage.

Τῆς μὲν γνώμης, ὦ Ἀθηναῖοι, αἰεὶ τῆς αὐτῆς ἔχομαι, μὴ εἴκειν Πελοποννησίοις.  So, at the end of Book I, begins Pericles, "ἀνὴρ...πρῶτος Ἀθηναίων," in a long speech advising war, and weighing the factors that will determine its outcome.  It is an appeal neither to honor nor justice, but a careful consideration of the land superiority of the Spartan army, the countervailing utility of Athenian sea power, the relative vulnerability of Attica and the Peloponnese to marauding armies, the capability of each side to remedy their current weaknesses, the relative wealth of Athens, the availability of mercenaries, and the greater reliability of Athens' allies.  The speech has a surprisingly familiar feel to it (perhaps because we, in far different circumstances, and with distressing frequency, continue to publicly discuss going to war).  But it is here merely the last in a series of appeals for help, complaints about interference, and solicitations for alliance.  By and large these speeches deal very little with right, or the will of the gods.  Rather, they weigh the advantages and disadvantages of organized violence.

In Thucydides war is rooted in reason.  And reasoned discourse, that for which we most honor the Greeks, doesn't always get it right, as Pericles, hedging, acknowledges.  And as Thucydides, knowing his readers know the outcome of the war, shows without comment.  As noted by another ancient,

כִּי לֹא לַקַּלִּים הַמֵּרוֹץ וְלֹא לַגִּבּוֹרִים הַמִּלְחָמָה

The race is not always to the swift, nor the war to the mighty.

New Guinea and the Philippines

My dad died almost thirty-five years ago.  I was born in the mid-fifties, and the fact that my dad served in the second world war was, to me, the most unremarkable thing about him--at that time, pretty much all my friends' fathers had so served.  It was a fact as common as having a black-and-white TV or riding your bike to school.  I was supremely uninterested.  Not hostile, not defiant, neither ashamed nor particularly proud--just uninterested.

My dad had two "war stories," the guy who would yell, "Hand grenade!" in his sleep, and the time they stumbled across a banana plantation and made themselves sick gorging on fresh bananas.  My parents had about fifteen record albums, one of which was "Songs of the U.S. Armed Forces," and my dad particularly liked "Those Caissons go Marching Along," since he was in the field artillery.  Beyond those facts, and his having been in the Pacific rather than in Europe, I knew nothing, and really cared nothing.

In every way he was the least military of men.  He never owned a gun, never swore, rarely drank, took us to church every Sunday, and had no temper.  All the kids in the neighborhood loved him, and, unlike almost every other father I knew, he didn't have us say "yes, sir" and "no, sir."

When my mom died a few years back I found, among her papers, a service record she kept for my dad, recording a very few facts about his time in the military.  Most of the record was left blank, but there was enough from the itineraries to show that he participated in the 1944 New Guinea campaign and the "mop up" operations in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao in the spring and summer of 1945.  He would have been around 28, 29 years old, just a little older than my son.

It being far too late to ask about any of this, and really knowing very little about the war in the Pacific, I came across, and recently finished, Stephen Taaffe's MacArthur's Jungle War:  The 1944 New Guinea Campaign.  Though I have absolutely no military experience, I enjoy reading war books, accounts of battles and campaigns.  Part of that is the vicarious pleasure taken in reading about terrible things you will never have to experience--climbing Mount Everest in a snowstorm, crossing the Arabian desert with supplies running low.  But, in addition, the practice of war, horrible and irrational as it is, is a large part of human history and human existence.  We don't know ourselves unless we know It--even those of us who have been fortunate enough to escape its direct terrors and atrocities.

But here there was a third perspective, not only the secondhand thrill of hardship not experienced, not only the awe of a massive endeavor of an emerging Western power to destroy the geopolitical threat of an emerging Eastern power, but also the consciousness that, in the middle of this maelstrom of destroyers and battleships, amphibious landings, firefights, bombardments, jungle and hilltop and swamp and cave assaults, heat and disease, my poor dad was slogging along with the rest of them, making the best of it.

And pretty much keeping it inside when he came home.

My mom notes that he looked awfully thin when he got back home toward the end of 1945.  She described him as "attabrine yellow," something which puzzled me until I learned in Taaffe's book that attabrine was something the soldiers were given as a preventative against malaria.  It tended to turn your skin yellow.  And when I asked one of my mom's sisters about it, she told me something I never knew:  dad came back from the southern Pacific with malaria, and never quite shook it his whole life.

So much there, so much I blithely overlooked.  So much stoicism, so much love.

Happy Father's Day, dad.

According to Doyle

I've been a Sherlock Holmes fan since I was a kid, and have been an enthusiast, not only for the fiction of Conan Doyle, but for the variations on the character that have almost obscured the "real Holmes."  Of the film treatments, I always appreciated Jeremy Brett's "orthodoxy," and I think I liked "The Seven Per Cent Solution" more for its swashbuckling Sigmund Freud that for its Holmes.  I thought George C. Scott was awfully good in "They Might be Giants"  (I assume, until corrected, that Joann Woodward's Mildred  was the first female Dr. Watson).   I have very much enjoyed Benedict Cumberbatch's "high functioning sociopath," though his characterization owes a little too much to the revived Doctor Who.

Still, it's fun to go back to Doyle, as I recently did in completing The Valley of Fear.  

The Holmes novels have always been less prized that the stories--with the exception of The Hound of the Baskervilles.  That's probably because, unlike The Hound, they spend a lot of time away from Holmes.  In The Valley of Fear the first half of the novel covers the murder, Holmes' investigation, and the solution, a satisfactory if (by cinematic standards) low-key resolution involving a missing dumbbell, a hidden bicycle, and the taking of a single, inner ring from a finger of the victim.  There's even a bit of Professor Moriarty, mostly as window dressing.

The second half of the novel is an entirely different story, explaining the background and motivation of the killing.  It's set in America, and it's just "wrong" enough to give the story an interest entirely separate from the plot.

I once had a friend who returned from a trip to England with a trove of English comics.  One dealt with the adventures of a certain "Dead-Eye Dick," the cover of which afforded us endless amusement.  It portrayed a saloon, someplace in the Rockies, I think.  A gunfighter has burst in through the swinging half-doors, and our cowpoke hero has risen from his poker game, fire in his eyes, and exclaims, "Whatever do you mean by this intrusion??"

Wrong.

The second part of the book is set in a rough American mining community, terrorized by an organization call the "Scowrers."  Doyle apparently didn't make up the scenario out of whole cloth; he based it on a book he read extolling the Pinkerton private detective organization, and a Pinkerton is, in fact, the eventual hero of the tale.  The Scowrers are members of what is equal parts fraternal organization, labor union, and Murder, Inc. Whether anything like this in fact existed I'm not able to say.  The enemy seems always to be articulated as "capitalists," but murders are committed by request, no questions asked, ruthlessly and frequently, often of wholly innocent workers.  Hence, The Valley of Fear.

As a stand-alone novel I would guess that it has Holmes alone to thank for it's still being printed.  And as a picture of American life and labor relations, it seems to fall into the seriously "wrong" category.  But as a period Edwardian melodrama and a window into the way that Englishmen of that period saw America, it has its interest.  

Vocatio Contra Mundum

I have begun to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Nachfolge. 

When I entered college in 1973, liberal arts schools had begun offering, as the freshman introduction to writing and research, an elective on a fairly narrow topic (a practice that my daughter's school still follows).  I chose a course in the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and we read The Cost of Discipleship and Ethics and portions of the Letters and Papers from Prison.  As a kid with a serious Protestant (Presbyterian) background, and an inchoate interest in theological/philosophical matters, it was a good beginning, even if, now, I wonder that I could really make head or tail of it at that age.

Bonhoeffer, of course, has an appeal beyond that of academic theology: around 1940 he became involved in a conspiracy seeking to assassinate Hitler and negotiate an armistice.  Bonhoeffer's role was to establish communications through ecumenical contacts (an effort that came to little due to the skittishness of the English).  He was arrested on unrelated charges and held in various prisons with some hope of release.  When, however, his connection with the conspiracy was established, he had little chance, and was hanged, with Allied troops just weeks away from liberation. 

Bonhoeffer was far from unknown when living.  He spent time in America at Union Theological Seminary, and collaborated with Karl Barth on the formation of a "Confessing Church" when the Nazis were working to create a more loyal Reichkirche.  But he became more widely known after his death, and, given the end his commitment led him to, it should come as no surprise that his 1937 book, Nachfolge ("Discipleship"), was given the English title, The Cost of Discipleship.

In retrospect it seems surprising that, at that time and place, the book was publishable at all.  It is not overtly political.  (How could it have been?)  But it focuses on the call to follow, to act more than to believe.  In doing so Bonhoeffer ran up against the common understanding of the sole decisiveness of faith in Lutheranism, which condemns all saving imperatives to act as "works-righteousness."  In response Bonhoeffer asserts that answering the call to follow--that is, obedience-- is not a "work," in Luther's sense, nor, alone, fully a salvific act, but a break with one's former life that only, itself, makes possible the faith that saves:  "Der Ungehorsame kann night glauben."  "The disobedient cannot believe."

In Nachfolge Bonhoeffer identifies "Weltlichkeit" as the central problem of contemporary Christianity:   "Worldliness."  He takes issue right away with the conventional portrait of Luther as the one who left the cloister for the world.  No, says Bonhoeffer, "Luther mußte das Kloster verlass und züruck in the Welt, nicht weil die Welt an sich gut und heilig wäre, sondern weil auch das Kloster nichts anderes war als Welt."  Luther fled the cloister because it had become more worldly than the world.  Christian life begins with the answer to a call to discipleship, against the call of the world.  Grace has a cost, unspoken, perhaps, but undeniable.

In his later Letters and Papers from Prison Bonhoeffer talks about "the world" somewhat differently; we must live "etsi deus non darentur," as if there were no God.  "Nicht der religiöse Akt macht den Christen, sondern das Teilnehmen am Leiden Gottes im weltliches Leben."  Paradoxically, it is the worldliness of a world without God which God calls us to.  "Die mündige Welt ist Gott-loser und darum veilleicht gerade Gott-näher als die unmündige Welt."  The absence of God in a mature world makes him nearer than formerly.  Bonhoeffer's later ideas were appealed to by the "Death-of-God" theologians of the sixties, but his focus was much more on God's co-suffering-with, not a resulting fully-blown "secularity."

I may try to explore this contrast with time.  But I have a certain hesitation, because, though these are undoubtedly "theological" works, their aim is not, primarily, the understanding.  "Nachfolge" can, indeed, be translated "Discipleship," but it can also be understood as a verb in the imperative:  "Follow!"  When I look back on my earlier reading, I see how imperfectly I understood the implications of Lutheran theological notions.  But I also have to look at how I did, or didn't, respond to the call.

It reminds me of the last words of Jesus in the last chapter of the last gospel.  He utters some rather enigmatic statements about the fate of Peter and John.  It is noted that the statement about John was initially misunderstood.  It is, genuinely, a fascinating theological exegetical exchange.  But what are Jesus' final words?  

τί πρὸς σέ; σύ μοι ἀκολούθει.

"What is that to you?  Follow me."

A quarter dunned

...with Finnegans Wake.

I tend to read it four pages at a sitting.  The first page I think, "Why am I back to this?  This is ridiculous."  By the second page I am getting into the swing of things, enjoying the rhythm, the so-called words forming almost complete thoughts, themes coalescing, sometimes familiar ones.  This is when I smile, or laugh, or say, "Hmmm!"  By the fourth page I'm getting tired of it, and close the volume, but look forward to coming back.

I become more and more convinced that I have done the right thing in avoiding the guide books.  I ran a little experiment, fed "Finnegans Wake" into the Amazon searcher and put about fifteen books into the buy-basket, each being a guide of some sort, and each having the "Look Inside" feature.  So at my leisure I would occasionally pull it up, choose one of the books, look at the introduction or table of contents, or a random selection.  And what I found of course was references to references that I would have never gleaned in a million years, many of which I don't doubt are accurate, but which would extend reading the book, if taken seriously, to many lifetimes.  Many are quite interesting, but, of course, deceptively suggest that they themselves are anything like what they are purporting to explain.  Maybe, after completing the book itself, from cover to cover, it might be fun to chase down some of these rabbit trails.  But to take this kind of thing too seriously is to undermine the whole idea that an ordinary reader can actually read this book, a proposition I am still reluctant to abandon.

That's not to say that Finnegans Wake isn't more than usually dependent upon prior knowledge of rather arbitrary and obscure things.  I would go so far as to call that a defect.  But it is also a feature, since it highlights the fact that, yes, almost all literature comes to us needing some degree of background.  You don't need a knowledge of Victorian history, politics, economics, religion, law or social classes to understand or appreciate Dickens--but surely they help, and enrich the experience.

Let me conclude this brief pause on the journey with a consideration of two passages:  Finn MacCool and the Mookse and the Gripes.

At a certain point (still in section I) a paragraph began with the number, "1."  That's new, I thought.  Flip, flip, flip, flip.  There was another paragraph some six pages on, preceded with a number, "2."  And immediately before it:  "ANSWER:  Finn MacCool!"  So what we had here, plainly, was a series of questions, an examination, and the answer to those pages I had flipped through was Finn MacCool, or, more properly, Fionn  Mac Cumhail, the legendary Irish king and giant, whose Fennians were, to him, what the knights of the round table were to Arthur.  So, before proceeding further, I pull out a mostly-neglected volume from the shelf, "Wars of the Irish Kings," and read an account of the revolt of Midac, son of Colga, against Fionn, and, for good measure, I pull out my copy of "Celtic Myths and Legends" and skimm over the story there of Fionn's pursuit of the Giolla Dacker (and His Horse).  Now I'm ready, think I.

Except that nothing, or next to nothing, in the six relevant pages seemed to relate to anything I knew of Fionn.  It was a pretty opaque passage, and my preparation had mattered not a bit. 

But shortly thereafter came the tale of the mookse and the gripes.  Now here I had a little help, an illustration in the Folio edition of a fox on a throne wearing papal robes and the triple crown.  The passage was obviously a riff on the fox and the grapes, with Pope Adrian as the fox and, presumably, the gripes/grapes as Protestants, on the other side of a river (the Tiber, I suppose--and a gripe is a sort of protest).  Not, understand, that there was any intelligible story here, but there was a wealth of clever references and wordplays that, were I excerpting this crazy text for a beginner, I might well draw on for a suggestion of the unusual entertainment that this text can provide.

Toward the end of this passage a woman appears, Nuvoletta, who seems to be our dear Anna Livia, who is identified with all waters, and all rivers, and, more specifically, the River Liffy, which riverruns through Dublin, and I actually laughed out loud at the silly pun on the Father of Waters in this sentence:

"And into the river that had been a stream (for a thousand of tears had gone eon her and come on her and she was stout and struck on dancing and her muddied name was Missisliffi) there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears."

In short, what I despaired of in the Finn MacCool passage I regained in the Mooske and the Gripes.  And so onward.

The Three Marlowes

To be more exact, it should be two "Marlowes" and one "Marlow".

The common thread among the common names is corruption.  The playwright Christopher Marlowe authored the great English "Doctor Faustus."  A few centuries later the Polish-born English novelist Joseph Conrad told at least two of his tales through a fictional character, the reflective seaman Marlow.  And, some decades later, in the California, the paradise of the New World, one Raymond Chandler created a shabby, unbending private eye, Philip Marlowe.

I suppose that a quick Google search might reveal whether Conrad drew on the playwright, or Chandler on either.  But I prefer to just start with the coincidence.  (If Joyce had come up with the name, I would have thought, "Well, 'Mar' is the Aramaic title, "Lord." "Lord low"?)

Why corruption?  I'll start with the playwright, and admit, at the start, that I don't really know his work, other than the "Faustus."  But here we do treat of hubris, unbridled desire, the longing for lordship.  Faust's insatiable desire for knowledge became, for Goethe, his (literally) saving grace.  Not so with Marlowe's Faustus.  Yes, I am uncomfortable with that last, desperate offer:  "I'll burn my books!"  But Faustus becomes his appetite, whether for knowledge, or women, or superiority, or even the simple pleasure of safe mockery.  He authors his own damnation and fatally, he gets what he wants.

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough,
That sometime grew within this learned man.

From an author-Marlowe we move to an intermediate Marlow, Conrad's involved narrator of Heart of Darkness and more-detached narrator of Lord Jim.  The two novels seem to have been written almost simultaneously.  Kurtz is Conrad's Faustus, who finds only horror in the labyrinthine journey into, and out of, his own dark heart.  By contrast, Jim, the young idealist, by great good fortune learns early of his own darkness, in a personal, and literal, fall from his charge, abandoning his passengers to what he fears and believes is an imminent plunge under a cold, dark sea.  Marlow encounters Kurtz only at the brink of the frightful jaws of hell.  Jim he meets at disgrace, in the facing of consequences, and in the fugitive run from remote outpost to remoter, seeking a personal redemption which Conrad, mercifully, allows him.  Conrad's theme is corruption, but he does not insist on its inevitable victory.

And then there is our American Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's Philip, a character whose noir trappings and snappy patter all but obscure his genuinely heroic integrity.  Chandler's novels are about corruption, the deep, unrelenting corruption of wealth, and he really makes us believe, as the apostle says, that the love of money is the root of all evil.  There are gangsters, of course, and grifters, and cops on the take, but Chandler's real villains are the enormously wealthy men who appear only briefly, like Harlan Potter, in The Long Goodbye.  His long tirade against human venality, population growth, publicity, the cost of war, "confiscatory" taxes, mass production, and the drug and cosmetics business, leaves Marlowe literally speechless:  "I was sitting there with my mouth open, wondering what makes this guy tick.  He hated everything."

That kind of power saps the spirit.  "You've got a hundred million dollars and all it bought you is a pain in the neck."  Every ordinary human desire is stifled.  The rich (per the now-presumed-dead Terry Lennox) "never want anything very hard except maybe somebody else's wife, and that's a pretty pale desire compared with the way a plumber's wife wants new curtains for the living room."  It is as much a hell as the playwright's "adders and serpents," or the seaman's "dark places of the earth" where bright intentions are put to the test.

 

Sense or Sensibility

I have chosen foolishly.  I have begun Finnegans Wake.  In fact, I've read about a tenth of it.

Now it seems to me, to begin with, that there are two ways to approach this book.  The first is to arm yourself with one or more of the commentaries, guides, keys, glosses, and the like, that abound in both written and electronic form.  The second way is to simply dive in, and try to make sense out of it as best one can.

I have chosen the second way, because I balk at the idea of having to read one book (or five) in order to read another one.  I guess I am also concerned that the guidebook approach runs the risk of reading, not Finnegans Wake, but another writer's work as excavated therefrom.

Let me explain.  The text is largely senseless, and has remained so.  It has been described as a work written in an invented language, but I don't think that that's quite the right way to put it.  The book is in English.  The words, most of them, are recognizably English, and the occasional bursts of other languages are recognizably French or German or whatever.  There is no invented language, but a good portion of the book is written in invented spelling:  "The house of Atreox has fallen indeedust."  Well, "indeedust" is plainly not an English word itself.  But, just as plainly, it can signify "indeed" or "in the dust" or some other expression I'm missing.  Is "Atreox" "Atreus," the house of Agamemnon and Menelaus?  Seems likely, especially from what follows:  "(Ilyam!  Ilyum!..."

These enigmatic strings of almost-sentences seem to cluster around themes.  Here there is a riot of Islamic terminology, there references to the Normans who came to Ireland.  But they don't form a narrative.  And great swatches are as opaque as mud.  Occasionally I come across a reference to something that would be utterly incomprehensible if I didn't already know something particular from outside of the book (like, for instance, a line from the music hall ballad, "Finnegan's Wake.")  Most places I struggle to find any referent at all, even when the invented words are transparent enough.

So, back to what I was saying above, about forsaking the guides:  Whatever Joyce thought he was doing, I seem to be imposing some meaning, some sense, some patterns, some interpretations into the text.  It is "eisegesis," not exegesis.  I have little confidence that what I am recognizing here or there is remotely similar to what Joyce thought he was laying out. But at least, by forsaking the guides, I am imposing my own mistake, not that of my learned predecessors.

That's not to say that I have entirely avoided those general pronouncements on the interpretive frame of the text that anyone contemplating tackling the Wake is bound to come across.  One generally accepted idea is that Joyce has taken up the notion of a four-stage circular theory of history proposed by an eighteenth century Italian writer, Giovanni Battista Vico.  Knowing that, I can't help but look for references to four-fold cyclical patterns, in this passage or that.

Here is something that I came across last week, for example:

"Wroth mod eldfar, ruth red stillstand, wrath wrackt wroth, confessed private Pat Marchison retro."

Now, by some chain of reasoning, which now escapes me, I became convinced when I first read this, after puzzling over it in its context, that these four phrases referred to the four stages of the sacrament of penance:  contrition, confession, absolution and satisfaction.  Yes, I know, very questionable.  But that "retro" at the end suggested a return to the first.  And how?  Sin again, Finnegan!     

And although some have called this Joyce's "book of the night," I have found that my initial thought, that it might be best read late at night, while dozing off, letting its nonsense phrases make their own sense automatically, didn't work out.  I'd call it a morning book--or at least one that yields whatever meaning it has, best, when read alert and refreshed, and at a rate of no more than two to three pages at a sitting.

Despite the difficulties and frustrations, its stubborn lack of sense, I still find myself returning, which surprises me.  It brings back to mind something that I've actually quoted on this blog before, Dr. Johnson's reply to being told that Richardson's Clarissa was "tedious":

"If you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment."

To some extent I am of the same mind about the Wake.  If you try to read it for the "sense," you will go nuts.  But, read for the "sensibility"--the playfulness, the circularity, the strange randomness, the oracular quality--it yields a unique kind of satisfaction (but not one, I would add, that could be gotten away with by anyone less that the author of Ulysses.)