22/2/2018 "THE RED AND THE BLACK" by STENDHAL

This was Stendhal’s first novel, written in 1830 and first published in Paris in 1831. It provides a rare insight into French life in a period of political turmoil following Napoleon’s abdication, known as the Bourbon Restoration (1815-1830). The Bourbons Louis XVIII and Charles X were on the throne as constitutional monarchs, and although France prospered, the country was politically, religiously and socially divided between the royalists and those who had supported the Napoleonic Revolution.  The few newspapers of the time were controlled by the government; but in Paris political factions met at dinner parties and in the numerous cafés and bars on the boulevards. Paris buzzed, but not always in a good way.

The plot follows the life of Julien Sorel a village boy and son of a carpenter. He is clever; he can recite Latin texts from the Bible by heart and does so rather often. His intellectual skills are recognised and thus he advances through society, first becoming the tutor to the children of the local mayor Monsieur de Rênal.But when Rênaldiscovers Julian is having an affair with Madame de Rênal, he moves to a seminary. He is not happy there; he finds it dull and his fellow scholars do not take to him. However, the seminary director, abbé Pirard, is greatly impressed by Julien’s abilities, and arranges for him to join the staff ofa wealthy Parisian diplomat, Monsieur de la Mole. He becomes Monsieur de la Mole’s private secretary and is entrusted with important tasks including letter-writing and the handling of the family estate. However, he is always an outsider, belonging to a lower class. Socially he is out of his depth and has to keep quiet about his admiration of Napolean because the family and their high-class friends are royalists. He finds it hard to adjust but nevertheless has a sexual adventure with the headstrong young daughter, Matilde. She becomes pregnant, and the couple wish to marry; but the father is furious, and at first refuses to give his consent. Julian is still a young man (early 20s) and he agonises with his emotional attachments both to his earlier love, Madame de Rênal, and to Matilde. He is apparently unhinged, and he shoots Madame de Rênal in church, but fails to kill her. For this he is executed by guillotine.

One of our members had the original French version, much thumbed, another had Roger Gard’s translation, but most had G.K. Scott Moncrieff’s. We made brief comparisons, but there was much of real substance to discuss and we didn’t dwell on this. My version (Wordsworth Classics) has an excellent Introduction by Moya Longstaffe but I didn’t read it until writing this blog. In fact, it’s clear that the book is one which repays research, and indeed it has often attracted scholars. We book-group folk approached the book as humble readers, most of us had not read it before. ‘Let’s make a start’ said the proposer, ‘but wait: we have a longish email from one of our members who has been rushed to Tasmania to attend a family wedding’:  

I found this a fascinating book, of great scope and depth.
Perhaps the book started from a desire to write a Voltaire type satire about French society at all levels - rural, Church, and Parisian society. But the intriguing characters that emerge and the detailed analysis of the shifts and turns of their mental state make it so much more than that.
The two main female characters are very well done. Sorel himself is pretty unappealing - self-centred, ambitious, hypocritical, struggling to have genuine feelings for others - but the story is so well told that the reader follows his exploits always with interest and sometimes with sympathy. There’s an appealing sense of adventure about many episodes, particularly those involving ladders and bedrooms!

 It is unusual to have a novel that is so bang up to date in its political context – its a ‘Chronicle of 1830’ - and you get a good sense of the times and all the factions and plotting as Francestruggles to move on from the Revolution and Napoleon.
There is a strong underlying thread of nostalgia for the Revolution and also for Napoleon, to whose exploits Stendhal owed so much of his career. I found it difficult to be sure if Stendhal is in Julian’s camp on Napoleon or identifies with the more ambivalent voices. You might expect anyone who had been on the disastrous Russian Campaign to detest Napoleon and his unnecessary  wars, but plenty of the soldiers (but not so many citizens) remained loyal fans of Napoleon to the end. I guess that emerging nostalgia leads finally to the Second Republic and the Second Empire.

 I see it suggested that the title might refer to Church versus Army (the Hussars had some red or scarlet uniforms, but of course most French uniforms were blue) or it might refer to the secular versus the religious. I don’t think it matters what he intended - it’s a richly evocative title, with both colours symbolic of many contrasting aspects of life.

We didn’t all agree with this impression of Julian, which does however match in tone most descriptions and reviews we have come across, where he is ‘an ambitious young social climber in a cruel, monarchical society’. Our proposer, on the other hand, defends Julian in an email as follows:

My take is that Julian is only 22 when he dies. He starts the book as young and cut off 
from "civilisation ". Every piece of progress demands courage and his friendship with the retired army man helps him. When he makes the first move with Mme de Reynal it is clear he is testing his courage. This is a central theme.

  

I agreed whole-heartedly. We might ask the question, how would we ourselves have behaved in Julian’s circumstances?  Even today, clever village boys and girls living in rural surroundings anywhere in the world need a bit of help from a wise grown-up if they are to be self-fulfilled. And, to succeed, they need to go away. Julian’s humble origins meant he might never become a military officer even though he was an admirer of Napolean and his military campaigns. A career in the church seemed like a good idea, given his interest and ability in Latin.  And if he had been a social climber he would have handled himself much better. At the end, he didn’t need to go to the guillotine. Aided by his lovers, he could have easily saved himself and must have seen that. As our proposer wrote in his reply to our in-Tasmania member:

So often he could have played his hand better [if he was just self centred]. Most obviously he should have cited Mme Reynal and Matilde for the trial and claimed Crime of Passion. He instead did not ask to see Reynal and yet realised he really loved her. He tried to sort out Matilde's life with that of the child after his death. Note how realistic he was when facing his decision to sacrifice himself for their honour. In court he chose to speak and addressed the jury on the basis of a class vendetta. Thus he sealed his fate but this was calculated because he could see things being OK if he died, but not if he lived. It is so interesting to see him develop as a man and gradually cast aside the artifices he had relied on.

Yes, we all know young men (less often women) with savant-like skills (language, music, art) who are poor at managing their affairs. Julien is one of those. Stendhal wasn’t, he was a witty, man-about-town. But some of Julien’s characters and incidents may have been drawn directly from his own life. Like Julian, he engaged in sexual adventure and tried to understand the nature of love, writing a non-fictional work about it (De L’Amour in 1822). Both fell in love with an aristocratic girl called Matilde (or Métilde). Both went to Paris as young men and felt socially inferior. And Stendhal also learned to recite the New Testament by heart.

Stendhal is known today as a pioneer of literary realism, presenting and analysing everyday events unembellished by romantic overtones. Much of this book is about what Julien is thinking, introspection, indecision, especially in relation to love (his name Sorel is a paladrome of L’Eros). In navigating the mental labyrinth, he is sometimes guided by what his hero Napolean may have done – he thinks that amorous affairs are like military campaigns. And he isn’t sure whether or not he is in love. Distinctions between infatuation, desire, love and lust cannot easily be made. But once he’s made up his mind, his actions are immediate and often dramatic (for example, the poignant scenes of Julien climbing into the bedroom of a lover using a ladder that is conveniently placed in the shrubbery nearby).  The author does not of course describe the intimate details. We get this sort of language instead:  ‘when she had no longer anything to refuse him, she thrust him from her, with genuine indignation, and then flung herself into his arms’. Our own mind minds can work on this as we choose. Feminists seem to have appreciated Stendhal’s work. Simon de Beauvoir liked Stendhal’s tendency ‘to say things like it really is’. Here is an extract from a recent scholarly article on the subject (Scott, 2008): 

Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘Stendhal ou le romanesque du vrai’ occupies a privileged position as the fifth of five literary essays located towards the end of a section devoted to myths of femininity, which closes the first volume of (her 1949 book)Le Deuxième Sexe. Stendhal is introduced by Beauvoir as an exception to the rule according to which male authors …. traditionally represent women as passive Others rather than active Subjects within their work. 

Stendhal was not much appreciated in his own time, the romantic period. The Red and the Blackpresents a deeply unattractive picture of France – it satirizes and offends, it deals with taboo subjects. Even recently, Justino Alves Bastos, commander of the Third Army during the 1964 Brazilian coup d'étatordered the burning of all ‘subversive books’ which, astonishingly to us, includedThe Red and the Black(he must have been a well-read commander). The final chapter called Exit Julienwas NOT considered to be a happy ending, not endearing itself to the book-buying bourgeoisie. He was however appreciated by several influential writers in the decades following his death: Hippolyte Thaine, Freidrich Nietzche and Tolstoy. He was labeled France's last great psychologist by Nietzche. The young Tolstoy was especially fond of him.Generally though, Stendhal’s reputation did not develop until the 20^thCentury; now he is considered to rank alongside Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac and Alexandre Dumas in any list of the greatest French novelists.

Some parts of the story do seem implausible. Why would a person with such good literary skills copy someone else’s love-letters rather than write his own? His behaviour towards the end of the novel stretches credibility – his final demise is almost a suicide. Throughout, Stendhal is irritatingly obscure. Obscure is evidently one of the author’s affectations. For example, what does the book’s title mean? Red might refer to blood, military uniform, passion or the Phrygian cap, the headwear of Marianne, symbol of the revolution. Black is presumed to represent clerical dress, or perhaps the frequent mental state of Julien. Red and black are the colours on the roulette wheel, and Julien was a risk taker. Like black and white, the match red and black represents contrast, divergence, the colour of hearts and spades the playing cards. So the title works at many levels. But what about the dedication he writes ‘to the favoured few’. Who are the few? Perhaps he realised that those who truly appreciated his story would be just a few, at least in his own generation. It doesn’t really matter.

Nevertheless, we enjoyed this book, perhaps for our own different reasons. For some, appeal came from the psychological insights during character development, for others the rich prose which so nicely and delicately represents complex human emotions, for others the historical content and the admiration of Stendhal’s creative imagination.

Stendhal’s grave is in Paris. He specified the epitaph and wanted a marble slab shaped like a playing card. The epitaph is ‘He lived, he wrote, he loved’. In Italian of course.

Reference

Scott, M (2008) Irish Journal of French Studies 8, 55-71, downloadable from https://doi.org/10.7173/164913308818438355

29/11/2018 “THE LONG SHADOW” by DAVID REYNOLDS

Introducing “The Long Shadow” (2013), the proposer said that, as our meeting fell in the month of the centenary of the Armistice, he felt we should mark the occasion with a book about the impact of World War One on the century that followed. The David Reynolds book was the only serious candidate of which he was aware.

David Reynolds is a British historian who is Professor of International History at Cambridge. He specialises in the two World Wars  (although until now most of his book output has been about the Second) and the Cold War. He served as Chairman of the History Faculty at Cambridge for the academic years 2013–14 and 2014–15. A short TV series narrated by Reynolds accompanied the launch of the book, and he also lectured at the Edinburgh Festival.

In his introduction Reynolds quotes George Kennan, who characterised the First World as “the great seminal catastrophe of this century”. Kennan was struck by the “overwhelming extent” to which communism, Nazism and the Second World War were all “the products of that first great holocaust of 1914-18.”

Although the book was long, it was written with unusual clarity and incision. Reynolds was able to simplify complex ideas across a whole range of subjects with admirable brevity. If it sometimes made you pause, or was challenging, it was only because the wealth of ideas successively described left you giddy – a sort of intellectual fairground ride. The book was in many respects the history of the last century.

The general – and very enjoyable – discussion that opened up reflected the vastness of the subject matter covered by the book. It cannot be covered in a blog of acceptable length, but here are some highlights.

It was very unusual to get a writer so comfortable in writing across such a wide range of subjects. He covered military history, political history, economics, painting, poetry, literature, general culture and more. He did this across a time span of a century. And, although his major focus was Britain, he wrote very cogently about developments in Germany, France, Russia, Ireland and America. Reynolds was inclined to give both sides of an argument without overtly stating his own position, but that gave the book a welcome feel of objectivity and absence of a personal agenda.

A “terrific book” was the general view, “very enjoyable”, “enlightening and absorbing”.

But there were some notes of reservation. “At times too much detail for my taste….I would have preferred more focus on what is the shadow….I think his writing is too diffuse, and in the end I wasn’t sure what he was trying to say”.

‘Could we define “the shadow”? Was it loss of life, anguish, the rise of fascism, the spread of communism, the Great Depression, World War Two, the ongoing crisis in the Middle East?’  The consensus was that it was all of these and more. He had been wise in using the evocative concept of the “shadow” rather than in striving to demonstrate causation, always very difficult in considering history. He was talking about impact in a general sense. And the word “shadow” – for which 16 meanings are given in the OED! - is not necessarily pejorative.

Another reservation was that “the structure was a bit confusing (Part One ‘Legacies’; Part Two ‘Refractions’), and it led to a degree of repetition”. But for most the structure was fine.

Irritatingly we found Reynolds hardly put a foot wrong in his grasp of the bewildering array of subjects he covered, whether on concept or on detail. For a book of history to deprive us of the satisfying opportunity to pick nits is rare indeed. Finally, however, our resident statistician claimed to have nailed him – Reynolds had asserted that German South West Africa (today Namibia) was roughly the same area as England and Wales combined, whereas we reckoned it was 6 times bigger!

Occasional shafts of ironic humour brighten the narrative, such as:

“A year after the Armistice, Sir Henry Wilson, chief of the imperial general staff, fumed ‘We have between 20 and 30 wars raging in different parts of the world’, which he blamed on political leaders who were ‘totally unfit and unable to govern’. Wilson’s deputy, Gen. Sir Philip Chetwode, warned colourfully that ‘the habit of interfering with other people’s business, and of making what is euphoniously called ‘peace’, is like ‘buggery’; once you take to it you cannot stop.”

The financial dimension of the War was one of the few that Reynolds did not discuss in depth. We noted the heavy financial impact on Britain of the two German wars. Britain had not been entitled to reparations after the First War, having declared war and not having been invaded, but found herself in substantial debt to the US, as it did also after WW2. British WW2 Lend Lease debts to the US were not fully repaid until the end of 2006. War bonds raised from the British public for WW1 (and earlier wars) were not repaid until 2015.

We debated the impact of World War One on religion, again one of the few subjects not tackled in the book. Had the War accelerated the decline in religious belief, which could be traced back to Darwin and beyond? We could not resolve this, noting that many in the forces and amongst the bereaved had found religion a great comfort during the War, but accepting that later reflection on the appalling violence and subsequent brutalisation might have shaken the belief of many.

An interesting fact unearthed by one of our members was that the Armistice would have been at 2.30pm on the 11^th of November if Lloyd George had got his way. For Lloyd George, with characteristic egotism, wanted to announce it at 2.30 when he stood up for PM’s Questions. Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, the senior Forces member of the British Delegation, had to appeal to the King to overturn Lloyd George’s order and change it to 11am. Thereby Wemyss saved hundreds of lives, and thereby he incurred the vindictive fury of Lloyd George.

We noted that Reynolds heads a whole chapter “Evil”, which is devoted to genocide in the Nazi concentration camps. But, leaving aside that as unquestionable evil, could the Allies claim the moral high ground given some of their behaviour in other aspects of the Second World War, such as the hundreds of thousands of European citizens killed by RAF bombing, the use of flamethrowers and thermite grenades, and the use of nuclear bombs? The defence is that such tactics were necessary to win – or shorten – the War, but not all of us accepted that argument.

Reynolds is particularly strong on tracing the changing perspectives on the War in Britain, and clear-sighted on the ways in which the facts had become distorted. However, the head of the Imperial War Museum recently said that he had hoped that the commemorative efforts for the centenary of the War would lead to the popular view and the historians’ view of WW1 moving into alignment, but that they had failed to achieve that.

In conclusion, we agreed for our part with the historian John Horne’s view, quoted by Reynolds, that the Great War was “the seminal event in the cycle of violence and ideological extremism that marked the twentieth century.”

25/10/18 “THE REMAINS OF THE DAY” by KAZUO ISHIGURO

We were informed by our host that he often reads books by prizewinning authors. It was for this reason that he had acquired “The Remains of the Day”, by the Nobel Prizewinner (2017) Kazuo Ishiguro.

While this was a credible explanation for his choice no one was fooled.

The host had originally nominated “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera but had forgotten that he had previously nominated this book in 2015 when it had been discussed and reviewed by the Group!

His embarrassment led him to reflect on the cause of this memory lapse and he concluded that like Stevens, the butler and narrator of “ The Remains of the Day”, his forgetfulness was age-related.

The appropriateness of his choice became apparent as we read the novel.

It was perhaps some conciliation to the host that the only member to spot the not-so-deliberate mistake was our youngest member.

Our host provided a brief overview of the Kazuo Ishiguro’s family background and literary career. Born in Nagasaki, Japan on 8^th November 1954 his family moved to the UK in 1960. Ishiguro attended the University of Kent in 1974 and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in English and Philosophy in 1978 and in 1980 he gained a Master of Arts in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. He became a British citizen in 1983 and he and his wife and daughter live in London.

Ishiguro’s writings have been hugely successful. He has written eight works of fiction and his books have been translated into over 50 languages. Some, including “The Remains of the Day” have been made into lucrative films.

He also writes screenplays and song lyrics. They are successful too. Our host played us a snatch of Ishiguro’s friend and jazz artist Tracey Kent, singing his melancholy song ‘Bullet Train’ :

Tokyo to Nagoya
Nagoya to Berlin
Sometime I feel I lose track
Of just which hemisphere we’re in….

He has received many awards for his work, including the Man Booker prize in 1989 for “The Remains of the Day”, the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017 and most recently, in 2018, he was Knighted for his services to Literature.

There was general agreement that this is a beautifully crafted novel. To those who had not read any of Ishiguro’s work it was a great surprise. They had not anticipated such sophisticated use of language from a Japanese author, not realising that he had been raised and educated in Britain.

The novel impressively establishes the character of Stevens, the butler and narrator of the story. His stiff manner of speech exposes Stevens’s limitations as he struggles to find the language to deal with emotion, to converse with his peers or to adjust to the need to engage with the new American owner of Darlington Hall with a much less formal relationship, and especially the “banter”.  Thereafter, Stevens becomes a student of “banter”, taking every opportunity to hone his skills, often without success.

The Group considered the novel “technically brilliant”.

It manages to present an unpromising tale about the life of a man who lived exclusively in the service of others in an interesting and compelling way.

Stevens was the butler in a distinguished English country house, Darlington Hall. Lord Darlington to whom Stevens had devoted his long life of service had died and Mr Farraday, a jovial American who is the new owner of the Hall encourages Stevens to make use of his vintage car to take a short motoring holiday to the West Country.

As this journey unfolds Stevens describes his understanding of the role of the butler in a stately home and he identifies the essential characteristics required of those butlers who aspire to be regarded as a  “great” butler.

Much is made of “dignity”, devotion and unquestioning loyalty all exemplified through vignettes drawn from life at Darlington Hall.

The story reveals the fragility of Stevens’s circumstances.  His need to “inhabit” his professional role requires him to set aside any thoughts of questioning what he is told by Lord Darlington. The dismissal of the Jewish housemaids at Darlington Hall who were well liked and who performed their duties to a good standard illustrates the absolute authority exercised by Lord Darlington.

As the journey progresses, more and more about Lord Darlington’s involvement in political manoeuvrings in the lead up to the Second World War is related. His attempt to broker rapprochement through engaging with Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister and Ambassador to Great Britain is referred to as is his post war troubles with his reputation ruined through a failed libel action. These reflections cause Stevens to adopt an increasingly protective/defensive attitude towards Lord Darlington, “He wasn’t a bad man at all”

Stevens is unable to deal with emotion. This disability manifests itself in his relationship with Miss Kenton who tries to elicit a reciprocal response to her affection, and also in his account of his relationship with his father and in particular his troubling behaviour at the time of his father’s death.

The motoring holiday draws to a close with Stevens facing up to reality. His reflections enable him to recognize his mistakes and to ponder, “what might have been” . However he continues to show the irrepressible spirit upon which his self worth is dependent. He continues to rationalize and excuse his actions. Finally, he plans to find ways of improving his “bantering” skills in order to commit to a new way of life embracing the changes needed to enable him to satisfy his new American master.

While most of the group found themselves feeling a bit sorry for Stevens as the victim of the anachronistic social system, moulded by his upbringing and the culture of the day, one member suggested that he was dishonest and manipulative. He questioned Stevens’s sexuality and considered him devious in allowing the villagers to believe that he was an upper class gentleman.

These comments apart the novel was unanimously admired, both for its technical excellence but also as a cameo on growing old and the expression of quintessential ‘Englishness’.

Reference was made to the film of ”Remains of the Day” and to the portrayal of the English butler in other well known works; Jeeves, as gentleman’s gentleman to Wooster, Hudson in Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey all portraying life “below stairs”.

It was remarked that interest in this is a peculiarly English fascination linked to what made the country “great” (a superiority complex born of the fact that Great Britain is the only country undefeated in Europe).

It was also suggested that the virtues of unwavering loyalty and dedication to his master extolled by Stevens were still alive and kicking and could be seen in the behaviour of Civil Servants today. We were reliably informed that no senior Civil Servant voted for Brexit but that their professional duty was to set aside their personal views and to work towards delivering the best outcome.

There followed a discussion on the failure of our politicians to seek to establish “common purpose” on such an important matter. One of our group, who has occasion to visit China in the course of his work, explained the contrasting singularity of purpose in China, where, for example, there are weekly Party meetings in the university departments that must be attended.

It was suggested that the novel is not so much about “ what the butler saw” but what the butler did not see or was unable to see until it was too late.

Stevens’ reflections resulted in his having to confront things he had done or said and with hindsight had regretted or was embarrassed about.

We sympathized with him, recognizing that most of us would admit to having these feelings from time to time.

In Stevens’ case his reflections attack the ideas upon which he has built his life. They test his ability to keep a lid on his emotions and to retain the “dignity” with which he has tried to live his life.

The novel succeeds in exposing the man behind the butler in a clever and powerful way. It struck a chord with many members of the group and this added greatly to their enjoyment. It provoked unanimous approval.

Our host was congratulated on his choice of novel and for being able to remember that an important theme of the “Remains of the Day” is the effect of age on memory.

27/9/18 “HOMO DEUS” by YUVAL NOAH HARARI

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A select company of three met to discuss this month’s book, "Homo Deus: a Brief History of Tomorrow" by Yuval Noah Harari. This is a follow-up to our look at Harari's previous work, "Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind".

Since we did not wish to diminish the scope of our discussion by 33.3%, we did not have a blogger for the evening.  Hence the notes that follow are a brief (briefer anyway than Yuval Noah Harari’s definition of the word) summary of the proposer’s preparatory notes.

The proposer felt that this is a book that invites discussion and debate.  Like ‘Sapiens’, it stimulated him to  run its ideas past whoever happened to be nearby when he was reading it.  It also stimulated reflection on his own life decisions.  The text is engagingly written, and frequently provokes the reader to interact with it, weighing the plausibility of the various arguments presented.

The first part of the book is to some extent a re-run of the content of ‘Sapiens’ – perhaps a necessary exercise in order to set a context for Harari’s account of the new projects of mankind.  He defines these new projects as immortality, happiness and divinity, and argues that famine, plague and war are largely problems whose solution now lies in our own hands, rather than being beyond our control.  These assertions, deliberately provocative, stimulated much discussion on the evening.

The writing throws up some great metaphors and similes.  For example: “terrorists are like a fly that tries to destroy a china shop’ (they have to enrage a bull), or the illustrative use of the history of lawns.

Harari also uses catchy section headings that provide a memorable framework for his ideas – for example ‘Organisms are Algorithms’ and ‘Why Bankers are different from Vampires’.  The proposer also enjoyed the snippets of history and accounts of scientific experiments with which the writer illustrated his themes.  For example the Pharoahs’ creation of a huge artificial lake and the city of ‘Crocodilopolis’, and the experiment with rats placed in flasks of water (not so enjoyable for the rats, of course).

The cover of the paperback edition was not great in terms of graphic design, but the little thumbprint/electronic circuit image was a clever interpretation of one of the book’s important themes.  We noted too that it hinted at the shape of an acorn, also appropriate.  The use of images in the book itself, while sparing, is very effective.  The proposer particularly enjoyed the ‘Humanism in Five Images’ pages.

In conclusion, the proposer found the book somewhat overwhelming, in that each proposition opens up numerous new lines of enquiry.  However, by identifying the quests for immortality, happiness and divinity as themes for investigation, Harari provides a useful framework to combat passive or heedless acceptance of ‘the way things are going’.